Lou Reed

(Included on the album “Transformer”, RCA Records, 1972)

“Perfect Day” is an image.

Here it is, taking shape before your eyes.

That “perfect day” in the park. Being together. The animals at the zoo. The mild sun grazing the skin and the serenity that lazily spreads through the whole body.

That day when you manage to find a bit of peace, a bit of balance, between flickers of hope and glimmers of light. The day when everyday violence and anguish can find no place. The anxieties stay locked away, at least for a while. A walk, a bit of sangria, then a film at home.

It's so beautiful, so simple…

And yet there are passages within "Perfect Day" that break what would seem to be an apparent idyll between two people. The first is "you just keep me hanging on", which literally would mean "You keep me going", but is also a slang phrase used to indicate the wait between one fix and the next. On the other hand, even the final line, repeated four times as the music fades out with the same light step with which it began, confirms that air of subtle decadence and darkness, as if something were slipping away from us, shadowed by the genuine simplicity of the images the song conjures. "You're going to reap just what you sow". The reference could be to his relationship with Shelley Albin, Reed's great love from his youth, and the regret stemming from that relationship, or to his relationship with Bettye Kronstadt, his future first wife, or perhaps to his inner conflicts with sexuality, drug use, and the reckoning with his own ego.

We must not forget, in fact, that: "Lou Reed was also the man who gave dignity, lyricism and rock to heroin, amphetamines, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, the passivity of outcasts and suicide, and then set about debunking all these achievements and getting himself back into trouble by turning everything into a monumental joke in bad taste."

Suggesting a more complex reading, one devoted to drugs, are other passages too, such as when Reed, with that same cadenced, arrhythmic voice of his, addresses the object of this perfect day, telling them that they make him forget himself and believe he's someone else, someone better, someone kinder. Like a detachment from the self, an alienation from what one truly is, toward a shore of bliss that is, however, only temporary. It doesn't last long. The time of a perfect day. The time of a fix.

Or perhaps, the more romantic among us would say, the time of a kiss.

The swelling arrangement was crafted by the ever-missed Mick Ronson, who produced the album "Transformer" – alongside David Bowie – and who also plays piano here; doesn't it swell the chest with melancholy? "Perfect Day" never quite manages to be a joyful song, even as it wears the clothes of a pure, almost conventional romanticism. Between the lines you can read something restless and bittersweet, because behind that perfect day the protagonist seems troubled by something. Not so much in the moment he tells us about his day, but in all the other days, the ones that aren't perfect, the ones with no trace of serenity or redemption. The ones he hasn't told us about. Or perhaps the ones the American musician told us about in other songs, other stories, with other characters.

We can't know if, or how much of, Lou Reed was in his songs. But anyone who has followed his artistic career would swear that in every story, whether the decadent, ornate one of the album "Berlin" (1973) or the glam yet still utterly current one of "Transformer" (1972), from which the song is taken, or any other of his works, there's always something of him in it. Maybe everything. Every album seems to be a chapter of the same story: his life. And at the same time, "it's like acting": writing those songs and then performing them in front of an audience — nothing more, nothing less than being a stage actor. Reed never wanted to explain his own songs, especially their supposed autobiographical references, almost as if wanting to protect them. Perhaps, had they been explained, they would have lost some of their charm and their enigmatic quality. Like a director's notes, which subject a film to the director's totalizing vision, dampening the viewer's imagination and freedom of interpretation. It's no coincidence that Lou Reed always maintained that one needs to find a personal key to interpretation: "You have to believe what you want to believe and not what you hear said." A simple but flawless view, one that owes much to literature; Reed studied creative writing and directing, and his dream was to manage to combine the art of writing with that of rock.

He said: "I always had the secret hope that the intelligence that once resided in novels and films could be absorbed by rock."

And one cannot help but think that he succeeded.

But, getting back to "Perfect Day", any self-respecting classic track can't be without its covers. The most famous is without doubt the one by Duran Duran from 1995, featured on the album "Thank You". Reed went so far as to call it potentially the best reinterpretation of one of his songs. Le Bon and co., respectful of the original, do indeed breathe new life into the track, infusing it with a note of ecstatic elegance.

In 1997 Lou Reed recorded, together with fellow artists such as David Bowie, Elton John, Tom Jones and Bono, a new version of "Perfect Day" for charity, for the BBC. The single raised more than two million pounds donated to Children in Need and was a huge hit, especially in the UK, where it stayed at the top of the charts for three weeks, and in Ireland, where it even held the top spot for seven.

Also unforgettable is Reed's performance alongside our own Luciano Pavarotti at a 2002 edition of "Pavarotti & Friends". Whether it's the tenor's jovial smile as he accompanies Reed on stage, or Reed's tenderly pleased expression as Pavarotti belts out the chorus in full voice, that unlikely encounter between two such distant and opposite worlds still makes the heart race, especially now that neither man is with us anymore.

We could go on talking about "Perfect Day" for a long time yet. We could try to decode every single word, weighing its intonation, searching for some ambiguity, some broader, darker glimpse, or simply one closer to our own feelings.

We could discuss it following a narcotic reading in the vein of "Trainspotting", or we could simply let ourselves be lulled by the romanticism of the small things the song lays before us. A gust of crooked, imperfect magic carrying within it an evocative seed.

However you choose to look at it, "Perfect Day" is, and always will be, a masterpiece.

Just a perfect day

Drink sangria in the park

And then later, when it gets dark

We go home

Just a perfect day

Feed animals in the zoo

Then later a movie, too

And then home

Oh, it’s such a perfect day

I’m glad I spent it with you

Oh, such a perfect day

You just keep me hanging on

You just keep me hanging on

Just a perfect day

Problems all left alone

Weekenders on our own

It’s such funJust a perfect day

You made me forget myself

I thought I was someone else

Someone good

Oh, it’s such a perfect day

I’m glad I spent it with you

Oh, such a perfect day

You just keep me hanging on

You just keep me hanging on

You’re going to reap just what you sow

You’re going to reap just what you sow

You’re going to reap just what you sow

You’re going to reap just what you sow

Bibliography and sources:

“Classic Albums: Lou Reed: Transformer”, 2001

Bockris, Victor “Transformer. The Lou Reed Story”, 1997

Lester Bangs Lou Reed Interview in Creem, 1975

Lou Reed Interview in Jam! Magazine, 1996

“La Repubblica XL”, 2013