So we’ll begin with another contradiction. All that cynicism and distance that surrounds the public perception of ‘Lou Reed’ like a block of ice, how do we match that up with the fact that so much of his music is so fucking achingly sentimental, so nostalgic, so fixated on some fleeting moment of zen-like universal comfort, in spite of all the sneering and street hassle and leather daddy hi-jinks? Because that’s the essence that keeps me coming back to him really.. the former I mean, not the latter.

Of course, I guess I still like all the shrieking dissonance and hair-raising guitar noise and decadent droning plenty too (yes, I had the “John Peel played ‘Heroin’ and everything changed forever” moment same as everyone else, even if mine was closer to 1998 than 1968… and it speaks volumes, I think, that it sounded just as ‘what the fuck is this’ jaw-dropping at the dawn of the 21st century as it did when copies of the banana album first started to sneak over to these shores). But that’s not what I feel like discussing today, I suppose.

Let’s talk about ‘Sweet Jane’ instead. I don’t know if it’s Lou Reed’s best song, or even my favourite one, but it’s the one, I think, where that moment of calm, basic-level happiness he always seemed to be striving for was first fully illuminated.

I remember ages and ages and ages ago, reading the booklet that accompanied the cheap ‘best of the Velvet Underground’ CD that I bought shortly after hearing ‘Heroin’ on the radio, the writer saying something about how Lou Reed’s lyrics always seem to reflect this obsession with the idea of things being “alright” - and indeed, that writer was really on to something I think. In song after song, it is a state of unspectacular ‘alright-ness’ that is sought out and celebrated: “..it was alright”, “it’s gonna work out right”, “..everything was alright”, “it’s gonna be alright”, on and on, like some endlessly repeating mantra. And it’s not some great, transcendent moment of happiness or revelation of love or anything that he’s after either, it’s just… things are alright. Sitting quietly at home, looking out of the window, coffee on the stove. Sitting next to your beloved over breakfast, walking out to get groceries – whatever. Things are alright. I can dig that.

At heart, this seems to be where most Lou Reed songs (all of his more upbeat numbers, anyway) are coming from. In fact, maybe this realisation even allows us to take a more sympathetic approach to his legendarily aggressive attitude toward journalists and interviewers. Imagine, the poor guy sitting there in his apartment, savouring his moment of perfect alright-ness in the morning, when suddenly there’s some whiny jerk on the phone wanting to interrogate him about his sexuality and his drug habits, and David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and why his latest album sounds like he recorded it in a dog kennel. Awful. No wonder he got a bit shirty with them. Who wouldn’t? Why couldn’t they all just leave him alone? He had nothing to say. He probably just wanted to take in the silence, or put the radio on, sit back and enjoy his breakfast.

Anyway, it is this holy ‘alright-ness’, this quiet contentment, that “Sweet Jane” is of course really about. I know that there’s an actual Jane in the lyrics (of most versions), but if you think it’s just her who’s being hymned during the chorus, well…. I hesitate to say ‘you got it wrong’, but suffice to say you have a very different understanding of the song from me. Sweet Jane, as yelled exultantly on the pre-‘Loaded’ demo version, hesitantly whispered on the ‘Live ‘69’ version, dutifully intoned on the album version, represents instead a state of mind; an ideal place to be; a totem of the kind of basic, everyday happiness and contentment that most men & women seek, most of the time. Quietness, and companionship, and the sun shining in in the morning.

Of course Reed recorded this song umpteen times during his lifetime, but, predictably enough, it is the three most prominent Velvet Underground-era recordings that keep me spellbound.

The first of these, chronologically speaking, is the ‘Live ‘69’ version, when the song was still in pretty embryonic form, before all that business with Jack and Jane had come into being, and in many ways this version is all the more perfect for its simplicity. As that indelible guitar riff rolls out slow and steady, the band sounding like they’ve just been taught it and they’re following the leader to establish the feel, Reed goes straight to the heart of the matter, softly intoning the verse that ended up being the big emotional crescendo of the completed version, repeating it several times, rolling the words around his mouth like their message is still in the process of filtering down through his heart/brain: “anyone who’s ever had a heart / they wouldn’t turn around and break it”; “anyone who’s ever had a dream / anyone who’s ever played a part”.

