Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Anthony DeCurtis
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Cover photograph by Waring Abbott / Getty Images
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ISBN 978-0-316-37654-9
E3-20170812-JV-PC
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Anything for You
1. From Brooklyn to the Crotch of Long Island
2. Corner Table at the Orange
3. Fellini Squared
4. The Destructive Element
5. Aggressive, Going to God
6. All the Things That Are Missing
7. Transformer
8. A City’s Divided Soul
9. Rock n Roll Animal
10. One Machine Talking to Another
11. A Speed-Addled, Leather-Clad Virgil
12. This Gender Business
13. Fucking Faggot Junkie
14. Growing Up in Public
15. Just an Average Guy
16. New Sensations
17. New York
18. I Hate Lou Reed
19. Magic and Loss
20. Between Thought and Expression
21. Me Burger with I Sauce
22. Fourteenth Chance
23. Sadly Listening
24. This Is Today
25. Metallica
26. The Measure of a Man
27. The Afterlife
Photos
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Anthony Decurtis
Notes
Newsletters
For Francesca, my mountaintop, my peak—this, and everything
INTRODUCTION
ANYTHING FOR YOU
PEOPLE ALWAYS SAY TO me, ‘Why don’t you get along with critics?’” Lou Reed told me one night in 2012. “I tell them, ‘I get along fine with Anthony DeCurtis.’ Shuts them right up.” We were sitting in the dining room of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach creative writing. I’d brought Lou down to do an interview with me in front of fifty or so invited guests and to have dinner with a dozen students, faculty members, musicians, and local media luminaries. As with so many things with Lou, it was touch-and-go until the very end.
Getting Lou to come to Penn, which is in Philadelphia, was complicated. Arrangements for his visit had been made months in advance with his manager, who assured me that Lou had approved them. The Kelly Writers House is an actual thirteen-room house in the heart of the Penn campus, and the interview would take place in the front room. Lou would be paid a modest fee, and the agenda was a brief reception, an hour-long interview, and a home-cooked meal served at the Writers House afterward. Patti Smith, Suzanne Vega, and Rufus Wainwright had all done it in previous years and had a great time. But Lou was different. I knew it was asking a lot of someone who didn’t typically relish events of this kind, and I wanted to make sure in advance that he understood what the evening entailed. His manager assured me that he did.
But two days before the event, Lou’s manager called and asked me if I would speak to Lou. Lou now wanted to do only the interview—not the reception, not the dinner. The intimacy of the event was the whole point, so that wasn’t acceptable. But Lou was adamant. When I called the next day, Lou answered “Hello?” with a voice that sounded as if it was coming from inside a crypt. I explained the situation, and he matter-of-factly responded, “Well, we don’t have to do any of it.” The genial artist I had known for years had transformed into “Lou Reed.” When we ended the conversation, I had no idea if he was going to show up or not.
He did show up. When he arrived, he greeted me warmly, as if nothing untoward had happened the day before, and we went into a faculty office that served as his greenroom. For his rider, Reed had requested kielbasa—which had caused great mirth for me and the Writers House staff. What would the fearsome Lou Reed insist on? Boys? Girls? Drugs? No, kielbasa. I later learned that kielbasa was necessary: it helped with his diabetes. A platter of meats and cheeses from Philadelphia’s famed Di Bruno Bros. gourmet shop was brought to us, and Reed began chatting with me as if we had all the time in the world.
As we talked, I could hear the guests gathering downstairs for the reception. Reed, meanwhile, picked up a piece of prosciutto and, after tasting it, launched into an encomium to its excellence. It was, without question, the best prosciutto he had ever had. Could I please tell him where he could get some for himself? I introduced him to the woman who had ordered the food, and he peppered her with thanks and questions. In the meantime, the reception was now fully under way. People peeked into the room every few minutes to see if we would be coming out anytime soon. I decided the reception would have to be sacrificed. Lou was in a good mood, and if the interview went well, he might be willing to stay for dinner. We continued to enjoy the food, and finally I stood up and said, “We should probably go do our talk.” He looked as if he had completely forgotten about it, but he stood up and followed me downstairs and into the front room.
When we emerged I could feel the audience’s tense energy. Lou, of course, seemed impervious. That kind of tension was the emotional sea he swam in, the air he breathed. The room was small, and it was packed. A number of people had traveled great distances to be there. Everyone had known that Lou was in the house, but his not emerging for the reception lent the gathering an edge. This was Lou Reed, after all. Maybe he would walk out. When we sat down in the two chairs set up in the front of the room, we adjusted our mics, and I thanked Reed for coming. “Anything for you,” he said. Our conversation rambled on for an hour. We talked about writing, Andy Warhol, Delmore Schwartz, the Velvet Underground, and Laurie Anderson. We took questions from the audience, and then we were done.
