LOU REED
Ecstasy
Reprise

But as Reed gets what he wanted and loses what he had, fans are missing some of his strongest music ever. The live album was his best (of many) since 1974's Rock n Roll Animal, and Twilight, pigeonholed as his love offering to Laurie, was beyond that a daring guitar-o-rama and a full-bodied, uniquely consistent excursion in the throwaway hodgepodge mode that yielded so many keepers in his neglected '70s work. Ecstasy is even more impressive. Dominated emotionally by dark songs about extreme sex and relationships gone sour, it will once again be linked to Anderson even though many of its details diverge radically from what everyone knows about the couple's life together--that they have no children, for instance. Resist the impulse to turn music into gossip and hear Ecstasy for what it is--a complex, musically gorgeous synthesis of the obsessions that powered Reed's failed 1973 Berlin and his great marriage albums of the early '80s, especially The Blue Mask.

Since happy love is much rarer in good art than it is in good lives, Twilight remains moderately miraculous--far from innocent of struggle and doubt, it's nevertheless the most open-hearted, sweet-tempered record Reed's ever put out there. It was only a moment, though, and on Ecstasy he says hello to his old demons. Masking profound rage with bitchy back talk, Reed's romantic egotism has always doomed his personal and artistic commitments--he needs new sensations. But perhaps because he's put in two decades as an attempted mensch, first with ex-wife Sylvia Morales and then with Anderson, his demons now sometimes seem more like daemons, geniuses, as on the passionately impenetrable title song, about a soul-shaking sexual adventure with or by a mythified someone who could be rough trade or a prominent New York performance artist. The amazing "Mad," Lou's tirade after he's caught cheating--"You said you're out of town for the night/And I believed in you/I believed you"--lays open the asshole he knows himself to be without apologizing for his baseline arrogance. And the impossible marriages of "Tatters" and "Baton Rouge," both carefully fictionalized, are sketched with the kind of intimate incidental detail only appreciated by someone who's learned from experience how specific relationships are.

Add several paeans to the perverse--among them a hopeless declaration of sexual indenture and a moaned and shouted 18-minute noisefest--and three off-message changes of pace that include a slave's freedom rant and an upliftingly spiritual closer, and the complexity of Reed's conception should be clear. Words, however, are truly only half of it. Understandably, Reed's old fascination with sadomasochistic transcendance puts off those who don't swing that way at least a little. But the music on this record, its gorgeous part, could change that.

Together with his long-time guitarist Mike Rathke and the ever more fluid bassist Fernando Saunders, Reed has gradually adjusted his trademark minimalism toward a body-friendly responsiveness. The guitar hooks on "Mad" and "Ecstasy," far less trebly and staccato than the Velvet Underground norm, render those demented statements rather beautiful--touching and vulnerable alongside hateful and proud. And while the timbre of Reed's sprechgesang will never again be as supple as in moments of youthful lyricism like "Pale Blue Eyes," his sere thoughtfulness here is at least as tender--his perspective seems like mature understanding rather than neurotic distance. If rock is to be an art form--and come on, it's earned the option--best it should honor life's physical reality as unmistakably as this music does. Let his fellow bigshots respect him. Us guys'll just give him R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Rolling Stone, Apr. 13, 2000