Chapter Twelve
FROM BERLIN TO ROCK ’N’ ROLL ANIMAL: 1973–74
God isn’t a Christian or a Muslim. He’s the victim of cult followings. He’s a bit like Lou Reed.
Karl Wallinger, World Party
By the spring of ’73, Reed knew the glitter-rock scene was fading. And by now, his marriage to Bettye was collapsing.
The pressure of pioneering rock madness plunged Lou’s marriage to the abyss. By Reed’s impossibly high standards, his wife had failed him miserably. She did not understand him and she could not keep up with him. She simply was not of his caliber, and he grew bored with her: “For a while,” one friend thought, “the nuptial plan had seemed like self- preservation, but Lou had come to see it as a dreadful trap. The girl was trying to housebreak him!” Cornered in a relationship he wanted to slough off, Lou took to slapping her around in a fifties style. Lou’s surly, uncomfortable, distinctly uptight manner was a creation of the times—the changing American male—that he shared, for example, with Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan. He even flaunted his misogyny, despite the fact that hitting women was not endorsed by Andy Warhol. “My old lady was a real asshole,” he rasped to one astonished interviewer. “But I needed a female asshole around to bolster me up; I needed a sycophant who I could bounce around, and she fitted the bill … But she called it ‘love,’ ha!”
Years later, when Bettye was contentedly married with children, she confessed that she could not understand how she got so deeply involved with someone like Lou. But at the time, she was too young to have a secure sense of herself in relation to her increasingly wild husband. She grew confused and despondent. Lou, who wore her tortured life like a badge of courage, bragged, “She tried to commit suicide in a bathtub in the hotel. It was someone standing there holding a razor blade. She looks like she might kill you, but instead she starts cutting away at her wrists and there’s blood everywhere …
“She lived,” he complained, “but we had to have a roadie there with her from then on.”
Lou responded to the disintegration and chaos with great material. In 1973, “Walk on the Wild Side” placed Reed among the top-selling artists on the lucrative rock-music scene, competing with “Frankenstein” (the Edgar Winter Group), “Midnight Train to Georgia” (Gladys Knight), “Angie” (the Rolling Stones), and “Love Train” (the O’Jays) as the most popular single of the year. Lou knew that after a hit single his best move would have been to, as he put it, hand them down a boogie album. Common business sense would have told Lou to solidify his foothold in the rock field by making another record that sounded like Transformer and continuing to tour. Lou, however, chose to duck back inside the studio and record a depressing album about Bettye that would destroy his commercial credibility.
In ten songs, Berlin dramatized the breakdown of his marriage with Bettye by telling the story of two American drug addicts living in Berlin. Each song tore away another bandage from the mummy of Lou Reed. He challenged his audience to wonder how it felt to stay awake for five days on speed and booze, lonely, cold, miserable, but terrified of going to sleep because you could not stand to encounter yourself in the world of your dreams. The song sequence that eventually became Berlin revealed a darker, more introspective side of Lou than had his first two solo albums. “It was an adult album meant for adults—by adults for adults,” Reed explained later. “I had to do Berlin,” he insisted. “If I hadn’t done it, I’d have gone crazy.” Lou’s management team and friends were against taking this direction. Lou’s writing had never been better. He was taking, Lou explained, “the approach you would use in poetry. Instead of making a division between pop songs and a real story or a real poem, merging them so the separation didn’t exist anymore. The fun I had in trying to write a really good short story or poem wasn’t separate from writing a song. I put the two together and then I had the whole thing going on at once.”
Much to the consternation of the RCA executives Reed also cut David Bowie, along with his glitter-rock overtones, out of the equation. Reed and Bowie had put much distance between each other by the fall of 1972. As the media continued to compare them even after Lou’s North American tour, Reed started to criticize and even insult Bowie by way of escaping the stigma of dependency. Each star hinted in the press that the other was exploiting the relationship. Bowie, for example, insinuated that Lou was borrowing too much of his identity. “I’m a ball of confusion, mentally, physically. Everything about me is confused, and Lou is very much the same way.” Lou retaliated, calling David in Circus magazine “a very nasty person, actually.”
To gain artistic control of the project, once again Reed entered into a Faustian agreement with RCA that would undermine the first half of the seventies for him. “Convincing the record company to finance the project was not easy,” Reed recalled. “There was this big fight with RCA. I talked them into the veracity of the whole thing, of how astute it would be to follow up “Walk on the Wild Side” with not just another hit single, but with a magnificent whatever. So I shoved it through.” In exchange for being allowed to make this tortured and poetic album exactly as he wanted it, Reed promised to deliver two commercial products to RCA—one live and one studio album in the style of Transformer.
Fortunately, since Lou was at his commercial peak, all the doors in the rock world were open to him, particularly those of the new generation. After Bowie, Reed, and lggy Pop, the most striking player on the scene was Alice Cooper. His comic-book translations of Reed’s themes, combined with inventive management, had turned him into the biggest- selling rock star of the early seventies. Lou hated Alice and attacked him with the same vituperative humor he had directed at Zappa. This did not, however, stop him from hiring Alice’s whiz kid twenty-four-year-old producer, Bob Ezrin, responsible for Cooper’s classic hit albums Love It to Death, Killer, School’s Out, and Billion Dollar Babies.
In April, Reed and Ezrin flew to London. The city was crackling with rock energy, and Lou, who had received more votes than Mick Jagger in a recent British music fans’ popularity poll, had the rock world at his feet. But, rather than continuing with Phantom of Rock posturing and ego trips, Reed committed himself solely to getting his artistic self-portrait down on vinyl. According to Reed, Ezrin suggested Lou weave the songs into “a film for the ear” (as the album was eventually marketed), building them around movie images. Having their pick of musicians, Reed and Ezrin put together Lou’s best recording band since the early Velvets. On bass, Jack Bruce of Manfred Mann and Cream; on keyboards, Steve Winwood of the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic; on guitars, two top- flight Detroit players who had worked with Ezrin on Cooper’s records, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner; B. J. Wilson, of the psychedelic band Procol Harum, played drums on two tracks before being replaced by the blues-based Aynsley Dunbar.
As he started burrowing into the dark tunnel of some of his greatest compositions, the harder, colder Reed emerged. What made Lou’s work stand out was that despite portraying himself as a basket case, he was also portraying himself as a pioneer of pain, who was willing to take risks in order to bring back the pictures of his life. Like Warhol, he showed an extreme fascination with suicide; yet he claimed that he would never consider it: “It’s so easy a way—the actual process. I mean, I’ve seen so many people like that. You either do it or you don’t. And I know where I want to go. I’m in control. I know that there’s this level and then there’s this level. 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.”
