Lou Reed

(20131102.01)

...remembered (via Glen O'Brien)

Hey Lou, it's me. "I wished I talked to you more when you were alive..."

You wrote that to Andy when he bought it. Well, fucking ditto.

I just wanted to say that you went out well. You went out on top. And the whole fucking thing...your um, oeuvre, is like, scintillating and mind-boggling and thrilling and scary. Thrills and chills, fear and loathing, and then, just when we least expected it, you pulled out a big fat heart.

I first saw Lou Reed when I was in college. It had to be the summer of '67 because the first Velvet Underground album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, had come out in March.  The one with the Warhol peel-able banana on the inside of the LP. I had seen it in the record store. I think I didn't have enough money to buy the album right off but I knew that the band was involved with Andy Warhol and they looked more interesting than anybody I'd ever seen before, and that was good enough for me.  There was Andy on the back cover, staring through a tambourine.  Lou was the guitar player in wraparound shades and a cop hairdo holding a guitar with his fingers bent in a weird posture, possibly resulting from taking a pill.

So I went to see The Velvets play at La Cave, a folk club on the East side of Cleveland, Ohio. I had gone there numerous times to see gentle folkies like Bob Gibson, Tom Rush, Judy Collins, and Ian & Sylvia, but I was especially psyched to see the weird band managed by Andy Warhol that had a songs called "Heroin," "The Black Angel's Death Song," and "All Tomorrow's Parties." With the incredibly beautiful German singer who was in La Dolce Vita. Nico!

The club, which was located in a basement, was either half full or half empty, but it wasn't exactly the usual folkie crowd. There was a biker contingent present. And strange pale people, not deadhead hippies. The show started in an unusual way—the band, all dressed in black, came out one at a time.  One rifing, then two, then three... I don't remember who came out first; I'm guessing it was Sterling Morrison, but it was Lou who came out last, wearing a t-shirt. He had short hair, wraparound shades and a thick muscular neck. He played a hollow bodied Gibson, and he played the hell out of it. Suddenly, in my boring Midwestern city, I found myself in new territory.

The Velvet Underground was a rhythmic band and they played hard, tight, intensely. As if they were under the influence of some strange stimulus. I had never heard or seen anything like them—well, nobody had. John Cale had straight, black shoulder-length hair and was wearing a black turtleneck, black jacket, and what looked like a large diamond necklace. (Rhinestones no doubt.)  It wasn't until halfway through the set that I noticed that the drummer was probably a girl.  The beautiful Nico was nowhere to be found.

For me it was love at first sight. The audience began dwindling as the show went on, but the bikers hung tough. It was an unforgettable show: "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Run Run Run," "European Son," "Heroin," "White Light/White Heat," and "Sister Ray." I had another reason to move to New York. If New York 1967 was like this, I had to get there.

I finally got there in the summer of 1970 just as the Velvet Underground was playing their last engagement at Max's, two sets a night for two months. John Cale was gone, as was drummer Moe Tucker. The band was Lou, Sterling Morrison, Doug Yule on bass, and Doug's brother Billy on drums. Lou's last night before he quit was recorded on a Sony cassette recorder by Brigid Berlin—it was later released as The Velvet Underground Live at Max's Kansas City.  It wasn't the dark, controlled anarchy that I'd seen a few years before but it was sublime and poetic. Lou seemed world-weary, but he went out on a good night.

I met Lou in 1971. He came up to Andy Warhol's Factory where I was working on Interview Magazine. Lou was already one of my heroes (I made my art school film project using "Heroin" as the soundtrack) and I was both thrilled and disappointed meeting him. He was very nice and open, but he seemed strangely damaged. He had been living in Long Island and working for his father's accounting office. I wondered how this could have happened to him. But the good news was he was making music again. He was recording his first solo album, with Richard Robinson producing, for RCA Records. I suggested that Lou write something about the record for Interview.  He sent me a piece and I thought it was embarrassingly earnest, but also kind of lobotomized. I told Lou that it wasn't really what I had in mind and he apologized to me. I felt awful.

