Chapter Twenty-Three

Ecstasy

1999–2001

He was the Johnny Cash of New York rock.

Mick Jagger

In the fall of 1999, Lou started working on his next album, Ecstasy, with a new producer, Hal Willner. They were both seeking the same grail, the perfection of recorded sound through new developments in digital recording techniques. From then until the end of Lou’s life, Willner, as Lou called him, would become his faithful companion on sonic adventures, his producer and advisor who accompanied him everywhere. They shared much in common in terms of musical taste and having fun, instantly feeling as if they had known each other from college. Lou finally had a mensch in the studio. If Laurie was his first guardian angel, Robert Wilson was his second, and Willner his third. According to Roderick Romero, sound was always on his mind. Over the years Lou spent obscene amounts of money trying to make his records sound the way he heard them in his head. “We mostly talked about sound,” said Romero. “We talked about sound quality. We were both really passionate about how we felt that it was great to have all this new technology and how invigorated we were by it. At the same time we felt the sound quality was being lost, like the bandwidth and what you were being exposed to. We both loved vinyl a lot. So we would listen to different albums—like here it is on vinyl, here it is on CD, here it is as a download. And what if you were playing it in your car, what kind of sound are you getting? Lou was passionate about everything to do with sound. He was so passionate about specifics, down to his graphics or the tone of the guitar—or even a string. Everything was diagnosed and he was impeccable about it. He would never let go. He would keep pushing. And he would tell you right out like you know, ‘This is crap and that’s not.’”

“The best thing to do with Lou was to listen to music,” said Willner. “He was someone who would tear up and just cry when he heard something beautiful and get the goose-bumps. And if he had them, he’d show you. There was just nothing like listening to music with Lou.”

***

“Ecstasy is Reed’s finest album since New York,” raved Ted Drozdowski in the Boston Phoenix. “In fact, it rocks harder. The guitars crackle and whistle like a wood fire, displaying a superheated crunch in their rhythm tracks. It seems like the ideal sound Reed’s searched for as he’s experimented with different instrument and amplifier combinations over the years. Some of Ecstasy’s lyrics probe what it means to be human as thoroughly as ‘Some Kinda Love’ or ‘I’m Set Free’ from The Velvet Underground. Yet they’re tempered with a poignancy acquired from decades of self-examination and perhaps a newfound tenderness that’s a benefit of the love Reed’s found with performance artist/musician Laurie Anderson.”

According to this writer’s interpretation of Ecstasy song by song, Lou opened the album with the title song, bemoaning that he had lost his ecstasy (Laurie) and fearing he will not be able to get her back. In its third song, “Paranoia Key of E,” Laurie caught him cheating on her again. At first, he swore this wasn’t true. He blamed a friend of hers for stirring up trouble. He suggested they make up their own language so nobody could intrude upon their private discourse. Then he grew tired of posturing and admitted that he had had another woman in their bed. On “Mad” he tried to cool her out by comparing them to other couples. His attitude was the roles are shifting but let’s dance. He tried to blame it on her for telling him she would be out of town. He couldn’t believe she had found a hairpin. It was all so mundane. Laurie got really mad! She screamed that he was scum and she screamed at him to grow up. She torpedoed a coffee cup at his metal head. First he took umbrage, but then he turned around and threw a moody. He admitted that he wasn’t always right; still, he was upset by what she said. After all, he had been exhausted and she had told him she was going to be out of town! How could he even imagine that she would reverse her plans? Talk about perversion! Talk about a hairpin! Back-peddling as fast as his little legs would go, he puffed on “Modern Dance” that on reflection he was willing to admit that his 1950s concept of a wife’s role might not suit Laurie so well in 2000.

In an extraordinary profile of Reed called “Oh My God I get very difficult and depressed sometimes” by the British writer Nick Johnstone in the May 2000 edition of Uncut, Lou acted out the drama. “It was kind of like in the song ‘Mad,’” he said, raising his voice to act out the role of comic hero. “‘I listened to you. You said you weren’t coming back! You said you weren’t going to be home! Now you are home! Who knew! Look at this!’” He points at the double bed, referring to the section in “Mad” where he gets caught with his pecker in the wind. “‘This is your fault,’” he barks, chuckling. “Now that kind of logic can’t be beat.”

Asked if the marriage proposal on Twilight, “Trade In,” produced the rejection on “Modern Dance” on Ecstasy, Lou replied, “It’s hard to believe it isn’t. My work should have a forward thrust to it. After all, there is a universal chord to all of it. He wants her and he wants her in a way she won’t do. ‘Ahh, it’s not a life being a wife, huh? That’s not enough for you? Well, that’s not enough for you? OK! Alright, that’s not for you!’

“‘Maybe I should go to Amsterdam, okay?’” He careens through the attic of his memory, ranting. “‘You’re not coming? Are you sure you’re not coming? OK, let’s go to Tanganyika!’ Oh my God, I get very difficult and possessed sometimes.’

