FEATURE:
Groovelines
Lou Reed – Perfect Day
__________
THERE are a couple of reasons…
why I am thinking about Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. For one, it must form one of the best double A-sides ever (its other being Walk on the Wild Side). The song was the first single from his album, Transformer. Released in November of that year, maybe people best associate Perfect Day with a BBC advert that ran in 1997. After featuring in the 1996 film, Trainspotting, it became known to a wider audience. Perhaps a generation who did not grow up with Lou Reed or his music with The Velvet Underground. The Transformer album is one of Reed’s very best. Its third track in, Perfect Day is the standout for me. I will come on to discuss Perfect Day in the context of the BBC charity single that was released in 1997. That version is twenty-five on 17th November – exactly twenty-five years since the original was released. In terms of its background and origin, I want to start with some information from Wikipedia:
“The original recording, as with the rest of the Transformer album, was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson (who also wrote the string arrangement and played piano on the track). The song has a sombre vocal delivery and a slow, piano-based instrumental backing.
The song was written after Reed and his then fiancée (later his first wife), Bettye Kronstad, spent a day in Central Park. The lyric is often considered to suggest simple, conventional romantic devotion, possibly alluding to Reed's relationship with Bettye Kronstad and Reed's own conflicts with his sexuality, drug use and ego.
Some commentators have further seen the lyrical subtext as displaying Reed's romanticized attitude towards a period of his own addiction to heroin. This popular understanding of the song as an ode to addiction led to its inclusion in the soundtrack for Trainspotting, a film about the lives of heroin addicts.[3] However, this interpretation, according to Reed himself, is "laughable". In an interview in 2000, Reed stated, "No. You're talking to the writer, the person who wrote it. No that's not true. I don't object to that, particularly...whatever you think is perfect. But this guy's vision of a perfect day was the girl, sangria in the park, and then you go home; a perfect day, real simple. I meant just what I said”.
The mark of a really great song is one that can succeed and have life as an original, but it can also be transformed and adapted by others. I think a lot of people try and look for darker and more controversial meanings behind songs from edgier artists that do have a heart. By that, Perfect Day seems like this paen to a blissful moment and great love. A man putting his heart out there. Lou Reed has written some beautiful love songs but, with The velvet Underground, drug references were not too far away. Some have interpreted Perfect Day as a song about heroin or being in a drug-induced bliss. In 2020, Far Out Magazine reported how some see Perfect Day to be about drugs:
“The material, upon first listen, sounds like an innocently beautiful effort and, if you were unaware of this theory about the song’s true meaning, then it would never spring to mind. The accusation about the track being centred around heroin is one that has been around since the birth of its inception with Reed even attempting to extinguish the theory all the way back in 1973, but his words fell on deaf ears. “That’s a lovely song. A description of a very straightforward affair,” he told NME a year after the release of Transformer.
Reed’s denial of the track being about heroin is backed up by many who, over time, have claimed that the former Velvet Underground had no reason to lie about what the meaning of the song when, in comparison, he famously released a track titled ‘Heroin’ with his former band—a factor which proves he clearly had no issues with wearing his outside influences on his sleeve.
The theory was given a second wind in 1996 when, in Danny Boyle’s masterpiece Trainspotting, an overdose scene in the British classic film that follows a bunch of heroin addicts in Edinburgh—a collaboration which only added fuel to the fire of the rumour.
However, this interpretation, according to Reed himself, is “laughable”. In an interview in 2000, he stated, “No. You’re talking to the writer, the person who wrote it. No that’s not true [that the song is about heroin use]. I don’t object to that, particularly whatever you think is perfect. But this guy’s vision of a perfect day was the girl, sangria in the park, and then you go home; a perfect day, real simple. I meant just what I said”.
I think that Reed’s lyrics and performance on Perfect Day are beautiful. If you have not heard the song before, then I would suggest you listen to the whole of the Transformer album and see how it fits in. Reed, one of the very best songwriters ever, is at the top of his game on his 1972 album!
If anything, those who sang on the BBC 1997 version of Perfect Day brought new life and meaning from it. In no doubt their version explores and augments love and togetherness, it remains one of the best adverts ever. Featuring a range of artists and personalities, it not only highlighted the diversity and importance of the BBC; it brings tingles and shivers when you hear each person take a line or two from the song. I think that many people went back to Lou Reed’s original when they heard the BBC cover (Reed featured on the BBC version). I like the actual and true meaning behind Perfect Day. Aural Crave gave us more details about what inspired one of the all-time best songs:
“Lou Reed was able to place us all in front of a mirror, in a strong contrast to the hippie rhetoric of peace and free love that raged in California in those years. He was a deeply sensitive artist, who had touched pain with his hand and seen the darkness with his eyes. Reed was afraid of sleep because the darkness and loss of consciousness took him back to the electroshock therapy (a very common therapy back in the days) he had received when he was teenager, that had been administered to “cure” his alleged homosexuality. If you analyse some of his albums, you may come to realise that the sensitivity of his sublime poetry came from the pain.
Perfect Day, the single released in November 1972 from his second album Transformer, is simply the “perfect song”. The song that everyone would like to receive as a love message. The most beautiful song on the album, and perhaps the most beautiful song by Reed.
You made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else
Someone Good
These are the verses that I most adore of this immortal poem. It’s great to think that there is someone in the world who will help you forget who you are and make you feel better. It reminds me of a phrase from Jack Nicholson’s beautiful movie As Good As It Gets, where at some point, Jack says to Helen Hunt: “You make me want to be a better man”. The person to whom Lou Reed is talking in the song is Shelley, one of the most important women in his life since adolescence, the woman who inspired some of the most beautiful songs in his first part of the career (including I’ll Be your Mirror).
Shelley was Lou’s first real love story, which lasted for his whole time at high school. A very complex and psychologically intense story. Reed recalled, in some interviews, how beautiful those meetings were; going to get ice cream, going to the zoo together, seeing a movie. All the while he tells us in the lyrics, that it is wonderful to enjoy the little pleasures in life, because we won’t have a second perfect day, as the sad melody and the cadence of the voice suggest. That day was perfect and had to be perfectly immortalised, forever, in memory and in this song.
The fruits of those moments will continue to be collected for a very long time, as he says in the last verse: “You’re going to reap just what you sow”. Behind a good harvest there is always hard work – simple, but so difficult to put in place. It’s not easy to listen and listen and understand the difficulties, needs and feelings of each other. It is even more difficult to put aside our selfishness, our ego and our fears, to give love, then to learn how to receive it. The concept is deep and extensive; all the books in the world would not be enough to fully explain it, yet Reed expressed and synthesised it in a few, unforgettable verses”.
I will finish there. A tremendous song that sounds touching, haunted, timeless, and pure when Lou Reed sung it. In the hands and mouths of a cast of other artists, the BBC version turned it almost into something hymnal and ethereal. Whichever version you prefer, one cannot argue against the fact Perfect Day has these wonderful lyrics. Lou Reed died in 2013. He would be proud of the success and life the song has enjoyed! The song has featured on other shows and media. The power the song has and how it makes you feel is almost otherworldly. As a piece of music, It is almost…
SOMETHING holy.