But I could relate to what he was going through. He had been the voice, guitar, and words of the best, most sophisticated rock band ever, and they didn't sell any records. Brian Eno said something funny, that the first Velvets album didn't sell many copies but everyone who bought one started a band. Lou knew he was up there with Dylan and the Stones, he even thought he was a better guitar player than Hendrix, but the record companies didn't get it. Their idea of cool was Jefferson Airplane. And the Velvets' last record, Loaded, had been hijacked by Cale's replacement, the band's newest member Doug Yule, who remixed the album after Lou's departure. (Two of the songs on the album went on to become standards—"Sweet Jane" and "Rock and Roll.") No wonder he was depressed.

As I spent time with Lou I would see flashes of what I expected from him all along. He was brilliant, but had a lot of bitterness in him that fed a mean streak. A mean mean streak that alternated with empathy and great humor.

I courted Lou's friendship and he was a friend back. I was 24 and he was 29. (I know because we have the same birthday.) I finally got to know the guy about as much as one could and I watched, quietly cheering, as he pulled himself back together.  But it was a weird process. We'd go out for brunch and Lou would be putting back double bloody marys before noon, and seemed to be taking pills that pushed him in different directions, up and down, but he also seemed to be getting his swagger back.

Lou did a reading at St. Mark's Church. He published the lyrics to "The Murder Mystery" in the Paris Review. He hooked up with Bettye Kronstadt, a tall good-looking cocktail waitress and aspiring actress and he got his own apartment, although it was an ugly apartment with shag carpeting and bad suburban furniture. But with Lou, he was either in perfect taste or execrable taste. He seemed to like both modes. Although, frankly, I think that, as artistic as he was, he simply wasn't a visual person.  He always had perfect hair or the worst hairstyle ever. Sometimes you wondered if he was being ironic or clueless.  Lou, who had no choice about being hip, was fascinated with squaredom. That was part of the appeal of Bettye. She was a nice square chick. They got married. Then I remember seeing her with a black eye that never seemed to heal. 

Lou started calling me to hang out, which was fun. Sometimes he'd call up late to see what I was doing. One night he called and I was listening to Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story and he started in on me. "Do you actually like Rod Stewart?" When he stopped mocking me he started telling me about a great discovery he'd made, a fantastic young band from Boston that he was planning to produce. "All their songs are about me," he said. I had a feeling he wasn't kidding.

Lou would drop by my apartment in the late evening. "Do you have any drugs?" he'd ask. I don't think I ever did, at least when he asked. I'd say "I have some pot," and he'd snort and scoff. That wasn't drugs. Lou was often hard to read. I was a fan of a singer-songwriter named Armand Schaubroeck who made an album about prison after being sent up for 32 robberies that he committed when he was 17 and I decided to introduce them, thinking Lou would dig him. Lou wasn't impressed. Armand was crushed.

I actually thought Lou's first solo album wasn't very good. The songs were good, most of them unrecorded Velvets songs, and when they turned up on post-breakup Velvet Underground albums they were great, but Richard Robinson's production was very studio-musician in its musicianship. Too slick. Lou was in terrific voice, but the production, the back up singers, the whole thing sounded about as hip as Bettye Reed.

I met David Bowie when he came up to the Factory in 1971 to play "Andy Warhol" for Andy Warhol. He was smart and nice. Andy didn't know quite what to make of him, or the song, especially since Bowie had started out with a sort of Lindsay Kemp mime routine. But Bowie was brilliant and this was probably when he hooked up with Lou.

In 1972 I went to London with a group of American rock writers for the release of David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. It was a fantastic trip. I saw Harry Nilsson play piano in the lobby of the hotel where we stayed. I danced with David at The Sombrero, a basement disco. And we all caught performances by two acts Bowie was hooking up with at London's Roundhouse. There was Iggy Pop—utterly amazing—doing the best-ever set. "Did you like that?" Iggy yelled at the crowd. "Yeah!" they screamed back. "Okay," said Iggy, "Let's do it again!"

