1989 was a great year for dinosaurs

When I saw that Lou Reed died a few days ago, my thoughts immediately brought me back to 1989, the year I finally bought my first Lou Reed album, “New York” (cassette actually—this was 1989, after all). I’d always admired Reed up to that point, appreciated his music, identified with many of his characters, was intrigued with those I didn’t. I liked “Transformer” and the VU albums, but I didn’t own any of them. Maybe that was because by the time I came of age and started paying attention to music, Lou was struggling. His past music was a museum piece to me, his new music missing my target. I remember hearing his single “I Love YouSuzanne” in 1984, played over and over again on MTV because it was the first video Lou Reed ever produced and they finally had an excuse to play him. It was a good song, a fun piece of pop that showed Reed had the chops to produce some decent dance music, but it wasn’t the type of album I was going to rush out to buy.

And Lou wasn’t the only one struggling creatively throughout the 1980s, a decade that was not kind to many of the rock and roll pioneers who dramatically re-landscaped music in the 1960s and 1970s. So many of those acts ran out of gas in that decade, producing albums that ranged from bland to bad, pale shells of their former selves that made you wonder if maybe rock and roll stars who didn’t lifestyle themselves into an early grave should have expiration dates on them, a point where they just stop trying to be rock and roll stars anymore and are denied any more studio time.

There was Bob Dylan, continuing the funk he’d entered in the late 1970s, bottoming out with “Knocked Out Loaded” and “Down in The Groove,” two albums that are not just bad for Dylan, but are just plain bad. Neil Young bounced from style to style, from doo-wop to country to electronica, with a string of records so lackluster that his label sued him. The Rolling Stones started the 1980s off well with “Emotional Rescue” and “Tattoo You,” before a newly cleaned up Keith started to re-assert his authority within the band and touched off a feud with Mick that led to “Undercover” and “Dirty Work,” two albums that weren’t necessarily bad, but that desperately needed focus and direction.

David Bowie, after the triumph of 1983’s “Let’s Dance,” seemed to run away and hide from his superstardom, unable to cope with a market demographic suddenly made up of significant numbers of screaming teenage girls. Eric Clapton just quit, climbing out of bed once in awhile to record another dull, forgettable song.

Perhaps the most egregious example greatness gone bad was Paul McCartney, who kept playing to his worst pop instincts until hitting the bottom with the theme song to the movie “Spies Like Us,” a song so dismal it prompted a friend to say at the time that every last drop of talent had drained from the man’s body. If you want to hear it, you’ll have to find it yourself on YouTube because I’m sure not going to link to it. If you dare watch it, you’ll be stunned that this guy was once in The Beatles.

I don’t know why so many bands hit the wall in the 1980s. Age, I suppose, is the easiest explanation. Exhaustion. Copious use of drugs and alcohol finally catching up to them. Maybe they were responding to the increasingly conservative culture of Reagan and Thatcher that they had fought so hard against in the previous decades. They had lost, so why keep trying? Screw it.

But then came 1989 and, for whatever reason, so many of those old dinosaurs found relevance again, producing a stunning batch of good music in just a matter of months. Neil Young went back to rock and roll and lit it up with “Rocking in the Free World.” The Stones found a workable Mick-Keith balance with “Steel Wheels,” even addressing the intra-band tensions directly with the single “Mixed Emotions,” the band’s last Top 40 hit in the U.S.

Dylan, his interest in music renewed by 1988’s “The Traveling Wilburys,” produced “Oh, Mercy,” an album that was not just as wise and profound as anything he’d done before his Jews for Jesus phase, it was fun, too. Clapton released “Journeyman.” Bowie formed a new band, Tin Machine, and while their self-titled 1989 debut was hardly revolutionary, it was good enough to leave the teenage girls behind and show the man still had some life left in him.

Even Paul McCartney, who had fallen so low, rose back up collaborating with Elvis Costello on “Flowers in the Dirt.”

The common theme among all those albums, it seems, was the musicians simply went back to their roots. They quit trying too hard—or not hard enough—stripped away the artifice and in some ways started from scratch, reinventing themselves by going back to their own beginnings. They quit trying to be rock and roll stars, quit trying to write songs for radio programmers or arena audiences and wrote about what they wanted to write about. Only now, instead of being idealistic, anonymous teenagers singing about horniness and confusion or how much better the world should be, they wrote songs from the perspective of middle aged men looking back on their silly youthful selves and everything that came afterward.

And so it was with Lou Reed and “New York.” His Reagan-era creative funk never cut as deep as the others, but like them, he went back to his beginnings in 1989, rediscovering his hometown, his muse, and how it had changed since the VU days, mostly not for the better. He was ticked at how the marginal people he identified with so much—the poor, the weird, the strange—were being pushed even further out to the margins, while his city became increasingly a playground for the rich.

The album’s centerpiece, “Dirty Boulevard,” is typical, a guitar grinding in anger while Reed pummels the powerful for not even pretending to give a damn about the poor anymore (give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on ‘em/…..your poor huddled masses, let’s club ‘em to death”).

And just to make 1989 even better for Reed, the Cowboy Junkies released their cover of “Sweet Jane” that year, a version so achingly beautiful that even Reed said it was better than his own.

A few of those acts managed to keep up the momentum after 1989, producing some of the most vital music of their careers (Dylan, Young). Others have proven to be more hit and miss (McCartney, Bowie, Clapton). For the Stones, it was their last gasp. For Lou? I have to admit, I’m not sure. I never paid much attention to him after that. My attention drifted away from him, and “New York” would remain the only Lou Reed album I’ve ever owned. But if you have to own only, it’s not a bad one.