Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  To whoever managed to hear it, however, the album’s music spoke definitively for itself. Side one opens with “Sunday Morning,” Reed’s answer to Warhol’s suggestion that he write about paranoia. It features perhaps the Velvets’ most delicate arrangement—a tinkling celeste, viola, and piano, all played by Cale—and Reed’s most self-consciously sweet vocal. In what would become a consistent Velvets strategy, those sonic elements existed in tense opposition to the underlying dread of the lyrics. The song captured the mood that Kris Kristofferson would later distill in “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a sense that at a quiet moment that evokes spirituality and peace, your own life is nowhere near serenity. The song may be about paranoia, but the fear in it seems generated not so much by the outside world but by something perverse inside the singer himself, a “restless feeling” whose disturbing sources he doesn’t “want to know.” His inability to share the peacefulness of a Sunday morning is the result of his own habits and actions (“all those streets you’ve crossed not so long ago”)—or perhaps both result from a kind of original sin that damns him to the intense isolation he feels.

  “I’m Waiting for the Man,” the album’s second track, is the first iconic Velvets moment on record. It’s about scoring heroin in Harlem, and the guitar, piano, and drums rattle like the Lexington Avenue local barreling uptown to 125th Street. In its gleeful, if cold-eyed, details it offers a vision that is precisely the opposite of the psychedelic Summer of Love just on the horizon. Reed amends the title line to “waiting for my man,” which gives the song a sexy, homoerotic feel, as does the singer’s hasty assurance to the locals that he’s not in Harlem to chase black women around. Again, as in “Sunday Morning,” the contrast between the music and the lyrics is compelling. Reed describes his character as “sick and dirty,” and the wait for his connection is nearly unendurable. But the exuberance of the playing and the exquisite cool of Reed’s vocal led to the charge that he was glamorizing addiction—an allegation that would follow him his entire life. But by the end of the song, even when the singer describes himself as feeling “so fine,” he knows that he’s a kind of Sisyphus who will be back tomorrow, desperate once again to score.

  Nico makes her first appearance on the album with her lead vocal on “Femme Fatale,” which Reed composed in response to Warhol’s suggestion that he write a song about Edie Sedgwick, the Factory It Girl of the moment. The term suited Nico as well, though while the song describes a siren-like figure with whom men get involved at their peril, both Sedgwick and Nico proved to be damaged at their core, a painful vulnerability that Nico’s voice brings to the fore, in stark contrast to Reed’s deadpan background vocal. A woman singing about another woman being a femme fatale, a “little tease,” and describing how she walks and talks lends the song a homoerotic charge as well.

  The sexual power in “Femme Fatale” finds darker expression in “Venus in Furs,” which takes its title from a novella by the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose name gives us the term “masochism.” If the woman in “Femme Fatale” has to resort to teasing and pleasing to exert her power, Venus enslaves her lover Severin by virtue of her sexual dominance, the leather boots that he worshipfully kisses, the whip that “cures” the emptiness in his heart, which is the same desperate loneliness that afflicts the singer in “Sunday Morning.” The song floats on a hypnotic drone created by Reed’s guitar and Cale’s viola, while Reed’s vocal is a seductive incantation that summons the hothouse eroticism of Severin’s submissive devotion. Unlike any other music at that time, “Venus in Furs” evokes a mesmerizing inner world of forbidden desires. That Venus is the Roman goddess of love intimates that love itself nurses a kind of corruption, a triumph of power over sweetness.

  The album’s next song, “Run Run Run,” breaks that internal mood with raw guitar rock that, in its evocation of street characters (Teenage Mary, Margarita Passion) in ardent search of drugs, echoes the episodic storytelling of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” In its presentation of specific characters and specific New York neighborhoods like Union Square, the song is also something of a precursor to “Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed’s strangulated guitar solos on the track also distinguish it from virtually all other popular music of the time.

  The album’s first side concludes with “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” Reed’s preemptive eulogy for the Warhol crowd and, ironically, Warhol’s favorite of the Velvets’ songs. Cale’s piano and viola and Reed’s sitar-like phrases on guitar create a dirgelike setting for Nico’s sepulchral vocal. The song beautifully taps into the loneliness and emptiness underlying the blithe party-going of the Factory crowd. All tomorrow’s parties are finally no different from yesterday’s, as unchanging as the song’s portentous drone.

  “Heroin,” one of Reed’s greatest masterpieces, is a bold, successful attempt to re-create both the appeal and the experience of shooting that drug. Like all of Reed’s best work, the song takes no moral position on drug use; it simply attempts to render the experience from the standpoint of the user. More than seven minutes long, the song backs away from neither gritty details, like the blood that shoots back up the dropper as the user injects it, nor the eroticism that is so much of the allure, however unconsciously, for addicts. As in “Venus in Furs,” the ritual of shooting up offers an escape from the daily agonies of the quotidian world; the drug, the singer declares, is his “wife” and his “life.” The delicate guitar melody that begins the song evokes the drug’s calm, while the rush of getting high comes through as Reed and Morrison on guitars, Cale on viola, and Tucker on drums whip up the tempo. The song is an extraordinary journey, and Reed would forever after mention how people would tell him that they first shot up as a result of listening to it, which made him stop performing it at various times.