Finding Lou’s enthusiasm infectious, the studio musicians took the recording as seriously as Reed did. Jack Bruce read the song lyrics (many musicians do not bother to do this), and constructed an empathetic musical part. “Jack Bruce,” Lou recalled, “wasn’t supposed to be on the whole thing, but he went through the whole trip because he liked it a lot.”
According to at least one musician, though, Lou was far from being in control at the Berlin recording sessions. Blue Weaver recounted how Lou was brought into the studio to record the vocal track over the instruments. “He couldn’t do it straight, he had to go down to the bar and then have a snort of this or that, and then they’d prop him up in a chair and let him start singing. It was supposed to be great, but something went wrong somewhere.”
“Blue Weaver is an asshole,” Lou riposted. “He’s a schmuck, a fucking ass. Blue Weaver ought to keep his fucking mouth shut, because he can’t fucking play.” But in fact Lou had such difficulty laying down the vocal tracks that he finally had to overdub them later in New York. “We killed ourselves psychologically on that album,” he admitted. “We went so far into it that it was kinda hard to get out. It was a very painful album to make. And only me and Bobby really knew what we had there, what it did to us.” What it did to Reed and Ezrin was leave them strung out and exhausted. Ezrin relied on heroin, which was cheap, strong, and easily available in London, to get him through. “I didn’t know what heroin was until I went to England on this gig,” he explained later. “We were all seriously ill. I would rather have had a nervous breakdown.”
After the recording sessions, Dennis Katz spirited Lou off to Portugal for a much needed respite. They were joined by two friends from Amsterdam, with whom, according to friends, Lou had a tryst. In a postcard to Barbara Falk in New York, Lou wrote that both he and Portugal were divine, signing off, “Ha! Ha!”
Reed and Ezrin had planned Berlin as a double album with a gatefold sleeve and a booklet inside consisting of “film stills” of the story and lyrics. One week before Ezrin was due to deliver the final mix to RCA, he was informed that the RCA executives would not accept a double album because they didn’t think the product merited that kind of outlay. RCA’s turnaround left Bob Ezrin with the excruciating job of snipping fourteen minutes off the opus. He couldn’t help but feel that the beautifully constructed work had been butchered. Lou recalled that “when Bobby Ezrin gave me the master, he said, ‘Don’t even listen to it, just put it in a drawer.’ He went back to Canada and flipped out.”
With his last words, “Awright, wrap up this turkey before I puke,” Ezrin checked into a hospital suffering withdrawal from both the intensity of the project and heroin. However, according to a close friend, Bob’s collapse had as much to do with rebounding from the intense involvement with Lou as it did with heroin: “Bob played the wrong game with Lou—he tried to be brilliant, to be his match. The only way to survive is to be the best you can and care for him deeply and hope that nothing goes horribly wrong. Nobody could ever be as brilliant as Lou.”
Whatever the emotional cost, Lou had recorded the most moving, beautiful music of his career. It treated love, loss, betrayal, bitterness, and redemption in a more sophisticated manner than any other rock music. With Berlin, Lou expanded the borders of his metier, making something that would best be described as Lou Reed music.
RCA released Berlin that July in the U.K., Reed’s strongest market, and he flew to London for the release. While there, he attended David Bowie’s retirement party at the Cafe Royale. According to Tony Zanetta, “Lou and David were ships in the night. David’s attention span is short. And it was an intense period in his career. The party was part of the promotion. We flew Don Pennebaker over to film at the Hammersmith Odeon. And we planned this party at the Cafe Royale and invited every celebrity we could think of—and a lot of them came. The famous result was Mick Rock’s picture of Lou, Mick Jagger, and David. But David didn’t have a social scene. Maybe they had a chummy reunion that night, but that was the extent of it.”
Berlin was released in the U.S. in September. Though the album was Reed’s first solo masterpiece, at the time Berlin drew predominantly negative reviews, of which “the worst album by a major artist in 1973” was one of the more restrained. Rolling Stone pronounced it “a disaster.” Another critic lamented, “I have difficulty caring about Reed’s maladjustment,” while Bruce Malamut considered it “the most naked exorcism of manic depression ever to be committed to vinyl.” David Downing wrote in Future Rock that it contained “no hope … [The protagonists] stare straight into each other’s eyes and find only emptiness.” And Roger Klorese regretted the range of Lou’s vocals, “which sound, typically, like the heat-howl of the dying otter.”
However, some more introspective writers recognized the spirit of Lou’s genius. “Like most of the current crop of singer-writer-players, Reed suffers from the handicaps of having a poor voice, little singing ability, and even less instrumental technique,” wrote the leading rock critic in the States, Albert Goldman. “His compositions are monotonously monochromatic, being, like most songs of the new rock theater, mere background music. But he does have the knack of twisting into sharp focus the imaginative substance of the current mania, which increasingly resembles the Berlin cabaret scene of the twenties.”
“Berlin was full of insights you’d just as soon not have into the painful nuances of the war between the sexes,” added Ellen Willis. “It was not on any level easy to take, and it was not popular. The metaphor of the divided city (which would be picked up by seventies rock-and-rollers from David Bowie to Johnny Rotten), and a loose narrative line, provided the framework for a stark record of emotional destruction closer in tone and spirit to the Velvets’ first album than anything Reed had done since.”
While being a token outlaw in the media, Lou could also be easily hurt. Berlin’s critical rejection twisted him into knots of Warholian resentment. During this period Lou maintained a fixed, sinister glare in public and rarely smiled. In interviews he developed his hard-line stance with rock journalists. His speech was abrupt, evasive. “Who cares about critics?” he snapped at one reporter. Another writer observed, “When he talks, he’s polite but distant, never allowing those with him the privilege of feeling quite comfortable in his presence. He also enjoyed drinking particularly fearsome alcoholic concoctions and forcing writers to partake with him.” To friends, however, Lou cried out, “Can you think of another rock star who inspires such hatred?” Some thought Berlin marked the major turning point in his solo career.
