Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  Aspects of sexual life that had previously been marginalized began to rollick into the mainstream. The Stonewall riots of 1969 brought gay sexual life out of the Mafia-run bars and after-hours joints that Reed loved and into the streets. In short order, New York—in particular the West Village, where the Stonewall was located—became a hotbed of flamboyant gay cruising. What had once been closeted was now visible for all to see. Newspaper and television reporters, ever in search of a lurid story, spread the news. Leather bars proliferated near the Hudson River docks, a bustling commercial area during the day that was known, ironically enough, as the meatpacking district. The working-class white men delivering and picking up animal carcasses and cartons of vegetables during the day were replaced at night by a subculture of gay men, often hypermasculinized in their own way, seeking every niche and fetish of sexual pleasure. In the manner of New York nightlife, where the edgiest corners inevitably become emblems of hipness, these hard-core regions would be lined with town cars and limousines on weekend nights and early mornings as celebrities and their hangers-on went in search of vicarious thrills. The sexual carnival would spill out of the clubs and onto the abandoned piers and into the backs of the empty trucks in the area, which, for unknown reasons, were left unlocked at night, as if to more easily accommodate the local gay population.

  Hard-core pornography even began to move into the mainstream in 1972, with the cinematic release of Deep Throat, a film about a woman (played by Linda Lovelace) whose clitoris is located in her throat. The film, which features extensive oral sex scenes, was widely reviewed and discussed. For a time it became fashionable for couples, particularly in New York, to go see the film together—a far cry from the recent past, when individual men haunted the furtive “adult” film theaters in Times Square—a sign of hip liberation that became known as “porn chic.” (Martin Scorsese, who saw Deep Throat, would parody this phenomenon in his 1976 film, Taxi Driver, when a witless Travis Bickle takes his fantasy girl, Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd, on a movie date to a porn theater, much to her horror.)

  Soon these changes began to influence popular music, particularly in England. Glam rock, emerging in the early seventies, defined a new kind of rock star—one who took the gender play of the sixties to a much greater extreme. In England, Marc Bolan, the driving force behind Tyrannosaurus Rex, later to gain fame as T. Rex, became a star of the hugest proportions on the strength of his lisping vocals, gorgeous head of dark curls, and fey mythologizing. The band started out as mystical folkies, but soon crafted a style of rock and roll that borrowed from greats like Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent. In a modern touch, the band’s sound thinned out the roar of those earlier records, opening up spaces that retained the catchiness of the originals but abandoned the more masculine elements of their force and threat. Bowie would soon follow, and he and his guitarist Mick Ronson would borrow that approach on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, adding a far more provocative level of homoeroticism with their garb and live performances, which often featured both men in makeup with Bowie kneeling onstage in front of Ronson, who in turn played up the phallic imagery of his guitar to the hilt.

  In the States, Alice Cooper cracked the Top 40 with his own American-style brand of gender-bending. As would be true with many metal bands to follow, going so far as taking a woman’s name somehow did not cause the band to be perceived in homoerotic terms, at least by its legions of young followers. Gay imagery in the United States was still so outré that it could be hidden in plain sight. The same was true of the Kinks’ “Lola,” a 1970 song about a man’s tryst with a transvestite that restored the band to the American Top 10 for the first time in six years. The only controversy that song generated had nothing to do with the character who “walked like a woman but talked like a man” or his dancing partner who “got down on [his] knees”; it had to do with the song’s assertion that the champagne the singer drank tasted “just like Coca-Cola.” The BBC rejected that nascent product placement, so songwriter Ray Davies changed the beverage to the more generic “cherry cola” in order to get the single played. The sexual playfulness sailed right through.

  Deeper underground, the New York Dolls began their residency at the Mercer Arts Center in early 1972, combining trash, glam, and a zany transvestism with an infectious zeal. It was as if the zonked-out boy-girls of Warhol’s Factory scene had become obsessed with Chuck Berry and formed a band. “I seem to inspire transvestite bands. They’re very cute,” Reed deadpanned at the time. This was no longer the rock and roll of the juvenile delinquent fifties or the high-minded sixties. The rebellion carried over, but this was a new era—and music—of sexual liberation.

