Chapter Eighteen
1984–86
I think he would do a situation comedy at this point if they paid him enough money. Doesn’t Lou Reed think he’s Delmore Schwartz? Absolutely!
Glenn Branca
After their Hawaiian vacation, Lou and Sylvia returned to New York and entered a period of their “great adventure” defined more by commercials than music. In early 1985, Sylvia launched a new campaign for increased media exposure and revenue. Lou signed an advertising contract with Honda motor scooters. With “Walk on the Wild Side” playing in the background, the quick-cut heavy TV ad, directed by Steve Horn, showed a leather-clad Lou wearing shades perched on a scooter in a variety of Manhattan locations. The official line, “Take a walk on the wild side,” came from a Mr. Neil Leventhal, Honda’s motor-scooter manager, who proclaimed, “Reed is an innovator—one of the pioneers of new music. His music is unique and experimental—much like scooters.”
In May 1985, Lou signed a contract with American Express to advertise credit cards. Appearing beneath the tag line “How to buy a jacket” in print ads aimed at the college audience he had been cultivating with his MTV appearances, Reed posed casually in trademark leather jacket and shades.
When they appeared in June, the Honda commercials were widely reviewed and became one of the most acclaimed ads filmed in New York. “Rock singer Lou Reed flings off his sunglasses, unbuttons his jacket, and with a cool stare declares, ‘Don’t settle for walking!’” read one. “Posed astride a red, two-passenger scooter in front of New York City music club the Bottom Line, Reed is the latest in a string of unusual celebrities [like Miles Davis and Devo] Honda has chosen to advertise its scooters.” In addition to the TV spots, Honda ran in several prominent magazines a full-page color ad of Lou astride the bike by Manhattan’s Hudson River docks. Honda reported the commercials helped sell as many as sixty thousand scooters. This kind of exposure was a surer sign of commercial success in the United States than anything Reed had done before.
In the mid-1980s, Lou also accepted assignments to write songs for other projects that had little in common with his own work. Lou claimed to enjoy the work, declaring, “I really love it if someone wants me to contribute a performance or a song and they give me a subject.” Taking a line from a 1975 book that had particularly influenced him, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he added, “And it’s even better if they tell me what kind of attitude they want. I can divorce myself from it completely.” During the mid-1980s, apart from commercials, Sylvia booked Lou into a string of interviews, TV spots, films, public appearances, celebrity concert tours, and assorted publicity outings, culminating in hundreds of mentions of Lou and his work in every media venue available. The campaign helped sell Reed’s latest product and renewed interest in his large back catalog.
In 1980 Lou had played a small role as a record executive in a movie written by and starring Paul Simon called One-Trick Pony. Despite claiming that he had not enjoyed the experience at all, in the mid-eighties Lou did a slew of film work. In 1983, Lou contributed “Little Sister” to the film Get Crazy and made a playful comment about aging rock stars by appearing in his first scene covered in cobwebs in the famous Bob Dylan pose on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Despite the film’s failure the song was well received, particularly by his little sister, who was proud to be the final and only member of his family to receive good press in a Lou Reed song. Late in the year, Lou contributed a song to a rock cartoon, Rock and Rule. The soundtrack also included songs from Debbie Harry, lggy Pop, and other punk performers. In 1985 he wrote a zany, three-chord dance track reminiscent of his 1964 Pickwick compositions, “Hot Hips,” for the film Perfect, starring John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. The same year he came up with a disco number, “My Love Is Chemical,” for the film White Nights, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov. “When they’re alone in the dance studio, you expect him to put on Mozart and instead he puts on Lou Reed,” noted director Taylor Hackford, who felt Reed’s song gave depth to Baryshnikov’s character. In 1988 Lou contributed “Something Happened” to the film Permanent Record.
Lou’s most famous quote about rock and politics had been made from the stage at the Bottom Line in 1977 when he’d snapped, “Give me an issue, I’ll give you a tissue, wipe my ass with it.” And on another occasion he had been quoted saying, “Nixon was beautiful, if he had bombed Montana and gotten away with it, I would have loved him. I have no fear … of anything.” He had not been recruited into any political party in the 1970s, being, if anything, a political liability. He made a tentative entry into the political arena in 1984, singing backup vocals on Carly Simon’s theme song for the disastrous Democratic National Convention that summer, “Turn the Tide,” alongside Shirley MacLaine, Mia Farrow, Dick Cavett, Mary Travers, and Phoebe Snow. When Bob Dylan invited Reed to play his Farm Aid benefit on September 22, 1985, he jumped at the opportunity.
