Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  One night, after Reed had been “doing that kind of stuff” for a couple of months, Albin was at a party where Reed was playing when “Richie Mishkin said to me, ‘Lou is getting a blow job, and he wants to know if you want to come and watch.’ I don’t know if it was a guy or a girl, or if Lou was saying that or Richie made it up, trying to be risqué, letting some of Lou’s evilness rub off on him. Who knows? But that was the end of it. I left and said, ‘That’s it. Goodbye.’ You can push me for a long time and I’m very tolerant, but when I’m done, I’m done. You were supposed to be the girlfriend who was really his mother, and I wasn’t interested in that. I was done.”

  That may have been it as far as Albin was concerned, but not Reed. “He kept trying to get me to come back to him,” she said. “He couldn’t imagine that he could be so offensive that somebody was going to say, ‘That’s enough.’” They would remain in touch even after Reed graduated from Syracuse and returned to New York, and Albin would loom for a long time as a symbolic figure for Reed, the metaphoric embodiment of everything he “had, but couldn’t keep,” as he put it in “Pale Blue Eyes,” the gorgeous ballad he wrote about her, though Albin did not have blue eyes. Ever the writer, Reed was perfectly capable of altering the facts for the sake of a more effective image, one that, in fact, had a private meaning for the two of them. Indeed, Albin served as an inspiration and sounding board for Reed. “A song like ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’—that’s a conversation we had word for word,” she said. “I know when he wrote it; I think it was my junior year in college. I got a lot of letters from him. A lot of them were lyrics. One of them was ‘The Gift.’ My mother met him and one of the reasons she hated him so much is because she read those letters. She didn’t realize it was just a writer writing. Lou just thought out loud and he wrote. A lot of them were about the Hay Loft, and a lot of other things that your mother really should not know. I dumped them all into an incinerator when I was purging him from my life.” As an artist herself, Albin summed up Reed’s approach to life: “Everything you do, everything you look at, everybody you know, and every conversation you hear—it’s fodder. To expect a writer not to use you is craziness.” Reed, she said finally, was “a romantic. He could be very sweet. He’s probably the only person who ever literally gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day. But he wasn’t happy unless he made somebody more miserable than he was. That is exactly what he fed off as an artist, as a writer, as a songwriter. Misery made for his best work, whether it came from me or somebody else. So I’d call him a romantic and I’d call him sweet, but I’d also call him an incredible pain in the ass. He wasn’t anybody I wanted to live with and put up with. It wasn’t worth it. It was too much grief.”

  WHILE AT SYRACUSE, REED met and studied with the poet, essayist, and short-story writer Delmore Schwartz, who had a decisive impact on him. Schwartz achieved acclaim in 1938 with the publication of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, a collection of stories and poems that established him as one of the leading voices of a new generation of American writers that would succeed such modernist giants as T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ezra Pound. Schwartz was just twenty-four when In Dreams came out, and his promise seemed unlimited. He was young, handsome, immensely talented, and spellbindingly articulate. Sadly, that promise was never entirely fulfilled. Haunted by his parents’ divorce, Schwartz divorced twice himself, and the second breakup proved particularly devastating. He had begun to drift into paranoia, and at times he was convinced that his estranged wife was having an affair with Nelson Rockefeller, then a prominent political figure—and eventually governor of New York and vice president of the United States—whose family had amassed a fortune through its control of the Standard Oil company. The Rockefellers’ immense wealth, political power, and international influence made them the relentless focus of conspiracy theories of all sorts, sometimes with good reason. Schwartz, however, saw the Rockefellers not merely as geopolitical power brokers but as specifically fixated on destroying his life and career. Unfortunately, he was doing a spectacular job of that himself and did not require their assistance.