  WHEN DAVID BOWIE PROPOSED to RCA Records that he produce the next Lou Reed album, Reed knew that was exactly what he needed. “Lou was going through an incredibly bad patch around the time that I first met him,” Bowie said about their initial meeting at the Ginger Man restaurant in New York, “and he was being left on the side in terms of what his influence had been. And none of us knew what his influence was going to be—the direction of the Velvet Underground’s reputation.” When they parted later that night, Bowie told Reed, “I hope we see each other again; this has been such a thrill for me.”

  Even as Bowie was beginning his rise to superstardom, Reed loomed as a hero to him. “Just the verbal and musical zeitgeist that Lou created,” Bowie said, “the nature of his lyric writing that had been hitherto unknown in rock… gave us the environment in which to put our more theatrical vision. He supplied us with the street and the landscape, and we peopled it.” Reed, for his part, was hardly modest about his impact on the scene that Bowie ruled. “Glam rock, androgyny, polymorphic sex—I was right in the middle of it,” he said. “Some say I could have been at the head of the class.”

  The idea of their working together was not merely charity on Bowie’s part nor desperation on Reed’s. It was a savvy move by both men. Reed understood that Bowie could make a contemporary figure of him, help him appeal to the new, young audience that had grown up in the wake of the sixties and that Bowie had perfectly described in “All the Young Dudes,” the glam anthem he had written earlier that year for Mott the Hoople. Those kids were tired of their older siblings’ obsession with the Beatles and Stones and were crazed for T. Rex, all of whom are mentioned in the song. Most important, they never got off on “that revolution stuff,” but they were eager for a revolution of their own.

  Reed, meanwhile, understood that Bowie represented a new cutting edge—not just in his theatricality, but musically. “I wanted to see how he did things in the studio,” Reed later said about his desire to work with Bowie. “What did he do? He seemed really quick and facile. I was very isolated. Why were people talking about him so much? What did he do that I could learn?”

  If Bowie could potentially provide Reed with contemporary appeal—as well as the rock stardom and commercial success that he had always yearned for—Reed would provide Bowie with stature, establishing him in a lineage that he very much wanted to be part of. Neither man would admit to such desires—Bowie was too self-conscious a rebel and Reed too determined to style himself as an artist beyond any concern about sales. But those desires were a big part of what brought them together. Billboard noted the shifting standing of the two men: “The year started out with David Bowie fast gaining recognition as one of Lou Reed’s trendy disciples; the year will end with the tables neatly turned.”

  “That was a really exciting time,” said Bettye Kronstad about the months leading up to the recording of Transformer in London during the summer of 1972. “Bowie had a name—he was a big deal. This album would push Lou over the top. And I wanted to marry him after he was famous, after he was successful—not beforehand and then get dropped.”

  Of course, not everyone was enthused about the prospect of Reed and Bowie’s union. Richard Robinson, who had produced the Lou Reed album, only learned that he had been replaced at the helm of Reed’s follow-up the day before he planned to leave New Yo
rk for London to work on it. Neither he nor his rock critic wife, Lisa, took the news lightly. “While Lou’s solo debut had been difficult to make and didn’t turn out the way either Lou or Richard envisioned, I was fiercely loyal to Richard and royally pissed off at Lou,” she later wrote. “I stopped speaking to, and writing about, both Bowie and Lou for a while.”

  Angela Bowie, David’s wife at the time, arranged for Reed and Kronstad to live in a nicely appointed duplex in Wimbledon, a suburb just outside London, though they ended up spending much of their time in a posh London hotel. Photographer Mick Rock believes that Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, who hoped to manage Reed as well, arranged for Reed to stay in Wimbledon in an effort to keep him clean. On July 8, a month or so before they started recording, Bowie brought Reed onstage with him at a Save the Whale benefit for the Friends of the Earth at Royal Festival Hall in London. Backed by the Spiders from Mars, Reed and Bowie performed “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “White Light/White Heat,” and “Sweet Jane” before three thousand Bowie devotees. A master promoter, as always, Bowie had already begun the process of introducing Reed to a new audience and creating the sense of an event for their collaboration on Reed’s next album.

