VAL KILMER’S RANCH, THE PECOS, NEW MEXICO, 2005
Roderick Romero is an artist with two particular crafts. He is the leader and singer of the trance band Sky Cries Mary. He is also a world-class architect of tree houses. He built a number of his most famous ones for movie and rock stars. Roderick reminisces about meeting Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in the summer of 2005.
Lou came out to Val Kilmer’s ranch with Laurie to get away and take off to Mexico. At that time I had finished working on Val’s big tree-house project and I’d come up with this idea for building a stone house off of this cliff that looked out over a river. So I started working on that, but then Val was like, “This is awesome but I’m running out of money.” I said, “That’s cool.” So I went back to New York to hang out with my daughter Petra. That’s when he called me and said, “You’re not going to believe who’s here!” I’m like, “Who?” He said, “Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson are having dinner in your tree house tonight!” I go, “Well, do they like it?” He said, “They love it! You gotta get back out here.” So I got on a plane the next day and shot back to Albuquerque and drove out to Val’s ranch on the Pecos.
Every night for the next seventeen nights we had dinner in the ranch house: Lou and I always sat opposite each other. It would be like Laurie and Val and Val’s assistant and Lou and me. We sat around and bounced ideas about everything in our brains. Most of it was fun. We talked about Andy Warhol, we talked about the New York scene, about sound quality. We just went through it all. There were many super-fun moments, but during these dinners we had three huge arguments. And those nights were like, ahhh!
It started when I said something about a guy who had almost killed Laurie. Lou was like, “I hate that motherfucker.” He would get so mad because this person dragged Laurie out on a very intense trip across the Himalayas. She got super-ill because she couldn’t take the oxygen level, but he kept pushing her. This guy’s a very good friend of mine so I was trying to defend him. I’m like, “He’s not such a bad person.” Lou was like, “Fuck you! He almost killed the love of my life!”
The next time we got into an argument it was about Kenneth Anger. I thought Anger was a really great, revolutionary filmmaker, but it turned out that Lou hated him, and he got really pissed at me. Laurie would always try to cool things out or make light of it, rolling her eyes and laughing quietly.
The third one began when I didn’t know what a big fan he was of James Dean, and I brought up the fact that there was a lot of information that James Dean was gay. When he died in his ’53 Porsche, they found little burn marks all over his chest. Back in those days in gay bars, people would be like, “Hey, put out a cigarette on my chest.”
Lou got so mad: “James Dean? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He said, “Roderick, I asked Laurie how old you are and she said you’re 14.” He loved James Dean and was really pissed. I don’t think it was because he was gay, I think I was saying something he just didn’t believe. I guess there were certain triggers. He’s like, “Fucking Roderick!” And then I always backed down because it’s Lou Reed staring at me across the table. [If you want to know where Lou sat with Dean, check out “Walk on the Wild Side (Bertallot Radio Mix)”, track 18, on that essential Reed-curated compilation, NYC Man.]
Before we left, Lou was like, “Roderick, you’re going to call me when you get back to New York, right? I got to get out of here.” I’m like, “Yeah, sure I’ll call you.” But after they left, I started thinking it was like a summer romance. He was nice to me at the dinner table, but I mean, come on, this was Lou Reed. So a month went by and then he called me one night. He said, “Roderick, what the fuck is going on?”