  Despite his precarious grip on his sanity and the erratic quality of his later work, Schwartz maintained his literary reputation into the sixties. In 1960 he was awarded Yale University’s prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry (previous winners included Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden), and he was invited to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration, though the invitation reached him four months late because he had no fixed place to live at the time. Schwartz was still able to captivate listeners in conversation, and he retained enough charisma to attract a seemingly endless series of young women. Nonetheless, his many loyal and influential friends feared for his well-being. His condition had reached the point where they regularly needed to bail him out of difficulties with landlords and other creditors. His alcoholism and paranoia raged at times, and he often rewarded his friends’ efforts with anger, insults, and suspicion. Poet Robert Lowell and novelist Saul Bellow, both of whom would write about Schwartz in some of their best-known work, and other friends helped land him a position in the English department at Syracuse, which had recently formed a creative writing program. Administrators at Syracuse were aware that Schwartz was hardly functioning at the height of his powers, but his reputation carried the day and he joined the faculty in the fall of 1962.

  Like many charismatic professors with few emotional boundaries, Schwartz tended to attract worshipful students. Indeed, a young woman, still in her teens, who had recently studied with him at the University of California joined him for an ill-fated few months at Syracuse. Schwartz introduced her as his fiancée and described their lovemaking as “like Grant taking Richmond.” However, after he suggested that she was in danger of being killed by an unnamed assailant, she arranged to be shepherded out of town, never to return.

  Nonetheless, Schwartz had little trouble finding acolytes at Syracuse, Reed primary among them. Along with the classes he taught, Schwartz daily occupied a corner table in the back of the Orange Bar on Crouse Avenue, just off campus. The legal drinking age was eighteen in those days, so socializing with professors in bars around campus was even more common than it is today. Shelley Albin spent so much time around Schwartz while at Syracuse that it was difficult for her to recall if she had ever actually taken a course with him. The man Saul Bellow called the “Mozart of conversation” kept students spellbound with tales of the literary masters with whom he had rubbed shoulders. Schwartz taught a course devoted to James Joyce and carried around a copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake that was covered in his own annotations. Simply displaying such fluency with that famously daunting novel would have been enough to excite admiration in English majors. Schwartz, a superb reader, would recite passages for his students’ delectation, and his immense knowledge and deft comprehension of the intricate, highly musical rhythms of Joyce’s prose would leave his disciples reeling. Schwartz was also a great admirer of Sigmund Freud, and his approach to literature embedded the written word squarely within the life of the author who had written it. That was a departure from the dominant critical approach at the time, which viewed literature as free of both history and individual psychology. Schwartz’s discussions of literary titans like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce frequently included gossip and sexual speculation about their personal lives. In short, he treated his students with an easy familiarity, as if they were insiders, privy to the same knowing insights and sly observations that he was.

  Reed found this irresistible. Through Schwartz he found entrée into a larger world, one where writers don’t just sit in their rooms and conjure masterworks, but where they hold forth in public in compelling ways about matters both serious and trivial. In Reed’s eyes, Schwartz was a rock star, a stature magnified by the relative obscurity of Syracuse—he was a genuinely big fish in a small pond. That he had achieved literary fame while still in his twenties only made him a more attractive figure for Reed; that was precisely the fate he desired for himself.
Shelley Albin said that Reed was the first person she had met who “thought like an artist and spoke like an artist”; Schwartz fulfilled that role for Reed. That Schwartz took Reed seriously as a writer intensified the effect he had on him. “I’m not surprised by his friendship with Lou,” said James Atlas, Schwartz’s biographer. “Delmore was a powerful figure by that time and had friendships with a number of younger writers. Anybody with a serious interest in art and literature would have been someone Delmore responded to.” Schwartz was a Brooklyn Jew who rose to important artistic heights, and in him Reed read his own destiny. Reed would speak rapturously of Schwartz for the rest of his life.