In his defense, Reed claimed, “Before Berlin came out, Rolling Stone said it was going to be the Sgt. Pepper of the seventies, and afterward they wrote a pan and then they had a huge article criticizing the pan. It won all kinds of awards … it won the Thomas Edison award in Holland, and the best album of the year in Stereo and Hi-Fi. So critically it did not get panned, not in my book. Not unless you look at some jerk-off magazine, a tit-and-ass magazine disguised as some junior hippie kind of thing. But outside of those morons—who are illiterate little savages anyway—it did really well.
“If the people don’t like Berlin, it’s because it’s too real!” Reed continued. “It’s not like a TV program where all the bad things that happen to people are tolerable. Life isn’t like that. And neither is the album.”
In an eloquent defense of the record in Rolling Stone, Timothy Ferris shot back at Reed’s critics, noting, “Stephen Davis, writing in this magazine, characterized the record as ‘a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence, and suicide.’ Which it is. But I fail to see how that makes a bad record. Berlin is bitter, uncompromising, and one of the most fully realized concept albums. Prettiness has nothing to do with art, nor does good taste, good manners, or good morals. Reed is one of the handful of serious artists working in popular music today, and you’d think by now people would stop preaching at him.”
In one of the few but important perceptive reviews, John Rockwell in the New York Times pinned both the dramatic, filmlike quality of the piece and its complex sexual overtones as impressive departures:
“The backings are clothed in rock dress, but the form is more operatic and cinematic than strictly musical in the traditional pop sense, and the sentiments are entirely personal. While others prance and play at provoking an aura of sexual aberrance, Reed is coldly real. Berlin is a typically dreamlike saga of a sadomasochistic love affair in contemporary Berlin. But the contemporary is enriched by a subtle acknowledgement of Brecht and Weill, and the potential sensationalism of the subject is calmly defused by a sort of hopeless matter-of-factness. It is strikingly and unexpectedly one of the strongest, most original rock records in years.”
Berlin stalled at No. 98 on the U.S. charts. “The record sales, compared to Transformer, were a disaster for a normal person, but for me it was a total disaster,” Reed explained. “The record company did a quick scurry round like little bunnies, but I went somnambulant. It wasn’t brain rot like some people think. I just kinda did no more.”
Lou’s response to the criticism was so intense that it affected every major event in his career from 1973 to 1975. Realizing this in a moment of lucidity and honesty while performing in front of a packed audience, Lou announced, “Berlin was a big flop, and it made me very sad. The way that album was overlooked was probably the biggest disappointment I ever faced. I pulled the blinds shut at that point. And they’ve remained closed.”
“I think Lou’s power probably ended after Berlin,” opined one friend during the second half of 1973. “He had poetry and he had something to say and he said it and then he was finished saying it. It was an extraordinary moment, but he never went beyond it.”
Despite negative reviews of Berlin in the U.S., Lou was still riding high on the wave of publicity surrounding that album and Transformer, and he was thrilled to scale his ambitious heights further when he came up with the ideal name for his mid-seventies persona—the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal. It fit him like a skin.
In August 1973, Lou and a new band moved up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and set about to rehearse for a tour in support of Berlin. “They rented a set of rooms at the Music Inn,” Jim Jacobs, who would design and run the stage throughout the epic tour, remembered fondly. “He was drug-induced all the time. He hated rehearsing. He resented everyone and everything. He’s not a nice guy and he can’t help himself.”
During the rehearsals Reed drunkenly stumbled around the stage, smashing microphones and barking at the road crew. Acting as if he didn’t give a shit about the endeavor, he fomented strife among his musicians, staff, management, and friends at every opportunity. “Lou’s very good theatrically,” recalled one observer. “He’s very good at staging. He was always a great director. I noticed on several occasions he would be in the middle of a situation, and without saying anything, or really doing anything, he had everyone around him fighting. He started some big chaos or commotion. And unless you were watching very, very carefully or from a distance, you would never have known that he was responsible for it.”
The European tour had twelve scheduled dates in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, and a handful of cities in the U.K. Despite receiving a plethora of bland or puzzled reviews and going down in rock history as a commercial disaster, Berlin did well in Britain, rising to No. 7 on the album charts by November and winning Lou a silver record. This rating was particularly good, considering that Transformer was still on the charts. Reed thought of Berlin as his version of Hamlet and dubbed himself “the Hamlet of Electricity.” The comparison applied to the European dates on the 1973 Berlin tour, which Lou and his team called the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour.
Reed and his entourage flew into Europe and then drove from country to country. On the tour, the ecstatic but exhausted Lou, skirting drug and alcohol madness after touring continually for over a year and a half, played Hamlet to his royal-size entourage of twenty-three. Bettye, who was still holding on by her fingernails, was cast in the dual role of Ophelia and Gertrude. Dennis, who was beginning to look and sound to Lou like his parents, played Claudius; and the two young men who were hired to simultaneously run the lights and act as his bodyguards, Jim Jacobs and his partner, Bernie Gelb, became Lou’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
They played a different city every night, often driving on to the next venue after a show. Before going on tour, Lou had gone to see Andy Warhol at the Factory to ask advice on how to do the lights for the shows with a limited budget. Warhol advised Lou to use the stark, raw lighting Albert Speer designed for Adolf Hitler’s speeches: intense white spotlights against a black background, setting the whole spectacle in high contrast. “I’ve seen Lou perform over the years, and that was close to the top of his performance peak, his stage personality,” Gelb summed up. “He had it all together. Europe was just incredible. The whole tour was sold-out. On the European tour the lighting design involved a black stage and, for the most part, straight white spots right in Lou’s face. He was the center of the illumination on the stage, and anything else you saw was reflected light. There were some other small colored effects, but basically the band on that tour wore all black and stood at the back of the stage and Lou was front and center with the lights shining on him.”
Lou spent most of his time with Jim Jacobs and Bernie Gelb, who took possessive care of him. Jim immediately connected with Lou, finding him wonderful to be with, bright and witty. “I thought that he was a first-rate intellect and a qualified and very fine American poet,” Jacobs recalled. “I enjoyed listening to his music every night, because he was so crazy and so out of tune all the time. Lou really preceded punk rock by ten years. He was also very ambitious. And I cared about him.” Gelb had similarly strong feelings for his charge: “I carried Lou offstage, I walked him to his dressing room and got him to the shows and l drove his car. Lou and Jim and I traveled separately from the band. And thus there was some jealousy from the other members of the entourage. But we were having a good time.”
