Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  Around this time, Reed started to show an interest in spirituality, an unlikely aspect of his personality that would find various expressions throughout his life: in tai chi and other martial arts; in meditation; in diets of different kinds; in his obsession with the chemical properties of amphetamine and its relationship to his health; in Buddhism; in the avant-garde jazz of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Ornette Coleman; and in the erasure of self that the S and M sex in “Venus in Furs” and drug delirium in “Heroin” evoke. Reed and the Velvet Underground are often rightly perceived as representing a kind of anti-sixties, a tough, streetwise corrective to the era’s psychedelic utopianism. As always with Reed, however, that impulse in him was counterbalanced by its nearly direct opposite, an intense interest in transcendence. He attended the Easter Sunday Central Park Be-In in late March of 1967, and even his most debased activities seemed like necessary stops on a highly individual journey to redemption and salvation.

  Rob Norris, who would later join the Bongos, met Reed around this time at the Boston Tea Party; Norris was then in his teens. “Every time I’d go there, we’d all hang out in the back room, and Lou would hold court,” Norris said. “Different people would come back. It was very social; people would just wander in and out. Jonathan Richman was almost always there—he was very quiet.… People would ask Lou stuff like, ‘How’s Nico?’ or ‘What’s Jackson Browne [who performed with Nico and played on her Chelsea Girl album] doing now?’ He’d just say, ‘What do I look like, a billboard?’ I remember this one woman was so crazy about him. She said, ‘You make me so crazy, I just want to kill you!’ Lou just looked at her very kindly and said, ‘Why don’t you just bake me a cake instead?’ It was the sweetest thing.”

  Norris had recently journeyed to Haight-Ashbury to experience the good vibrations firsthand (1967 was, after all, the year of the Summer of Love), and he saw connections between what was happening out there and what the Velvets were up to. “The most fascinating time was after the Tea Party moved over to Lansdowne Street, and my friend said, ‘I’m going upstairs to have a conversation with Lou, and I think you might be interested in it.’ I just sat there while those guys talked about the deepest stuff. Lou was interested in the Church of Light. He was interested in astrology, energy healing. He talked about levitation. It was amazing to me.” It’s hardly unusual for people using amphetamine to engage in long, rambling, abstruse conversations. But even back then—and however high he may have been—Reed had little patience for people or subjects he wasn’t interested in, so his discussing those topics at such length and with such enthusiasm is telling. Like many users, who regard their compulsion as a kind of hell to which they’ve been condemned, Reed discouraged Norris from drug use. “The first time I met him, when there was no one else in the room, Lou very sharply looked me up and down,” Norris said. “I was eighteen or nineteen, and really nervous. He looked at me and said, ‘Are you on speed?’ I said, ‘No. I’m just nervous to meet you.’ He said, ‘Good. Because drugs are shit. They’ll just pollute you and ruin your life.’ He was eating some kind of brewer’s yeast. I was thinking, ‘What the fuck have I walked into here?’”

  Tony Lioce, a rabid music fan who lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and hung around the Tea Party, recalled similar experiences with Reed and the Velvets. “You’d pay three bucks and hear them play two long sets,” he wrote. “And almost no one came. There’d be maybe forty people on a good night. And generally the same forty people night after night, including one girl who always showed up in a wedding dress.” Reed, Lioce wrote, was typically “gracious and kind, talking about everything from a weird diet he was thinking about—eating nothing but lettuce—to his love of Dion and his total dislike of Frank Zappa.” But Lioce also caught a glimpse of Reed’s harder edge. Reed, he wrote, would “go from sharing a joint with us one night to making it very clear on the next that he had no interest in talking to anyone, us especially. One time, we brought him a bottle of Clan MacGregor Scotch, real bottom-shelf stuff but his favorite, and he was flat-out rude, didn’t want to let us into the room to give it to him.”

