Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  When it came time to think about college, Reed and Hyman became fixated on Syracuse University, a private school in upstate New York with a solid academic reputation. But it wasn’t the academics that attracted them to the school. Reed’s father drove them to Syracuse for a weekend visit, and they had the time of their lives. “We thought we had landed in heaven,” Hyman recalled. “Lou’s father went to sleep, thankfully for us, and we met all these girls and were partying. I was thinking about what a party we were going to have when we got up there. When we were driving back, Lou said to me, ‘This is going to be so cool. We’re going to have the best time!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I can hardly wait.’”

  Reed’s senior yearbook describes him as a “valuable participant” on the school’s track team, and it states his interests as “basketball, music, and, naturally, girls.” He had “no plans” after graduation but was prepared to “take life as it comes.” Life, alas, would not prove so easy to take, however. When he graduated, Reed informed Hyman that he would not be going to Syracuse, although he had been accepted at the school. The pressure of his experimentations and the questions they raised about his identity had begun to get to Reed. He said that he had been feeling depressed, and that his parents thought it would be best for him to stay nearby. “He never shared it with me,” Hyman said, “but I guess he was going through a period where he was questioning his sexuality. And I think his parents got caught up in it.” Reed had also been accepted at New York University, which, along with its campus in Greenwich Village, had an additional campus in the Bronx, where he enrolled. Staying close to home did not relieve his depression, however, and Hyman’s suspicion that Reed’s parents got “caught up” in his problems proved all too true. Reed’s mood swings, acerbity, and general rebelliousness had certainly caught their attention. He and his parents fought about his mysterious comings and goings, and the “effeminate” behavior that Hyman described could not have helped matters. Homosexuality was not merely regarded as a clinical psychiatric disorder at the time; its legal status was dubious at best in many parts of the United States. For parents like Sidney and Toby, for whom middle-class respectability was a paramount concern, the possibility of their son being homosexual would have been deeply disturbing. There is no question that Reed’s parents loved him. He was their firstborn child and their only son—a special status in a Jewish family. His younger sister adored him. But his wild ways upset the orderly life the family had come to Freeport to enjoy, and now the seriousness of his depression called his mental stability into question. It’s quite possible that Sidney and Toby were worried that their son might take his own life. One day, during Reed’s freshman year at NYU, when he was seventeen, his parents picked him up at school and brought him home “limp and unresponsive,” in Bunny’s description, “dead-eyed” and “noncommunicative.” At odd moments he would begin laughing maniacally. Sidney and Toby told Bunny that her brother had suffered a “nervous breakdown,” and they kept the news from everyone else.

  Sidney and Toby sought help for Lou, and doctors suggested that he might be schizophrenic. According to Bunny, their reasoning was that Lou may not have been picked up often enough as a baby and had been left to cry in his room—a ludicrous notion, needless to say, but a common idea at the time and one that would instill intense feelings of guilt in Toby, feelings from which she would never recover. Lou’s condition exempted him from the draft, although, as was also common at the time, he might well have exaggerated his symptoms through drugs or other means. A psychiatrist wrote a letter that, according to Bunny, stated that Lou “suffered from delusions and hallucinations, saw spiders crawling on the walls and… might be schizophrenic.” Lou framed the letter and hung it on the wall of his room.

  The Reeds ended up agreeing to have their son undergo electroconvulsive therapy—electroshock therapy, as it was called at the time. Writing years later about that decision, Bunny explained, “My father, controlling and rigid, was attempting to solve a situation that was beyond him. My mother was terrified and certain of her own implicit guilt since they had told her that this was due to her poor mothering. Each of us suffered the loss of our dear sweet Lou in our own private hell, unhelped and undercut by the medical profession.” As barbaric as the notion sounds—and, indeed, as barbaric as it often was in practice—ECT was a common treatment. Indeed, in much milder forms, it is still used today. Reed, however, was devastated by his treatments, which took place at Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Queens, New York, in a series of outpatient visits on which his parents accompanied him. “I watched my brother as my parents assisted him coming back into our home afterwards, unable to walk, stupor-like,” Bunny wrote. “It damaged his short-term memory horribly and throughout his life he struggled with memory retention, probably directly as a result of those treatments.”