On the country-musician-heavy bill next to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, and lined up for performance between George Jones and Loretta Lynn, Lou’s presence sparked humorous speculation as to whether he and John Denver might team up for a duet on “Rocky Mountain High.” However, Lou told David Fricke of Rolling Stone that he had overcome his city-dweller attitude and could appreciate the problems the farmers were having. “I’d show up out there in Blairstown and go, ‘What the fuck is going on? It’s raining here. What is this, another weekend with rain?’ Finally they sat me down to tell me the facts of life, such as there are farmers out there and they’re getting killed by the drought. I became aware of what weather means, besides New Yorkers going away for the weekend.” Lou delivered a blistering set, but there were more than a few cynics who questioned his use of a charity event to gain publicity. “How do people in New York perceive Farm Aid?” asked one cynical journalist who appeared surprised to see Lou in Champaign, Illinois. “I don’t know how the people in New York perceive anything,” Lou riposted. “We’re like snowflakes, we’re all different.” On the two occasions that Lou played a show at Bob’s request—Farm Aid and Dylan’s fiftieth birthday—he made sure he gave an outstanding performance. The reviews of his Farm Aid show were unanimous in describing Reed’s set as a blistering rock ’n’ roll show. And Lou’s shit-eating grin at both events indicated his own satisfaction. Backstage, however, he had a different experience. Lou’s bodyguard, Big John Miller, was accompanying Lou and Sylvia across a field backstage at Farm Aid when they spotted Bob some two hundred feet away. On seeing them Dylan lit up like a Christmas tree and started running toward them, his arms spread wide open. Lou stopped in his tracks, returning the gesture with a big smile of his own. But the euphoria of recognition was to be short-lived when Dylan hurtled past Reed to throw himself into the arms of Big John, leaving Lou staring at his feet as he turned eighty-five different shades of red. Farm Aid eventually generated $50 million to help save 2.3 million American farmers from over $212 billion of debts.
Once Lou got going in a new direction, he was, like his mentor Warhol, relentless. No sooner had he done Farm Aid than he volunteered to take part in the Artists United Against Apartheid Sun City project. The Panamanian superstar Ruben Blades, whose lyrics were on a par with Reed’s, had suggested that Lou take part in the effort. “I couldn’t not be vocal about apartheid,” Lou explained. He sang one line on the record “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City,” a multiracial effort headed by “Little” Steven Van Zandt, who had left Springsteen’s E Street Band the previous year. The Sun City gang comprised artists from a variety of musical disciplines and included Dylan, Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Bono of U2, Jimmy Cliff, Kurtis Blow, Run-D.M.C., and Afrika Bambaataa. The organization got more than they bargained for when Lou came to the studio and started advising them on how to produce the record. The Los Angeles Times called the song “a refreshing attack on the practice of isolating musicians by category.” Lou appeared in the video of the song and was also in several scenes of the documentary The Making of Sun City. Besides the record and the video, the Sun City project released a book and eventually undertook a concert campaign to force the release of the South African nationalist leader Nelson Mandela.
Lou benefited from the exposure all these do-good benefits gave him. But he found the experiences less than satisfying personally, largely because he could not handle it when so many lesser mortals than he appeared more prominently in the spotlight. One character who Lou particularly despised was “Little” Steven Van Zant, who organized the Sun City benefit.
To help put Lou’s segue from commercial songwriting into political songwriting into perspective, in the early summer of 1985 he joined another star-studded project, including Sting, Tom Waits, and Marianne Faithfull, recording Kurt Weill’s “September Song” for a tribute to the German composer most famously associated with Bertolt Brecht. It was a project he felt particularly close to. “I want to be a rock-and-roll Kurt Weill,” said Lou. “My interest—all the way back with the Velvets—has been one really simple guiding-light idea: take rock and roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With subject matter written for adults so adults, like myself, could listen to it.” The 1985 release of his recording of the Kurt Weill song on the album Lost in the Stars coincided with another strong resurgence of interest in the VU, largely perhaps because culturally the first half of the eighties was a rerun of the first half of the sixties.