  One of the reasons for the Velvets’ extended stays in Boston was the manager Reed chose to replace Warhol: Steve Sesnick. Warhol was, needless to say, a hard act to follow, an internationally known artist. Sesnick was just a guy in Boston eager to step onto a bigger stage. He didn’t know much more than Warhol about how the music business worked, and however cultured a town Boston was, it was hardly the entertainment center that New York was. But as far as Reed was concerned, Sesnick’s lack of a public profile was part of his appeal. Reed got rid of Warhol in an effort to step out of his shadow, so what would be the use of working with another imposing figure who would be hard to control? Besides that, Reed was increasingly coming to see the Velvets as his band, and Sesnick conveniently shared that view.

  “I don’t know how Sesnick ended up managing the Velvets, because he really didn’t know anything about how to do it,” said Norris, who got to know Sesnick when he asked Norris, who played guitar, to join the Boston band the Rockets. “I think he just talked his way into it. He had the gift of gab. He was an odd man, quite a piece of work. He lived on alcohol and meat—he never ate anything else. That was his philosophy. He was domineering, even a bit dark and scary. He would play people off each other, try to keep people on edge. But he was silver-tongued, could charm anybody into anything.”

  That the Velvets spent so much time in Boston and essentially stopped playing in New York was, at least in part, a result of Sesnick’s strategy. No doubt Reed perceived New York as Warhol’s turf. Performing there regularly would make it much more difficult to move out of his sphere of influence. Some speculated that the Velvets were angry that New York radio didn’t play their debut album, which doesn’t make much sense since almost no stations played it. It’s not unusual for a band, once it has achieved a certain stature, as the Velvets had with The Velvet Underground and Nico, to limit its exposure in its hometown and concentrate on building a national following. But that strategy makes much more sense for regional bands than it does for one from New York; if you have an enthusiastic following there, you pretty much already are a national band. Pulling back a bit from the New York scene may have been a smart move temporarily, but as the sixties were drawing to a close, some people were beginning to think of the Velvets as a Boston band. By any measure, that was a step backward.

  IN SEPTEMBER OF 1967, the Velvets entered Mayfair Sound Studios in New York to record the follow-up to The Velvet Underground and Nico. Tom Wilson produced the album to the usual discontented mutterings of Reed and Cale, and Gary Kellgran and Val Valentin handled the engineering. In part because the Velvets had been performing live with such regularity, they’d worked up a fair amount of new material. But when it came time to choose the songs for the album that would be called White Light/White Heat, they concentrated on the most raucous and wildest of their repertoire. Perhaps Reed’s inclination to write softer ballads like “Femme Fatale” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” had left the band with Nico, although a semblance of that type of song survives on the delicate “Here She Comes Now,” which closes the first side. The album’s aggressiveness might also be an expression of all the changes in the band’s world. Nico was gone. Warhol was gone. Sesnick was in. The band was spending less time in its hometown, performing onstage more, and Reed and Cale’s drug and alcohol abuse continued apace. “Our lives were in chaos. That’s what’s reflected in that record,” Morrison said about White Light/White Heat. “Things were insane, day in and day out: the people we knew, the excesses of all sorts. For a long time, we were living in various places, afraid of the police. At the height of my musical career, I had no permanent address. I see that reflected in there.”

  For better or worse, the album made not the slightest effort to build on the momentum of The Velvet Underground and Nico. Cale described White Light/White Heat as a “very rabid record. The first one had some gentility, some beauty. The second one was cons
ciously anti-beauty.” Even underground FM stations had been reluctant to play songs from the first album; what were they supposed to do with White Light’s title track, a roaring hymn to amphetamine, or “Sister Ray,” a rollicking, seventeen-and-a-half-minute epic that features murder, oral sex, and a main character who’s so fucked up that he can’t properly locate a vein to shoot up in? “Sister Ray,” of course, was another of Warhol’s favorites; he had encouraged Reed to resist any pressure to remove the line about a girl “sucking on my ding-dong.” “The Gift” combines a short story that Reed wrote while at Syracuse with a variation on “Booker T.,” an instrumental the band often performed live and named after the great Stax organist, Booker T. Jones. Cale suggested doing a spoken-word reading of the story, which centers on the sexual paranoia Reed felt when separated during the summer from his girlfriend Shelley Albin, over the instrumental. Presumably in order to take advantage of the ironic possibilities of his elegant Welsh lilt, Cale handled that reading, as well as the sung speech of “Lady Godiva’s Operation,” a song so erotically twisted in its medical torture that Reed wryly explained it by stating, “I had twenty-four shock treatments when I was seventeen years old. I suppose it caused me to write things like this.” The album’s most explosive track is “I Heard Her Call My Name,” four and a half minutes of blasting distortion and feedback that features Reed’s most savage guitar playing. At a time when most mainstream rock bands were becoming increasingly polished in their playing, as rock and roll transformed into the more grown-up and sophisticated “rock,” the Velvets brutally serrated every edge of their sound.