Uncharacteristically, Lou paid little attention to what was going on around him. Spending his time sleeping in the car, he allowed everything to be done for him. “He had no control and he didn’t want it,” said Gelb. “He was totally uninterested. He just wanted to show up, he wasn’t interested in the opening act, didn’t want to sit around too long before or after the gig. I think by the time we got to Europe we didn’t even use him for sound checks. Lou would just show up, walk on, do the set, and split. Then he’d chill out and get in the car and go back to the hotel. He never asked a question or got involved with anything and was very cooperative. He did whatever we asked him.”
Reed painted his face a stark white, blackened his lips, eyes, and hair, donned a black-on-black costume, and employed a number of props such as sunglasses and a leather jacket. His jerky, stumbling movements were combined with a catalog of rock clichés borrowed from classic performers like Jagger, Bowie, and lggy Pop.
The three-week European tour met with universal success thanks, to a degree, to the supercharged band, led by the guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. Their twin guitar riffs gave Lou’s music a heavy-metal sound it had not had before and perfectly encased the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal onstage. Many Reed classics, such as “Sweet Jane,” Rock & Roll,” “Waiting for the Man,” and “Heroin,” became current again. “The band cooked,” Gelb agreed. “They were fabulous. When I say Lou wasn’t in control and he didn’t pay attention to the details, that was true for everything except for onstage.” Every show was sold-out, and the crush of fans caused riots.
The consensus was that Lou’s shows were either brilliant or terrible, depending on how stoned he was. When he was on, he moved effortlessly from song to song like a spellbinding spinner of tales performing in shamanistic ritual. When he was off, he had no rhythm, no flow. One moment he would be standing stock-still at the microphone, and the next he’d careen across the stage on a collision course with the amplifiers. Often he stuttered and stopped. The more outrageous Reed became on-stage, the more the audience applauded him. One Dutch journalist who interviewed Lou a number of times in the 1970s, Bert van der Kamp, commented, “There were people in awe of him, and he would act the part. He could hardly stand on his feet and they had to push him out onstage. People were very fascinated by this over here.”
When the tour reached Paris, Bettye emerged briefly from the background to play out her final tragic scene. During the first part of the European tour her presence was subdued. She still made a desperate overture to Lou, which roused him to a final act of cutting her off. Gelb, with Jacobs, steadfastly ignored Bettye, giving total allegiance to Lou. But even Gelb was surprised how quickly and irrevocably Lou turned on her: “Bettye made it a third of the way through, but then I saw the day he turned on her. It was in Paris. Nico came to visit. He turned on Bettye and the next day she was a nobody, a stranger to him. He had the ability to turn on you so completely and quickly as if he was turning it on and off. It was amazing. I have never seen anyone else cut someone out of their life so efficiently.”
“I think the sexual thing was not important to Lou,” Jacobs commented. “It wasn’t the real issue. He didn’t want anyone else to be getting sex, but it was more like not getting his fair share. I don’t think he really cared.”
In Paris they played the Odeon. “By then Lou could barely show up to the concert,” Jacobs reported. “You just never knew if he was going to trip on the stage. He’s not athletic, he’s uncomfortable.”
Gelb maintained a good record of keeping the fans away from Reed, who hated to be touched by them. “Only one fan was able to get to him on the whole tour,” Gelb recalled proudly. “That was in Paris. One crazy young girl who jumped onstage and wrapped her arms around Lou. I got to her three seconds after she got to Lou. I grabbed her, pulled her offstage, ripped her shirt off in the process, and threw her out in the back alley topless and slammed the door.”
In Amsterdam, Lou renewed his relationship with a man with whom he shared a number of interests. “One night in Amsterdam was the only night on the tour that he managed to get away from us,” said Gelb. “He went out with this guy who was a speed freak.”
“He would do any drug that was available,” said Jacobs. “Coke, speed, pot, quaaludes, and a lot of booze. Speed and booze were his favorite drugs. He shot a lot of speed.” The aftermath of this particularly wild night, however, threatened the next tour date in Brussels. Although Gelb and Jacobs managed to locate and transport Reed to the theater, his physical health and state of mind were significantly compromised. Jacobs recalled, “They stayed up all night doing really awful speed. The next day Lou was in the worst mood I had ever seen him in my life, and that’s truly an awful thing to say. I had to dress him. I finally got all of his clothes on. We played some games together and I finally got him into a better mood. His time came and I literally shoved him onstage. He could barely walk, he stumbled around and sang, and this audience just loved him.”
Unfortunately, drugs were just part of the problem during the stop in Brussels. “At one point he did some very odd maneuver and his leather pants ripped up the center,” Jacobs recalled. “He wasn’t wearing any underwear and he was standing onstage with his balls hanging out. Bernie ran out onto the stage with some silver gaffer tape and taped him right around the crotch. Lou was so pissed because this tape was around his balls. He sang one more song and he left.”
“We didn’t know, but just before he went onstage one night in Brussels, he did a massive dose of meth,” Gelb added. “About a half hour into the show he started going into spasms, tachycardia, and he came over to the side of the stage and he said, ‘Get me off the stage.’ So I told everyone to shut it down. Then I picked him up over my shoulder and carried him up to the dressing room and locked the door. I laid him down and managed to bring him down to a state where I wasn’t afraid he was going to die. And he was really fucked up. It was one of those things where he was saying, ‘Don’t let anyone see me, I can’t talk to anyone. Don’t let anyone in the room.’ When I felt comfortable enough that he wasn’t going to die, I stood outside the door for the next hour telling Dennis Katz, ‘Yes, I understand you are his manager, but he doesn’t want to see you now.’”
“And he would not do an encore,” said Jacobs. “They destroyed the theater. They ripped the seats up and they threw everything at the stage and they even loved that! Because he was being such a bad boy.”
Realizing that Lou was seriously endangering his health and thereby compromising the tour, and that he was losing touch with his meal ticket, Dennis Katz, who seldom joined the touring, once more assigned his most trusted assistant, Barbara Falk, to the task of tour manager and Lou baby-sitter. This relationship would last through the most hard-core mid-seventies touring and would become one of the most significant of Reed’s professional life. “Lou was getting more and more difficult to handle,” recalled Barbara Falk, who had known and worked with Lou for some time. “You could never get enough for Lou. And Dennis wasn’t perfect either. He didn’t do what Lou thought he should do. Lou resented the fact that Dennis didn’t show up. Every once in a while Dennis would have to come to a gig somewhere, but he wasn’t there hovering, saying, ‘What can I do, what can I do?’ Actually, Lou didn’t like it when he came to gigs. Because we had a routine, and I had to pamper him. The rider said, ‘Johnnie Walker Black. Don’t give to Lou Reed, give to Barbara Falk’—and I would dole out one drink before he went on. I had to practically carry him onto the stage. But when Dennis would come, he would be jolly hockey sticks and all of this stuff. And it grated—it didn’t help. Lou thought they were on totally different wavelengths altogether.
