Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis

Author:Anthony DeCurtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

14

GROWING UP IN PUBLIC

AS THE SEVENTIES DRAINED into the eighties, a sense of cultural exhaustion permeated American society. President Jimmy Carter, an unpretentious man from rural Georgia who had risen to the presidency on the strength of a post-Watergate desire for decency in government, described that mood as a “crisis of confidence” in a speech he delivered in July of 1979. Though Carter never used the word, that speech became known as his “malaise” speech, and it proved to be one of a number of significant factors that led to his crushing defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan in the presidential election the following year. The revolution in Iran that overthrew the shah and installed an Islamic government disrupted the country’s oil production, which affected supplies throughout the world. For Americans, who regarded cars and cheap gas as essential elements of their national identity, the long lines at filling stations represented an emotional as much as an economic blow. In November of 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two American citizens hostage—another shock to American pride. A planned helicopter raid in April of 1980 to free the hostages failed utterly, compounding what was seen internationally as a humiliation for the United States.

Many Americans viewed these setbacks as part of the inheritance of the sixties counterculture, a post-Vietnam unwillingness to exercise America’s strength around the world. America was losing its global stature, and at home the sex-and-drugs indulgences sanctioned by the counterculture were coming under suspicion. Concern about sexually transmitted diseases was on the rise, and in 1980, the first cases of what would eventually be known as AIDS were reported. Rehab programs sprung up as the toll of drug and alcohol dependence became increasingly clear. Former hippies magically transformed into yuppies, young urban professionals in search of the materialistic good life rather than social change. Riding the wave of these developments, Ronald Reagan vowed to combat the excesses of the sixties and reinstate traditional patriotic values, intensifying a culture war that persists to this day.

It was within that cultural context—and strangely congruent with it—that Lou Reed and Sylvia Morales got married on Valentine’s Day in 1980. Reed had announced their forthcoming nuptials from the stage of the Bottom Line during a run of Christmas shows in 1979. The choice of Valentine’s Day reflects Reed’s deep romanticism, which could border on Hallmark card clichés. Of course, in the life of Lou Reed, even such heartwarming gestures had a serrated edge. Reed and Morales were married in Reed’s apartment on Christopher Street near Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, the same space he had shared with Rachel. Now Rachel was gone and Sylvia was fully installed there, with all the institutional and legal legitimacy that marriage provides. Reed, looking like a promising young banker, wore a dark suit and a white shirt and tie, and Morales wore a white wedding dress. His hair was cut short—not the butch short style he had favored at around the time of Rock n Roll Animal, but respectably cleaned up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.