Chapter Ten
1970–71
I’d harbored the hope that the intelligence that once inhabited novels and films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.
Lou Reed
Lou had as complex and problematic a relationship to his past as he had to his present. One of his music companies that held the copyright to “Heroin,” for example, was called Oakfield Music, after the street on which his parents still lived in Freeport, and no less an authority on Lou Reed than John Cale had pointed out that Lou’s best music had always been made in reaction to his parents. Thus, returning to his parents’ home at 35 Oakfield Avenue in August of 1970, after having so dramatically resigned from the VU, can be seen from several viewpoints. On the one hand, Lou was returning to a sanctuary. His parents had always been good to him. They would be good now. On the other hand, according to long-term friends, Lou’s parents were the only people he appeared to really fear. And he was returning on their terms and at least to some extent on his, a failure. The VU had not become commercially successful. He had no money.
There is no doubt that the fall of 1970 was a confusing and depressing time for Lou. Having turned his back on the scene that had supported him for the previous six years, unplugged himself from his music and his drugs, and started seeing an analyst again, he was making himself frighteningly vulnerable to the demons of schizophrenia—the lures of heaven and hell—that plague people who dedicate themselves to an artistic métier. And the fear came down on him like a black cloud making him, in his own words, “sad, moody, amazed at my own dullness” while still “spellbound by the possibilities.”
In this fragile state Lou had little time, after spending his first forty-eight hours at home locked up in his room asleep or having nightmares, for respite since the world he had so arbitrarily left kept on turning, as he saw it, on him.
September was a terrible month. Jimi Hendrix, a guitar player Lou greatly admired, though claimed to be better than, died. Loaded came out and smashed him over the head with its back cover, showing a photograph of Doug Yule alone in the studio surrounded by instruments with the clear implication that he was the resident genius of the VU now, and giving credits for all the compositions exclusively written by Lou Reed to the band jointly—with Lou’s name third, after Yule’s and Morrison’s. When he put it on the turntable, he was horrified to discover that Sesnick had remixed the album, butchering, in Reed’s opinion, not only several of his compositions, but the whole concept of the record. “The end of ‘Sweet Jane’ was cut off, the end of ‘New Age’ was cut off, the guitar solo on ‘Train Round the Bend’ was fucked around with and inserted,” he said. “How could anyone be that stupid? They took all the power out of those songs.” Looking at the song listings, he realized that their sequence had been changed so that the thematic structure of the album, an element Lou considered vital to the presentation of material, was entirely missing. “Secondly, I wasn’t there to put the songs in order,” he complained later. “The songs are out of order. They don’t form a cohesive unit, they just leap about. If I could have stood it, I would have stayed with them and showed them what to do.” As if that were not bad enough, when Lou went back into New York in September to try to persuade Sterling, whom he had known since his halcyon days at Syracuse, to re-form the band, Morrison was not even interested in discussing the subject with Reed.
It was a hasty, ill-timed move prompted, perhaps, more by emotions than foresight. “I had hardly talked to Lou for months, and I said, ‘Man, I just don’t want to talk,’” recalled Sterling. “He said that as long as I’d played with him, I’d never told him he’d played well. This was quite possibly true. I said, ‘I didn’t need to because other people told you.’ And he said, ‘Who do you think I wanted to tell me?’ It pointed out to me a real failing in me—I didn’t think he needed me to tell him. I was dumbfounded. But I was so mad at him I just didn’t want to talk. I would never tell him why. Which is a strange way to behave. You know the ‘Poison Tree’ by Blake? Like that. ‘I was angry with my friend … I told it not …’ I don’t tell you and that’s your punishment.”
