What Goes On

[It is indeed “lady”–and more crucially, it’s “see the BELLS up in the sky,” not “bills”!–hopefully the curators of this great site will fix this!]
As to the song’s theme, I frankly see nothing here about getting dumped, or about drugs. (Either might of course have been involved, but neither finds any clear reflection in the text itself. ) This, it seems to me, is quite simply a song about loving someone who is going through turmoil, who is beset by their own inner “demons” and knows it, but is at the same time unwilling to just open up and reveal “what goes on” inside of them. The authorial persona (the “I” narrating the song) is not only distressed over this, but is in fact on an emotional roller coaster (“one minute up, one minute down…), excitedly agitated (“…fly from side to side…”), probably even vacillating between ecstasy and depression (“see the bells up in the sky / somebody’s cut the string in two…”). They passionately wish to know the beloved’s mind, to know more intimately what the trouble is. They want to offer support, consolation, solidarity in any way possible but, finding they are shut out, the best they can do is to continue to suffer all these emotions in silence, while trying to offer some kind of consolation in the vaguest of generalities–after all, that is really all they have to work with (“lady, be good, do what you should, you know it will work alright…).
Note that this hope (even confidence?) that some kind of divine grace may intervene, in the midst of one’s apparently hopeless struggles to “find [one’s] proper place” and “do what [one] should” is the central theme of “Jesus” (on the same early VU album). That song is explicitly formulated as a prayer. The “lady be good…” consolation offered in “What Goes On” may be imagined as something actually said to the beloved, but it might also be understood as a prayer on her/his behalf. Having little way of knowing what internal “demons” are involved, the authorial persona (on this reading) simply “gives it over” to divine grace, hoping and praying for the best. (Ordinarily, I would hesitate to freight this song with such interpretive baggage. But sorrow over sin and separation and a fervent desire for redemption are indeed themes that recur throughout Lou Reed’s work….)