Lou Reed was a lot of things in his long career and, thank god, boring was never one of them. (I had a particular musician in mind to point out boredom, but my wife told me not to be mean. I told her to go back to consuming her margarita and leave me be).
Folks – critics and fans alike – have done a lot of head scratching about some of Reed’s output; does anyone yet know the point of Metal Machine Music, basically four sides of electronic sludge that some parsed as a middle finger to the music industry or, well, maybe every breathing thing?
No.
But boring? Uh uh.
And one thing Reed was never boring about was ruminating on the state of the world, internal and external. It could be sporadically perverse musings on the demimonde – heard most during his days helming a GOAT contender, the Velvet Underground – or more straightforward dissections of society such as his great solo album New York from 1989. If you wanted to hear a song about former Austrian politician and one-time UN Secretary-General – and, eventually, outed Nazi – Kurt Waldheim, well, this was your album.
But in 1972, his solo career still a pup, Reed unleashed Transformer, his sophomore release and it brought him chart success not seen during his Velvets time. And not least was a little ditty called “Walk on the Wild Side.” It reached number 10 on the charts in the U.K. and number 16 here in the U.S. Not bad for a guy whose band’s debut The Velvet Underground and Nico was admiringly mocked for selling only around 30,000 copies.
But if Nico was an album that indeed spawned 30,000 bands, “Walk”, in its own counterintuitive way, allowed those outside the mainstream to feel they had a home. It is probably the only charting single ever that found space for cross dressers, transsexuals, drug use and, gasp, oral sex.
Well, thanks Lou. Before this song, now 50 years young, we didn’t even know you had a tent.
“Walk” had room for a bit of everything that the underground had to offer; if your mom needed a primer on what to warn you against, well, Reed was her Google.
Candy came from out on the island
In the back room she was everybody’s darling
But she never lost her head, even when she was giving head
She says, ‘hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’
Holy First Amendment Batman! How many somersaults did Anita Bryant turn over that?
And Steve Miller needed to be bleeped?
In an interview around the time of the Transformer’s release, Reed said “I suppose though the album is going to offend some people.” He said the songs on the album were “from me to them – as in, the outsiders - but they’re carefully worded so the straights can miss out on the implications and enjoy them without being offended.”
Indeed, it has been posited that censors at the time simply did not get some of the lyrics on “Walk,” though some U.S. radio stations changed “And the colored girls go,” to “And the girls all say.” All girls matter!
Perspective and context are also key here. Transformer came out at a time when glam rock was a rage and many of its performers wore women’s clothes. David Bowie and Elton John were attracting gay and straight fans.
My favorite band The Who wrote a classic 60s degeneration called “Pictures of Lily” about, uh, pleasing one’s self, but that was at least somewhat cloaked.
Lou Reed had no time for cloakage.
Never more than in another verse that certainly feels like a precursor to one of today’s many cultural flashpoints. And it’s the very first verse:
Holly came from Miami, FL-A
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs then he was a she
She says ‘hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’
Oh Lou, you provocateur you.
Reed said later that the song was inspired by Nelson Algren’s 1956 novel A Walk On The Wild Side which referenced bootleggers, hustlers and prostitutes in America’s favorite city to ignore mores, New Orleans. Reed shifted the location to his native New York and homed in on those he had known since riding a coattail on Andy Warhol’s Underground. Warhol was the Velvet’s first champion and manager and produced the debut.
Despite Reed’s own efforts to broaden the vocabulary of popular music, references to transgender folk were not exactly common in 1972, five years after the Velvet’s debut. They may have been out there, but they were not common. (can I just throw out there that the B side of this single was “Perfect Day,” which can be construed as a paean to romantic love; not that transgenders can’t find classic trad love!)(and, it could also be noted, the song was co-produced by Bowie, who catapulted to full-scale superstardom the same year with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and who had also developed a personae as an androgynous scene shifter at this point)
The Holly in “Walk”? That would be one Holly Woodlawn, a transgender actress who grew up in Miami but left when she was 15 after a period of homophobic bullying. She hitchhiked, learned to, natch, pluck her eyebrows, and was discovered by Warhol who put her in some of his films starting with Trash.
Candy was Candy Darling, another transgender actress and the subject of a prior Reed song, “Candy Says.” Some think she was the subject of another very famous and oddly radio-ready ditty, the Kinks’ “Lola.”
But what would folks today say?
Things are fraught, right?
In 2017, some students in the Guelph Central Student Association at the University of Guelph in Ontario suddenly – if you can call controversy 45 years after a song’s release suddenly – called the song homophobic, apologizing for including “Walk” in a playlist at a campus event.
Poppycock said many, including Reed’s longtime producer Hal Willner. Reed, many have said, was writing a love song to these characters he had met during a particularly fecund time in his life and career.
Homophobic? Reed was – sometimes – gay or bisexual or some combo. A transphobe? He dated one for three years and dedicated 1975s Coney Island Baby to her.
The trans fight boils.
Although there have been almost as many methodologies as there have been studies, trans identification is up in recent years and it has become political football.
The fight is being fought everywhere from the Supreme Court to local school boards to psychiatrists’ offices. Some feel that children and teens who previously didn’t have a voice to express their torment and confusion are finally being heard. Others feel that Big Pharma have stuck their noses in because there’s shareholder-lovin profit to be made selling anything from puberty blockers to hormone replacement meds.
And as is the case with everything else these days in the vitriol-verse, the truth lies somewhere in between the poles.
But Reed and his famous single? As they say on ESPN when notably stupid things happen, “c’mon man.”
Jenni Muldaur, a former friend and occasional backup singer for Reed noted that “Lou was open about his complete acceptance of all the creatures of the night. The album was called Transformer. What do they think it’s about.”
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