Sterling had been on a slow bum ever since 1968 when Lou had forced John out of the band. He had virtually refused to talk to Lou since. By pleading with Morrison from a weak position, Lou had begged to be rejected. And Sterling, who had an understandable if misplaced sense of revenge, snapped at the opportunity. “He was saying, ‘Oh, it was this diet I was on. Wheat husks,’” Morrison continued. “He said, ‘I take responsibility for all that. You and me, we’ll put together some new band.’ So I said, ‘Lou, from what I see, it will take at least two years to get right back to where we are today.’ I was right: it took him at least that long.”
Lou set himself up for another horrible rejection when he called Shelley in November to congratulate her on the birth of her daughter, Sascha, and she hung up on him. “My mother was sitting next to me when he called,” she explained. “I said, ‘You have the wrong number.’ He said, ‘It’s me.’ And I said, ‘I know.’ He said, ‘It’s Lou!’ He was absolutely devastated. I can still hear his voice today. He was crushed. It was such an awful thing to do, but I was just not duplicitous by nature, and it was not in my ability to carry on a conversation and not have her know that this was Lou. But he was really astounded and shocked and hurt. It was a terrible time in his life and I think the end came for Lou and me when I hung up on him. It was as if I was saying once again, ‘I understand how rotten you feel, but I’ve done it, so go fuck yourself and die! And I’ll watch quietly.’ I completely lost my best friend when I did that, and I have just been sorry about it ever since.”
Reed’s identity crisis was exacerbated by the undaunted progress of the Velvet Underground. Loaded received positive reviews. The band continued touring. His absence went unnoticed and unmentioned. Doug could do a fairly good imitation of Lou. There also emerged a second factor that both depressed and motivated him. Throughout 1970 and 1971, as Lou sat on the sidelines of the music scene, Cale came out with his first solo album, Vintage Violence; Nico released her third, Desertshare; and Warhol produced Trash, a commercially successful (partially Lou Reed inspired) film about a heroin addict and a drag queen.
As Lou experienced the bends of acute withdrawal from drugs and the Velvet Underground, the rock world was going through its own difficult passage. Elvis embarked on his first tour since 1958, Elton John began his first U.S. tour in Los Angeles, and Jimi Hendrix played his last concert at the Isle of Wight Pop Festival. One reason Lou left the Velvet Underground was because he was afraid of dying. He had good reason to believe that he might. The years 1970 and 1971, the period of Lou’s exile to Freeport, took an inordinate toll on the rock-and-roll industry. Following Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Gene Vincent, Slim Harpo, Duane Allman, Junior Parker, Alan Wilson, Tammi Terrell, Otis Spann, and King Curtis, who had played on Reed’s first recorded single, “So Blue,” met their deaths through disease, drug overdoses, or, as in the case of Curtis, violence.
In the month following Lou’s resignation, the powers that be turned their attention to the very music he was most associated with. Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a series of speeches in the fall attacking liberal Democrats as “troglodyte leftists,” charging them with “pusillanimous pussyfooting,” with an emphasis on music and media as promoters of drugs. In November, President Nixon proposed that all pro-drug lyrics be banned. In response, the president of the Velvet’s first label—MGM—canceled the recording contracts of eighteen artists accused of promoting drugs. A permissive era appeared to be coming to an end.
Meanwhile, fans, rock critics, and members of the Velvets were left trying to figure out just why Reed had deserted them. Strange rumors floated around the New York rock scene, such as: Lou really was dead and his manager had murdered him; he had cracked under pressure and split for parts unknown; he had finally succumbed to the lure of heroin. When the more mundane truth, that he had gone home to Long Island to live with his parents, emerged, one cynic quipped, “Oh, well, he writes all his best songs on Long Island,” echoing Cale’s sentiment that Lou wrote best in reaction to his parents. Meanwhile, according to his greatest champion, Lester Bangs, “Lou Reed, sitting at home in Long Island, probably watching Hollywood Squares, showed neither his face nor said a word.”