  Reed’s friends, however, were divided in their views on Schwartz. Lincoln Swados, who coedited a literary quarterly with Reed named Lonely Woman after an Ornette Coleman tune, shared Reed’s admiration. Albin’s friend Erin Clermont, who aspired to write fiction herself, was another of Schwartz’s fans. “Those gatherings at the Orange Bar was really where I got to know Lou,” she said. “Lou worshipped Delmore. There would be six or seven people around the table on any given night. I would sit there like a quiet chick at the table, but Lou would contribute to the conversation. I remember someone once said to Lou, ‘You always speak in italics.’ I love that. That was true to the end of his life. But to me, Delmore was at the Orange as a teacher—one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. He was a marvelous raconteur and he had so many stories.” As was hardly uncommon at the time, Schwartz took Clermont’s admiration as a sexual invitation. “He did stick his hand down the back of my pants one time,” she recalled. “He was probably close to fifty by then. For me, he might as well have been eighty. I was not into that at all. I either just ignored it or pulled his hand out. Still, his voice was beautiful, and as a young man, he was very beautiful.” Richard Mishkin, who would stop by the Orange occasionally, took a more jaundiced view. “Delmore was drunk all the time. He seemed like a has-been—and sad. He was past his peak because he put himself in that position by drinking. Like Lou, he was an egotist and thought whatever he said was gospel. What he did was important, but it wasn’t that important.”

  Albin, of course, was another regular at Delmore’s Orange Bar sessions. “I don’t drink” were the first words she said to me when I asked her opinion about Schwartz. “I’m not a fun drinking date, nor do I find people who are drunk or high fun. So Delmore was not half as interesting or magical to me as he was to the people who were drinking around him for four or five hours. I think he was overrated. Most often I was there for an hour and then I would leave.” She had strong recollections of his conspiracy theories. “By the time we knew him, he was totally paranoid,” she said. “He had the Rockefeller paranoia going—that’s what you heard about all the time. He drank so much and became incoherent. He’d be spitting while he was talking, and if he ever ate anything it was all down his front. If I stayed four feet away, I was okay.” In Delmore’s view, Albin was the sort of mother-protector for Reed that he sought in his own wives and paramours. “He’d turn to me and say, ‘Your job in life is to be sure that Lou is a writer—and not this crappy rock-and-roll stuff. I can get him into Harvard. He can get into Princeton. He’s got to be a writer, and that’s your job.’ Then he signed a book to Lou, but gave it to me. It was like, ‘I’m giving it to you, because it’s your job to stay with Lou,’ or whatever. Okeydokey. It was like, ‘You’ll be the mother and the adult here.’ I don’t have the book. I gave it to Lou. But Delmore was very impressed with Lou and wanted Lou to be like him. I do think he was sort of the father figure that Lou wanted.”

  Reed always said that Schwartz threatened to come back from the grave and haunt him if he ever sold out and betrayed his literary talent. Schwartz may well have seen rock and roll as such a betrayal, but Reed would later write to him about his efforts to get a music career going, and it’s unlikely he would have dwelled on that if he believed that his mentor would have disapproved. Reed took the threat seriously, however, and held Schwartz up as a standard of artistic integrity. His version of Schwartz was, in part, his own invention, a version that omitted the writer’s paranoia and alcoholism, perhaps because Reed sensed those qualities in himself. He could spare Schwartz his judgment—and spare himself as well.

  3

  FELLINI SQUARED

  DESPITE A ROCKY CAREER at Syracuse—getting tossed off the student radio station and booted from ROTC, dealing drugs—Reed graduated with honors in June of 1964 with a BA in English. Along with his generally outrageous behavior and innate desire to shock, Reed displayed a characteristic savvy during his time at Syracuse. His rebelliousness aside, Reed took care to avoid getting kicked out of school. He pushed the college to the limits of its tolerance, but he also taught himself how to work the system to his advantage. “When all is said and done, there was no reason for Lou not to graduate,” Richard Mishkin said. “He went to class and he was very smart. And he made sure he took classes, especially as a senior, that you couldn’t fail unless you never showed up.” Just as he had exploited his psychological problems to get off-campus housing, Reed deftly negotiated his course requirements so that he wouldn’t have to take too many classes he didn’t like. “Lou waited until senior year to take these nasty required courses,” Erin Clermont said. “We wound up in the same botany class. I had to take biology and botany, but Lou made a deal with the dean, so he only had to take one required science course, and he copied my notes for that one. That was the first time it hit me: boy, he’s very clever. He had an angle. Why didn’t I do that?”