And the next night there was Lou. Lou put on a great show. He was wearing eye makeup and had his fingernails painted black.  The music was hipper than on the solo album and Lou was on.  I went backstage to see him afterward and he was sweating and grumpy. He had no roadie and was moving his own amps.  But that was the beginning of a new Lou. Bowie and his guitarist Mick Ronson proved to be the perfect producers.

In a way Transformer was the most Warholian of Lou's records. "Vicious" ("You hit me with a flower, you do it every hour,") was written at the suggestion of Andy. "You know, vicious, like I hit you with a flower." A silly almost nursery rhyme song was named "Andy's Chest," although the words seem to have nothing to do with that subject. "Satellite of Love" seemed to be channeling Andy's voice ("I watched it for a little while, I like to watch things on TV.") "Perfect Day" captured a kind of pop art normality. But the unexpected and unlikely hit was "Take a Walk on the Wild Side," which had come out of a project that had fallen through, a Broadway show based on Nelson Algren's gritty novel Walk on the Wild Side, in which Lou drops the names of various Max's back room denizens. 

Lou was back. So was his ambition.  And now he didn't have Cale or Yule to worry about. He was in control and it suited him. He became one of the great control freaks of all time. His next album was Berlin, an ambitious album, a sort of rock opera produced by Bob Ezrin, who had produced four albums for Alice Cooper. It featured the guitar duo from Alice's albums, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner.  Although Berlin wasn't very commercial, it led to two records that made him an arena act: Rock 'n' Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live. Lou goes heavy. Lou Reed sells out. (Maybe an impossible joke on the record company?) Lou ties up and pretends to shoot up in concert.

I hadn't seen him for a while when we hooked up for the purposes of a cover story for L'Uomo Vogue. I wrote the piece and Oliviero Toscani took the photographs. I couldn't believe the way Lou looked when he showed up. He had transformed his Transformer self into something far more radical. In a black t-shirt and black jeans, he looked like he weighed ninety pounds. His hair was dyed black and close cropped in a radical curved shape, like a Vidal Sassoon butch. Soon it would be blond or spotted with iron crosses shaved into it and he was wearing nail polish and black lipstick.   He was clearly "on." It was the same old Lou, but he had turned a corner. He made a TV spot for Rock n' Roll Animal in which he stared into the camera, perfectly still and you only knew it was film when he blinked at the end. Very Andy.

Lou had some problems with his record company, although his last three albums had been hits. And his management often found him unmanageable. He had been on the road in a seemingly precarious state for about three years when he owed RCA an album. And so he made Metal Machine Music, sixty-four minutes of feedback that he presented as if it were the logical progression from John Cage or La Monte Young. (The baffled record company almost released it on their classical label.)  Subtitled "The Amine Beta Ring." Sounded like drugs. The liner notes were revelatory: "This is not for the market. The agreement one makes with 'speed.' A specific acknowledgement. A to say the least, very limited market...for those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush...My week beats your year."

Lou was still a hero, but he was doing a sort of high-wire act: high wired. It was amazing. He came in second in a poll of rock star mostly likely to die next, right after Keith. But he continued to show remarkable ability to persist, rebound and adapt. He had pulled himself back from the brink, and with 1978's Live: Take No Prisoners album, recorded at a series of shows at the Bottom Line, he appeared at the peak of his black-humored powers. It is both a great live rock set and one of the best comedy albums of the late 20th Century. The album starts with a scratching sound of a match being struck, a cigarette being lit, and Lou's intro where he apologizes for being so late. "We were tuning," he says. And from there he seizes rock and roll and drags it kicking and screaming into Lenny Bruce, Don Rickles territory.

He performs the jazzy "I Wanna Be Black," daring to wigger before there was wigger: "I wanna be black, have natural rhythm, shoot twenty feet of jism too, and fuck up the Jews."

On a sixteen minute "Walk on the Wild Side" he introduces new characters, explains the usual ones, and launches into a diatribe on critics, savaging Robert Christgau of the Voice and John Rockwell of the Times. "Imagine working on an album for a year and some asshole in the Village Voice gives you a B+."