The explanations Lou offered for his surprise departure were quite rational. He cited poor relations with the band, his manager, even the audience; a chronic lack of money; unendurable touring; and near categorical lack of acceptance. In truth, however, it was Reed’s fragile emotional and physical state, exhausted and overburdened with these pressures, that was broken rather than aided by severe drug use. “I know a lot of people who experiment with a lot of these things as methods to solve problems or find outlets or whatever, but, when you find that they don’t really work very well, you move on to something else,” he told Lester. “Like I haven’t got any answers but the same ones everyone else has: yoga, health foods, all of that.”
Lou began to quietly reconnoiter New York. Meeting with old friends and checking on his connections, many of whom were shocked by Reed’s confused state, Lou tentatively tried to re-establish himself. “I met Lou at the Factory,” recalled the writer Glenn O’Brien, who was working for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. “He was living with his parents. He came around the Factory and he was really pathetic. I don’t know what he was on, but he was really out of it. He was my hero, but it was like his life was over. So I thought, ‘He’s a great poet and a great writer. I’ll get him to write for Interview.’ And he turned in this thing that was so embarrassing that I was really shocked. I had suspected that he had been on psychiatric drugs when I met him. It was like it was written by somebody on Thorazine. It just didn’t make any sense at all. Then I had to call him up and say maybe you really didn’t want to do this. He was kind of apologetic. ‘Well, oh yeah, you know I knew it really wasn’t good.’ It was horrible.”
Toward the end of 1970, Reed was asked to contribute an essay to a book called No One Waved Goodbye, about the deaths of Brian Epstein, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. Lou penned a sober reflection full of images of himself. It was a much more successful piece than he had done for Interview, and good therapy too. “One cannot get to the top and switch masks,” it read in part. “Your lover demands consistency, and unless you’ve established variance as your norm a priori you will be called an adulterer.”
Among many key points Lou made in this best written and most revealing of his prose pieces was that the rock audience was the most changeable of all audiences, and that anyone who dared face them should wear armor. “Or, as my analyst puts it, don’t depend on anyone, not your lover, your friend, or your doctor.”
“I must redefine myself,” he added, “because the self I wanted to become is occupied by another body.”
To state that a person as complex as Lou Reed had a nervous breakdown is tricky because one immediately wonders if all eight Lous had the breakdown or was it just five, etc. However, in the opinion of a number of long-term friends who knew him before and after this period of exile in Freeport, Lou went through some kind of internal process that undermined the confidence he had had when he’d arrived as an authentic rock-and-roll animal on the Lower East Side back in 1965. Signs of his shaky self-image come from his own account of finally accepting his father’s overtures to work for the family business, albeit as a typist at $40 a week, rather than the heir to the throne, and in an even more revealing incarnation as a trash collector on Jones Beach, although that assignment only lasted for one day.
***
Reed’s story is not possible to understand unless one is aware of the extremely sensitive, easily hurt, vulnerable sides of his personality that were bound up in his deeply buried roots with his confused sense of himself as a homosexual who, because of the 1950s mentality he grew up in, desperately wanted to be heterosexual, and a little boy who felt that he had never gotten enough attention from his mother.
It should come then as no great surprise that Lou was blown away and to some extent woken up again musically in January of 1971 by the release of John Lennon’s powerful solo single “Mother.” With its opening bell and pitiful refrain, “Mother you had me but I never had you,” it summed up much that Lou had been struggling to express ever since his first published piece of prose at Syracuse in which his mother seduced him. After a period spent largely in the company of his dog and his rolling inner thoughts, in 1971 Lou sprang into action.
