‘I originally met Lou Reed at a party. I came with a friend, we both had long hair and some guy approached us and told us we looked very commercial and would we like to meet this band called the Primitives who had this terrible single out, called “Do the Ostrich”. Lou was in the band, but he was bitter because they wouldn’t let him do “Heroin”. A relationship was struck up and we moved into an apartment together. I remember always noticing these faggy-looking types hanging around the apartment. It took me quite a while before I realized what was going on.
‘Sterling [Morrison] had gone to Syracuse College with Lou, and Mo lived down the street from him. She was a button operator or something by day and in the evening she’d go home and play drums. We had so much trouble with drummers but Mo was good at being basic so she was brought in . . . Actually Lou was always saying, “Sterling can’t play guitar,” and that Mo couldn’t play . . . He kept saying, “But man, she can’t play . . .”
‘My idea was to keep the sound simple, but by overlaying the instruments’ simplistic pattern the accumulative effect of the sound would be incredibly powerful. I was highly intrigued by the whole Phil Spector wall-of-sound concept but obviously I had to modify it to a four-piece set-up. Actually I always found myself caught between playing the viola and playing bass. I never thought we made enough of the viola, which is a very powerful instrument.
‘There were always conflicts and presumably always will be. Though we both basically agreed on that particular policy. Lou was the vocalist, front man and songwriter for the band. I was just taking it easy and generally having fun. Now I look back on it all, I wasn’t particularly enamoured of the more garish aspects of, say, the whole Exploding Plastic Inevitable. But then, that’s exactly what Lou was very into.
‘Those guitar solos – they’re all Lou’s – and one of them, I think it’s on “I Heard Her Call My Name,” is really incredible. But that was his sound. Actually all those songs are so fast – I kept trying to get them down to a slightly slower pace, y’know.
‘But then the break-up occurred. I’d just got married, which was one cause, I think. Also Lou was starting to act funny. He brought in this guy called Selznick – who I thought was a real snake – to be our manager and all this intrigue started to take place. Lou was calling us “his band” while Selznick was trying to get him to go solo. Maybe it was the drugs he was doing at the time. They certainly didn’t help. I mean there was another time – an incident that Sterling can in fact witness to – where Lou played me this song he’d written and I immediately started adding an improvised viola part.
‘Sterling muttered something about it being a good viola part and Lou turned around and said, “Yeah, I know. I wrote that song just for that viola part. Every single note of it I knew in advance!” It was sad in a way because there were still some great songs to be recorded like “Here Come the Waves” which later became “Ocean” on his first album and a bunch of others. I heard a bootleg tape of a concert we did at Columbus, Ohio, and all it sounded like was Lou constantly tuning his guitar up and down for ten minutes at a time. Also there was absolutely no applause.
‘Actually, I’m amazed at just how different we were in our ideas, now I’ve heard everything Lou’s done since that time. It all just sounds like a weak representation of tunes and nothing more. I mean, some of his songs in the Velvets really made a point, y’know? Now he just appears to be going around in circles, singing about transvestites and the like. The only thing I’ve heard him do since, where he put up a good performance, was on the song . . . uh . . . it’s a girl’s name . . . oh – “Sweet Jane”.
‘I think he might start writing some good songs again, were he to go back and live with his parents. That’s where all his best work came from. His mother was some sort of ex-beauty queen and I think his father was a wealthy accountant. Anyway, they put him in a hospital where he received shock treatment as a kid. Apparently he was in Syracuse and was given this compulsory choice to either do gym or ROTC [a military service deal]. He claimed he couldn’t do gym because he’d break his neck and when he went to ROTC he threatened to kill his instructor. Then he put his fist through a window or something and so he was put in this mental hospital. I don’t know the full facts. Every time Lou told me about he’d change it slightly’
– John Cale, talking to the author, spring 1974.
‘New York is so desperate. You have to be desperate to go there at all. Lou asked me and . . . Lou isn’t my friend though. Because he wouldn’t share his drugs with me. He was taking Octagell, which is the strongest form of speed. You know of it? It makes your teeth clench together [she demonstrates]. Also I had to leave his house because he was beating his girlfriend’
– Nico, talking to the author, summer 1974.