Now Lou was in a great mood. He remained in his seat as people came by to say hello and brought memorabilia for him to sign. He was gracious to everyone, and looked over the rarities presented to him, mentioning that even he didn’t have copies of some of them. Then, after about fifteen minutes, he joined us for dinner. Everyone got their Lou Reed story. And I got my compliment.
I’D GOTTEN TO KNOW Lou from writing about him in Rolling Stone and elsewhere, and over the course of more than fifteen years we’d regularly run into each other in New York—at clubs and concerts, at restaurants and parties. I always felt that one of the reasons Lou and I got along well was that we met socially before we ever met as artist and critic. In June of 1995 I go
t stuck at the airport in Cleveland, where I had gone to cover the concert celebrating the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Backed by Soul Asylum, Lou had turned in a roaring version of “Sweet Jane” as part of that show. My flight back to New York was delayed for hours and I was settling in for the wait when I ran into a record company friend, who introduced me to Lou and Laurie. There’s nothing like an interminable flight delay to grease the gears of socialization.
“You reviewed New York for Rolling Stone, right?” Reed asked, referring to his classic 1989 album.
“Right.”
“How many stars did you give it?”
“Four.”
“Shoulda been five,” he said. But he was smiling. The ice had been broken.
So we sat and chatted in the airport lounge. The subject of the Hall of Fame’s list of the five hundred songs that shaped rock and roll came up, and Lou asked if “Walk on the Wild Side” was on it. It was, and he seemed pleased to be represented. Then, in a sweet gesture, he asked if Laurie’s “O Superman” had been included. It had not, but at that moment I got a sense of how important she was to him. He didn’t want to make the moment all about him.
Though I subsequently interviewed Lou a half dozen times or so, I remember those more casual moments with the most affection. I recall talking with him at length about Brian Wilson, whom he greatly admired, at a party for Amnesty International. Another time, I ran into him outside Trattoria Dell’Arte on Seventh Avenue when he and Laurie were heading to Carnegie Hall to see the Cuban musicians who had been part of the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. It was a warm summer night and Lou was wearing a light-colored short-sleeve shirt. He was in his late fifties at the time, and his hair was graying. In the fading sunlight, I could see the lines of aging on his face and neck. Rather than the daunting, leather-clad figure of Lou Reed, he looked like the man he had in a sense become: an aging Jewish New Yorker out for a night of entertainment with his arty, attractive girlfriend.
He also seemed to be in a terrific mood. He was excited to see the show and asked if I was going. When I explained that I didn’t have tickets, he half-jokingly asked, “Do you think Laurie and I could get you in as some kind of”—he hesitated in order to come up with the exact right phrase—“celebrity perk?” We all laughed, but I was touched nonetheless.
Encountering him around the city that way always made me proud to be a New York native. An artist of incalculable significance, Lou was also, as one of his song titles put it, the ultimate “NYC Man,” as inextricable a part of the city as, say, the Twin Towers. Now he and they are gone and the city still stands, however much diminished.
THOSE INTERACTIONS WITH LOU both spurred and complicated the writing of this book. I have been a Lou Reed fan for decades, since the Velvet Underground, and hold his work in the absolute highest regard. Other than Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and James Brown, no one has exerted as great an influence on popular music as he has. Particularly when we would run into each other unexpectedly, I would walk away feeling how extraordinary it was that I was on such familiar terms with Lou Reed.
I’m not unaware that I was useful to him. I wrote well and appreciatively about him. He always conceived of himself as a writer, and my having a PhD in American literature, writing for Rolling Stone, and teaching at a prestigious college all meant a great deal to him, though that’s the sort of thing he would never admit. To borrow a phrase from one of Lou’s close friends, the photographer Mick Rock, I saw Lou the way he wanted to see himself.
But I was always aware of his innumerable contradictions, and fascinated by them. Sometimes when I was interviewing him, I could see him tense up, watch his jaw tighten and his eyes grow cold, see him get ready to snap as he had famously done with so many writers so many times. See him about to become Lou Reed. Then he would remember that it was me, that it was okay, and he would calm down and simply answer the question. He would joke about how being insulted by Lou Reed had become something of a badge of honor in the music industry (“Kind of makes you hard, doesn’t it?”), and how he’d used that persona to his benefit. “God forbid I should ever be nice to people: it would ruin everything,” he told me. “The fact is, it works well, being thought to be difficult, because then people just won’t ask you to do things you don’t want to do. Being a nice guy? That’s a disaster. You’re just asking for trouble. People think, ‘Oh, he’s a nice guy, let’s work him over.’ As opposed to, ‘Him? Forget it. He’ll rip your throat out.’”
When Lou died I was as shocked as anyone who wasn’t in his very closest circle. The opportunity to write this book emerged soon after, and I wondered about it. It’s not something he would ever have wanted, and while he was alive I would not have written it. “Anything for you” would never have gone that far. No question: this book does not at all times see Lou the way he wanted to see himself. Aspects of his sex life, his drug use, and his cruelty that he came to be embarrassed about, and, in some sense, would have loved to erase, are discussed here in detail. As are his generosity and his kindness, his talent, his vision, and his genius. So if this book does not present him the way he wanted to see himself, to as great a degree as it was possible for me, it presents him as he was. And, I believe, as he knew himself to be. It is the full, intimate portrait, of an artist and a person, that he, like anyone of his stature, deserves.