The patter is fast and furious as he deals with an audience of hecklers. "Here's where I turn into Lou Reed...I do Lou Reed better than anybody."

"You got some coke? Anyway, I know you're not interested in my problems. Either am I?"

"Drella? Are you here?" Lou asks, hopefully.

"Oh you're here Catherine"—that's Andy's assistant Catherine Guinness—"He went to see Monique van Vooren? What does she do?"

I ran into Lou a few times with Andy. Andy loved Lou and Lou loved Andy, but they were so similar that they really had their ups and downs. Both were dissemblers and contrarians. Both were essentially nice and potentially cruel, hyper-sensitive, bordering-on-paranoid people with a mean streak and a heart of gold.

Andy complained over and over that he hadn't been invited to Lou's wedding to Sylvia Morales. (Me either! Maybe it was because I was friends with Sylvia's best friend Anya Phillips, James Chance's girlfriend, who was being snubbed big time. Anyway Andy was in Dusseldorf at the time!) In the diaries Andy wrote about being snubbed by Lou: "The MTV awards were so exciting, it was like the Brooklyn Fox shows in the sixties with so many stars. Diana Ross was my date, but she was in another row, the first row, because she was picking up Michael Jackson's award. Lou Reed sat in my row but never even looked over. I don't understand Lou, why he doesn't talk to me now."

Lou got mad at me when I made the mistake of talking to the writer Victor Bockris for his 1994 unauthorized bio of Lou, Transformer.  I should have known that Victor would only use the bad things I said. I said he was one of the greatest songwriters ever, up there with Dylan and Cole Porter. I said he was a true poet. A great guitar player.  A really funny guy. A mensch, a twisted mensch, but a mensch. But Victor picked, "He's like Stalin in that he loves the people, he's filled with generosity for the human race, but not for any one person in particular." That was true, but on the other hand, it was a lie. Lou was a love. All kinds of love. "No kinds of love are better than others."

Still, Lou never cut me dead.  Maybe he'd be a little snide, but he was nice. When I cut my hair short in '78 he said, "Hey, did you join the Marines?" I guess he knew a real admirer when he saw one.

When Andy died Lou got back together with John Cale (his on-again, off-again collaborator/pal/nemesis) and they made Songs for Drella, which is about as tender as Lou could get.  After that John said he'd never work with Lou again. (He didn't until the Velvets reformed). On "Hello It's Me" Lou sings:

    Andy, it's me, haven't seen you in a while

    I wish I talked to you more when you were alive

    I thought you were self-assured when you acted shy

When Mary Harron made the movie I Shot Andy Warhol which basically presents the demented Valerie Solanas who shot Andy and almost killed him as a quirky feminist hero with a slight resemblance to Fran Lebowitz, Lou complained:

"I find the idea offensive, a movie dedicated to the person who shot Andy Warhol. I think other people would be offended too. Suppose I said we were gonna do a movie called I Shot John Lennon. What do you think would be happening? They would be lined up in the street right now. You want to do a movie about Mark Chapman played by Tom Cruise? You've got to be kidding!"

In the song "I Believe," Lou sang about Valerie Solanas, "I believe I would have pulled the switch on her myself."

So Lou grew up. Got sober. Married one of the nicest people around—Laurie Anderson—and he did his Lou Reed thing. Always suprising. Bob Wilson? Metallica? I think the last time I saw Lou he was sitting in a restaurant in the West Village with a party of people including his publicist. He said hello. I said hello. Later, the publicist, a friend of my wife, said to her: "Wow, Lou must really like Glenn?"

"Why," my wife asked.

"He said hello to him!"

To me Lou is one of the greatest artistic figures of our time. His eloquent language and music changed the world. He followed his vision down the dark alleys of the soul and, holding his course, he invariably found the white light. And if he didn't, he tried again.

 But who has written a better song than "Some Kinda Love"?

Nobody.

"Between thought and expression lies a lifetime."

Great life Lou. Way to go.