“Lou was feeling more and more alienated—as if Dennis didn’t care enough about him. Dennis was getting paid and we weren’t. He had a Bentley and a this and that. And we owed everybody. Band members were always knocking at my door because they had family at home and they weren’t getting paid. It was always borrow from Peter to pay Paul, and who can I put off the longest. But Dennis always got paid. And I think Lou started to resent that.”
Actually, Dennis Katz was the least of Lou’s worries. To maintain the ferocious pace of touring, he had resorted to a wide variety of pharmaceuticals. “He was like Lenny Bruce,” recalled Falk, who was astounded by the extent of Lou’s involvement with drugs. “He used to carry around all these medical books about speed. And go into libraries. And in Europe where you could get works in drugstores. He was carrying all this around. He also had an enormous sense of fun and wit and chumminess. But he was usually coming up, down, or sideways. We had this mother–son thing, but it was also like a twisted marriage. He thought it was cool to have a girl—they didn’t have girls on the road back then. I used to have to carry him around. He was very light. I would drag him, behind the shades, through immigration; I could have sworn he was asleep a couple of times.”
The combined efforts of Gelb, Jacobs, and Falk aided greatly in the struggle to keep Reed sober. The trio’s greatest success, in fact, lay in convincing him to swear off booze for the bulk of the European tour. “At the beginning of the tour in the States he was drinking really heavily,” Gelb remembered. “At shows, at rehearsals—always bottles of Scotch or bourbon hidden in the amps and the PA. And one day we put our foot down—he was smashing equipment, breaking things, being a jerk: the alcohol did terrible things to Lou—and somehow we convinced him. lt seems incredible that he would agree to stop drinking, but it was necessary. We were ready to drop him. He’s a real survivor. He had good sense. He partied, met friends, got high. But he didn’t get drunk for the rest of the tour.”
By the time the show found its way to Britain toward the end of the tour, Lou was relatively clean and the show had honed itself into an incredible performance. After the Brussels show he had learned his lesson, and the English tour, where they were doing a city a night, demanded everyone’s undivided attention. “He drove the fans nuts,” Bernie Gelb said. “The Liverpool show—Jesus, that was the hardest show I ever had to get out of. The fans surrounded the hall, and they were tough there: every time we tried to leave, they would throw rocks at us. We were pinned in the back alley, there was an IRA bomb threat. There were twenty steps up to the front of the building, and I ended up driving the car up the steps, slipping out the front, and driving back down the steps. It was like a movie, like driving on the stairs in Rome or something. It was really insane.”
Audiences across the country reacted in much the same way, making it abundantly clear that Lou Reed had become a major solo rock-and-roll star. “Lou was the mascot of people who liked to get down and dirty,” Jacobs noted. “It was very difficult with Lou. He was on speed at the time and his sexual ambiguity was always difficult. You didn’t know whether he would get drunk and be with a man one night or get drunk and be with … But it was always very exciting to be involved on that total level.”
“Lou is brilliant,” concluded Bernie Gelb. “He’s as highly intelligent as any musician I have ever met. He can talk about any subject you want to talk about. But like all great stars, Lou had a great ego. At the end of the day, for all the good times spent watching him operate, Lou just isn’t the nicest guy to ever walk the face of the earth. But he lived a very dramatic lifestyle.”
Reed’s success in Europe, especially the U.K., where Berlin lingered in the charts’ Top Ten and Transformer remained a steady seller, may have been obvious to the fans, but to many journalists and celebrities, including the icons of mainstream rock, the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal persona relegated Lou to second-class status. Feeling that he had done his time in the trenches and had been an extraordinary influence on younger bands, Reed resented being eclipsed by rock stars of the stature of Bowie and Jagger. “He never got over the idea that he wasn’t Mick Jagger or he wasn’t David Bowie,” said Jacobs. “He was always overshadowed because they were better performers. Lou was not a good performer. He doesn’t have a good voice. What Lou has is a devoted following of people who appreciate and love his work. When we got back to America, he was really fighting with Dennis. We were pretty tight, we lived together basically for that whole six-to-eight-week period, but then there was nothing left for us. There wasn’t anything to do, and I was saying goodbye to Lou and he was saying good-bye to me. We just got tired of each other. I got tired of taking his shit.”
The Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour continued playing across the U.S. through the summer. As Lou’s popularity soared, however, the aggression of his audiences followed. The primarily male audience erupted at each concert in chants of obscenities and endorsements ranging from “Lou Reed motherfucker!” to “It’s your life, cocksucker!”
Reed began to act out in an increasingly crazed manner. “He was drinking so heavily again, he would go piss in the corner of the room and just drive you crazy,” recounted Barbara Falk. “He did it up against the wall in some place in Canada. I think he pissed under the table one time on drummer Prakash John’s foot. And Prakash was fastidious.”
“I know why you’re all here,” he yelled at a bunch of friends, fans, entourage members, fellow musicians, and journalists in a hotel bar late one night. “You just want to get the headline story ‘Lou Reed OD’s in Holiday Inn,’ don’t you?”
***
In the autumn of 1973, Lou finally worked out a divorce agreement with Bettye, with the help of Dennis Katz. “When they split up,” recalled Barbara, “she talked to Dennis a lot. And Lou’s assistant Ernie and I had to up and m to pack stuff up in the apartment. I don’t remember if he had started doing speed then.”
Everyone who had ever spent any time with Bettye knew of her sweetness and emotional generosity. But Lou, who had moved into a whole new realm of existence, had come to resent her. The marriage, he said, had “kept me off the streets. 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.”
Lou later complained to friends that no sooner had he started earning money than he started losing it. “Sometimes you’re better off without anything,” he said. “Make a fresh start.” Looking for someone to blame for his financial problems, he found Bettye as the obvious target. “Everyone should have a divorce once, I can recommend it,” he snapped sarcastically. The alimony payments forced him to leave his Upper East Side apartment and live temporarily in hotels.
