Every band that manages to stay together for any length of time has a member who serves as its glue, and Tucker played that role in the Velvets. Her talent aside, she lacked any agenda other than wanting the band to succeed and wanting everyone to get along. She was the most down-to-earth member, the one everybody liked. The ambitions that created tension between Reed and Cale, and eventually between Reed and Yule, did not at all come into play with her. Most important, Reed regarded Tucker as a sister. He did not feel threatened by her, and he was tolerant, even protective, of her. Her absence created a void that negative feelings rushed in to fill.
THE SESSIONS FOR LOADED, as the Velvets’ fourth and final studio album would be called, ran intermittently through the spring and early summer of 1970. Along with the ten tracks on the album, the band recorded versions of many other songs that, sometimes under altered titles, Reed would later include on his solo albums. To impress the band’s new label and bring an end to the Velvets’ five-year journey in the commercial wilderness, Reed was under pressure to write hits. Indeed, the album’s title refers, however ironically, to Reed’s apparent belief that the album was “loaded with hits,” although a nod to Reed’s continued drug and alcohol intake is also likely. Three Atlantic staff producers—Geoffrey Haslam, Shel Kagan, and Adrian Barber—worked on the recording of the album, which contributed to the feeling that it was far from a focused band effort. Steve Sesnick was also making his presence felt—to the extent of contributing off-tempo cowbell to an early take on “Sweet Jane.” (“The guy couldn’t dance either,” Yule remarked.)
As the weeks went by and Reed seemed less and less manageable, Sesnick turned his attention to Yule, who was far more upbeat and malleable. As he had done with Reed in relation to Cale, Sesnick encouraged Yule, whose musical instincts were far more conventional than Reed’s, to assert himself in the sessions. Sesnick also went so far as to ask Cale to come to the studio to record an organ part on one version of “Ocean.” Cale was mystified but nonetheless agreed, though none of the other musicians were there when he played. “It may seem astounding in retrospect, but I instantly agreed to go and help them,” Cale wrote. “During the ‘Ocean’ sessions all I could see was that everything had become more fragrant, the playing had become much gentler, there was an almost overwhelming emphasis on not playing loud. Lou wanted to go into the pretty stuff.”
Reed began to lose interest in the sessions for a variety of reasons. While he wanted the band to have hits as much as, if not more than, anyone else, he did not respond well to pressure. Tucker’s absence was a factor as well, and even Morrison began looking at the prospect of life beyond the band. He enrolled in courses at City College to complete his degree, with an eye to pursuing graduate studies in English.
Early in the summer, the band began a months-long residency in the upstairs room at Max’s Kansas City, with Doug Yule’s younger brother Billy, who was still in high school, filling in for Tucker on drums. Those shows went a long way toward reestablishing the Velvets in their hometown. Local supporters finally had a regular spot where they could see the band, and the shows were written about widely and favorably. While the room, which was small, was not always filled, word spread that it was a show to see. “The Velvets played there all summer for no apparent reason,” said Lenny Kaye, who was there many nights. “It kind of became an upstairs hangout. There weren’t a lot of people there, maybe fifty by the end of the night. It was interesting to hear the songs that would be on Loaded played every night. They weren’t in their noisy-noisy period. They would play two sets. The first would be more formal. The second, people would dance to—a concept I find amazing. It was loose, almost like a fraternity party.”
Reed was comfortable at Max’s, mingling easily with the crowd of musicians, writers, publicists, record company execs, and artists, all of them fans of the band. But it was still a lot of work. The band played two sets a night, five nights a week, sometimes while working on Loaded in the studio during the day. Indeed, the wear on Reed’s voice, never the strongest instrument, from singing at Max’s is often cited as the reason Doug Yule assumed lead vocals on four of Loaded’s ten songs: its opening number (“Who Loves the Sun”), its closer (“Oh! Sweet Nuthin’”), “New Age,” and “Lonesome Cowboy Bill.” Reed particularly regretted not doing the vocal on “New Age,” a song, tellingly, about faded promises and lost glory. “No slur on Doug, but he didn’t understand the lyrics for a second,” Reed later said. For Reed, who valued intelligence over any other virtue, that was a grave insult. But Reed, of all people, understood the difference between singing in front of fifty of your friends at a club and doing a vocal on an album that, at least potentially, people would be listening to for many years to come. So why didn’t he simply let Yule sing at Max’s and save his own voice for the studio? Maybe the live shows lifted his spirits and he didn’t want to hold back there. In the studio, however, it’s possible that he emotionally checked out and just didn’t care. He was the type of person who, if he felt the tide turning in Yule’s direction, would be simultaneously too depressed and too proud to fight it. Later he would simply say of Loaded, which was released in November of 1970, “It’s still called a Velvet Underground record. But what it really is is something else.”
