Lou Reed is a prick and a jerkoff who regularly commits the ultimate sin of treating his audience with contempt. He's also a person with deep compassion for a great many other people about whom almost nobody else gives a shit. I won't say who they are, because I don't want to get schmaltzy, except to emphasize that there's always been more to this than drugs and fashionable kinks, and to point out that suffering, loneliness and psychic/spiritual exile are great levelers.

The Bells isn't merely Lou Reed's best solo LP, it's great art. Everybody made a fuss over Street Hassle, but too many reviewers overlooked the fact that it was basically a sound album…. Most of the songs were old, and not very good, with a lot of the same old cheap shots.

The first indication that we've got something very different here is the no-bullshit cover art; the second, a cursory listening to the lyrics. Immediately, one notes the absence of mirror shades, needles and S&M. Lou Reed is walking naked for once, in a way that invites comparison with people like Charles Mingus, the Van Morrison of "T.B. Sheets" and Astral Weeks, and the Rolling Stones of Exile on Main Street. The Bells is by turns exhilarating …, almost unbearably poignant (all of the lyrics) and as vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool (the title opus). (pp. 93-4)

As for the lyrics—well, people tend to forget that in numbers like "Candy Says," "Sunday Morning" and "Oh! Sweet Nothing," Lou Reed wrote some of the most compassionate songs ever recorded. Though Reed's given folks reason to forget, every lyric on The Bells offers cause for recollection. This album is about love and dread—and redemption through a strange commingling of the two. To have come close to spiritual or physical death is ample reason to testify, but it's love that brings both fathers and children, artist and audience, back from that cliff, and back from the gulf that can sometimes, in states of extreme pain, be mistaken for the blue empyrean ever. In "Stupid Man," someone who's been self-exiled too long … rushes home to his family, desperate not to have lost the affection of his little daughter. Like all of Reed's people on this record, he's looking for love. A tune with that same title emphasizes how jet-set stars, hustlers and kept professionals (and middle-American boys and girls) may be united by a common longing. It's a nation of rock & roll hearts. "City Lights" … isn't only about Charlie Chaplin but about a lost America, the implication being that, in these late modern times, all the lights in the world might not be enough to bring us together.

On side two, everything coalesces in unmistakably personal terms….

"Families" is most personal of all. A friend described this and certain other parts of The Bells as "the gay outsider's occasional yearning for the straight life and its conventions," but that's inaccurate. "Perfect Day" was Reed's maudlin streak, yet sexual preference really has nothing to do with the anguish behind ["Families."] … What Reed may not realize is that, through this very song, some reconciliation is effected, because he's fulfilled a promise that very few of us are ever able to keep by finally being able to forgive and love in spite of all the tragedies that go down in every family….

With "The Bells," more than in "Street Hassle," perhaps even more than in his work with Velvet Underground, Lou Reed achieves his oft-stated ambition—to become a great writer, in the literary sense. More than that I cannot say, except: Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we'll be your family…. You gave us reason to think there might still be meaning to be found in this world beyond all the nihilism, and thereby spawned and kept alive a whole generation whose original parents may or may not have been worthy of them. (p. 94)