  Whether or not Reed’s alleged memory loss had anything to do with his ECT treatments—his subsequent prodigious drug and alcohol abuse could well have been factors—he came to regard his being subjected to them as an egregious family betrayal, a kind of Oedipal revenge. His feelings about his father, in particular, were irretrievably darkened. According to Bunny, Lou’s bisexuality was not a reason for her parents’ consenting to the treatment. That view is “simplistic and unrealistic,” she wrote. “My parents were many things—anxious, controlling—but they were blazing liberals. Homophobic they were not. They were caught in a bewildering web of guilt, fear, and poor psychiatric care.” Still, given their backgrounds and the mores of the time, they would have had to be cultural visionaries not to include Reed’s potential gayness in the welter of issues that were factors in his problematic behavior. Reed’s gay posturing in his parents’ and others’ presence was a defiant, conscious provocation, and, along with his mood swings and general recalcitrance, it elicited a crushing response, one that would ravage his family and poison his attitude toward it forever. Bunny expressed no doubt that her parents regretted their decision “every day until the day they died. But the family secret continued. We absolutely never spoke about the treatments, then or ever.”

  Reed, too, largely kept the story of his treatments to himself. Some of his closest friends would not learn about them until years later. Allan Hyman described Reed’s affect during and immediately after the treatments. “When I saw him during the holidays, he was very withdrawn,” he said. “He was never a friendly, outgoing type, but he was totally hostile and more sarcastic than ever. He was dark.” Hyman saw no trace of his friend’s former humor and liveliness. “He had always had this rebellious side to him, but that was kind of comical. It was fun.” Now, “he had a nasty edge to him that he had never had before. Everything was fucked up. This person was ridiculous. That person was full of shit. Very cynical.”

  2

  CORNER TABLE AT THE ORANGE

  LOU REED STAYED AT NYU for two semesters, and during that time he received follow-up treatments for his depression at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Eventually, his mood began to improve, and he revived the plan he had hatched with Allan Hyman for them to attend Syracuse University together. Located about 250 miles north of New York City, Syracuse, while geographically remote, was, and remains, a well-regarded private college, and at the time Reed attended, it was also a national football powerhouse led by fullback Ernie Davis, who, in 1961, became the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy. Reed was primarily interested in English and, ironically enough, given his relations later on with many practitioners in the field, journalism. Syracuse was strong in both areas.

  Some of the more typical aspects of college life proved problematic for Reed. He enrolled in the campus’s ROTC program, an option available to Syracuse students who wanted to opt out of the physical education requirement. In an oft-repeated story that most likely is apocryphal, exaggerated, or simply untrue, he was expelled for pointing an unloaded firearm at his commanding officer’s head. That Reed mishandled his weapon in a way that was regarded as potentiall
y dangerous—and that such an infraction proved the last straw in what no doubt was a checkered military career at best—is far more likely.

  Hyman, meanwhile, made the mistake of inviting Reed to rush the fraternity he had joined. Hyman recalled, “He thought it was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard. He thought fraternities were ridiculous, the ultimate middle-class, sellout thing to do.” Nonetheless, in characteristically contradictory fashion, Reed agreed to do it. “So he showed up one night during rush,” Hyman said. “He walked in like he had just rolled out of the gutter, wearing a jacket that was stained and threadbare. He looked like a bum. Conversation stopped completely when he walked into the room.” Of course, that was entirely Reed’s intention. “He loved it,” Hyman said. “One of the brothers walked over to him and said, ‘You walk into a fraternity dressed like that?’ Lou said, ‘Fuck you. I wouldn’t join this fucking asshole fraternity if you paid me.’” That was the end of the evening. As they were leaving, Hyman asked Reed, “Why did you even bother showing up?” “Because you asked me to,” Reed replied.

