The Blue Mask

The Blue Mask is such a wonderfully kooky record, maybe my favorite solo Lou, duking it out with Berlin and Transformer. Part of the fun is the sequencing, which is either genius or mad in its tone swings. The good times begin with "My House," in which Lou and his wife, sitting down with the Ouiji Board, discover that the ghost of Delmore Schwartz, the tortured poet and first great influence on Reed's creative life, has taken up residence in the guest bedroom, much to Lou's delight. Lou proceeds to croon an aching paean to Delmore's genius, calling himself Daedalus to Schwartz's Bloom. Next is the confusingly ironic "Women," in which Lou professes his love for all of womenkind: "I love women, I think they're great." Apparently, the man had kicked drugs and booze and gotten married before making this record, so I'll assume he's playing it straight, but we're a long way from Transformer when he passionately belts out how "women are a gift to the world." A celebration of his new spouse or a rejection of his bottom past? Well, all that love and respect tumbles into the bar rock dramatizing an alchie's descent to the bottom, "Underneath the Bottle," in which our hero mocks the self-pity of the maudlin drunk. Damn, that one hurt. Favorite lyric: "ooh ooh eeee, son of a b/ you get so down, you can't get any lower." This alchie sounds like he's ready for rehab, but the last two songs of Side 1 bring the darkness in ways you can believe, unlike so many of his previous solo attempts to convince us he's satan's ambassador to NYC. "The Gun" finds him in the voice of a killer stalking a domestic couple, and it's genuinely horrifying- at least it was last night while I pondered killing my department head and hoped he'd pull the trigger by the end of the song. The title track is a fucking monster, as Lou gives his demons full play over a savage backbeat and nasty guitar screeches (Robert Quine plays here, and have you noticed how often Robert Quine shows up on the best records of failing solo artists?). This is one of the few songs that matches the deep late night self-loathing wince for wince.

And of course, when you flip the record, Lou is singing about being "just an average guy" worried about taxes and his bowels. I'm not sure if he's just trying to fuck with folks, or he's trying to capture the full range of his emotional swings, or whether no one paid any attention to sequencing, but it works in beautifully disorienting ways. "The Heroine" offers little other than the obvious wordplay on the far better and more famous VU song, but it is a quiet lead-in to an even nastier piece of noise, "Waves of Fear," in which Lou delivers a guitar "solo" that sounds strikingly like a constipated puppy trying to take a load on the kitchen floor. It's made even more bizarre by a break in the middle that is part show tune and part Nomeansno. From there we get a poignant ballad about the day John Kennedy died, and finally a loving tribute to his wife with Lou calling for her everloving arms in some of the finest "singing" I've ever heard from him. After all that blood, booze and pain, love conquers all at the end of this story.

That this wildly underrated miracle came between two hideous Lou records (granted, that describes much of the solo work), further highlights its striking quality. Play this back-to-back with the Beasts of Bourbon's Sour Mash and you've got yourself a middle-aged man's fuck the world party, but hey, you get redeemed at the end by the love of a good woman. Good times!