#9, “Coney Island Baby,” Lou Reed (1976)

150 Favorite Songs: #9, “Coney Island Baby,” Lou Reed (1976)

It’s funny. “Coney Island Baby” is not an abstract song, in terms of the words Lou Reed sing-speaks over its six and a half minutes. It’s extremely specific: Lou starts the song mumbling about being in high school and wanting to play football, and hearing that he’s too small and light weight to play the position he wanted to, but wanting to impress the coach so badly that he agreed to play a different position. It’s all a metaphor, which we’ll get into later, but it isn’t a song like “Who Do You Love,” where you can just put yourself into it; nor is it a song that is about a very specific thing that applies when one is in the same circumstance, like “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror.” But once a song is in the world, it belongs to the listener, and I found something very meaningful in “Coney Island Baby” that Lou Reed didn’t ever put there.

I’ll finish the story I started in the last entry: I had made my intentions clear to this girl upon whom I had designs, and I spent a week in a sort-of limbo where I felt like I was the shriek in Prince’s voice in the outro to “The Beautiful Ones” where he sings “do you want him? or do you want me? cuz I want yooooou!”

And then one evening she came over to my apartment, and the connection we felt was still very strong, and we sat in my room and talked and I had music playing from my laptop because I always did, and at some point “Coney Island Baby” came on and she told me that she was going to see through the relationship she was in.

And—I dunno. Trying to write about this seems like mysticism somehow, like trying to convey what exists in the space inside of a drum—the absence is the sound, you know? All I remember, and I remember it very vividly, was being there and neither of us having much to say, and then Lou finished mumbling his intro about wanting to play football, the drums ambling along laconically and the single guitar notes absently being plucked, and then the mumbled spoken part became a mumbled sung part, and the guitar gets a little more intentional, and the backing voices come in to sing “ooooh, ooooh” and then the drums pick up too and he sings about the princess who lived on the hill, and in that moment, I knew that it was all okay. I don’t know how I knew, but I heard it and then Lou hit the chorus and started singing of the glory of love, glory of love, glory of love just might come through, and I was hit with a wave of acceptance.

I don’t know that being there in that room while she was there and Lou Reed was playing moved me through the stages of grief very quickly, but I don’t really know what else would have done that. I felt sad, but I also felt lucky that I had had the opportunity to feel so strongly, and I felt hope—that there is a right-now that we are all living in, and a future-tense where the right-now holds less power, and it became easy for me to let go of the right-now. All of this happened in a few minutes, while “Coney Island Baby” played.

And eventually she left, and I let what I was feeling become a thing I had felt, and we stayed friends and eventually a few years passed and we found ourselves in the future-tense, and the glory of love came through.

And absolutely none of that has anything to do with what Lou Reed put into “Coney Island Baby,” except that it’s a love song, too, and a complicated one, at that.

Lou Reed was writing about something very specific in “Coney Island Baby.” The metaphor in the intro is about how he tried to be straight when he was queer, and the glory of love he sang about was about him and his girlfriend, a trans woman named Rachel Humphreys, whom he had been with for four years at the time he wrote the song. At the end of the song, he speaks—in a clearer voice than the one at the beginning—“I’d like to send this one out to Lou and Rachel.” Ultimately, the relationship didn’t last, and Lou married another woman, and he didn’t really ever talk about Rachel again with anybody. Like I said, complicated.

That’s obviously a very different story from the one I have about what “Coney Island Baby” sounds like to me, but I think that’s one of the things that makes art magical. It is a person taking an imperfect implement—melody and rhythm, or color and brushstrokes, or letters on a page, or light and sound and motion—and make them into the representation of an actual feeling. Human feelings are complex, and they don’t translate directly into the art that’s meant to capture them.

I always think it’s a little bit funny when someone says that a song they wrote is about a person, because I don’t think that’s ever really true—it’s maybe about how the person they were thinking of when they wrote it made them feel, to some extent, but the creative process transforms a feeling into something else. It has to—all of the tools we use to construct songs or poems or paintings or films can only ever provide rough approximations of the feelings that inspired them, and the act of approximating requires the artist to narrow it down into specific choices. What’s left is the product of artifice.

But I think that artifice, and the craft of it, is one of the most incredible things in the world. it’s amazing that Lou Reed could have a feeling years before I was born, and capture it with his voice and some guitar notes and drums and a hint of bass, and then decades later, in an entirely different context for an entirely different person, something in his feeling felt true for me, too. I sat in my bedroom twenty-some years ago and heard what Lou captured, and despite vastly different circumstances, found that the glory of love did, indeed, see us through.