  For his part, the instinctively reticent Reed learned quickly from Bowie’s knack for grabbing attention. Wearing “shades and maroon fingernails,” he attended a press event held at the luxurious Dorchester Hotel for junketeering American writers interested in interviewing Bowie about the Ziggy Stardust album. While an advance copy of Mott the Hoople’s version of “Sweet Jane,” which Bowie had produced, played in the background, Reed walked over to where Bowie was being interviewed by a reporter and kissed him. “I was hoping to get a two-way interview,” the journalist said. Bowie’s reply: “That was a two-way interview.” Mick Rock caught the moment in a photograph, though Bowie would be coy about it later. “I remember David in interviews saying, ‘Oh, no, we were just about to whisper into each other’s ear,’ and I would think, ‘Well, I saw the kiss, David,’” Rock said. “Lou always just said, ‘Of course we kissed.’”

  DESPITE HIS STARDOM AND air of supreme self-confidence, Bowie was only twenty-five when work began on Transformer. Though Reed himself was just five years older, Bowie was nervous about collaborating with one of his idols. “I was petrified that he said yes to working with me in a producer’s capacity,” Bowie revealed. “I had so many ideas and I felt so intimidated by my knowledge of the work that he had already done.” Still, Bowie’s ambitions were not small. “I really wanted it to work for him,” he said, “and be a memorable album that people wouldn’t forget.”

  In contrast to his first solo album, Reed came to the sessions for his follow-up with a cache of new songs. Bowie told the press, “I think his new material on the album that we’re gonna do will surprise a lot of people as well. It’s miles different from anything he’s ever done before.” Reed had “Walk on the Wild Side,” which he had written for a musical based on the Nelson Algren novel A Walk on the Wild Side that never came to fruition. Never one to waste a good idea, Reed recast the song as a kind of musical documentary about the Factory scene. For his part, Bowie was fascinated with Warhol (he had written a song about him, “Andy Warhol,” for his 1971 album, Hunky Dory, and had met him at the Factory). Warhol had already become something of a society figure by this time and the Factory had lost some of its cachet. But the culture at large had caught up with the lifestyle of the Factory characters, so by the time Reed decided to write about them, they seemed very much of the moment.

  With its laid-back, soft-jazz arrangement, “Walk on the Wild Side” is often thought to be an anomaly in Reed’s catalog, which is more typically characterized by ferocious hard rock or emotionally complicated ballads. But the song, which Bowie called “a classic” and “absolutely brilliant,” would become an undeniable milestone, the only U.S. Top 20 hit of Reed’s forty-six-year career. In its quiet way, “Walk on the Wild Side” celebrates the sexual transformations of Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling, three transgender Factory stalwarts and the stars of Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s 1971 satire of the feminist movement, Women in Revolt. Two other Factory denizens make an appearance in the song: Joe Dallesandro, who played a hustler in the Warhol trilogy Flesh, Trash, and Heat, and Sugar Plum Fairy (actor Joe Campbell, a longtime intermittent boyfriend of Harvey Milk, who would be assassinated for his gay activism).

  It’s not as if Reed knew those characters well, or really at all. “They’re just cursory sketches,” he admitted, “but the descriptions had to be vivid enough to make an impact in about three minutes.” Holly Woodlawn claimed that she had met Reed once at a party, and for years, Dallesandro, who never met Reed and was married and had children when he was starring in the Warhol films, bristled that Reed, intentionally or not, confused the character he played on the screen with his real life. In Reed’s mind, he was not creating a literal documentary but drawing on the people he saw around him for material. Of Sugar Plum Fairy, for example, whom Reed also didn’t know, he said, “With a name like that it was too good to leave alone.”