Doug Yule once remarked that the best and worst things about Lou were his willpower and drive, that once he set his mind on a notion, he had an unusual ability to take it to its conclusion. Apparently this referred as much to the reshaping of his psyche as his career. The first firm step Lou made on the comeback trail was in finding a collaborator or mate who would accompany him on the hard task of returning to himself and New York to, as it were, face the music. This new companion, whom he met in a department store, was a young woman in her early twenties named Bettye Kronstad. Bettye had grown up on Long Island in a mode similar to Lou, middle class, Jewish, suburban, and was at the time they met attending acting classes where she referred to herself as Krista. Ironically, this was Nico’s real first name, which must have sent a flash through Lou’s brain. However, the person Bettye most reminded him of, with her string of pearls and elegant clothes, was the young Shelley Albin. In other words here was a girl whom he could, he presumed, make over into whatever image best suited him. Skinny, flat chested, sexy, and most fittingly of all an actress, Bettye bore a look that was becoming popular at the beginning of the 1970s. She resembled a glamorous starlet in Andy Warhol’s 1971 classic film L’Amour.
No sooner had he found Bettye than Lou reacted as he always did when he found a new playmate: he totally overreacted, throwing himself into the affair with all the supportive charm and encouragement he could muster. Soon he had pitched Bettye onto an impossibly high pedestal from which she could only, in time, fall. From Lou’s point of view, however, it was a totally positive development. It unleashed in him a whole new series of poems, which celebrated his relationship with Bettye.
“I think I am in love,” Lou announced in a poem called “Bettye.” “I seem to have the symptoms (ignore past failure in human relations / I think of Bettye all the time).” Another piece, “He Couldn’t Find a Voice to Speak With,” began, “I am sorry, princess, I am so slow in loving / Believe me, it is inexperience.”
“Bettye,” Lou announced in the trendy magazine Fusion, “is not hip at all, and I want to keep her that way. I believe in pretty princesses.” He underscored the sentiment in a poem he published in the same magazine, but worried that he might sound like a “bisexual chauvinist pig.”
Everyone who met Bettye remembered her as the kind of woman whom Reed’s parents would have chosen for his wife. “I met Bettye once,” recalled Gerard Malanga. “She was a very sexy-looking Jewish babe, but quiet. And Lou kept her in the background. She wasn’t voluptuous, she was very thin and taller than Lou, at least five feet nine inches. She was a stylish babe, she knew how to dress.” With her conservatively styled hair, string of pearls, and elegant clothes, Bettye lived in a different world from the violent landscape of Reed’s writing. She reminded Lou’s more skeptical friends of Betty in the Archie comic books. “Some part of Lou really does like stability and the old cozy kitchen and homey living rooms,” concluded Sterling Morrison.
Meanwhile, several other developments in Lou’s life helped further lift his spirits. He launched a successful lawsuit against Sesnick to win back songwriting credits and copyrights on Loaded. Reed eventually won the lengthy battle to gain sole copyrights to the songs on the two albums, The Velvet Underground and Loaded, that listed the credits to the band collectively. “Lou really did want to have a whole lot of credit for the songs, so on nearly all of the albums we gave it to him,” Sterling Morrison commented a decade later. “It kept him happy. He got the rights to all the songs on Loaded, so now he’s credited for being the absolute and singular genius of the Underground, which is not true. There are a lot of songs I should have co-authorship on, and the same holds true for John Cale. The publishing company was called Three Prong because there were three of us involved. I’m the last person to deny Lou’s immense contribution, and he’s the best songwriter of the three of us. But he wanted all the credit, he wanted it more than we did, and he got it, to keep the peace.” However, Lou found moral justification in the decision of the court and soon afterward was also able to free himself from his management contract with Sesnick, although in the process he lost the rights to the name Velvet Underground. “Every song on the album was written by me,” said Lou. “And no ifs and buts, nothing about it. But I had to go to legal lengths to establish it.”
The foundations were now laid for Reed’s emergence into the world. “It was just obvious that whatever it was, I had to have control,” he concluded. Control became his mantra over the course of his entire solo career.
He received an offer to turn Nelson Algren’s famous novel about heroin addicts and hookers, Walk on the Wild Side, into a Broadway show, which didn’t pan out, but led to his writing “Walk on the Wild Side.” And most importantly of all, as it would turn out, with Bettye by his side he started revisiting New York. Through the auspices of his old Factory friend Danny Fields, he met a couple named Lisa and Richard Robinson, who had set up a salon for rock writers centered around their apartment called Collective Conscience.