As soon as Lou shed the skin of Bettye, he went into self-destructive overdrive. His first thought was to go back on speed again so he could lose some weight and wail once more. For a while he had the drug sent to him from Amsterdam. When he resumed his steady use of methamphetamine, his physical and mental breakdown accelerated. His speed habits got a boost after a chance meeting between Lou and his old Syracuse friend and Eldorado bandmate Richard Mishkin. Mishkin introduced him into a speed circle that centered on a man who would become a major influence on Lou in the 1970s, Ed Lister. “I remember when I introduced them, it was a Sunday morning and I drove him down to Ed’s house,” Mishkin recalled. “Lister was one weird motherfucker. He was the largest user of speed that I had ever encountered. He would use needles meant for horses, deep-vein stuff so that he could get more in and just would use so much it was unbelievable.”
Ed Lister came from an upper-middle-class family in upstate New York. He lived in and owned a brownstone that doubled as a shooting gallery. An accomplished thief, Lister also used the house to store and fence stolen merchandise in order to fund his lifestyle. “He would go steal cars and drive through the suburbs,” Mishkin recalled, “and he’d have a long pole with a grasper on it which he’d use to open people’s mailboxes and steal credit cards. Then he would dress up in a priest’s outfit—Lister was a master of disguise—and go round to the department stores and buy everything. So he was a fence. If you wanted something, you could buy it from him.”
Ed Lister was the leading member of a large New York speed scene made up of a bizarre cast of characters with whom Lou fit right in. One of its prominent members was the Turtle, who went to Columbia University. The Allen Ginsberg figure of the group, he was loving, gentle, and maternal. Turtle’s apartment was a popular spot for the others to go sit in and talk for six to eight hours on amphetamines. He had a lot of records and books, and he always seemed interested in other people. Turtle distinguished himself by spending more time in jail than anyone else. Bob Jones, who was also on the speed scene but unlike most of the others had an appreciation of Lou’s music, described the relationship between Turtle and Lou:
“I don’t think he liked Lou very much, although Lou sort of liked him. He was too gentle for Lou. He didn’t have any of these macho pretenses, but he would shake his head in great sadness and say, ‘Mike was shot the other day at Eddie’s apartment.’ He had a way of saying it that was very gentle. I think Lou wrote a song or two about Turtle. Another thing that was interesting was Turtle was gay and everyone around him was gay.”
Reed and Lister immediately hit it off, primarily because Lou was fascinated by Ed. “It’s not hard to believe they became friends, because Ed was a doll—a very charming guy,” explained Andy Hyman, who had also been introduced to Lister by Mishkin. “And an extremely good-looking guy. A little like a young Michael Caine—big and powerfully built. Lou had a very romantic view of Lister. Lister came from a very rich family. Lister was a very educated man. Lister was godlike.
“There was a doctor who was the original Dr. Feelgood. He’s dead now, or else he’s in his late eighties. He was very old then. He was the guy who provided the amphetamine for the cast of Hair. On several occasions I saw Lewis at his office. The few times we actually sat down and had some conversation was in the waiting room. He was friendly then.”
Lister, for his part, treated Lou abysmally, noted Jones: “He said that Lou couldn’t sing, that nobody liked his music, and that he could understand why. He said, ‘The guy’s tone-deaf’ and ‘Who would listen to that shit? No wonder his records never sell.’ He liked people like John Denver.
“Everyone just thought Lou was a bad singer and a pain in the neck. He was only a big shot to me, and I think he liked to have me around because he recognized that kind of adulation. I was the only person who would both bring him drugs, shoot up with him, and let him talk about rock-and-roll without sort of walking out of the room.
“Lou spent quite a lot of time proselytizing shooting up. He said, ‘You’re not really taking speed unless you’re shooting up. You think you’re taking speed, but you’re not taking speed.’ Somehow, though, Reed managed to retain a semblance of control.”
“Lou, for the most part, used drugs very wisely,” commented another friend. “The man really knew his own capacity. He would take pure methamphetamine hydrochloride and grind it down and include the whole experience in his music. Then after a month or two he’d decide to clean out his system. He’d stop entirely and move on to health foods and lifting weights. He knew exactly how to gauge the limits of his tolerance.”
The popular sentiment in many amphetamine circles at the time was that speed was good, that it didn’t harm one’s health, and that the euphoric effects were perfectly natural. The only drawbacks, they argued, came through vitamin deficiency. As a result, Reed and the rest of the group would regularly ingest fistfuls of vitamins while shooting up—without, however, bothering to eat. The effects of chronic speed use and poor diet had particularly strong consequences for Lou, whose hands would become so dry that his fingers and fingernails cracked and bled. This made playing the guitar a near impossibility. He also experienced what the speed group called “a wandering jaw,” where his mouth would unconsciously open and his jaw would hang loosely against his neck. Although he managed to cope with speed’s physical assault, Reed succumbed to the radical personality changes it induced. He would go from being a nice boy from Long Island to a paranoid maniac, hallucinating about Machiavellian plots. Real and imagined slights elicited violent reactions. Taking his reviews seriously, he wanted to kill the writers, no matter how much they adored him. His free-floating hostility reduced most communication to the basics, even to the point of threatening old and dear friendships. According to Mishkin, ever since they had left Syracuse, “Lou was never nice to me, and now he was more extreme. It was a straight line of development. But that was the speed, it made everyone awful. Your life loses meaning outside of the drug. Everything has to do with getting high and then getting more of it and then getting down without going crazy and then getting high again.”
Through the end of 1973, in between speed binges and his divorce, Lou Reed and the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour continued their assault on cities across America. By this point Lou had stopped playing guitar at all onstage as well as in the studio. Instead, he had become a spindly-thin stand-up lead singer, whose eyes bulged out of his near-shaven bullet head as if they were plugged into an electric socket. His body was a shivering sack of anemic skin and bones clothed in a black T-shirt and jeans.
According to Lester Bangs, “He’d poke his arm so full of invigorating vitamins that he lost all the fat overnight, then cartwheeled onstage in spastic epic[ene]-choleric fits looking like some bizarre crossbreed of Jerry Lewis of idiot-movie fame and a monkey on cantharides. He moved in the short, clipped, violent motions of a speed freak.” According to Cale, “Steady doses of amphetamine changed the muscle structure of Lou’s face so he can’t smile anymore. When he smiles, his face gets limp and sags. It looks like a weird Frankenstein grimace.”