‘I was really fucked up. And that’s all there is to it. It’s like I really encouraged it. I did a lot of things that were really stupid and I don’t know how they could sit and listen seriously to that stuff. But I catered to it for a long time because I thought it was funny.
‘It was such a big deal, a song called “Heroin” being on an album and I thought that was really stupid. I mean, they had it in the movies in the forties – The Man with the Golden Arm, for Chrissakes. So what was the big deal? It was like talking to pygmies. People were offended because we did a song called “Heroin” but there’s plenty of stuff about that in literature and no one gives a shit but it’s rock’n’roll so we must be pushing drugs or something. I thought after all that stuff about “Heroin”, well. . . If you find that so shocking, take a look at this. It was a stupid, childish attitude I had but, you know, as long as they were going that way I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll give it a little push that way, a little street theatre.” Getting involved in all that was like going along with it, pandering to it. I don’t think it brought out the most attractive features in me’
– a clean and sober Lou Reed talking about the seventies in Q Magazine, spring 1989.
Another predictable ‘nothing-to-do’ night in New York in the early spring of 1974 and a couple of friends and I decided to forestall yet another predictable lurch down to Max’s Kansas City by paying a short visit to some ‘nouveau-tack’ disco/lounge bar dive that someone from the record company had earlier handed me a free pass to, called (aye-aye-aye) The Twinkie Zone. The cab checked us out on 49th and Lexington and already, as we walked down to the entrance, there was some sort of a ruckus going on around the cloakroom area. Nothing to get too concerned about: just a bunch of negroes laughing and giving everyone ‘high-fives’ with their ample palms. Then I noticed the centre of attraction, huddled stooge-like within this morass of grinning black faces, and things start to get vaguely sinister. From a distance the character looked like just another sub-human Manhattan dementoid who must. . . ah, but then I started getting closer and distinct physical characteristics started uncomfortably insinuating themselves on the vision.
He (She? It?) stood there looking to all the world like one of those mangy half-starved Mexican dogs (who always appear limping pathetically across the desolate stone landscape of a Sam Peckinpah movie just after the outlaw heroes have vamoosed across the border) but transformed by some hideous miscalculation of fate into human form. The hair was shaved as close to the head as possible, like Charles Manson’s when he was graced with a prison cut, and went one step further, but mutilated even way beyond that by what appeared to be large random patches of diseased albino colouring. It was only when I got closer that I noticed these areas on the sides of the head were in fact specifically shaped like Nazi iron crosses. Then there was the face which possessed not only the most uniquely grey and decayed fleshly pallor I’ve yet to witness on any human visage but also a fixed glazed look to the eyes like several hundred watts of electricity were being fired through his central nervous system. The body was skinny and emaciated almost beyond belief. God, he looked awful!
My boot heels were already set to go a-wanderin’ straight out the door again when one of the assembled company, a former Warholite as it happened, started chirping away in perplexed quasi-Brooklyn chipmunk tonalities.
‘Lou! . . . Lou!. . . Lou?. . . LOU Reed? . . .’
I turned around again expecting maybe to see some Porky Pig look-alike in leather-boy drag to emerge suddenly from the shadows, drink in hand, but the disturbed cries for recognition were directed towards the offending object itself, who continued to stagger around in a daze until he manoeuvred his shaky form up to the girl, stared right into her face and burbled, ‘Susan’, before sidling off in the approximate direction of the bar and almost walking face-first into a nearby plate-glass window.
It took me a good minute of solid staring to visually equate this utterly dissipated apparition with any previous physical incarnation that was ever named Lou Reed. It wasn’t easy. For a start, I’ve never seen a man so utterly paralysed, so completely devoid of life while managing to somehow keep breathing, as Reed had looked that night.
‘We were worried when we first saw him like that, too, but what can you do? Louis is such an extremist’ Barbara Falk is the secretary for Dennis Katz, a successful young lawyer who works up on the 37th floor of a skyscraper situated on 59th and Madison. Dennis Katz is also the manager of Lou Reed. ‘Dennis and Lou did have a fall-out when Louis appeared with those Nazi crosses in his hair. But. . . like I said, what can you do?’