In the confusing transition between the 1960s and 1970s that would lead shortly to both glam and then punk rock, many of the rock writers associated with the Robinsons’ group would have a vital impact on the rock world. Henry Edwards, for example, wrote for the New York Times. Richard Meltzer became, for a short time, almost as famous in rock circles as some of the stars he wrote about. Scribes like Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, and Richard Hell were beginning to move from writing into music. Lester Bangs and David Dalton were also having a vital impact.
The Robinsons and Fields, who were both trying to build a power base for themselves in the rock world, welcomed Lou into their fold with open arms, extending to him and Bettye the special attention normally reserved for Warhol superstars like Jackie Curtis or the up-and-coming Patti Smith.
Lou, who was still undecided about the exact path he intended to pursue now that he was getting back on his feet, naturally took to the Collective Conscience salon and basked in their recognition of him as a writer. This was pointedly underlined by his first public appearance in New York that March, when he gave a reading at St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project. Standing behind a lectern in front of the church’s nave, Lou commenced his reading before a top-of-the-line downtown crowd, consisting of poets like Allen Ginsberg, Warhol people, the Robinsons’ coterie, and various fans of the VU, with his most famous lyrics. Then, egged on by his audience’s enthusiasm, punching the air, he launched into a series of poems about Bettye and concluded the reading with a number of new poems with gay themes. At the end he grabbed the opportunity to announce that he never intended to sing again because now he accepted that he was a poet, adding that if he ever did anything as foolish as returning to rock and roll, the ghost of Delmore Schwartz would surely haunt him.
Meeting up with his old friend Allen Hyman, Lou demonstrated just how far he had drifted from the sensibility of his parents and his Freeport self. “We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years and he called me up and said it was time we got together again,” Allen recalled. “So he came out to the house with this girl, Bettye, and we were sitting in the living room and my brother Andy was there also, because Lou and Andy were very friendly. I was very fascinated because the Velvet Underground was one of my favorite rock-and-roll bands, and I wanted to know about ‘Heroin,’ and how he had come to write this music. He communicated to me how he had been addicted to heroin at the time, and I had no idea that he had been. We were talking about his obsession with drag queens. It was like he was more attracted to the lifestyle, rather than being involved. It sounded so outrageous.
“Lou and Andy were jamming and we were having a good time. Then suddenly his girlfriend said something to him and he started beating her up, slapping her around. And Suzanne, my wife, got so upset, she said, ‘Stop this, what are you doing?’ And it was clear that he wasn’t kidding around. She’d interrupted a song or something like that, and he started smacking her around. My son, who was maybe four or five years old, was really upset by this whole thing going on, and Suzanne said to Lou, ‘You’re going to have to leave.’”
According to Lou’s favorite writer on the downtown scene, Richard Meltzer, Lou used to needle Bettye constantly about his “gay past” and drive her crazy by telling her how much he missed sucking cock. Worse still, he started to lash out at her violently on the slightest provocation. Friends also recalled the bruises and black eyes Bettye hid behind dark glasses.
Lou was trying to reconcile his confused feelings about sex and love and his relationship with Bettye. In the process he worked out his own view of what being gay was all about: “Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you have to camp around in makeup. That’s just like platform shoes. You just can’t fake being gay. If they claim they’re gay, they’re just going to have to make love in a gay style, and most of these people aren’t capable of making that commitment. You can’t fake being gay, because being gay means you’re going to have to suck cock or get fucked. I think there’s a very basic thing in a guy if he’s straight where he’s just going to say no. ‘I’ll act gay, I’ll do this and I’ll do that, but I can’t do that.’ Just like a gay person if they wanted to act straight and everything, but if you said, ‘Okay, go ahead, go to bed with a girl,’ they’re going to have to get an erection first.”