LOADED’S REPUTATION, SUCH AS it is, rests primarily on two iconic songs, “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll,” songs that are not merely among Reed’s absolute best but also undeniable rock classics. Each expresses a wistful idealism, a belief that love and rock and roll can save even the most damaged lives. Reed would often treat gender-bending as a pointed insult to conventional sexuality, but in “Sweet Jane,” the couple’s cross-dressing—“Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest”—seems more like a sweet kink, a sexy gesture to liven things up a bit in the bedroom. Indeed, the song exalts tradition—the days when poets “studied rules of verse” and women flirtatiously “rolled their eyes.” The song indicts easy cynicism—the belief that “life is just to die,” the sort of self-congratulating knowingness of many of the ultra-hipsters that, from the Factory to Max’s, often surrounded the Velvets. The innocence of “Sweet Jane”—both in the character and in the song—is redeeming, a repository of hope, part of why the song remains so popular and so loved. That, and the indelible four-chord guitar riff that is one of the most identifiable moments in the history of rock and roll.
“Rock and Roll,” meanwhile, is one of the genre’s greatest songs about itself. In it, five-year-old suburban Jenny is rescued from an existence of pointless materialism (“two TV sets and two Cadillac cars”) when she turns on a New York radio station and hears the sounds that save her life. The scene recalls the one Reed described about doing the math homework he detested (“despite all the computations”) in his Long Island home and being transported by the sound of Dion’s voice on the radio to a realm of infinite possibility. “‘Rock and Roll’ is about me,” Reed said. “If I hadn’t heard rock and roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet.” The song’s reference to “amputations” (as well as the “disfigured” parents in the album’s “Head Held High”) may well be allusions to the grisly fate of Lincoln Swados, Reed’s roommate for a time at Syracuse, who moved to New York and attempted suicide by hurling himself in front of a subway train. He lived but lost an arm and a leg. Reed loved and identified with Swados, who was a talented writer, musician, and cartoonist, but whose psychological problems—he was diagnosed schizophrenic—left him crippled. As he often did, Reed manifested his affection in troubling ways. His friend Ed McCormack remembered Reed and Swados visiting McCormack’s apartment, and Reed saying, “This schmuck, he tried to kill himself by throwing himself under a train, and he even fucked that up. He couldn’t even do that right.” But McCormack understood the deep feeling beneath the grim joking, as did Swados. “Lincoln seemed to take it in good humor,” McCormack said. “I mean, you have to be pretty close to someone to be able to joke with them that way.”
In the so
ng, Reed insists on his conviction that “despite all the amputations,” rock and roll could still save your life—and your soul. He admired Swados for going on in his own troubled way, and he may well have been thinking about himself as he felt the band he had formed and believed in slipping away from him. All the songs on Loaded, but most especially “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll,” are songs about a kind of desperate encouragement, a call to believe that there is a future beyond even the most devastating breakages. They were songs to himself about himself, prayers that somehow, whatever happened, it would ultimately be possible to survive, to be “all right.”
6
ALL THE THINGS THAT ARE MISSING
ON AUGUST 23, 1970, a Sunday night, the Velvet Underground showed up at Max’s for the standing gig the band had held all summer. As usual, Billy Yule filled in for Maureen Tucker on drums, and the band’s first set, kicking off with “I’m Waiting for the Man,” consisted of seven songs from the Velvets’ three previous albums and the forthcoming Loaded. But for the second set, which typically would turn into a dance party, Reed emphasized the softer, more contemplative side of his catalog; “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Candy Says,” “Sunday Morning,” and “Femme Fatale” were among those chosen. Reed regarded such songs as indisputable proof of his skills as a songwriter, and particularly as a lyricist. They were not the noise fests for which the Velvets had become known. They reflected and appealed to the romantic side of him.
No one in the band knew that Reed would quit the Velvet Underground after that night’s show. That second set stands as both Reed’s declaration of his talents and his wistful farewell to all that. He did not want to go out with a bang, but with a graceful goodbye. Danny Fields said good night to Reed as the musician was leaving, and Reed just walked by him. Fields later learned that Reed had quit the band, and he, in turn, told fellow Factory habitué Donald Lyons. “Oh, I guess they’re going to be the Velveteen Underground from now on,” Lyons said, which is essentially what happened. Fields, who was working for Atlantic at the time, immediately approached Brigid Berlin, who had taped the show that night while sitting in the audience with poet Jim Carroll. Fields brought Berlin’s tape to Atlantic, and the label purchased it for $10,000, which Fields and Berlin split. The Velvet Underground Live at Max’s Kansas City, an album consisting of songs from that tape, was released in 1972.
Reed had confessed to Tucker that he was leaving the band when she attended one of the Velvets’ shows at Max’s a few weeks earlier. He also spoke to Sesnick about it, though possibly not until after his last gig. The degree of Reed’s forced alienation from the band he had cofounded, and of Doug Yule’s elevation within it, became apparent with the release of Loaded several months after that final Max’s gig. The entire project was presented in such a way as to diminish Reed’s participation in it. The album’s front cover did not feature any of the band members, but a mystifying and not especially inspiring illustration of smoke or fumes rising out of a New York subway station. “I was still very foreign in terms of my experiences in New York,” said Stanislaw Zagorski, the Polish designer who created the image. “I thought of ‘underground’ in terms of the subway.” The songwriting credits read “All selections are by the Velvet Underground,” and Yule and Morrison are given specific credits, along with Reed. The only band member depicted on the back cover is Yule, shown seated and playing piano amid the band’s equipment in the studio. The band members’ names are listed vertically on the back cover, and Reed’s name appears third, after Yule and Sterling Morrison. Clearly, Reed was being punished, put in his place. Wresting back those songwriting credits would be another battle, with Reed ultimately ceding rights to the band’s name to Sesnick in exchange.