Reed continued to function as an artist, whether he was master of his senses or not. In fact, he used the long hours and increased concentration afforded him by amphetamine use to compose a number of new songs. Working in an idiom where success was measured by commercial acceptance, however, he soon found himself marginalized. His devoted (if maniacal) public wanted, not a hardworking artist, but a freak show. One reviewer described a show in Boston where Lou “clumsily lurch[ed] about the Orpheum stage, violently yanking his frame downward at exactly the wrong times, rhythmically speaking, and crouched froglike to serenade the front row as his band droned on.” It was an uncomfortable spectacle, and one that, for all its appeal to the audience, brought Lou dangerously close to the edge. “They wanted to see me die,” Reed repeated. “I like to think of us as Clearasil on the face of the nation. Jim Morrison would have said that if he was smart, but he’s dead.”
***
Around the end of his tour and the beginning of his speed run, Lou had become acquainted with Dennis Katz’s brother Steve Katz, a star guitarist with Blood, Sweat & Tears. Lou and Steve talked and played guitar together. “Working with him,” recalled Steve, “eased me out of the unhappiness with my own band. When he asked me to produce his next album, I went for it.” Steve appreciated Lou and found it sad that Berlin was “a beautifully crafted album that was bombing … I think it sold maybe twenty thousand copies. I told Lou we’d have to get rid of this old mystique and put out his songs to new people. He had a great band now and he could become a star with a hot live album.” Lou accepted the strategy.
At the end of the U.S. leg of the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour, Reed’s faith in Berlin combined with the burning drive that had produced two of his greatest solo works in a single year paid off on December 21 when he recorded a concert in New York at Howard Stein’s Academy of Music on 14th Street. Wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times: “With Berlin, Reed has proven conclusively that he must be counted as one of the most important figures in contemporary rock. His concert December 21 at the Academy of Music should be an event.”
Guiding a Record Plant mobile unit, Steve Katz watched a capacity crowd explode into frenzy. A lot of fans still think it was one of the most spectacular concerts of their lifetime. Lou later characterized the performance as “manic.” Lou and the Katz brothers realized that the Academy concerts would make the great live albums they had been searching for and set about mixing the tracks to get the record out as quickly as possible—to capture the moment.
According to Reed, who insisted on maintaining the recording principles first used in The Velvet Underground and Nico, “It was a perfect sound. Because I mixed it. The engineer just left. He didn’t know how to record it. I couldn’t stand what they were doing. Cleaning it up! And I went, ‘Oh, no!’ and there was another big fight.”
On Christmas Eve, 1973, Lou was arrested in Riverhead, Long Island, for attempting to obtain drugs from a pharmacy with a forged prescription. Lou believed he had been sold out by another member of the speed scene. “The game never ended,” said Barbara Falk. “I had to scrape up five hundred dollars of my own money to get him out of jail. He was pissed off, but in a humorous kind of way. Almost as if it was part of his image and act. Famous people get busted—that sort of thing. He wasn’t scared or miffed about it, except that he was inconvenienced. He started kvetching a little bit. He was miffed that Dennis didn’t come. He said, ‘You come through for me, he never comes through … blah blah blah.’”
Lou got through the minor scrape with the law, but his drug habits were getting the better of him.
***
In early 1974, Lou moved in with a new girlfriend named Barbara Hodes, at 45 Fifth Avenue, and immersed himself in the New York scene. He prided himself on knowing more hot-dog places than anyone else: “In New York I can pick up a phone and have anything I want delivered to the door. I can step a foot outside the door and get into a fight immediately. All the energy, people going crazy, guys with no legs on roller skates. It’s very intense, the energy level is incredible. It’s nice at five in the morning to be stoned on THC and go down to Hong Fows, have some watercress soup, then you take a taxi uptown with some maniac and say, ‘Go ahead, drive fast, wise guy,’ and you just zip around. When you go up to Park Avenue, there’s a very funny turn and it’s always fun to wonder if they’ll make it.”
In the wake of the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour publicity, Warhol seemed to take a renewed interest in Reed. Warhol was doing a series of videotape interviews for a projected TV show in which he’d usually sit silently staring into space or hiding behind a newspaper while the hapless interview victim was subjected to a series of banal questions by one of Warhol’s minions. Reed had agreed to be videotaped on the stipulation that the interview be conducted solely by Warhol. Andy sat with his overcoat on, making it obvious that he couldn’t think of anything to ask, while Lou, heavily made-up and looking as sick as one could without being locked up, made phone calls trying to find drugs in between trying to get a rise out of Andy. The artist merely responded with an occasional mirthless laugh that meant he was bored and thought you were corny. The experience was excruciatingly uncomfortable. “It was very sad,” Lou recalled, “because he said while we were doing it, ‘You know, it can never happen again.’ And he was right.”
In January 1974, Reed and Andy Warhol discussed the possibility of making Berlin into a Broadway musical. Reed, Warhol, and Bob Colacello went to dinner at Reno Sweeney’s, a cabaret-style restaurant in Greenwich Village that had just opened. Reed was characteristically obnoxious and paranoid. “Lou’s opener was, ‘l want you, Andy, your ideas—not Paul or Brigid’s,’” Colacello recalled. “It was a very difficult dinner, with Lou hesitant to tell too much about his ideas, afraid Andy would steal them. He did explain the psychology of the lead character a bit: he only shows emotion when he’s out of speed, Lou said, and when his drug dealer makes it with his girlfriend but not him. When his girlfriend commits suicide, he can only describe and feels nothing.”
When the new live album, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, was released just five months after Berlin in the U.S. at the end of February, it won universal acclaim. The young Chrissie Hynde reviewing the album in the New Musical Express wrote, “He looks like a monkey on a chain, court geek—listen to him scramble to a corner, damaged and grotesque, huddled in rodent terror. Animal Lou. Lashing out in a way that could easily make the current S&M trend freeze in its shallow tracks. And the audience cheers after each song, we’re with you, yeah, we always loved all those songs, ha-ha-ha. Well, he hates you.” But, according to Timothy Ferris in Rolling Stone that March, he had finally become “a rocker and not a chanteuse.” Ferris noted:
“Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, an album of Reed’s standards, opens with ‘Sweet Jane’ and a jam by the band before Reed takes the stage, which establishes that, unlike some of his past backup groups, this one is first-rate. The rest of the side is devoted to a towering, unsettling version of ‘Heroin.’ It is sinister and stunning, rooted in a treacherous organ and strung tautly on a set of vaulting guitar riffs. The piece has the atmosphere of a cathedral at Black Mass, where heroin is God. Rock ’n’ Roll Animal is much less claustrophobic and oppressive than Berlin, but many people will probably loathe it anyway. Faggots, junkies, and sadists are not very pleasant, but theirs are the sensibilities Reed draws upon. His songs offer little hope. Nothing changes, nothing gets better.”