What, indeed? I mean, what am I even doing having an interview set up with Lou Reed, who, not three nights ago, I’d decided had finally degenerated into little more than a corpse with a heart-beat. I didn’t like the new album, considering the reconstruction work on ‘Heroin’ – and particularly ‘Rock’n’Roll’ – heresy of sorts, and the few rumours I’d heard floating around ranged from the prominent one that claimed Reed was back into taking speed (popular probably because it helped explain the loss of three or four stone in weight in about as many months) or else that he was obsessed with sadism, had done a recent video with Andy Warhol that has caused him much personal disillusionment and sorrow. And lastly, that he’d written a bunch of new songs, among them one called ‘I Wanna be Black’; another, a mini-opera about a cat and a dog called ‘Miss O’Reilly’s Dog’.
Anyway, Barbara leads me into a room full of law books and, before too long, I’m joined by Katz and Reed himself. There can’t be anyone cleaner-looking in the whole of show business (never mind the whole of New York) than Dennis Katz. I mean, what’s a nice Jewish lawyer like Dennis doing leading in this half-human neo-Nazi? And one of the same faith, already! Well, for a start, Katz is doing all the talking. Reed sits brooding next to him looking disturbingly like a frightened monkey in a studded leather jacket and tight jeans (Katz plays the organ-grinder). Such is the state of the singer’s emaciated contours that nothing seems to fit properly. All of which makes him appear even more uncomfortable.
For fifteen minutes Katz talks enthusiastically about how he’s now starting to handle Iggy Pop’s affairs (which makes him more and more appear like some benevolent missionary for that peculiar genre of ailing, sickly twilight-zone rock geniuses), how Nothing’s Happening in New Yuk, how Rock’n’Roll Animal is shaping up on the Hit Pick stations, how they had to put Animal out speedily because no one quite understood Berlin.
‘It was intended as a black comedy,’ laughs Katz. Ha, ha. I always thought it sounded like the creation of a team of people all suffering from terminal valium hangovers locked away to think up the most grandiosely turgid, depressing piece of brilliance they could muster from among their collective bloated fantasies.
Reed remains silent throughout, except for a couple of attempts at verbal interjections where his voice sounds so parched and dry he literally chokes on his own words. All hopes for some transcendental dialogue have temporarily been shelved. I’m more concerned about seeing Reed actually speak up and give one coherent reply. The first question I finally address to him is a throw-away concerning the reported traumas that went into the making of Berlin. The cogs begin to turn and out croaks a subdued, uncertain sound.
‘Berlin . . . I mean, I had to . . . I had to do Berlin . . . If I hadn’t done it. . . I’d have gone crazy. And everyone was saying, “Don’t do it – you’ll get killed.” It was insanity coming off after a hit single . . . but . . . but I mean, it was all written. If I hadn’t got it out of my head I would have exploded.’
Long pause.
‘It was a very painful album to make . . . and we got killed under it. And only me and Bobby [Erzin, the producer] really knew what we had there, what it did to us . . . I. . . I don’t wanna go through it again, having to say those words over and over and over again . . .’ Reed beats his fist against the table to emphasize the ‘overs’, looking more glazed and fatigued by the second as he relates the pained saga.
Ah, but c’mon, Lou, shape up and don’t get so maudlin about it. Wasn’t Dennis over there just telling me it was all one big black comedy? Reed fails to light up to the idea, however, and stolidly insists on pacing his words at an ominously slow rate – almost in reverence to the trials presumably incurred during the recording of the album.
‘No, there was no black comedy as far as we were concerned. I knew we were open to that, seeing as it came off, uh, after Transformer. I mean, I love Transformer . . . It’s a fun album, y’know . . . Transformer is a fun album and Berlin isn’t.’
So what about Rock’n’Roll Animal, which was recorded live at the Academy of Music with what has since become his old band. All except guitarist Dick Wagner have since split the roost, leaving Reed and manager Katz to pull together yet another back-up band. The sound on the album is all ‘pomp and circumstance’ heavy-metal thunder, expertly wrought but obviously far too session-musician finicky professional to hope to approximate the magical ineptitute that personified the Velvet Underground sound. Still, you don’t argue, at least for the moment, because Reed is more than a little adamant about his feelings concerning the appropriateness of the new versions.