  The Velvets had a propensity to feel slighted, which should be taken into account alongside Reed and Cale’s relentless complaints about what they perceived as Tom Wilson’s, his engineers’, and Verve’s lack of interest, at best, and outright hostility, at worst. “It finally got to the point that the record company hated our music so much, they wouldn’t even listen to it,” Reed said. “When we recorded ‘Sister Ray,’ the engineer stood up and said, ‘Listen, I’m leaving. You can’t pay me enough to listen to this crap. I’ll be down in the commissary getting coffee. When you’re done, hit that button and come get me.’ That’s completely true.” Cale frequently remarked about the attention Wilson lavished on the gorgeous women he brought to the studio while working with the band. Unlike Reed, however, who was consolidating his power, Cale would have valued a smart, outside perspective. “When I think of the many wonderful producers who would have been available to us, it boggles the mind that we did not use them,” he said.

  The Velvets were really enjoying playing live at this time, and they wanted White Light/White Heat to reflect the energy of those performances. Speaking about the band’s live shows, Maureen Tucker said, “We used to rehearse, basically, onstage. Lou would come in with a new song, and the guys would practice it, so they would know the chord changes. But after that, the song would evolve onstage. The third time, or maybe the tenth time we played it, we decided it was right.” Onstage, Norris said, the band was “like a finely tuned British racing car. I mean, they were just so together and tight and playful, too. They would do stuff like play their songs at different speeds, just to see what would happen. And Lou, I just never saw anybody play the guitar like that. That was a period where he was really going berserk, playing songs like ‘I Heard Her Call My Name.’ I couldn’t believe how great it was.” That song, yet another celebration of speed, evidently had a spiritual aspect as well, according to Norris, as does the title track, possibly a reference to Alice Bailey’s A Treatise on White Magic, which Reed read and mentioned in interviews. Reed also spoke about white light as a kind of healing power. Norris said, “I had a completely different experience of Lou than so many other people. He would talk about light a lot. He said ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ is about enlightenment. He always spoke of the feminine divine, and that’s what the solo in that song is supposed to be. You know that line ‘My mind split open’? That was supposed to be the feeling of being enlightened.”

  Writing about the Velvets’ Boston Tea Party sets at around this time, Tony Lioce recalled, “Live, they were like nothing we’d ever heard. Propulsive and explosive, totally engulfing, so dark as to be almost scary. My kid brother joined us one night, couldn’t handle it, and ended up taking a bus back home. Compared with the flower power marijuana we’d smoke in a parking lot before the show, this stuff was heroin.… The first set might include a dozen numbers. The second usually was just two: a black magic chant called ‘Sweet Rock and Roll’ that segued into ‘Sister Ray,’ still, to my ears, the most deeply disturbing piece of music ever written.” Reed himself said about White Light/White Heat, “They say rock is life-affirming music. You feel bad, you put on two minutes of this—boom. There’s something implicit in it. And we were the best, the real thing. You listen to… this album—there is the real stuff. It’s aggressive, yes. But it’s not aggressive bad. This is aggressive, going to God.”

  As he did with the banana album, Warhol designed the cover for White Light/White Heat. Perhaps because the backdrop of the banana album is pure white, the cover for the follow-up is black, with a photograph of a skull tattoo on a Warhol actor’s bicep layered on it, also in black. The black-on-black imagery also pulls against the twice-repeated “white” in the album’s name, as well as against its reference to “light.” Drawn to black-and-white in his own films and having been raised Catholic—he still regularly attended Sunday Mass with this mother—Warhol understood such oppositions well. Like the banana image and like White Light’s abrasive music, this cover was a rebuke to the brightly colored hippie optimism of the times.