The reviews of Rock ’n’ Roll Animal were, however, among the best ever. For the first time in his solo career Reed was being praised for his Velvet Underground as well as his independent material. “At its best, Reed’s live album brought the Velvets into the arena in a clean redefinition of heavy metal, thrilling without threatening to stupefy,” wrote Robert Christgau. “‘Lady Day,’ the slow one here, would pass for up-tempo at many concerts, the made-in-Detroit guitars of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner mesh naturally with the unnatural rhythms, and Reed shouts with no sacrifice of wit. This is a live album with a reason for living.”
John Cale was still not impressed: “I’m amazed at just how different Lou and I were in our ideas now that I’ve heard everything he’s done since that time. It all sounds just like weak representations of tunes and nothing more. I mean, some of his songs in the Velvets really made a point. Now he just appears to be going round 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 ‘Sweet Jane.’”
From February to March 1974, Lou hit the publicity trail doing interviews and photo sessions. He even made a TV ad for the new album in which, emulating a Warhol screen test, he stared blankly at the camera for fifteen seconds before blinking and making the startled viewers realize they were not looking at a photograph. Ironically, for a man who was famous for wanting to kill his critics, Lou befriended a number of rock writers, including Nick Kent, with whom he had a love–hate relationship. One day he would call him the Judy Garland of rock writers, the next he’d threatened to kill him.
Even when Lou was his most charming, he could not help but exude an eerie Poe-like quality. One scribe, who wishes to remain anonymous, recalled that talking with Reed was the weirdest interviewing experience he ever had:
Lou resembled the young Frank Sinatra slightly. When I pointed this out to him, he seemed surprisingly pleased, joking, “Don’t say that to Frank.”
Q: Are you interested in Frank Sinatra, Lou?
R: Sinatra’s fantastic. If somebody really gave him a really good song, with real lyrics, coming from him, and at this point he certainly could do it, you know, I mean, what the hell, come on, Frank.
Q: Would you like to work with him?
R: I’d like to write for him. I would love to get to know him, then put lyrics in his mouth, then all he’d have to do would be sing them, wouldn’t matter if he understood them. Can you imagine if Sinatra laid down ‘Heroin’ in Vegas at the Sands with Nelson Riddle conducting?
As he spoke, the mask of the young Sinatra superimposed itself on his face like a ghost image, and for a split second Lou looked exactly like Frank! The transformation was so abrupt it made me nauseous. I ran up to the bathroom to be sick. I recovered enough to conclude the interview. Before leaving, Lou invited me over to his apartment the following day so he could teach me what I evidently didn’t know about rock and roll.
Barbara Hodes’s apartment, where he was staying, was an elegant one-bedroom, tastefully furnished in fashion designer chic. Lou seemed comfortable there, joking with the Jamaican maid, who was dusting the European issues of Vogue. When she left, Lou proceeded to take me through the history of rock, playing singles, explaining their significance, meanwhile exulting in the music, punching the air with a clenched fist, grinning from ear to ear at certain notes. He was an intensely alive person who certainly knew what he was talking about. He delivered the whole lecture with a great deal of passion. However, I thought even then when Lou was at his most serious, he could not help but stir up humor in his interlocutors to such an extent that it was hard to get people to take him seriously. In many ways, at least on the surface, Lou was an extremely funny man. Like his mentor Andy Warhol, he was constantly laughing and exulting in life.
As I got to know him, he turned at times into a fascinating bunch of guys. Once I was talking to him backstage at the Bottom Line when, in much the same fashion he had turned into Frank Sinatra, he suddenly metamorphosed into Jerry Lewis. However, on this occasion he was not so pleased when I commented on the resemblance. “Enough with the cheap shots!” he snapped, turning abruptly back into Lou Reed. As we headed out the door, he launched into a story about fucking a groupie who kept asking him, “How come when you’re inside me I can really feel it, but whenever Mick Jagger’s inside me, I can’t feel anything?” To which a bug-eyed Lou said he complained, “Why are you telling me this?”
The overall question that cast a pall over Lou’s progress through the 1970s was whether he had lost it after 1970. “Everything has been a question of lack of confidence,” confided an observer. “Lou thinks that whatever ‘it’ is, he lost it.”
To the press, Lou spouted the kind of contradictory reactions to the live album that were his trademark, telling one journalist, “It was like a walking time warp to me … but I had to get popular.” The live album, according to Reed, was payback for the deal he had made with RCA in order to get Berlin released. Now, he said, he was paying his dues.
By the end of March 1974, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal had reached No. 45 in the U.S., remaining in the Hot 100 for twenty-seven weeks. Steve Katz was ecstatic with the success of his first production efforts.
The success of Rock ’n’ Roll Animal redeemed Lou and gave him added confidence enough to joust once again with his rival Bowie. One night in February while Bowie was in town for his Diamond Dogs tour, the two got together. Lou was wired, they were both very stoned, and the competition between them soon reached a fever pitch. Lou threw a drink on a table and there was a big fight between them. According to Barbara Falk, Reed was jealous of Bowie’s success. “He was jealous,” she recalled, “but he also said he was the cool, underground, credible one. David stomped out screaming.”
To a friend Lou confided that he was having a good time by taking the road of least resistance and going with things that annoyed him rather than fighting them: “Berlin being a failure and Rock ’n’ Roll Animal being a smash hit had been hard to take. What he really liked was Berlin. Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, what a degrading thing that was.”
On March 2, 1974, the writer Jeff Goldberg presented a birthday cake for Mr. Reed’s thirty-second birthday. He recalled that Reed raised his knife high and slammed it into the cake in mock-Peckinpah style. But, careful about his diet, he didn’t eat a piece. “He is very thin now, and he pops his knuckles a lot and rubs his fingers nervously,” Goldberg wrote. “Maybe he is always itching to play the guitar. He sometimes seems distracted, as if listening to music, and often breaks out with a dum-di-dum movement, as if playing the drums in midair. Why are people so afraid of him?”
“He has no respect really for anyone, which is interesting,” said Glenn O’Brien. “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’s what he’s all about to me. He loves being kind, but he hates your fucking guts.”