On November 13, 1985, Bob Dylan attended an exclusive party honoring his achievements at New York’s Whitney Museum. His guest list featured dozens of rock-and-rollers, including Lou Reed, Pete Townshend, Billy Joel, Little Steven, Dave Stewart, Ian Hunter, David Bowie, Roy Orbison, Yoko Ono, Judy Collins, and members of the E Street Band, as well as the writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, the filmmakers Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, and actors Mary Beth Hurt, Robert De Niro, and Griffin Dunne. “There’s no way you can be a pop artist today or do anything in contemporary music without being influenced by Bob Dylan,” said Billy Joel. Dylan was photographed with an uncomfortable-looking Reed on the steps of the museum.
In public Lou was now vocal in his praise of Dylan, and Dylan, whose whole career carried more weight than Lou’s, was vocal back, not only singling out Lou as one of the very few current artists he could listen to, but publicly thanking him on the back of one of his albums. However, in private Lou could still not control his shpilkes. Why was Bob always getting these awards and special editions when he, Lou recalled, received virtually nothing in the way of honors. You could see his point. The Velvet Underground are generally now considered to be the second most influential rock band of the 1960s. Lou had always been an artist on the same level as John Lennon, Keith Richards, and Bob Dylan, but, until the 1990s, without anything like the recognition afforded his peers.
At the beginning of 1986, as if refreshed by the excursions into other worlds, Lou recorded his next solo album, Mistrial. The album, released in April 1986, was designed to follow up on the pop vein originally tapped into by New Sensations. RCA released a promo tape called He’s Got a Rock and Roll Heart based on an MTV interview and a number of remixes and special editions of his songs. In addition to Reed’s customary print interviews, on May 19 he was on the Late Night with David Letterman talk show, along with the basketball player Michael Jordan and the actor Alan Alda, promoting Mistrial and its single, “Video Violence.”
Mistrial, artistically the lowest rung of Lou’s mid-eighties trilogy commencing with Legendary Hearts, received bored reviews and ran into several problems. The video for its second single, “No Money Down,” was cut from the MTV playlist for being too violent. In it, a Lou Reed look-alike robot has its face torn apart, which Lou thought was hysterically funny. “My wife didn’t,” he reported. “My mother felt the same way. She looked at it and said, ‘What can I say, Lou? I’m sure it’s very clever, but I don’t like seeing that happen.’”
After four albums with RCA he once again became dissatisfied with their handling of his work and determined to find another label. Mistrial marked the end of another period in Reed’s career.
What it came down to: “I think the album is a very up album. I think somebody in my situation should be positive. At this stage of the game it would be, possibly, disappointing to other people as well as to myself had it not been a positive album. I mean, after all, I’m getting paid to do something I would want to do anyway. I don’t have to work for a living. I don’t have to go through a whole bunch of things I couldn’t bear. I just think I’m very lucky and that attitude is reflected on the record I think. I want everyone watching to forget everything else and just listen to the music, and to have lots of positive energy and emotional moments. I think this is all any singer can hope for.”
***
In the summer of 1986, Lou made his strongest altruistic commitment when he joined a tour celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Amnesty International, the human rights organization that seeks the release of prisoners of conscience throughout the world.
Perhaps because he often saw himself as a persecuted artist, he could sympathize with others who suffered for their convictions. “I had never been a member of a group besides a rock band,” he said. “But I’ve joined Amnesty International. In a country where Reagan is president, it is very easy to be cynical. But I’m really fascinated about why people are arrested and what happens to them in jail. I mean, for the rock-and-roll records I’ve made, I’d be dead ten times over if I was over there.” By the time the Conspiracy of Hope tour kicked off June 4 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in front of thirteen thousand fans, the permanent lineup included Lou Reed, U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Peter Gabriel, Joan Baez, and the Neville Brothers. Guests who popped up along the way included Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Bob Geldof, Dave Stewart, and the comedian Robin Williams. During the tour, Lou would be called a great guitar player by some of the greatest guitar players ever. At the Amnesty concerts, he was introduced as “the legendary Lou Reed.” Lou’s continuing work with the program grew not only in time but also in intensity. Along the way, barnstorming across the country in the tour’s Boeing 707, he composed a song for the Amnesty cause called “Voices of Freedom.” Bonded by the cause, mutual respect, as well as “fun” (a word he used to counteract criticism of his intentions), the musicians developed a strong sense of camaraderie. On the road Lou cemented his friendship with Bono, whom he had met on the Sun City project, urging him to read “a really great short story,” Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” According to U2’s biographer, Eamon Dunphy, “There was a part of Bono that could have lived where Reed had lived, in the drug-induced twilight of New York City. Reed understood what U2’s music was trying to say, the difference between freedom and responsibility.”