  Hyman had more success—up to a point—when he approached Reed about forming a band at Syracuse as they had back in Freeport. “I was anxious to do it, more than he was,” Hyman recalled. “I thought we could make some money and have a lot of fun playing fraternity parties. And not just in Syracuse, but at Cornell, Colgate, and other nearby schools. So we got together and formed this band called L.A. and the Eldorados, which was pretty funny because the El Dorados were an existing group at the time. That didn’t matter to us.” As for the “L.A.,” that stood for Lewis and Allan. Reed and Hyman recruited guitarist Lloyd Baskin and pianist Richard Mishkin, who eventually switched to bass. They arranged to buy a Fender amplifier from a music store in Syracuse on an installment plan, and they were ready to go. The only problem, Hyman pointed out, was “that we didn’t anticipate how crazy Lou was. I would book a job at my fraternity, for example, for a hundred dollars—twenty-five dollars each for the night. But at the last minute, Lou would refuse to show up. He would just say, ‘I’m not doing this.’ I’d say, ‘We made a commitment to play this job,’ and we’d get into a huge screaming fight. He would eventually show up, but he’d be hostile. He’d turn his back to the crowd like Miles Davis and insist on playing his own music. We would always be escorted out.”

  Richard Mishkin was a fraternity brother of Allan Hyman’s in Sigma Alpha Mu, a so-called Jewish fraternity because at the time Jews were not permitted in many other fraternities. Mishkin had attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and had considered attending Oberlin Conservatory but ultimately enrolled at Syracuse, where his father had gone to school. He was serious about music, and he and Reed formed a bond—to a degree. “Lou and I really hit it off right from the beginning,” Mishkin said. “But when I say ‘hit it off’—you don’t hit it off with Lou. You find commonality and deal with his bullshit.” One element of Reed’s “bullshit” was his desire not to simply play the current songs that the band’s audience wanted to hear. “He was always interested in making a statement—pushing people and shocking people,” Mishkin said. “My attitude was that we were getting paid far more than we were worth to play the music these people wanted to hear so they could dance. They weren’t listening to the words. But Lou, in his mind, was a poet, and he really wanted to put his poetry to music. That was fine. As long as it could be danced to, I was happy with it.”

  But making music that could be danced to was not Reed’s goal. Not long after arriving at Syracuse, he importuned Katharine Barr, the sorority girl who ran WAER, the university’s radio station, about having his own show. The station primarily played classical music and show tunes, but Reed had other ideas. He explained that he wanted to do a jazz show, and Barr agreed, somewhat reluctantly. “I knew I was in trouble… when instead of it being The Lou Reed Show or Lou Reed Jazz or whatever, he called the program Excursions on a Wobbly Rail,” she later said. Reed borrowed the title from the closing track on pianist Cecil Taylor’s 1958 album, Looking Ahead! Taylor was a boundary-breaking player who helped pave the way for free jazz, and looking ahead was exactly what Reed desired to do. That explosive tune was representative of what Reed wanted to play on his show. His avant-garde tastes and tendency to argue with friends who would crank call him on the air led to complaints from listeners. Syracuse wasn’t ready for Reed, Barr said, and “it wasn’t too long until the wrath of the faculty and administration rained down on me. And I had no choice but to let him go.”

  It was at Syracuse that Reed began to take himself seriously as a writer and formulated the idea that he would return to again and again in interviews: he believed that rock and roll could serve as a medium for lyrics that addressed the same themes addressed by writers like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Hubert Selby. From his love of doo-wop, Reed had learned that rock and roll could be as transporting and lyrical as any other art form, that it could speak directly to the heart with incandescent power. But the rebelliousness of rock and roll, its ability to get under the skin of adults generally and authority figures in particular, suggested that the music held the possibility for true subversion. Why waste that impact on lyrics that had nothing to say? If you were going to be attacked anyway, why not say something that truly unnerved the powers that be? That became and would remain Reed’s project. “Lou fashioned himself a rebel because he didn’t fit in society the way a lot of people do,” Mishkin said. “That was who he was. He clearly enjoyed being offensive and he always understood exactly what he was doing. He used to sing this song called ‘The Fuck Around Blues.’ In nineteen sixty-one or sixty-two, people didn’t stand up on a stage and do that. But Lou did. I thought it was perfectly okay until I realized that maybe the venue wasn’t right. We’d lose gigs. People would get pissed off and throw beer at us. But we’d just change the name of the band and go back and play there again later.”