  But the mere presence of those characters, all described with cool, unjudging detachment in Reed’s deadpan vocal, captured the empathy and distance so essential to Reed’s writing. “They were the ragtag queens of Max’s Kansas City, and they got very little in return for all of the groundbreaking things that they did,” said Patti Smith, “and to be heralded by someone like Lou was lovingly compassionate without being syrupy.” Initially fearful of how the characters named in the song might respond, Reed later said that Candy Darling was so delighted with her treatment that she discussed recording an album of his songs.

  But “Walk on the Wild Side” is more than a song. It’s a slogan, and an invitation. Its title distills Reed’s primary symbolic value: to expose people to worlds they might never have become aware of otherwise. “I have always thought it would be kinda fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn’t met before, or hadn’t wanted to meet, you know,” Reed said. “The kind of people you sometimes see at parties but don’t dare approach. That’s one of the motivations for me writing all those songs in the first place.” In the early seventies, millions of people were standing on the brink of taking a walk on the wild side. All they needed was a little push, and Reed provided exactly that. The phrase “soundtrack of an era” is tossed around indiscriminately, but “Walk on the Wild Side” more than lives up to it. It gave a name to a burgeoning reality.

  “Writing songs is like making a play,” Reed said, “and you give yourself the lead part. And you write yourself the best lines that you could. And you’re your own director.… And you get to play all different kinds of characters. It’s fun. I write through the eyes of somebody else. I’m always checking out people I know I’m going to write songs about. Then I become them. That’s why when I’m not doing that I’m kind of empty. I don’t have a personality of my own. I just pick up other people’s personalities.”

  Typical radio listeners had no idea who Jackie or Holly or Little Joe or Candy were, but they knew about the changes that were taking place in the society around them, as well as in the sexual (and drug-related: “Jackie is just speeding away…”) realms of their own lives. For those who were not frightened by those changes (as many were; the battle lines of the culture wars that persist to this day were just being drawn), the dark side of the street, the wild side, began to look not so unfamiliar. In fact, it began to look welcoming.

  That the song is so musically accessible, so sinuous and promising, works to its advantage as well. Its indelible bass line, overdubbed by jazz bassist Herbie Flowers on both standup and electric bass so that he could earn an additional twelve pounds according to the rules of the British musicians’ union, makes the song immediately identifiable. The searching, lyrical saxophone solo that fades the song out was played by jazz saxophonist Ronnie Ross, who had been Bowie’s saxophone instructor when he was younger. That Reed was not screaming, that his guitar
was not overloading on feedback, simply made the call of the wild more seductive. Rather than confront listeners and intimidate them, flaunting his coolness, Reed allowed them to come to him, and to new experiences. What could possibly be so scary about a world that could be described this elegantly and directly, this dryly and wittily, while the “colored girls” serenaded you? Hey, babe, why not just take that next step?

  WHILE BOWIE’S PRESENCE WAS critical for reasons that extended beyond music, Mick Ronson, the guitarist in Bowie’s band and the coproducer, with Bowie, of Transformer, made essential contributions to Reed’s second solo effort. It’s been argued that Ronson, who also played guitar, piano, and recorder on the album, had a greater role than Bowie—or Reed, for that matter—in shaping and arranging Transformer’s songs, and it’s ultimately difficult to tell precisely who deserves credit for what. Ronson’s influence, Reed said, “was stronger than David’s—but together, as a team, they’re terrific.”

  As the years passed after the album’s completion, Bowie and Reed’s relationship had its ups and downs. Reed, in particular, was determined that it not seem as if he owed the album’s success to his superstar benefactor, so he tended to diminish Bowie’s role in it—not directly, but by rarely mentioning him. Bowie, for his part, exhibited a typically English reluctance to grab the credit—and likely had too much regard for Reed to want to shove him out of the spotlight. Despite his considerable talents, Ronson wasn’t enough of a celebrity to be pursued for interviews by the media, and his death in 1993 ensured that his special role in many musical ventures (including producing Morrissey’s 1992 album Your Arsenal and arranging John Mellencamp’s massive hit “Jack and Diane”) would go unheralded.