When the Amnesty tour arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, they celebrated at the Ramada Renaissance Bar. When the house band finished their set, a number of the Amnesty musicians jumped onstage. “Bono, high on the absurdity of the night, got up to sing. He started Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane’ and sang it to a raunchy young lady posing at the bar,” wrote Dunphy. “They jammed the night away, Baez, Gabriel, Adams, the Neville Brothers, Larry, Adam, and Bono. When they heard about it the next day, Lou Reed and Edge were sorry to have missed it. ‘If you ever do that again, be sure to wake me,’ Reed chastised Bono. ‘Okay, we’ll do it again tonight,’ Bono replied. Only this time it was contrived. The magic was missing on Tuesday night. But not the pleasure. Reed was one of Bono’s heroes. Bono had been no great record collector when he was young, but one of the few good records he had was of the Velvet Underground … Bono called on Lou to play the next night at the Ramada. Reed, after much persuasion, shyly consented, offering rare renditions of ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Vicious.’”
Ironically, despite Lou’s heartfelt involvement, several members of the press were even more cynical about his involvement with this venture than they had been about Farm Aid or Sun City, openly questioning his motives for enlisting. “Lou Reed is a washed-up ex-rocker who couldn’t fill my garage with paying fans,” commented one particularly riled journalist. “Somehow he managed to cash in on a Honda scooter commercial, and now he’s turned up on television and the Amnesty tour with his latest product, Mistrial, in tow.” And another scowled, “The Amnesty lineup consisted of such superstars as Sting, U2, Peter Gabriel, the Neville Brothers, and other has-beens such as Lou Reed, Jackson Browne, and Joan Baez also attempting to rekindle their flagging careers.” Even positive reviews were tinged with similar sentiments, as in the New York Times: “These concerts also helped seasoned, consistently creative artists like Mr. Gabriel and Mr. Reed reach the wider audience their work has long merited.”
On June 15, after two weeks of sold-out touring across the country, the concert’s core performers mustered their combined efforts and enthusiasm for a grand finale. From noon until midnight MTV presented, live from Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the last show in the Conspiracy of Hope tour. Lou, who had done his set earlier, returned to the stage during U2’s set to join Bono and the rest of the band in the antiapartheid song “Sun City.”
At the end of the month, Reed was back on the road, touring behind the Mistrial effort. “The most surprising thing about Lou Reed’s Tuesday night August 19 concert at the Universal Amphitheater was that the hall was only half-filled,” commented one reviewer. “Those who attended, however, saw what amounts to Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Survivor Traveling Roadshow—nearly two hours’ worth of two-chord rockers, third-person story-songs, and seven tunes off his latest album, Mistrial.”
In the autumn of 1986, Lou was recruited into RAD, a series of MTV Rock Against Drugs public-service announcements, joining the ranks of ex-drug-addict rock stars behind slogans such as “drugs suck.” Although eager to participate, Reed was concerned about being hypocritical: “I had a lot of problems with that spot. When all these rock people make these announcements—‘I did it, you shouldn’t’—my attitude when I was out on the street was, now he’s had his fucking fun, and he’s going to turn around and say, ‘Don’t have any fun because I tell you it’s not worth it.’ Who the fuck are you to tell me anything? I was prefacing it, saying, ‘I don’t want to tell you what to do, but speaking for myself, da, da, da …’ And the director said, ‘Lou, no offense, but this is aimed at eight-year-olds. You do that and they’ll go to sleep.’ So I thought about it, and that’s when I came up with what I said: ‘I did drugs … Don’t you.’”
