A beautiful film tribute to Lou Reed’s classic, Walk on the Wild Side, showing the characters involved:
What a hauntingly beautiful song. It is hard to imagine today, but I loved this song back when I heard it on the radio in Salt Lake City in 1972 without ever understanding its meaning.
This song also speaks to a time when gay culture celebrated its feminine side, something lost in today’s push to appear “normal” and assimilate.
Sadly, we no longer have “underground” cultures as everything spreads instantly across the internet, but this song stands as a tribute to a time when insiders could say astonishing things without the umbrella culture reading the code. Consider the lyrics –
Holly Woodlawn:
Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
Candy Cane:
In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
Little Joe:
Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
Backrooms, hustlers, and trannies? How did the meaning ever escape us? Even today I will point out the song’s meaning to gay friends who are surprised they never caught it.
(OK, I did not know what a backroom was in 1972, but I did in 1982 and I didn’t get it then, either. And for my straight readers – a backroom was a dark space at the back of a gay bar where men went to have sex, a convenience shut down when AIDS hit.)
Harvey Milk and Joe Campbell
Missing from the YouTube video is the Sugar Plum Fairy, slang for drug dealer, which may be why it was left out. The Sugar Plum Fairy was Joe Campbell who played a character of that name in Andy Warhol’s film My Hustler. Joe met Harvey Milk in 1955 when Joe was 19 and Harvey 26, and to Harvey’s amazement, Joe fell instantly in love, and they lived together for 7 years in New York. Harvey moved to San Francisco’s Castro after they broke up.
Amazingly, Joe Campbell had another famous lover named Oliver “Billy” Sipple. Sipple was an ex-Marine who became famous on September 22, 1975 when he went to hear a speech by President Gerald Ford in San Francisco’s Union Square. Standing next to Sipple was a woman named Sara Jane Moore who pulled out a gun and tried to shoot the President, but was thwarted when Sipple, acting fast, knocked the gun away, saving the President. Sipple was closeted, but Harvey Milk thought this was a great opportunity to show Americans that gay men could be heroic. The San Francisco Chronicle printed the information that Sipple was gay, but the resulting press onslaught on Sipple and his parents was devastating to them, and Sipple unsuccessfully sued the Chronicle for outing him. It appears he then sank into alcoholism until his death in 1989.
A little research turned up something else interesting about the other, “Little” Joe. Joe Dallesandro is alive and well and living in Los Angeles, at least according to Wikipedia. Hard to imagine he was a hustler in New York in the 70s and made it through alive. In fact, it is Joe Dallesandro’s crotch that is memorialized on one of the most famous album covers ever, The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers:
Update: Note Mixxie’s comments below for an even fuller picture of the time and people of the song.
I love this song, and the album!
Actually Joe Dallesandro was a hustler in the 60’s. By the mid through late 70’s he was making films in Italy and France. I’m surprised you didn’t mention his iconic roles in the Warhol/Morrissey films (often, mis-categorized as a trilogy) “Flesh”, “Trash”, and “Heat”. And Joe is a canny survivor (even as an adolescent hustler posing for the physique magazines in LA he was able to avoid the pitfalls of the trade, such as being exploited by a wannabe pimp, an older man who after being rebuffed by Joe threatened him with a broken bottle. Joe wound up putting the guy in the ER with several stitches in his face and undoubtedly some memorable scars. It was at that point he was sent by a judge back to NYC where a year or so later he walked into the room where Warhol was filming “The Loves of Ondine”. According to Jim Carrol, Joe turned tricks in a side-room of the projection booth of the one-time Warhol porn theater “Andy Warhol’s Theater:Boys to Adore Galore, a venture suggested by Warhol collaborator, Paul Morrissey, which lasted 6 weeks. Unlike Lou Reed, who had not yet met the people he immortalized (not always to their liking) in his song which he wrote in LA, Jim Carrol actually knew and worked with Joe and as a sometime hustler himself, knew one when he saw one. Lou Reed wrote a great song but he exploited the images he saw when he watched the Morrissey movies. He was notorious for exploiting and stealing imagery from the people he met and admired. I love “Transformer”, it’s a great album (although a lot needs to be said for Bowie’s contribution as producer) but Lou Reed was a prick, plain and simple. He’s also known for talking trash about people he had never met or at least, did not know well (like his remarks regarding Joe’s stupidity—nobody with as little intelligence as Lou Reed attributes to him, could have survived as long as he has considering the ups-and-downs he’s had. He’s either plenty intelligent, if not gifted with great articulateness, or he is the luckiest person alive. Being the logical-minded person I am, I tend to think he was a lot smarter than most people gave him credit for. I’ve known a few physically-oriented quiet types and they rarely fail to surprise with the occasional super-witty remark or astute observation. When Lou Reed referred to Joe as an idiot he was being an elitist of the worst type–the type who is fascinated by people with qualities he very likely longed to possess, i.e, toughness, good looks, amiability and simultaneously scorned. Let it be noted that Lou Reed famously asked the very attractive artist Duncan Hannah to shit in his mouth. (“Please Kill Me:The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” by Legs McNeil
To clarify, regarding my remarks pertaining to Lou Reed’s willingness to exploit and then drop, the people he came across or even loved; one of the earliest people he exploited was his brilliant roommate from Syracuse, Lincoln Swados, a tragic schizophrenic, gay and from a similarly well-off educated Jewish background as Lou’s. His friendship and early influence on Lou was fairly well documented in the seminal Victor Bockris biography but who was far more personally memorialized by his younger sister, Elizabeth Swados who wrote a very moving memoir on her struggles growing up with the schizophrenic brother she adored and looked-up to. By the time of Swados’ first tragic schizophrenia-related incident (he threw himself onto a train <or subway?) track and lost an arm) Lou Reed had pretty much dropped him. It's quite likely Reed ran into him from time-to-time in NYC because Swados wound up a fairly notorious street person before his rather early death. Lou Reed wrote a great song but he was not a nice guy and he was writing about people he had not met. He later disavowed any proclivities other than that of a straight male (in spite of having had a long term relationship with the transgendered, Rachel. I think he has recently reclaimed his bisexual past but it took him long enough to get to that point. It would be nice if his song led people to explore the individual's in a more in-depth manner, rather than take Lou's song as gospel but that never seems to be the case. How would you like to be Joe Dallesandro, alive and well in West Hollywood, a grandfather, and still being described and introduced with the lyric, 'he never once gave it away'? When you consider that when he was hustling he was 15 and 16 and it was not something he did for kicks but to survive, it kind of puts the 'beauty' of that song in a different light for me. He has been remarkably gracious about the lyrics in interviews (including the recent Reed documentary), choosing to put his own spin on their meaning. He's far more gracious in fact then Lou Reed has ever been regarding critics and journalists and past associates. Of course, the song is art and has to be judged on a different level but since it is about real people, two of which are still living, it would behoove one to consider they've had rich and varied lives beyond a few poetic descriptions in Lou Reed song.