This Saturday, April 18, at Cleveland’s historic Public Hall, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its latest slate of nominees. The ceremony and accompanying concert air Saturday, May 30, on HBO.
Paul McCartney will be inducting Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr; Stevie Wonder inducts Bill Withers; Peter Wolf, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band; John Mayer inducts Stevie Ray Vaughn; Steve Cropper, the “5” Royales; Miley Cyrus, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts; and Patti Smith is inducting Lou Reed.
In his four decades as a solo artist and as a member of the ’60s cult band the Velvet Underground, musician and singer/songwriter Reed — who passed away in 2013 at the age of 71 from liver disease — created a bold, uncompromising, experimental style of music that influenced New Wave, punk and grunge.
Jewish by birth, Reed once said, “My God is rock ‘n’ roll. It’s an obscure power that can change your life. The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.”
But as often happens, artistic genius comes at a price. In Reed’s case, that was emotional instability and mental illness, exacerbated by drug use.
In a recent piece at Cuepoint, Reed’s sister, family therapist Merrill Reed Weiner, writes a moving story about her brother’s upbringing and troubles, how his worried parents tried their best to help him with the tools and knowledge available to them at the time.
It’s a touching portrait of people gifted with an extraordinary child, who also had outsized problems to go with his creativity — and how Lou Reed survived his turbulent teen years to live a a relatively long, if not placid, life.
Weiner writes:
During Lou’s teenage years, it became obvious that he was becoming increasingly anxious, avoidant and resistant to most socializing, unless it was on his terms. In social situations he withdrew, locking himself in his room, refusing to meet people. At times, he would hide under his desk. Panic attacks and social phobias beset him. He possessed a fragile temperament. His hyper-focus on the things he liked led him to music and it was there that he found himself.
Self-taught, he began playing the guitar, absorbing every musical influence he could. In high school he formed bands and played in the school variety shows. His band began to get dates at small local clubs, which then expanded to playing gigs in New York City. By the age of 16 he was experimenting with drugs and closing the door on any communication with our parents.
Well worth reading for its insight into the struggle parents endure to help an atypical child, and how that child can have a profound effect on a sibling, the piece also poses an interesting question about the role of negative experiences in sparking creativity.
In today’s heavily therapized, highly sensitive society, children are sometimes medicated out of their personal quirks and challenges, or they’re wrapped in a cocoon of unquestioning acceptance and unstinting praise, so as not to wound their psyches.
Weiner asks:
Would it have happened if my family had received better psychiatric care, support for the family, reframing vs. blame, encouragement and education in communication, awareness of the impact of drugs? Could my parents have been spared their guilt, encouraged to do better than they did? Would Lou have become the artist he became without the furious anger that the treatments engendered? Did Lou use the treatments as a source of artistic fuel, a means to create an illusion of an abused individual? Who knows?
Click here to read the whole thing.
Nobody wants their children to be unhappy, but while there’s no rule that says that artistically gifted people must always have emotional and/or psychological issues, it is frequently the case that they do. Helping these kids find a stable center in which to live without stifling what makes them unique is a difficult balance to strike. And when there’s real mental illness involved, just keeping a child alive is oftentimes all parents can manage at any point in time.
Sometimes a child’s problems come from external sources — abuse or bullying — and it’s a natural reaction to want to keep children safe from anything that could harm them. But can great art spring from a comfortable, protected existence?
From pain comes poetry, but when is the price too high? So much of the beauty of this world has come from people whose own lives were tortured and miserable, in which they did not personally experience the pleasure their art brought to others.
And what if Reed had truly found solace in God, not just the god of his music? One has to imagine that, as deep as he went, a grounded spirituality could have led him even further, perhaps with less personal cost.
As Weiner observed, we’ll never know.
From Reed’s Hall of Fame bio:
In addition, like James Joyce with Dublin or Bruce Springsteen with the Jersey Shore, Reed became inextricably associated with New York, transforming the city in his songs into a cauldron of moral challenges, a spiritual proving ground in which damnation and redemption were sometimes impossible to tell apart. Reed both observed the world and transformed it, definitively shaping the sound and the sense of contemporary music.
Reed brought pleasure and inspiration to many through his art and inspired musicians of subsequent generations. Below find his performance with Metallica at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary show in 2010:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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