“‘I love you, I don’t love you, you do love me, but you don’t love me enough! Or, you love me but you won’t marry me—or vice-versa.’”

However, by the time he attained the heights on “The White Prism,” Lou had surrendered on all fronts to Laurie. Now he is calling himself her lifelong servant and asking her to cut him loose for his own good and hers. He admits that he cannot do better than this. Then he delivers a classic boy’s fantasy with an image of himself sitting between Laurie’s legs underneath her floor-length dress jerking off and shooting sperm all over its fabric.

On “Tatters,” Lou reached the morbid conclusion that their love was scattered in tatters on the harsh ground.

***

In June 2000 Lou was headed to London on a summer long tour, which brought this encomium from Ian Fortnam: “Reed’s latest collection Ecstasy is nothing short of a brooding, monovalent menace on a stick and so all would appear to be on target for a cracking show.”

The tour received the same level of acclaim as the album. Drozdowski was on the money. Commencing with Willner’s fine production values on the album, which had become synonymous with Reed’s collective band, Lou sounded better on the Ecstasy album and subsequent tour than he ever had. You don’t have to know anything about music to appreciate his powerful and graceful group, based on love for the music and the pleasure of playing together as one. “Reed is fully on top of his game,” Fortnam concluded. Gavin Martin wrote in Uncut, “It’s because he is in the flush of a late-flowering Laurie Anderson-inspired romance, or because he is enjoying a living large ethic borne out by Ecstasy’s substantial birth of this whole new Lou, rejuvenated and exulting in his blistering and righteously murderess band. This was an American Master. His art form still potent, the fire still at his fingertips.”

After Willner completed work with Lou on Ecstasy, he went straight on to produce Laurie’s parallel album, Life on a String. The Lou and Laurie saga as played out across these conversational albums all boiled down to the dynamic of infidelity: The big infidelity now takes center stage on Ecstasy and Laurie’s 2001 album, Life on a String. Laurie outdid herself on String, emphasizing how special Lou was, how much she loved the way his brain worked—but she wondered what had happened to the master of the slow-dance?

There are three songs in the first half of String in which Laurie turned a radical corner in her telling of the Lou and Laurie saga. First, in “My Compensation,” she introduces Lou as her most precious love. The song ends with her crooning over her love for his brain. Then on “Dark Angel” she brings Lou in as her negative angel who arrived in L.A.’s vicinity by parachute and said he was looking for a Caucasian jester, Laurie. In the lyrics, Laurie has Lou lay a bunch of Mickey Mouse advice on her, which she pointedly ignored. Somebody tripped in that scenario. Let’s get to the center of this: “Broken” is the album’s central charge against Lou. She is badly off because things have not been as wonderful as they might have been, and she is at the end of her tether with all Lou’s song and dance routines in which he persuades her to see things his way. This is a story full of grief and the feeling of being betrayed. She cannot, she concludes, carry on with him anymore. She wanted to tell him so many things, but lost her voice, always an image of impotence for Laurie. But more than no longer being able to talk to each other, she wonders why they’ve stopped dancing together. Whatever. She concludes that their love has been broken into pieces, apparently by Lou’s twisted mind games. Then on “Statue of Liberty” she delivers her big splash knockout crash of a line that explains how she has always avoided attachment by constantly going, concluding that moving forward is her modus operandi.

Anderson wraps up her diary of love with two scenes. On “One Beautiful Evening” Lou joins her on guitar. Now the dark angel has turned into a snake. This is classic Laurie Anderson land, inhabited by Laurie Anderson people. It’s a big, marvelous song propelled by 1950s soundtrack music amid a shimmering glow of magic. It would have made a happy ending to this tangled affair. However, Laurie had one last note to play. The album’s title track appears to her as a mind affair when in fact it’s the exact opposite. In this song about time travel, inspired by William Burroughs, she references Lou with the subtle suggestion that he was something that is lost in her past. All L.A. is looking for here is a single moment in which she can escape the planet. In other word, she’s a traveler and she’s leaving—that’s what she does—but this time she wants to leave the planet. No mention is made of Lou’s place in Laurie’s travel schedule. This unexpected shift in their relations at the turn of the century was even more disturbing than it was in the mid-nineties.

Here is my reading of the conflict in the conversation between Ecstasy and Life on a String:

Lou was in trouble. Sometimes Laurie was as regal as an eagle; sometimes she fell apart and felt lost. Lou feared conflict, feared he’d lost Laurie and would not be able to get her back. Sometimes he thought it was because he was not able to be her. She told him she loved the way his brain worked but often wondered what had happened to the master of the slow dance? How come sex appeared to have fallen by the wayside? According to Lou, she then claimed that he was cheating on her. He swore this wasn’t true.

Laurie saw Lou in a dark-angel costume jump out of a plane over an abandoned town where she was holed up struggling to write. As soon as he landed and identified her as the whiteface clown, Lou gave Laurie a pep talk full of lame advice. Laurie could not listen to anything he said. She told him she was feeling lost.