  Still, however smart and original, the cover was hardly inviting. The album was released in January of 1968 and, even more than its predecessor, fell flat. Without the Warhol hype machine or a sexpot lead singer, the Velvets had little beyond the quality of their music—intentionally off-putting and assaultive, in this instance—to gain attention for them. The label did release to radio stations a brief and strangely relaxed interview with Reed and Cale conducted by Tom Wilson, along with a photo of a bemused Reed being slapped five by Wilson. Oddly, Verve’s advertising for the album mimicked the mystical-good-vibes ethos of the era that the album itself soundly rejected. “Come. Step softly into the inevitable world of the Velvet Underground,” the ad copy read. “Where there is no now. Where yawning yesterdays fade out on timeless tomorrows. Where sounds reflect from plastic people.… Come. To where vinyl virgins devour the macabre mind.” Alas, there was definitely “no now” for White Light/White Heat. Reed summed up the album’s fate: “No one listened to it. But there it is, forever—the quintessence of articulated punk. And no one goes near it.”

  WITHIN A COUPLE OF weeks of the release of White Light/White Heat, the Velvets went into A&R Studios in New York with engineer Val Valentin to record two new songs, “Stephanie Says” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” each of which, in different ways, is a radical departure from the material on the album. Tom Wilson had left MGM by this point, so essentially the band produced itself, with Valentin’s assistance. “Stephanie Says” is the first of four songs Reed would write in the voice of a female character chronicling her experiences; each song would be titled with the woman’s name and the verb “says.” (Reed later adapted “Stephanie Says” into “Caroline Says” on his solo album Berlin.) The gender play in the songs is intriguing, as Reed sings as if transcribing the thoughts of these women (or, in the case of “Candy Says,” a transsexual) and their struggles; all are damaged in some way. “Stephanie Says” features a vocal that rivals Reed’s performance on “Sunday Morning” in its delicacy. If, as Cale said, the songs on White Light/White Heat are rabid, “Stephanie Says” explores an entirely different emotional terrain. In Cale’s view, “Stephanie Says” was about Steve Sesnick. “To Lou,” Cale wrote, “everybody’s gay.”

  “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” meanwhile, is a relaxed, soulful rocker that also stands in marked contrast
to the distortion-laden assaults on White Light/White Heat. Reed, Cale, and Morrison joked around while recording their background vocals, and it’s almost moving to hear their banter, which they didn’t erase from the track. The Velvets have become so enshrined in rock history that it’s stunning simply to hear them interact as a band, enjoying themselves. It’s possible that the two songs were done as a potential single, given the decided lack of commercial material on White Light/White Heat. In any event, no such single was ever released, and the songs would not officially come out until the mideighties.

  The Velvets went back into the studio in Los Angeles toward the end of May and recorded versions of “Hey Mr. Rain,” a song they had been performing live, but it would also not see official release until two decades later. This session would represent the last time John Cale worked in the studio with the band during its original lifetime.

  ON MONDAY, JUNE 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, a disgruntled writer and would-be radical feminist, shot Andy Warhol point-blank in the chest as he was speaking on the telephone at the Factory. Solanas had wanted Warhol to produce her play, Up Your Ass, which he was not interested in doing. Solanas believed that Warhol and other male media figures had taken control of her life, and shooting Warhol was an attempt to free herself. She also shot and wounded Mario Amaya, an art critic who was at the Factory at the time, and she attempted to shoot Warhol’s manager, Fred Hughes, but her gun jammed. It took a five-hour operation to save Warhol’s life, and he was never the same again. Always an isolated figure even at his most social, he became more reclusive and much less trusting, and the Factory, which had moved from Forty-Seventh Street to Union Square West, close to Max’s Kansas City, became much more security-conscious. The Velvet Underground was in Los Angeles when the news of the shooting broke, and Reed waited several weeks before calling Warhol in the hospital, a slight, however unintentional, that neither man would ever forget.