Reed Works His ‘Magic’ : He Mourns the Deaths of Friends in New Album

Three years ago this month, Lou Reed--the man who helped bring social realism to rock as a member of the Velvet Underground in the ‘60s--released an album that remained at or near the top of critics’ lists for the next 12 months.

Titled “New York,” the Sire Records collection was a sobering state of the union address that suggested the country had lost much of its spirit and values.

Reed’s impatience with the individual apathy and corporate self-interest that he saw as responsible for a plundering of society’s underclass and the environment was summarized in one of the album’s key numbers.

Sample lyrics from “This Is No Time”:

This is no time for celebration.

This is no time for shaking hands.

This is no time for marching bands.

This is no time for optimism.

This is no time for Endless thought.

This is no time for my country right or wrong.

Remember what that brought.

In the new “Magic and Loss” album that will be released Tuesday, Reed turns his attention from the sweeping urban landscape of “New York” to explore the interior of the soul.

The subject is death , and Reed examines it with as cool--but never cold--an eye as anyone in pop has ever brought to the theme. There is an underlining sadness, anger and confusion as he reflects on the loss of some close friends, including songwriter Jerome (Doc) Pomus, who will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Wednesday night in New York.

It’s a frequently brilliant work that’s as emotionally powerful as Neil Young’s stark 1975 “Tonight’s the Night” or Sting’s warmly philosophical 1991 “The Soul Cages,” two other albums that were also written after the deaths of close friends or relatives.

Yet “Magic and Loss” is a more comprehensive exploration of feelings as Reed emerges from his questioning and sadness with an even richer appreciation of life. That’s what makes the album an ultimately uplifting work.

Co-produced by Reed and Michael Rathke, the arrangements are appropriately spare. The focus is on Reed’s words, with dabs of guitar adding punctuation that ranges from fiery to mostly cleansing.

There are moments of bittersweet humor and tender irony amid the songs that carry us from the heartache of watching the gradual deterioration of a loved one, through the numbness of a funeral Mass and the farewell of a cremation.

Rather than simply speak in polite euphemisms about what he is seeing happening in visits to his friends’ hospital rooms and apartments, he uses words, including cancer and radiation, that rarely surface in pop music.

At one point, Reed becomes so deeply emersed in what is happening to his friends that he switches from narrator in the songs to the first person patient.

Sample line from “Magician”:

Magician take my spirit

Inside I’m young and vital

Inside I’m alive, please take me away

So many things to do--it’s too early

For my life to be ending

For this body to simply rot away.

Mostly, however, it’s Reed the observer and he takes us through the moments of despair as well as occasional moments of optimism when things seem to be improving.

In the opening “What’s Good,” Reed begins with some of the sly sarcasm associated with some of his sassy street-wise tunes from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

In an early verse, he asks

What good is seeing eye chocolate

What good’s a computerized nose

And what good was cancer in April?

No good--no good at all

By the end of the song, however, he has moved beyond the sarcasm and offers this simple, but disarming summation:

What’s good?

Life’s good--

But not fair at all.

“The Cremation” provides one of the album’s most poignant moments:

Will your ashes float like some foreign boat

Or will they sink absorbed forever?

Will the Atlantic Coast

Have its final boast?

Nothing else contained you ever.

But it’s “No Chance” that might best express the most universal sentiment--the disheartening regret that you didn’t have more time to spend with the loved one or friend.

The song’s closing lines:

No there’s no logic to this--

Who’s picked to stay or go

If you think too hard it only makes you mad

But your optimism made me think you really had it beat

So I didn’t get a chance to say goodby .

I didn’t get a chance to say goodby

There are seeds of this album in Reed’s earlier work; as far back as some Velvet Underground material and as recent as songs such as the AIDS-inspired “Halloween Parade” and “Song for Drella,” the musical biography of Andy Warhol that Reed and former Velvet sidekick John Cale released in 1990.

Yet this is a fresh and original work--even by Reed’s own history of opening doors in pop with his fearless, poetic explorations of the human condition.

There would be no better way at next week’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction dinner to pay tribute to Doc Pomus, who co-wrote such hits as “Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Viva Las Vegas,” than to play parts of “Magic and Loss.”

The album is so personal and so poignant that it finally gives meaning to that old show-biz cliche about an artist’s work being an artist’s gift.