It's difficult to locate the precise beginning of the end. Warhol, though a close friend of Reed's, had also been let go. Without Cale, things never sounded the same -- his viola and organ had added the creepy hum that gave the Velvets their unique sound. The band continued to play, releasing "The Velvet Underground" in 1969 and "Loaded" in 1970. After "Loaded," Reed left. Some say he wanted to pursue a solo career; others point to tensions with Morrison. Without their frontman, the band soon dissolved.

Rather than hover around his legend, invoking it from time to time when his star sinks a little, Reed pushed ever forward. He released 12 albums in the '70s. A few became classics -- songs such as "Vicious," "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Sally Can't Dance" got big -- and many fell flat. He experimented more than the Velvets had, too. "Metal Machine Music" came out in 1975, for example, and stands as a collection of atonal guitar screechings and electronic noise, unleashing his magnificent nastiness.

In the '80s, Reed tamed his Rock 'n' Roll Animal alter ego down to something more thoughtful. "New York," released in 1989, offers a beautiful and epic tour of his favorite city, from welfare kids to the havoc wreaked by drug abuse. The songwriter who'd eschewed the optimism of the '60s now showed no trace of detachment. His participation in Amnesty International events seemed to confirm that even crusty old curmudgeons could hold deep wells of sympathy beneath their leather. In the following years, he published "Magic and Loss" and then, briefly reunited with Cale, "Songs for Drella," a gentle and compassionate tribute to Warhol. A kinder, gentler Lou had emerged.

(It makes sense, if relationships can be said to make sense, that the new Reed has recently married the new Laurie Anderson. Not only do the two represent New York cool, they represent old New York cool. Like Reed, Anderson has evolved from '70s downtown art rogue to something far mellower in our minds; these days, we think of the revolutionary performance artist as something close to a folk hero.)

Transcendence and all, it took some time for America to make up its mind about Reed. (Europe is another story; like jazz, he's always had some of his greatest fans across the pond. Havel has claimed his music played a "special special role" in the liberation of the Czech Republic.) The guy whose songs were once banned on the radio had, under our noses, become loved and even respected. Critics scrutinized his every move -- his lyrics, his sexuality, his drug use -- almost as though they were taunting him: Where is the asshole who used to call us assholes?

Indeed, Reed has forged an ambivalent relationship with critical attention. In true Reed fashion, he used the limelight to spurn all the limelight. He'd agree to interviews and then proceed to abuse the interviewer. He's no recluse -- as much as he resented mass media and all its trappings, his career thrived on it, and he never forgot.

Somehow, his responses to the press are endearing. You can almost picture Reed with a daisy: I love them, I love them not; I love them, I love them not. (Except, of course, that it's impossible to imagine the Rock 'n' Roll Animal anywhere near a flower; if he actually held one, he would certainly smoke it, or at least give it a lecture.)

What the critics, and Reed himself, often miss is that his finest work is the cast of characters he's concocted over the years. The music was often, and can still be, great -- his latest album, "Ecstasy," came out in April to favorable reviews. But the thing that entrenched itself was the attitude, the theatrics. It was a schizophrenic attitude, too, full of revisions, and the energy of schizophrenia never failed to charge his performances.

Like Bowie, Reed cultivated a variety of characters for himself to inhabit over the years. He could be the glam, blond pretty boy, the vicious sadist, the cantankerous preacher and, a perennial favorite, the snide New Yorker. He either defiantly resists pop with dark, non-radio jams or he purports to transcend it with self-consciousness, cutting the earnestness of a catchy pop tune with those cold eyes and those fuck-you cheekbones. But it's still a catchy pop tune. "Sweet Jane"? Those chords snap and thrum like beautiful rubber bands.

"Ecstasy" returns to this territory, or at least closer than Reed's been in a while. Again, he presents variations on the theme of transcendence. He has suggested that he's demonstrated enough musical and lyrical variety (in, say, "Songs for Drella" and "Magic and Loss") to earn a return to classic Lou Reed. The songs are familiarly filmic, telling stories that rely on powerful -- often melodramatic -- images, and a cast of characters whose rough edges sparkle for a fleeting moment. It's that strange mix of heavy-handed and pluralistic we've come to expect: A man has his nipples sucked by whores, and that's OK.

"Strange mix" is one way to put it; another is conspicuously inconsistent. So maybe we like Reed for his contradictions and flaws, and for the fact that he doesn't know why we like him. That's rock 'n' roll, after all: all innocence and rudeness, too dumb to be cunning and too bad to be bad.

Of course, beautiful dumbness isn't enough -- we require of our musical greats some kind of human understanding, too. Reed has always understood our heads, in some strange way: There are symphonies in there. Some are written by others -- Mozart, the Beatles, Monk -- and they got there because they're perfect. They play at perfect times: when we're on our bikes in the sun, or jumping into the shimmering lake or walking home from the bar where we toasted life with friends.

But we hear other music, too -- imperfect notes we piece together ourselves from secret brain reservoirs. These soundtracks play when no other seems appropriate. Stepping out into the sun on a winter day and feeling a rusty screw in your heart, and sweating, wondering what your drugs were cut with, fearing this is the day you drop dead in a frothing heap on the way to the drugstore -- in these moments, Lennon and McCartney don't do the trick.

So we devise an accompaniment, too messy to be called music, and this is what Reed often touches. His songs sound like blissful death, other times nothing so elegant. They rub the private music that rises and falls with the beat of the ecstatic, broken heart. It's the walk home from the bar, yes, but punctuated with miserable retching in an alley; it's the jump in the shimmering lake only to find that quietly fluttering to the bottom is a strangely real option; and the bike in the sun? Well, the sun is black as hash.

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