  “There She Goes Again” lifts its stuttering opening riff from Marvin Gaye’s 1963 Top 40 hit “Hitch Hike.” Reed would routinely quote soul and R & B songs throughout his career—and equally often pervert their intent, as he did here. While “Hitch Hike” is an amusing chronicle of erotic obsession, “There She Goes Again” finds the singer infuriated by a woman who, addled by drugs, rejects him but is perfectly willing to get “down on her knees” for other men, including his friends. The singer’s recommendation—“You better hit her”—unsettled listeners even at a time when the likes of Carole King and Gerry Goffin could write a song called “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss).” Still, the theme of sexual violence hardly felt out of place in the dark world the Velvets evoked, and it was not one that Reed would shy away from in his future songwriting.

  “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” one of Reed’s most delicate ballads and one that his Syracuse girlfriend Shelley Albin recalled that he began to work on in college, shifts the album’s mood again. Sung by Nico, the song is a sweet reassurance to a lover beset by lacerating insecurities, a grimness, once again, underlying the song’s gentle surface. “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” which Reed cowrote with Cale, shatters the idyll of “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” As Cale blasts angular phrases on his viola, Reed seems to be free-associating lyrics that focus on violence and mortality. Performing this song had caused the Velvets to lose their gig at the Café Bizarre, the owner had so hated it. Reed later wrote, “The idea here was to string words together for the sheer fun of their sound, not any particular meaning. I loved the title.”

  The Velvet Underground and Nico closes with its longest and most challenging track. “European Son” runs more than seven and a half minutes and is predominantly a raucous improvised jam. The songwriting is credited to Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker, and the song is dedicated to Delmore Schwartz, a child of European immigrants. For all its length, the song has only eight lines of lyrics, which read as an oblique indictment of a culture that would “kill” an artist of Schwartz’s gifts. Reed, of course, was well aware of Schwartz’s hatred of most rock lyrics, but he had kept his mentor apprised of his progress as a musician nonetheless. It’s tempting to thin
k that Reed dedicated the closing song on The Velvet Underground and Nico to Schwartz at least in part because he believed, hoped, or perhaps even knew that on the strength of this album alone, he had already met the high expectations that Schwartz had set for him and inspired him to achieve.

  5

  AGGRESSIVE, GOING TO GOD

  AFTER SUCH A LONG buildup, it was obviously disappointing to everyone involved that The Velvet Underground and Nico failed to make a significant impact. It was not even a critical success; for the most part, beyond a certain curiosity about Warhol’s involvement and the album’s loopy cover, it was simply ignored. But it did immediately begin to make its way, however slowly, out into the culture. Fifteen years later, Brian Eno would remark that he “was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold thirty thousand copies in the first five years.… I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those thirty thousand copies started a band!” The album’s sales were actually not quite that dismal. In fact, in its first two years of release, The Velvet Underground and Nico sold nearly sixty thousand copies. Those are hardly blockbuster sales, but they do approach respectability. Eno’s larger point is true, though, and it’s why the album has provided inspiration for the countless alternative artists who followed the Velvet Underground. Before The Velvet Underground and Nico, there was no such thing as underground or alternative rock. You either had hits or you didn’t. There was no other code to live by. The Velvet Underground made it possible for rock musicians to make the same appeal to posterity that poets, novelists, playwrights, and painters made before them. If their contemporaries didn’t like or understand—or, in this case, even know about—their work, it was possible to imagine recognition sometime down the road.

  In the short term, David Bowie had already begun to perform “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles, met with Reed in New York and, at least briefly, considered managing the Velvets. Epstein died a few months later, but, given his concern for social propriety and his closeted gay life, it’s hard to imagine that he would have taken on a band as unruly as the Velvets. That he was aware of the band at all, however, was significant. Mick Jagger said that the song “Stray Cat Blues” on the Stones’ 1968 album Beggars Banquet was influenced by “Heroin.” Few bands whose work had sold so few copies had made an impression so high up the rock hierarchy.

  Along with the Factory, one of the places where the Velvets were coming into contact with the hip cultural elite was Max’s Kansas City, a kind of sanctuary of cool founded by club owner Mickey Ruskin in late 1965. Located near Union Square, an area deserted at night and entirely lacking social cachet at the time, Max’s first became a hangout for visual artists. That provided a natural point of entry for Warhol, who then introduced his extended world of musicians, filmmakers, and “superstars,” the motley collection of young women and transsexuals who, in a manner that proved astonishingly prescient, became famous because Warhol declared them to be. Max’s became a kind of clubhouse for in-the-know people. Warhol took over the back room, held court there, and often picked up the check, a definite attraction for his frequently impoverished retinue, most especially the Velvets. As he had at the Factory, Reed became a significant presence at Max’s. It was a rarefied world, one of the few places in which the Velvets would be perceived as important artists, and Reed carried himself accordingly. “Max’s at that time was kind of a metaphor for what New York was becoming, and what would soon be impossible to sustain,” said Danny Fields, who would sign such bands as the Stooges and the MC5 to Elektra Records. “It was the place for abstract expressionist artists, bands who were playing the Fillmore, the Warhol crowd, poets, models. I introduced Jackie Curtis to Sargent Shriver there! After a while you couldn’t fit fashion, poetry, rock and roll, art, and movies in one place. It was inevitable that Max’s eventually had to give way to a place like Studio 54. But the big difference was that to get into Max’s, you had to be fabulous. To get into Studio 54, you just had to look fabulous.”