REED’S MOTHER HAD ADVISED him to develop a skill that he could use to fall back on, and typing was it. Once he was out of the band, Reed took up residence in his old room at his parents’ house, and worked for forty dollars a week as a typist in his father’s accounting firm. When he actually did it, he found the work relaxing, though it was perhaps a form of relaxation indistinguishable from depression. Despite Reed’s frequent portrayal of his father as a tyrant, the older man was likely pleased to have his prodigal son near at hand; he may not yet have abandoned the notion that Reed would come work for the firm, especially now that he seemed to be putting his music career behind him. As the boss’s son, Reed came and went as he pleased. With music on the back burner, Reed was determined to focus on his career as a writer, so the typing came in handy in that regard as well. His “work” time could be devoted to his manuscripts.
Remarkably, once Loaded came out, it actually began to attract attention. Both “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll” got played on FM stations in New York and other major markets, and the album was widely and favorably reviewed. Lenny Kaye wrote a lengthy review in Rolling Stone that described Loaded as “easily one of the best albums to show up this or any year.” Had Reed not left the band, one could imagine a scenario in which the album became an underground phenomenon and, building on the momentum of the Max’s shows, the band hit the road on an extensive and well-organized tour, with Tucker back on drums. The Velvets would have been profiled in the burgeoning underground press and in local newspapers in the towns they visited. Loaded would likely never have achieved massive sales, but it certainly could have done well enough to ensure the band an ongoing career and solidify Reed’s place among significant rock songwriters.
Sadly, nothing like that was to be. Toward the end of his Rolling Stone review, Lenny Kaye noted, “Due to a near-textbook case of management hassles, Lou Reed left the group toward the end of the Max’s engagement, and though there is a possibility of a reconciliation at some future date, the present situation doesn’t look promising.” That admission took the wind out of the otherwise positive review’s sails. It stands to reason that Atlantic would have been similarly discouraged. The label likely did not have significant promotion plans for Loaded anyway, but how much support can you provide for a cult band whose founder, lead singer, and songwriter quit before the album even came out?
Sesnick’s plan was to install Yule as the new leader of the Velvet Underground. He did not share that plan with Yule until Reed quit, but Yule became a willing participant once he learned of it. After Reed left, Yule recruited Walter Powers, a bass player from Boston who had also been in the Grass Menagerie, to join the Velvets, and he moved over to a more prominent role on guitar and lead vocals. Morrison and Tucker stayed with the new lineup, and, with Yule at the helm, the band began to play shows once again. Later, Morrison turned down Reed’s offer to start a new band together and, in the summer of 1971, quit the Velvets to attend graduate school in English at the University of Texas at Austin.
With Tucker now the only remaining original member of the Velvet Underground, Yule and the band continued to tour in both the United States and Europe. Sesnick even arranged a record deal with Polydor for a Yule-led version of the band. Yule recorded an album called Squeeze, which came out in early 1973, working with only Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice and some session musicians. Its eleven songs, written by Yule, are harmless power pop, and history might have treated the album more kindly had it been released under Yule’s name rather than the Velvet Underground’s. (Interestingly, the English band Squeeze, whose debut album was primarily produced by John Cale, took its name from the album.) When it became apparent that Yule was not going to be able to lead a makeshift version of the Velvet Underground to commercial glory, Sesnick abandoned the band, and it broke up soon after.
BY THE TIME REED quit the Velvet Underground, he had become seriously involved with a young Columbia University student named Bettye Kronstad—five foot ten, blonde, quite beautiful, and nineteen years old. Having grown up in rural western Pennsylvania, she had moved to New York in 1967. She and Reed met in 1968 through Lincoln Swados, Reed’s former Syracuse roommate who would soon begin taking classes at Columbia himself. Reed was sufficiently attracted to Kr
onstad that, after meeting her for the first time, he told her to ask Swados for a character reference since she had no idea who he was. Then, as he was leaving, he slapped her ass, smiled, and took off. She was shocked, but Reed stayed on her mind. “He didn’t make the most positive impression,” Kronstad recalled, but Swados told her, “Ignore it. He just acts like that sometimes.… He’s a nice guy.”
At first Kronstad ignored Reed’s many calls. But she had heard of the Velvet Underground and was about to leave the country to travel in Europe for six months, so she figured, why not? For their first date, they went to the West End Bar, the legendary hangout of the Beats up near Columbia, and Reed proceeded to get seriously drunk. “He could barely walk, but he insisted on walking me home,” Kronstad recalled. “And he didn’t try to come up. He was a gentleman.” She had two weeks left in town before her trip abroad, and Reed continued to call. Again, she initially thought it best not to respond. “I didn’t really know what to think,” she said. “First he smacks me on my bottom. Then he’s totally drunk. I had a lot on my mind. I wanted to pack and go to Europe.”
Lou Reed Page 14