If we were to listen to this version without the context provided by subsequent recordings, it could perhaps be read as a pretty sad song. Could the Sweet Jane he’s addressing in the chorus have ditched him? Did SHE turn around and break it? Well if she did, Reed doesn’t sound too upset about things. It sounds like the nostalgic warmth of the happy memories are enough to keep him going, resigned to his fate as the totemic Jane of the chorus (like the verses, elucidated quietly, carefully and somewhat hesitantly here) assumes her wider, cosmic significance: Sweet Jane.


So here then, on the demo version, we have Jane and Jack, though they’re a little different from the ones you may know if you’ve only listened to the eventual album version. There’s no rock n’ roll band (HUH!) here, but instead it opens with what is possibly my favourite line in any version of this song, and one that just suits Lou Reed’s voice so well:

“Standing on the corner / thinking of the best..”.

He could have just left it there really. This song, his whole career. Just so, so, just… y’know. Says it all really. But nonetheless, the show must go on. This time round, Jane is in her corset, and Jack is in his vest – which, with no hetero-normative-ness intended, I much prefer to be honest. The brief intrusion of ‘Transformer’-era gender-bending when Lou reverses the garments on the album version strikes a bit of an odd note, I’ve always thought, in the middle of a set of verses that otherwise go out of their way to celebrate a very conventional, straight-laced kind of domestic contentment.

(In a way, the verses of this song seem like Reed’s attempt to remind his audience, “hey, normal people have feelings too” – a very humane and somewhat brave gesture in the midst of all the late ‘60s ‘squares vs. hipsters’ type palaver, especially from the man who’d soon reinvent himself as the “king of the underground street freaks” or whatever.)

So, thus far then, probably my favourite version of the song’s opening verse, but sadly I think he drops the ball a little as the demo version moves on to the second verse (the only drawback of this otherwise brilliant recording). Whereas the album version introduces ‘children’ and ‘villains’ into proceedings, here Reed just assigns all of his various rose-tinted, old worldy activities (blinking eyes, studying rules of verse, fainting, blushing etc.) simply to ‘women’ and 'ladies', rather giving the impression that he’s going off on some tirade about the decline of old fashioned femininity or something. I doubt that was the intent; In actuality I think he probably just hadn’t filled out this bit of the lyrics much yet and was just filling the gaps etc., but still – could be better.

What REALLY elevates the demo version though is the gloriously raw, uproariously sloppy nature of the band’s playing here, which at a push you could even see as prefiguring the work of such paragons of DIY earnestness as The Television Personalities or Half Japanese, complete with percussion provided by what sounds like someone with zero sense of rhythm banging two saucepans together (I think we can safely assume Mo Tucker was on maternity leave by this point). All of this serves to lend things a kind of strained, raggedly emotive genius that completely overwhelms any lyrical reservations as soon as the song hits the chorus and the band bellows together, out of key and barely in time with each other: SWEEET JAAAANE!

God, it’s just so beautiful, their inhibitions seeming to vanish as the song goes on, each chorus repeat adding more gusto, more chaos until the final ones, following the big “wouldn’t turn about and break it” crescendo and the peculiar baroque bridge section (Reed did a lot of these, but they rarely worked as well as this one), just fly free, really nailing the sheer joyfulness of the song’s message. NA NA NA NA, NA NA NA.

In this version, ‘Sweet Jane’ isn’t just a chorus, or a song title, it’s a universal exclamation, something to shout from the hilltops whenever you feel that everything is alright. It’s just it man, it’s right there. With this song as a vessel, and that whoever-the-hell-it-is banging those saucepan lids, this bunch of uptight white guys really rouse the spirits and raise the soul to new heights.

Often of recent, I’ve felt like turning to my own beloved and shouting, SWEEEET JANE!! She’s not much into the Velvets though, so it would probably just freak her out. If you’ve read up to this point though, I guess you must be into the Velvets. You know what I’m saying. You know it’s not all about heroin and sneering and Andy Warhol. We can do the secret handshake, and can leave this post right here because what else is there to say about music you love this much.

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(1) The demo version is available on CD 2 of the “Fully Loaded” special edition of ‘Loaded’ – an absolutely essential document for all Velvets fans, by the way. I mean, I love the original album too, but I think about 75% of the demo tracks are so, so much better than their album equivalents, and there’s a bunch of other great stuff too, and, and...

Labels: deathblog, Lou Reed, rambling, The Velvet Underground