Lou told Laurie that he had had another woman in their bed. Laurie hurled a coffee cup at Lou’s face and screamed that he was scum. He tried with Reedian logic to blame it on her. She screamed at him to grow up.

Lou took a big step when he admitted that he wasn’t always right. But he could not get over what she said about him. Lou realized that his old-fashioned view of what a wife should be might not be understandable to Laurie. Laurie told him that she had envisioned a really rich emotional life for them. But now, after nine years of fending off Lou’s serial manipulations, she felt that there were just too many things he used to tell her she no longer wanted—or could afford—to take in.

Lou surrendered to Laurie on all fronts. He admitted that he could not do better than he was. He started calling himself her lifelong servant. He also asked her to cut him loose for his own good and hers. Laurie countered with an offhand remark that went deep into their relationship. She had always distanced herself from people by keeping in motion. That was just the way she was, she explained. In fact, Laurie’s new touring schedules were taking her away from home for longer and longer periods. In his answering shot, Lou imagined himself sitting between Laurie’s legs underneath her floor-length dress jerking off.

Lou was still annoyed about the cup and the scum. In his 1950s mindset, she should never have mentioned his adultery. According to Lou, their love was lying in pieces on the ground because of Laurie’s bad manners. In a conclusion that could have given Lou a concussion, Laurie told him that what they had was broken and she could not continue being involved with him. Finally, he defended himself by claiming that he had a cavernous hole in his heart the size of a large motor vehicle and added sarcastically that he doubted a one-night stand would have any chance of filling it. Laurie booked a single one-way ticket off the planet.

2001 was a weird year for Lou and Laurie. According to both of them, by the end of Ecstasy and Life on a String the Lou and Laurie thing was in dreadful shape, perhaps kaput! It looked as if they were both contemplating the end. Lou was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist but was never inducted. Incorrect reports of Reed’s death were broadcast by numerous U.S. radio stations, caused by a hoax email (purporting to be from Reuters), which said he had died of a drug overdose. Anderson’s awards included the 2001 Tenco Prize for Songwriting in San Remo, Italy, and the 2001 Deutsche Schallplatten prize for Life on a String. She also received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Then came the 9/11 attack on New York, the Towers coming down uncomfortably close to Laurie’s studio. Lou was in New York, while Laurie was performing in Chicago, but she soon came back to New York with the debris and the incinerated bits of people blowing through her streets. As Anderson saw it, “After the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Towers, I saw an amazing amount of tenderness in New York City than I have ever seen. Plus it had been 50 years since New Yorkers had been Americans. So it was very odd that suddenly this little island was part of the country, and I think it was startling to people. New Yorkers are not good victims—it is not our style.”

Lou sent Laurie a poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe called “Laurie Sadly Listening,” published in the New York Times on October 6. The poem ends with the lines, “Laurie if you’re sadly listening / Love you / Laurie if you’re sadly listening / Love you.”

Then there was Laurie’s heroic 2001 Live in New York album, a Valentine to the city recorded eleven days after the 9/11 attack. She had originally planned to do a live version of Life on a String, combined with some stories. Then Lou suggested that they included some of her old songs too. The album also includes several of her most intense songs about their relationship, including “Poison and Broken” from Bright Red.

Everything Lou did was in collaboration with Laurie. At a tribute concert for terpsichorean dance legend Bill T. Jones, Reed and Anderson duetted on the Drifters’ Save the Last Dance for Me. Over the years, Laurie albums flowed over and into Lou albums—and both of them played on each others’ albums.

Laurie has a wonderful voice. It’s crisp and clear, its harbor is a calm Buddhist center. Laurie rarely emotes like a movie star, rock star, or priest, her humor is subtle and layered, and she uses the depths of experience with such precision. When Laurie commanded that Town Hall stage on September 19 and 20, she offered herself as a medium for the pain and confusion as we discovered policemen were the new heroes. I missed Ginsberg and Burroughs. Laurie stood there as somebody who was not afraid. Before 9/11, Laurie’s albums were unlikely to make you cry, whereas there are many tearjerkers in Lou Reed’s catalog. But then, if you listen to the New York Live album she might as well be a blues singer. She got down that night. It was a piece of magic. This was the work of a courage teacher, and the album is among the best things she has ever made.

In the fall of 2001, Laurie toured the United States and Europe with a band, performing music from Life on a String. She also presented some solo works, including “Happiness,” which premiered in 2001 and toured internationally through the spring of 2003.

The New York Live concerts released in 2002 were a big step in Laurie’s transformation from performance artist to hero. Live in New York was one factor in NASA’s decision to ask Laurie to be their first artist in residence for 2003. This was of course a fascinating story and was a sensational exclamation mark in her career. She was the Amelia Earhart of our times, a single young adventurous woman who would go to the end of the earth … a sort of Superwoman.