  After graduating, Reed returned home to his parents’ house on Long Island and promptly succumbed to a hepatitis attack that sidelined him for two months. He wrote to Delmore Schwartz and explained that he had set aside his application to Harvard because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go back to school, then or ever. He had not even looked at anything he’d written for six months, but when he finally did, he told Schwartz that he thought he had talent but needed to work hard. Primarily, however, he was trying to get his music career off the ground. He wrote about a “folk album” he had made that he hoped might elicit some interest from record companies, but they were having trouble with his lyrics, which they considered “offensive.” Other musicians, including an unnamed English band, were considering recording his songs. To make money he planned to take a job with the welfare department in New York, because he wouldn’t have to wear formal office clothes and he might be able to help some suffering people. He also mentioned his attraction to the city’s sexual underground, though he described those interests as deriving from a personal weakness. He talked about Park Avenue johns who were willing to pay hundreds of dollars—a significant amount of money in those days—to watch couples have sex. He said that he couldn’t resist exploring that world, walking right up to the edges of it, and, occasionally, toppling into it.

  Reed later wrote about this period, during which he also spent two weeks working as a copy editor for a divorce lawyer: “Much of my income came from selling envelopes of sugar to girls I met at clubs, claiming it was heroin. This led to hours of feigned stonedness with those more gullible than I, watching carefully to make sure they didn’t OD on sweets. What happened to the original drugs is another story.” The Vietnam War was beginning to escalate, and now that he was out of college, Reed lost his student deferment. However, because of his emotional and psychological problems, he received a 1-Y classification, meaning that he would be drafted only in case of a national emergency or an outbreak of war, which, technically, did not apply to Vietnam because Congress never officially declared war.

  Most notably, however, Reed took a songwriting job with Pickwick Records, a budget label whose factory-style work-for-hire ethos made the sweat-equity, no-nonsense hit-making of the Brill Building seem like Mount Olympus. In those days, fly-by-night record companies would jump on any trend—a dance craze, a musical style that would catch fire on the radio, like surf music or teen-tragedy ballads—and cash in on it. “They would put us in a room a
nd say, ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’” depending on what was happening at the moment, Reed recalled about the situation he had found himself in with three other songwriters for hire: Terry Phillips, Jimmy Sims, and Jerry Vance. Musicians, including Reed, would be assembled to record the songs, and albums would be printed up with covers and newly minted—which is to say completely made-up—band names designed to trick young record buyers into believing they were getting songs by established bands, rather than hastily assembled copies or obvious attempts to monetize trends. This was a time well before rock audiences became sophisticated consumers of the music. These albums, sold in five-and-ten stores and down-market department stores and purchased by teenagers or their unwitting parents, were inexpensive to produce. If they sold even a few thousand copies, the profits were considerable. While Reed wasn’t the most accomplished musician, he had ranging tastes and an ear—and deep fondness—for pop music. Suddenly, he had something like an outlet, albeit the most low-rent one possible.

  Pickwick, located in Long Island City, a section of Queens not far from Manhattan, was something like a songwriting emergency room. Every problem, difficulty, or complexity that could present itself in a songwriting situation did, and the job became something like a laboratory for Reed’s more serious songwriting. While there, Reed would demo songs like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” which he had begun working on at Syracuse. One wonders what his employers made of such efforts. For the songs that he cowrote for Pickwick—numbers like “Cycle Annie,” which is credited to the Beachnuts and channels the surf duo Jan and Dean, and the rocking “You’re Driving Me Insane,” credited to the Roughnecks—Reed often sang and played guitar for the label’s in-house band. To cite a perfect example of how the Pickwick method worked: Reed read in a newspaper one day that ostrich feathers were going to be a fashion trend. In order to exploit that unlikely development, Reed and his cowriters hastily came up with a song called “The Ostrich,” which—whether sincerely or ironically, it’s hard to tell—attempted to incite a dance craze. The song opens with a bruising bass line derived from the Crystals’ 1963 hit “Then He Kissed Me,” and Reed unleashes a searing guitar line. His vocal is a hoarse shout, a radio DJ’s manic exhortations to the imagined dancers to put their heads between their knees and do whatever they please. While its lyrics and concept are ridiculous, the song, aptly credited to the Primitives, sounds like raw, rough-edged garage rock, a sound much cruder than what was on the radio at the time.