Meanwhile, Richard Robinson, who was a staff producer at RCA Records, imagined himself gaining considerable credence from producing successful Lou Reed solo albums. The emergence of David Bowie in the U.K., who had just been signed by an A&R man at RCA in the U.S. named Dennis Katz, opened the door a crack further.
Like many musicians who spend the majority of their time and energy inside their heads with their music, Lou was, as we have seen in his relationship with Steve Sesnick, more easily led and manipulated than we might imagine given his fiery character and powerful will. No sooner had the poetry audience melted away and the Robinsons encouraged him to perform some of his “new” songs on acoustic guitar than Lou found himself playing what would ultimately end up on his first album (mostly outtakes from Loaded) to an appreciative audience at the Collective’s salon.
With the support of the Robinsons and their coterie, Reed regained much of the confidence he had missed since his days with the Velvets. Before long he was holding court. Meltzer recalled one such evening when he made the mistake of insulting the new incarnation of Lou Reed: “He took hold of an acoustic guitar and played a good ten to fifteen new compositions—all of them really okay—he’d been fooling around with at home. He completely blew up every time I opened my mouth, couldn’t fucking stand anything I had to say that didn’t capture the essence of his oh-so-unique creative vision. Like I’d tell him, hey, it would be real good with just him and an acoustic playing the clubs, he’d claim I was calling him a goddamn folky—beneath his dignity. I’d tell him one particularly nifty song reminded me of the Monkees; he’d say the Monkees were just plastic shit—he being, on the other hand, a sensitive genius. I’d tell him he was handling a passage the way Ray Davies might; he’d insist he never plagiarized anyone—his every thought being original. Lots of fury in his reaction ’cause, besides, what right did I—a mere writer!—have to question the efforts of a musician?”
In retrospect, several observers of the Collective Conscience group believed that the Robinsons were too-cool-to-live snobs “who were using Lou for their own ends and thought that he was lucky to be around them.” One friend remembered how they didn’t want Lou, a phoneaholic, to have both their private phone numbers since he had started calling fifteen to twenty times a day. Nonetheless, the Robinsons provided a stage on which Lou could rehearse his comeback and an audience to applaud his sense of humor. Despite his essay on fallen rock stars, he took Jim Morrison’s death that summer as a joke. “I didn’t even feel sorry for Jim Morrison when he died. I remember there was a group of us sitting in this apartment in New York and the telephone rang and someone told us that Jim Morrison had just died in a bathtub in Paris. And the immediate reaction was, ‘How fabulous, in a bathtub, in Paris, how faaaantastic.’ That lack of compassion doesn’t disturb me at all, he asked for it. I had no compassion at all for that silly Los Angeles person. How dumb, he was so dumb.”
No sooner had the Robinsons decided that Lou’s new songs were a top-notch batch of classic Reed material that simply needed the right production, than they invited Dennis Katz to meet Lou Reed. The major arm of Reed’s talent throughout his career has been in seizing upon the right collaborator at the right time. From Cale through Warhol to, at least for a little while, Sesnick, he has, in his own words, brought out the best in people he worked with. Dennis Katz was to be Reed’s most important single collaborator during the first half of the seventies. Katz had just become vice president of A&R at RCA. “I was musically oriented and had the ability to negotiate and structure deals that would give them an A and R head with both backgrounds,” Katz explained. “An A and R head must be able to do more than evaluate acts and listen to tapes. He must have a feeling for an act’s commercial potential, to know what they’ll be worth.” Everybody was in the right place at the right time. Having just signed the hottest new rock star in the U.K., David Bowie, Katz soon persuaded RCA executives that Lou Reed would be another perfect star for the new rock era. Katz was a bright light in an otherwise lackluster company. RCA had been living off Elvis Presley since the mid-1950s and had done little since then to consolidate their position. Other RCA artists during Lou’s RCA years were John Denver, Harry Nilsson, Hall & Oates, and Alabama. Lou signed a two-album solo contract with the company and immediately set to work with his new mentor.
