From gritty real-life portraits of self-destruction in his early days ("Street Hassle") to mature reflections on death and dying ("Magic and Loss -- The Summation"), the singer approaches the subject matter of his tunes with unflinching honesty. As Reed has transformed over the years, from an experimental songwriter and archprovocateur ("I Wanna Be Black," "Heroin," "Kill Your Sons") to a mainstream -- though more conscious than most -- middle-aged performer, his audience has grown in kind. In the bleary days when the Velvets were the dark-side darlings of Andy Warhol's Factory crew, only a coterie of hipster transgressives made the scene. Now Reed appears on high-profile stages that also host the Go-Go's, Chris Isaak, and Hall & Oates. Frightening as this sounds, it isn't entirely unreasonable; Reed is a man of mixed emotions, and some of the more memorable titles of his distant past ("Pale Blue Eyes," "Perfect Day") are genuinely moving ballads with melodies your grandmother could swoon to. Perhaps Reed's untidy mix of candor, simplicity, and deep feeling is precisely what it takes to propel the few-chord vamps of rock and roll to the level of art.
