I Went to a Fight and a Lou Reed/Metallica Album Broke Out

This week’s guest column discusses two artists I’ve alternately lied about loving and lied about hating. I’m not sure I’ll ever quite resolve that.

Jackson Maxwell, Associate Editor of Guitar World and Guitar Player, has some thoughts on Lou Reed and Metallica that I think you’ll enjoy.

All I have to offer is my own confusion and this one Metallica meme.

Carl

by Jackson Maxwell

Two musicians used to running the show, to getting their own way, have arrived at an impasse. Neither are young men anymore, but they treat the Art attached to their names with a holy reverence, the sort of evangelical commitment to the bit that your annoying conservative relatives say disappears as you inevitably become more practical with age.     

Their disagreement reaches a fever pitch. The older of the two men, less than a year shy of his 70th birthday, challenges the younger one right then and there to a “street fight.” 

He’s not fucking around. He’s a passionate student of martial arts who has spent decades learning street fighting techniques from the best instructors he can find, and a legendary temper that all the tai chi in the world can’t fully stifle. 

Lou Reed, of course, didn’t end up kicking Lars Ulrich’s ass inside of the cavernous structure that has long served as the general HQ, rehearsal space, and recording studio for Ulrich’s band, Metallica. 

The stakes were high, though. What had started as the sort of low-rent “let’s slightly re-contextualize decades-old songs our fans have already purchased in five different forms” album that’s become de rigueur for the state fair headliner set had turned into something decidedly more ambitious.

Recorded and released in 2011, Lulu is an 87-minute double album by Lou Reed & Metallica. It was originally supposed to be fairly straightforward – Reed tackling a dozen of hidden gems from his catalog, with Metallica backing him. Indeed, the two had already played together before – to the raging chorus of “...sure, ok!”s that usually greet weird awards show collabs – at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. 

10 days before recording commenced, however, Reed came up with an entirely different pitch – a concept album based on the century-old "Lulu" plays by German playwright Frank Wedekind. Upon its announcement, and even moreso following the trickling out of the album’s contents – unholy avant-metal, cement-churn instrumentals as the backdrop to some of the most confounding stream-of-consciousness ramblings of Reed’s career – the project was met with open, in some cases viral, ridicule.

Though he was decades removed from his last album of significance, Reed was still an incredibly revered figure – the irascible, street-smart poet who blew away Andy Warhol and smashed the worlds of doo-wop, ‘50s rock, and free-form noise together decades before the world could comprehend what it heard. 

Metallica, on the other hand, had become by this point a joke to music intelligentsia. Not that it really mattered. Their self-titled 1991 “Black Album” is less an album of songs than a military operation – it sounded like titanium and was loaded with hooks that were ruthless in their efficiency. Clean kills. No notes. It’s sold more copies in the SoundScan era of music (post-1991) than any album on the planet, and the sheer inertia of its success insulated Metallica from the blowback of subsequently taking legal action against their own fans, inviting a film crew to document their sessions with an overpaid “performance enhancement coach,” and making an incredibly polarizing album with perhaps the worst snare drum sound of all time.

Reed was also quite familiar with throwing a wrench in his own momentum. Over the previous 40 years he had built a solo discography of songs that careened in quality from revelatory to embarrassing and even downright odious. His response to the most commercially successful album of his career was to follow it with an album consisting of 65 minutes of nothing but guitar feedback.

Indeed, Lulu itself is an occasionally odious and often embarrassing document that – in a perfectly infuriating twist – tucks away a magic trick in its final act, an astonishing 20-minute dirge called “Junior Dad.” 

Reed’s father was a stern, controlling man who had abandoned his own literary dreams for a safe, mildly successful career in accounting, as his own mother had wished. By all accounts, he was often bewildered by his only son’s obstinance, severe mental health issues, and obsession with rock ‘n’ roll.  

For all of the above and, reportedly, (though this particular point is vehemently disputed by Reed’s sister) his bi-sexuality, Reed’s parents – on the advice of psychiatrists – sent the young Lou to electro-convulsion therapy.

Most prominently, Reed wrote of the experience in “Kill Your Sons,” a seething denouncement of both his treatment and his upbringing that casts his father as violent and uncaring and his mother as heartlessly oblivious.   

“Junior Dad” harbors less the teeth-baring rage of that song than a profound sense of loss, and confusion. It’s an elegant piece, driven by a whirring, droning string arrangement that circles around Metallica’s fairly restrained instrumentation – but for some snarling, high-gain guitar outbursts where choruses should be – until those strings completely envelop both Reed and Metallica, and stand alone for the song’s final nine minutes.  

“Would you come to me/If I was half drowning/An arm above the last wave,” Reed intones, sounding resigned to the answer and yet possessing – somewhere within that cynical frame – a hope that maybe, just maybe, things might turn out differently, that some corner might be turned, that some fence might be mended. “Would you come to me/Would you pull me up/Would the effort really hurt you?”

Never one to find the most orthodox rhythmic path between point A and point B, Lars Ulrich’s stuttering beat and ‘is he going to keep it together?’ fills keep you on your toes throughout that first half, echoing that dissonance and space between expectation and familial attachment.

“Burning fever burning on my forehead/The brain that once was listening/Now shoots out its tiresome message,” Reed sings – a bit more obfuscation can’t hurt, I guess. “Won’t you pull me up?”

“Scalding, my dead father has the motor and he's driving/Towards an island of lost souls.”

The father of Metallica frontman James Hetfield left him at the age of 13, without saying goodbye. The father of Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, meanwhile, was an alcoholic who routinely abused him and his mother. Both men, Hammett says, were moved to tears when they first heard the song’s lyrics.

I’ve long enjoyed a wonderful relationship with my father – a kind, patient, and understanding man. Just as I do with all those I love dearly, I spend my days sometimes gripped with an all-consuming fear of his loss. When I hear “Junior Dad,” it awakens that fear. It lays bare all that was forever left unsaid between Lou and his father, who died in 2005.  

The song’s droning strings are a great chasm, and Reed – in the face of his own advancing age – reaches across it to directly address the man who so shaped him. In hearing Reed try to bridge that impossible distance, I fear the day when I’ll be forced to do the same, rather than merely picking up the phone to feel a connection that I’m forever grateful is so strong. 

These were five men who by and large spent their careers projecting an outsider toughness, a wounded masculinity. They made violent music that wallowed in inhumanity and yet, two of their biggest respective hits were string-driven ballads that celebrated someone who gave them the peace, comfort and contentment their other material sneered at you for believing existed. 

Love songs aside, neither had ever, or have since, created anything so nakedly vulnerable as this song. 

Lulu would turn out to be Reed’s final album, “Junior Dad” the coda of his discography. Less than two years after its release, on October 27, 2013, he died of liver disease at the age of 71.

“Junior Dad” in Lulu – beauty and humanity in a sea of violence, depravity and oppression. There is no more fitting epitaph for the man or his work. 

Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.