Dennis saw an outstanding potential in Lou Reed: “Up to that point he was basically a songwriter. I really liked the Velvet Underground, even if I became familiar with their work only after they disbanded. The original group with John Cale had a much wider effect on other artists, but the later band was much more commercial, in my opinion.” He also found a personal connection to his new artist. “Dennis was straight,” recalled one observer, “but he had a few kinky things about him.” Both appreciated music, poetry, and maintained a strong work ethic. Katz and Reed formed the core of a team that would prepare the way for Reed’s solo career.
It was taken for granted that Richard Robinson (an in-house producer at RCA), who had become obsessed with reviving Lou’s career, would be Reed’s producer. “To date,” he said, “he has not been recorded in a way that enables him to communicate easily with those who want to listen. And he’s written the best rock-and-roll songs I’ve ever heard.”
Once Lou got back in touch with Danny Fields and found himself a star in the Robinsons’ coterie, things moved forward rapidly and very positively. In September he met a man who was to play a vital supporting role in his career, David Bowie. Bowie was on the verge of taking off into superstardom. He was already making a big point of how much he thought of Lou. He came to New York with his wife, Angie, guitar player Mick Ronson, and manager Tony DeFries to sign his RCA contract and meet Lou. Tony Zanetta, an American actor who had recently starred as Warhol in Warhol’s play Pork, was the go-between. “To celebrate the signing, Dennis Katz arranged for this party at the Ginger Man,” recalled Tony. “The big thing was the celebration of the signing and for Lou and David to meet. It was like going to a bar mitzvah. There were twelve to fifteen people, Richard and Lisa Robinson, Bob Ring who was A and R at RCA, Dennis, and other record-company people. Lou took Bettye and David had Angie with him. Rono, Tony, and David thought of me as his entrée to Lou and Andy. I didn’t know Lou. I was very intimidated by Reed. That amphetamine cutting humor frightened me so I sat there quietly, smiling. David was also not used to the biting, caustic humor. David was flirtatious and coy. He was in his Lauren Bacall phase with his Veronica Lake hairdo and eye shadow. So he let Lou take the driver’s seat conversationally. Plus Lou was one of David’s idols from the Velvet Underground. David was very shy. Lou was very short haired. I remember him being in jeans and a denim jacket. No colored fingernails or any of that. He didn’t even have long hair. And no one knew how to take Bettye. We all thought she was an airline stewardess. Very vapid. She didn’t have much to say. She wasn’t very hip looking. She was in pantsuits. Lisa Robinson was the social center of all this, she was pivotal in terms of conversation at the dinner. After the dinner, we went down to Max’s so David could meet Iggy Pop. It was in the back room seated at the big booth in the corner on the right when you went in. Danny Fields was officiating over the introductions.”
As 1971 drew to a close, Reed looked around for a manager. The first person he approached was his beloved Danny Fields, who declined, explaining, “Lou was making me crazy. So at a party at the Robinsons’ I went over and I told him, “Lou, I love you but this won’t work. I just want to be your friend.” This was best left to professionals who weren’t so emotionally or aesthetically involved, who weren’t so enraptured of him.” Next, Lou turned to Fred Heller, who managed Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose guitarist was Dennis’s brother. Dennis was clearly having a strong influence on Lou, who hired Fred on his advice. The perspicacity of this choice was intimidated by a buoyant, optimistic mood. Heller’s inventive motto was: “Lewis is going to be big in the business.”
The question underlying the venture, of course, was whether, when Lou emerged from his exile and hibernation, he still possessed, or indeed might have further harnessed, that elusive spirit, that “it” of rock and roll that he had possessed even through the final days of the VU. In short, did he have the confidence to get up onstage in front of an audience and make rock and roll not as a member of an—within their coterie—established and cherished group, but as a solo star in a new time when rock stars were beginning to look very different?