***
As 1986 drew to a close, the sporadic Mistrial publicity was on hiatus, as were the Amnesty tours. To keep his schedule full, Lou concentrated on more collaborations. Tipping his hat to an early influence, he joined his friend the bass player Rob Wasserman on a version of Frank Sinatra’s “One for My Baby,” which wound up on Wasserman’s Duets album. Lou also worked through early 1987 with Ruben Blades on the latter’s first English-language record, Nothing but the Truth. “Lou and I finished a draft for a song about a son coming back to a painful reunion with his parents,” Blades recounted. While Blades sat in the library of Reed’s New Jersey home, in the music room above, Lou played the melody to the song on his guitar. The tune prompted Blades to write some lyrics, and from this partnership came “The Calm Before the Storm.” “We were both emotionally exhausted,” Blades recalled. “I almost had an anxiety attack that night.”
On December 22, in Japan at the close of a two-day U.N. International Year of Peace Conference, Lou joined rockers from the Soviet Union, the United States, Europe, Africa, and Japan at the Japanese Jingu Baseball Stadium before some thirty-two thousand listeners in a benefit concert the performers called Hurricane Irene after the name of a Greek peace goddess. Hurricane Irene’s aim was to raise public awareness as well as money to establish a computer-based information network at the University for Peace in Costa Rica.
At the beginning of 1987 Reed flew to London to play the yearly Amnesty International benefit, the Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, with Peter Gabriel, Duran Duran, Mark Knopfler, Jackson Browne, and many others at the London Palladium.
By May, Lou was back on the road in the U.S., promoting Mistrial again. That summer his tour met up with U2 in Europe. This was the first time Lou had ever worked as a support act at a commercial concert.
In October, as a mark of his new, positive image, Rolling Stone magazine’s twentieth anniversary issue came out carrying long interviews with Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and, among twenty other major rock stars of the sixties through the eighties, Lou Reed. The same month a local Syracuse paper published an interview with a Scottish punk rocker who had visited the city and demanded to know where there was “a monument to Lou Reed at Syracuse University.” One of Lou’s favorite teachers, the poet Phillip Booth, recalled earlier that year discovering a tribute in the English-department men’s room where some wiseass had scrawled “LOU REED SHAT HERE” above the toilet.
In December, Reed played a benefit concert for homeless children in New York. The event, held at Madison Square Garden, was organized by Paul Simon. The first of a number of celebrity surprise appearances came when Debbie Harry and Grace Jones introduced Lou Reed and sang backup on “Tell It to Your Heart,” “New Sensations,” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed, in turn, introduced Dion, who sang “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue.” Then, Dion was joined onstage by Reed, Paul Simon, Ruben Blades, James Taylor, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen, calling themselves—after Dion’s legendary group—the Belmonts. As they sang Dion’s “Lonely Teenager,” the crowd leapt to its feet. “These guys all loved being Belmonts,” marveled Dion, adding, “Lou Reed, it was like, he knew the part.”
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In Lou’s tragic, majestic world there was a feeling that an end of something was being reached. Another beginning was necessary. Lou and Sylvia had recently clashed over his refusal to have children. When things were going well with Lou, Sylvia did not communicate with her old friends Susan Springfield, Roberta Bayley, and Risé (John Cale’s wife!), but when things started going badly with Lou, she got back in touch.
His least interesting albums are arguably New Sensations and Mistrial. He was beginning to lose fans who had been with him since the Velvet days. And one man who was in Lou’s AA group became fairly disenchanted with his work and him in the middle of the 1980s. When a member of their group who had been a close friend of Lou’s for twenty years went nuts and Lou was called upon to help him out, he expressed total indifference to his “friend’s” plight, exclaiming, “Who gives a fuck about him!” He really did not give a shit, and maybe that, acquaintances increasingly thought, was what really made him tick. “He doesn’t care for anyone except himself,” opined one.
“Maybe he has concerns for the masses. I mean maybe that’s what Stalin was like, maybe he had no friends but really loved people! I always liked Sylvia. I used to hear a lot of dirt. I think they had some bad moments.”
In rock, the decades ruthlessly winnowed out the losers. As the eighties entered their second half and the clarion call of the century’s final decade could be heard in the distance, more voices from the sixties and seventies fell silent; Dylan was still being heard. Neil Young was still out there.
“How long do you try to do it [make that grand comeback]?” challenged avant-garde guitarist-composer Glenn Branca. “At some point you have to actually start doing it. He hasn’t been trying to start doing anything as far as I can see.”