  The Warhol crowd got up to their usual shenanigans at Max’s—Martha Morrison recalled Brigid Berlin (dubbed Brigid Polk for her inclination to poke you with a methedrine-laced vitamin B shot) shooting speed while sitting next to her in the back room. But Reed was much more restrained. “‘Lou Reed’ was a character, too, you know,” said Bob Neuwirth, who ran into Reed at Max’s a number of times. “There was Lou the kid from Long Island, and then there was the public persona, the professional Lou Reed. But he was very casual. He wasn’t really an attention junkie. He wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to dance on tables, much less so than people like Bowie and Iggy, who were eventually around that backroom scene. Lou was much more dignified. I never found him to be in competition with anybody else. I never felt he was comparing his music to anybody else’s. In his depravity, Lou was dignified. Dignified depravity.”

  BUT EVEN AS REED remained part of the Factory scene, the Velvet Underground’s role in the solar system that revolved around Warhol was shifting. With the Velvets not earning money and his films starting to attract more attention, Warhol began to lose interest in the music scene. Meanwhile, now that the Velvets had an album out, even one that had underperformed in every regard except artistic achievement, Reed began to envision a career that involved more than being a satellite of someone else, however famous. Although Nico was the primary focus of the band in many people’s eyes, Reed had succeeded in both limiting her role on the album and making her feel sufficiently uncomfortable that her leaving the group seemed inevitable. Like a Mafia killing, the excision of Nico from the Velvets wasn’t personal for Reed—just business. Reed played guitar and wrote or cowrote a number of songs on Nico’s 1967 debut solo album, Chelsea Girl, including the title track, and he accompanied her during a few of her solo shows. Toward the end of May, she turned up late for a Velvets gig at the Boston Tea Party in Boston, and the band refused to let her take the stage. After that, she was out of what Reed was increasingly coming to think of as his band.

  Warhol was the next to go. Reed would sentimentalize his relationship with Warhol for the rest of his life, perhaps out of a natural desire to focus on the good in someone who had been so instrumental in his life and career. But at the time, Reed was convinced that Warhol had done as much as he was going to be able to do for the Velvets, and he had even come to resent the ineptitude of Warhol and Morrissey as managers. The band’s music had progressed beyond Warhol’s traveling circus. As a business, rock and roll was maturing, and the Velvets needed a manager who could help guide them through the new world taking shape. In later years, Reed would claim that Warhol asked him if he wanted to continue playing art venues or branch out and play music venues. Perhaps a conversation like that took place, but it seems unlikely, given how Warhol determinedly avoided conflicts of any kind. The conversation Reed described was more like something a father would say to his son, encouraging his independence, as if Warhol had assumed the caring paternal role that Reed had longed for his own father to fill. More likely, Reed had already seen opportunities he wanted to take advantage of, and Warhol had grown bored with playing the role of band manager. In any event, Reed “fired” Warhol, who was “furious” about it and called him a “rat.” “That was the worst thing he could think of,” Reed said, the childlike quality of the insult having obviously made an impression on him.

  DURING THIS TIME, THE Velvets had begun playing regular gigs at the Boston Tea Party on Berkeley Street in Boston, as well as at other spots in New England. Boston, in particular, became a second home for the band. It’s easy to understand the appeal. Boston is a sophisticated city, but it lacked the relentless media concentration of New York. The local papers would not be running daily updates on the doings of Andy Warhol and his entourage, so the Velvets would be free of that association. Because of all the colleges nearby, the town has always been a music hot spot, and the Velvets could build an audien
ce there on nothing beyond their records and the power of their live shows, which were consistently getting stronger. No Nico. No bullwhips. No Warhol-style theatrical extravaganzas. Just great songs played with brilliance and ferocity for an audience that was, far from being jaded, excited to hear a compelling new band. It was a formula that worked beautifully.

  Outside the media spotlight, the band members were relaxed and able to enjoy themselves both onstage and off. Martha Morrison described going to Martha’s Vineyard with Reed and Sterling. She saw her role as helping them get along, though Reed could be difficult, and Sterling tried to avoid him when he could. “I was always inviting Louie, as I called him, trying to get them to be nice,” she said. “One time, Sterling and I rented bicycles to go swimming—us Long Islanders love to surf. I invited Lou because he always wanted to come along, whatever we were doing, and I wanted to include him. On the way back, Lou got off his bicycle and went behind a car and took off his bathing suit and put his shorts back on. I was aghast that he would do that! But, you know, it’s hard riding with sand in your bathing suit!”