  One of those alternate names was Pasha and the Prophets, Pasha being one of Mishkin’s nicknames. That version of the band sometimes included a black female singer and other black musicians. “Lou and I would go down to the bars in the black neighborhoods in Syracuse, and everybody would look at us like we were going to die,” Mishkin said. “Most of these bars had pickup groups. I remember asking if we could sit in, and the musicians just laughed. They said, ‘You white boys can’t play this music.’ But, in fact, that’s the music we played. The musical influences that were strong for Lou and me were Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, a lot of Mississippi blues players. When we did sit in on occasion, they were astounded. I mean, we weren’t that good, but we were certainly as good as the guys that were playing there.” Reed and Mishkin eventually won the musicians over, and they would hang out and have a good time. Then they would offer to return the favor. “We’d say, ‘Listen, we have a band and once in a while we need guys who play like you,’” Mishkin recalled. “They’d say, ‘How much do you pay?’ Whatever we paid them was more than they usually got, because we got paid way more than we were worth.” Indeed, both men were making quite good money for college kids. “We had a backup gig at a big beer hall, for townies, mostly, but a lot of college kids went there,” Mishkin said. “That was for whenever we didn’t have a frat gig on a Friday night. We’d get a hundred and twenty-five dollars—twenty-five dollars each. When we played fraternities, we’d get anywhere from two hundred and fifty to seven hundred and fifty dollars, which was a lot of money back then. We didn’t play constantly, but we played often, and I never didn’t have money in my pocket.”

  As time went on in Syracuse, Mishkin became one of the earliest in a long line of people whose job it became to look after Reed. “I became Lou’s keeper,” he said. “It was my job to get him up in the morning, to make sure he got to the gigs, to make sure we had the equipment we needed to play. I did a lot of the booking in the beginning.” Mishkin also provided the band car for L.A. and the Eldorados, replacing Allan Hyman’s Jaguar sedan, which had previously served that purpose. “It was
a white, two-door Chrysler New Yorker with big fins on the back and a push-button transmission that my grandmother gave to me because she had bought a new car,” he said. “A friend drew big red guitars on the fins, with ‘L.A. and the Eldorados’ across the front and across the trunk, with maybe G clefs or something. That was the car we used to go to gigs. It had a big trunk. Our equipment at that point was pretty minimal: two guitars and a bass, two amps. I had chains that I’d put on it to get around upstate in the winter.”

  As an extracurricular activity, Mishkin, who had grown up hunting pheasant, took Reed hunting, another obviously misguided idea. “I had a shotgun, but I don’t think I gave him a gun,” Mishkin said. “We shot some pheasant and gave them to our girlfriends to cook. But it was so not Lou Reed to go out into the woods. He bitched from the minute we left until the minute we got back: ‘Who wants to walk around in the woods? Why would you do something as crazy as this?’ But he was laughing, and he had a great time.”

  THE MOST SIGNIFICANT MUSICAL contact Reed made at Syracuse was with guitarist Sterling Morrison, who had also grown up on Long Island. Morrison had applied to and been accepted at Syracuse but initially chose to attend the University of Illinois. Reed and Morrison met when Morrison visited Syracuse to see his friend Jim Tucker, who was also from Long Island and who lived in the room beneath Reed’s. Tucker and his sister Maureen had known Morrison from childhood. Morrison would eventually transfer to Syracuse for a time, and he and Reed would occasionally play together, both at school and on Long Island during breaks. They remained friendly, though their musical relationship in the Velvet Underground wouldn’t blossom for several years.

  At Syracuse, Reed characteristically turned what might have been thought of as a handicap to his own advantage. Given the treatments he had undergone for depression, Reed was able to get an off-campus apartment. “He claimed he had a mental illness so that he couldn’t live in the dorm,” Mishkin recalled. “I had a car as a sophomore, which was typically not permitted, but I claimed I needed it for work. The work I needed it for was the band, so that was legit. So we had a car to get around in, and an apartment where we could bring girls. Girls couldn’t go to the boys’ dorms, and vice versa, in those days.” Not that Reed’s apartment was exactly a luxurious love den. He shared it with Lincoln Swados, a gifted and highly eccentric writer and musician from Buffalo, with whom Reed would remain friends. “It was dirty, messy, pistachio nutshells all over the place, cigarette butts piled up,” Mishkin recalled of Reed’s digs. Indeed, Reed was so partial to pistachio nuts, which at the time were frequently dyed red, that his fingers were often stained by their coloring.