‘It’s the way those things should be done and hadn’t been done’ – more fists banged on the table to press the point home – ‘correctly. And it finally was done correctly! So just like Berlin had to be gotten out of the way, that had to finally close off and finally finish the fuckin’ thing! That’s the way I wanted those songs to sound from the very beginning. For better or worse, that’s it.
‘But, you see, when people think of the Velvet Underground they think of “Heroin”. I was always more fascinated by “I’ll be Your Mirror.” [Pause.] Rock’n’Roll Animal is a clarification of my old work . . . I think. I’ve had my hit single and I want all those kids to know what came before that. Because they don’t know and I want them to be aware of exactly what predated “Walk on the Wild Side”.’
The slow deliberate tone of his voice sounded not a little disparaging when the aforementioned hit single is brought up. So, d’you still stand by all that Max’s back-room ‘chic’ mentholated blubbering?
‘Oh sure – it’s cute,’ gurgles Reed. ‘. . . Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo . . .’ He sniggers into his Jack Daniels.
This is progress.
OK, Lou, so let’s get down to business. How d’ya lose all that fat then? Huh? As if on cue, Reed returns to his zomboid drone and the pauses between commentary become even more elongated and strained. Barbara Falk, ever the helpful soul, offers, ‘He just stopped eating,’ before Lou speaks up.
‘Uh . . . it’s like . . . uh, the guy I studied under . . . a poet, Delmore Schwartz. His friends wouldn’t let him drive a car because in his own words. . . . uh . . . “Life as he had known it had made him nervous.” [Sniggers.] . . . And I guess . . . uh.’ [Longpause.] ’. . . It depends on boredom . . . And tension. Getting interested, y’know, in things after you get things settled. Getting involved again . . . Not being bored. Because when I get bored . . . uh, funny things happen.’
So were you bored during the whole Lou Reed/Transformer period?
‘Well I wasn’t exactly exhilarated or thrilled by the whole thing. Boredom isn’t the proper word. I knew things weren’t right and I was waiting. And while I was waiting . . . uh . . . These other things sort of just happened. Like my marriage. It was kind of a pessimistic act. Nothing else to do at the time. Kept me off the street. “So what’s new this week?” “Well, I think I’ll get married.” And that’s when I really started gaining weight. Then one day it dawned on me that it was all like a movie. And the thing about movies is that if you don’t like ’em, you can always walk out. And as soon as that became clear, it was all very simple. Now I don’t get headaches anymore. And I’m poorer. All the money I make, she gets. They call it alimony.’
So does all this augur a spanking new positivism in the philosophical make-up of Lou Reed?
‘Well, I’m not pessimistic. I really like the way things are going and I love the new songs.’
Reed’s conversational prowess, however, reaches some kind of burlesque nadir when he actually gets around to trying to describe these new gems of musical/lyrical inspiration.
‘Uh . . . well, there’s one about. . . [Longpause.] Uh, what are the new songs? . . . I’ve got them on tape, y’know, but I keep forgetting them . . . [Another long pause.] Oh yeah, there’s one called “Kill Your Sons” about parents sending their kids to psychiatrists and giving them shock treatment. The songs seem to all have movement from the general to an example all of a sudden [Uh?] . . . not intimate but specific detail. [Uh?] . . . They all seem to move that way. Constantly.
‘There’s another called “Babyface” which is about two guys living together and it all comes down to the one saying to the other, “Well, you’re not the easiest person to get along with.” It’s about interpersonal relationships on a one-to-one level. Of the others, “I Want to be Black” – it’s about young middle-class kids who . . . uh, seem to go through this phase of wanting to be . . . like . . . uh, Black Panthers – isn’t going to be recorded.’
However, that disappointment is more than compensated for by Reed’s description of his forthcoming masterpiece, ‘Miss O’Reilly’s Dog’ (a song which actually saw the light of day entitled ‘Animal Logic’ on the Sally Can’t Dance album).
‘Oh yeah . . . It’s about this woman who has this dog . . . uh . . . and it gets shot ’cos it barks too much and the neighbours get upset. . . and then this cat. . . uh . . . I forget what happens to the cat but something happens to the cat. . . Anyway the dog and the cat meet. Yeah, the dog’s dead, I guess . . . I dunno how he’s still alive but he’s alive and then, uh . . . some dude sees ’em both and puts a board between ’em.’