Lou loved Hamlet and often would refer to it in conversation and interviews. Some lines from that play came to mind as I thought about what I wrote about him in here. At one point, when Hamlet is talking about his dead father, a monumental figure who literally haunts him, he says simply, “He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.” Lou Reed. All in all. Never again.
New York City
March 2017
1
FROM BROOKLYN TO THE CROTCH OF LONG ISLAND
NAMED AFTER HIS MOTHER’S late grandfather, Lewis Allan Reed was born on March 2, 1942, at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Sidney Joseph and Toby Reed. Sidney was a smart, handsome, ambitious accountant and Toby a housewife whose beauty was remarked upon by all who knew her. Three years earlier, at the age of nineteen, she had been chosen “Queen of the Stenographers” at one of the many local beauty pageants in New York at that time. She had been nominated by the firm where she was working, United Lawyers Service, and it was characteristic of her reticence that she claimed the only reason she was selected was that “the really pretty stenographer was out sick that day.” Her photo ran in the Brooklyn Eagle, and she was crowned queen at the Stenographers Ball held at the Manhattan Center on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, a run of subway stops and a world away from her life in Brooklyn.
The country was barely through the Depression and World War II was raging, but Brooklyn was a peaceful, if rough-hewn, place to live. The borough was overwhelmingly ethnic, with Italian, Irish, Jewish, and African American neighborhoods bordering one another and, in some instances, overlapping, with varying degrees of comfort. In contrast to the soaring towers and relentless modernity of Manhattan, Brooklyn was old-world and human-scale. The buildings were low and each neighborhood had everything its residents needed within a few blocks. The immigrant communities quavered on the tense balance of attempting to re-create the familiar comforts of their European homelands and embracing the fresh possibilities of life in the New World.
Both Toby’s and Sidney’s parents had emigrated from Europe in the early 1900s, her family from Poland, his from Russia. Sidney’s father, Mendel Rabinowitz, established a successful printing business and settled in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park, a predominantly Italian and Jewish area. A recognizably Jewish name like Rabinowitz would do Sidney no good if he hoped to advance in the world beyond his neighborhood, so he legally changed his surname to Reed.
The Reeds were not religious and did not belong to a synagogue, although Lewis would eventually be bar mitzvahed. Sidney Reed, an opinionated man, despised organized religion. He was something of a
loner, and the family did not have many close friends and did not belong to any neighborhood organizations. They lived in a small, walk-up apartment. Sidney was close to his younger brother Stan, who lived with the Reeds for a time, but for the most part the Reeds’ family life was tight and enclosed. Lewis was the Reeds’ first child, and, as the first and only son in a Jewish family, he was cherished.
Like so many men of his time, Sidney had struggled to find work in the wake of the Depression. A well-spoken man who prized the English language, he had dreamed of becoming a writer or a lawyer, but settled on being a certified public accountant, in accordance with his mother’s wishes. Toby, whose given last name was Futterman, had left school to go to work and help support her family after her father died when she was in her teens.
The war was a frightening time for everyone, but particularly for Jews, as the Nazis swept across Europe and rumors and reports of the fate of that continent’s Jewish population began to drift across the Atlantic to the United States. Personal disappointments were pushed aside, and a sense of tense, precarious gratitude became predominant. Simply to have a job and enough money to live and provide for a growing family—simply to be alive—seemed enough to be grateful for. Hoping for more was tempting the fates.
THE BROOKLYN THAT LOU Reed grew up in has been shrouded in a haze of nostalgia, perhaps deservedly. It sometimes seems as if the entire future of the music industry was forged by Brooklyn Jews of his approximate generation, Carole King, David Geffen, Neil Sedaka, Clive Davis, Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin, Seymour Stein, and Barbra Streisand among them. Jewish families typically encouraged education and ambition in their children, and that manifested itself in both creative work and business. The practical business side derived from a sense that survival in post-Depression America required making sure you entered a profession that guaranteed the bills would always be paid. The creativity derived from an exactly opposite source, one out of the parents’ control. As all immigrant groups tend to do, the Jews who came to New York attempted to reconstruct the homeland they had left behind. That provided a sense of comfort, and to contemporary eyes it looks romantic and charming. But these Brooklyn shtetls seemed restrictive and painfully old-world to the children and grandchildren of those immigrants. American music, radio, movies, and television all called to those young people with a wild sense of wide-open freedom that their neighborhoods and cramped apartments couldn’t begin to rival. That generation would leave Europe behind and create a vision of America in the popular arts that, before long, would become the prism through which the entire world viewed the country.
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