And then what happens?
‘. . . Uh, I think they both get high . . .’
I see.
‘I like these songs a lot. I think they’re the best I ever did. Nah, there’s no . . . uh, concept, but I notice as I listen to ’em over and over again that interpersonal relationship theme seems to be running through.’
So there are no obsessive topics to be incessantly dwelt upon this time? Like the last one was suicide, right?
‘Yeah, it was . . . But not mine! Hers! . . . Someone standing there holding a razor blade up and she looks like she might kill you but instead she starts cutting away at her wrists and there’s blood everywhere . . . Yeah, you could get interested in suicide.’
Ol’ Lou just drools on, his Peter Lorre bug-eyes set in a lethargic stare. But, like he says, suicide was last year’s thrill.
‘We got down to the point where we were saying, “Well, you don’t cut this way, you cut that way”’ – symbolically sliding a finger across the lower veins of his left arm – ‘But me? Oh no, I wouldn’t do anything like that. It’s so easy in a way: the actual process . . . [Long pause.] I mean, I’ve seen so many people like that. You either do it or you don’t. And I. . . I know where I want to go. I’m in control. . . uh, I know that there’s this level and then there’s this level’ – measuring up with his hand – ‘and I’ve seen over that level and I’m not even going to go near it. Ever. I’m in control, that’s for sure.’
But hey, Lou, then why do you look so godawful? I mean, don’t you want to be healthy and clean yourself up a bit? Quit getting the shakes and get a bit of colour in those pallid cheeks?
‘Well I’m getting healthier, y’know.’ He croaks. ‘My drinking is . . . uh, minimal now. I get into that when I’m bored. So much of that shit is behind me. I don’t write too much . . . but then I would only write a lot if I had no direction.’
The funereal pace of this discourse takes on an almost poignant tone when the matter of Andy Warhol’s failed attempt to videotape Reed recently is brought up.
‘Oh Andy . . . It was very sad because he said while we were doing it . . . “You know, it can never happen again.” And he was right. Y’see, Andy’s situation is kinda harsh. All that sixties energy and now we’re in the seventies and there’s nothing there. He seems to be waiting but . . . oh, he’s so fantastic. People still don’t realize how great he is. Oh, he’s made the transition, sure, but so have I, y’know. I’m just doing different things. All the rest have been left behind. I didn’t even think I had an image. I mean, what image? Now onstage . . . Well all those songs are real and I become that song. But it doesn’t affect me outside that particular song.
‘There are certain things I just can’t do, image or no image. I mean, I did go down to Lexington – I did all the stuff then. But I don’t now, and I think it’s kinda sad that people are still caught up in that. “Candy Says” . . . “Pale Blue Eyes”, those are my songs, from my personal experience. And “I’ll be Your Mirror”.
‘I mean, one night Nico came up to me and said, “Oh Lou, I’ll be your mirror,” and it bowled me over. I wrote that song for her. Most of the time I just write through other people’s experience. Yeah, you could say I’m a voyeur. But I’m not, y’know. I was just talking about what was going on around me. I’ve always been listening – to this day I still do. Like, I’m not a heroin, or I’m not speed, or I’m not liquor, or I’m not up or down. It’s like a circle. I write songs, that’s all. And I try to make ’em as real as possible. And the way that happens is because they are. They’re not necessarily about me, though. That’s where everybody gets confused, y’see.’
Finally, Reed is joined by a comparatively vivacious-looking New York girl called Barbara, who appears to be his girlfriend. Dressed in the current thirties-style glad rags she buzzes around him, while he remains seated, his skull creased by a lazy smile. Later in the evening I run into an old friend of his who laughs at my original odds on Reed’s chances for that big date with Sharon Tate.
‘Oh, he’s got his problems, but I bet he’ll outlive all of us. He’ll probably be around even to read his own obituary.’ Why not? He must have read enough of them already . . . Oh yeah and those Nazi crosses? They were actually World War One insignia of some sort. I mean, a nice upper-middle-class Jewish boy like Lou sporting Nazi crosses? His mother should live so long!