At the time of the Transformer sessions, however, the three men were getting along famously. “With Ronno and David there was a real simpatico,” Reed said, using an affectionate English nickname for Ronson, “which was certainly part of the situation I had with the Velvets, and miles above where I had been with the first Lou Reed record, where there was nothing simpatico.” On his end, the easygoing Ronson found Reed, whose cantankerousness in the studio is legendary, a pleasure to work with. As out of control as he could be, Reed could take direction when he felt that something important was at stake, as he did with Warhol and Morrissey for a time. Also, Ronson was not as complex a figure as Bowie was, not a potential usurper. Consequently, Reed could relax around him and respond openly to his suggestions. Ronson recalled meeting Reed at Max’s, and then Reed coming to his hotel room in New York a couple of times to play some of the songs he wanted to work on for the album. Ronson would get them down on a little tape recorder so he could think about suitable arrangements and production approaches.
“Lou used to say some funny things to me,” Ronson recalled about Reed’s method of giving him direction. “Some things like, ‘Can you make it a little bit more gray?’ That to me was like, what the hell is he talking about? I guess he was just trying to explain things in a more artistic way or something. That was kind of going over my head a bit.” Then there was the fact that Ronson hailed from Hull, a town in East Yorkshire in northern England, with a singular local dialect. “The thing with Ronno is that I could very rarely understand a word he said,” Reed recalled. “He had a Hull accent; he’d have to repeat things five times. But a really sweet guy. A great guitar player and a really sweet guy.” Funnily enough, Reed and Ronson’s inability to communicate effectively probably served to smooth the edges of their interactions—and freed Ronson to be as creative as he wanted to be in his approach to the album.
The studio lovefest, as well as the public displays of affection, prompted rumors that Reed and Bowie had fallen in love. True or not, it was a rumor perfectly suited to the times. “I actually wasn’t aware of it, if it happened,” Kronstad said. “It’s the sort of thing that would have happened when I wasn’t around.”
Neither ever confessed to an affair, and it’s possible to make sense of their connection and the rumors surrounding it without assuming a sexual relationship. On the simplest level, studios are hothouse environments, vacuum-sealed from the rest of the world, in which it’s possible to bond deeply with the people you’re collaborating with so many hours a day. Bowie was a magnetic figure just coming into his own, and, like all producers, he needed to draw the best performances possible out of Reed any way he could. Seduction, whether literal or metaphorical, can be an essential part of that process.
Beyond that, both Reed and Bowie had much at stake, and their mutual sense of self-importance, which would have been high on the most modest day of their lives, escalated due to the urgency of the project. Both men at the time were deeply attracted to outrage, shock, and attention, and neither would have felt any particular need to play down whatever camp element may have been present between them. That the sessions were going well would only encourage their sense that they were invulnerable, subject to no one else’s rules of how they should or shouldn’t behave. They were free to inspire each other with their mutual admiration both inside and outside the studio, and Ronson was always on hand to make sure the work got done.
IF THE LOU REED solo album was haunted by the Velvet Underground, Transformer treated that period of Reed’s life as a subject, a source of material, rather than a legacy he had to live up to. That writerly distance freed him to create a completely new sound and persona. “Walk on the Wild Side” is the most significant example of this shift, and “Andy’s Chest” is another. Originally written in 1968 for the Velvets, the song alludes to the attempted murder of Warhol by Valerie Solanas. “It’s what I thought about Andy being shot,” Reed said of the song, which strings together a series of gently surrealistic lyrics, including a couple of “bat” references to the Dracula portion of Warhol’s nickname, Drella.
Back when Reed was working with the Velvets, Warhol had asked him, “Why don’t you write a song called ‘Vicious’?” When Reed asked what he meant, Warhol replied, “Vicious, I hit you with a flower.” Reed thought it was a great idea, and by the time he got around to completing the song for Transformer, it was timely as well. Like the banana cover Warhol had designed for the first Velvets album, his “hit you with a flower” notion was a spoof of hippie idealism. More deeply, it also hinted at the passive-aggressiveness of so much sixties culture—a kind of personal violence concealed in flower power clichés. As the opening line on the opening song on Transformer, “Vicious, you hit me with a flower” set the tone for the rest of the album, connecting Reed to his Velvets past while distancing him from the sixties, an era that by 1972 was just beginning to be viewed from a critical distance.
As in his dalliance with Bowie, Reed played with his image in “Vicious,” in which the singer refers to himself as “some kind of gay blade” and offhandedly deflects an S and M invitation (“You want me to hit you with a stick / But all I’ve got’s a guitar pick”). “Make Up” and “New York Telephone Conversation” parody the self-involvement of the Factory scene and the back room at Max’s, two self-reflecting centers of hipness in the theatrical “city of shows” in which every appearance in public is a performance. “Make Up,” however, also nods to the gender-bending kids of the glam movement, for whom makeup and dressing up—and the identity transformations they enact—was at least as important as the music. “Here is this whole glam thing going on, so I just put myself in that head,” Reed said about the song. “It’s not like I had to go very far to do it. I have about a thousand selves running around. It’s easy.”
The song’s surprisingly direct bridge (“We’re coming out / Out of our closets / Out on the streets”) drew on the slogans of the gay liberation movement and had an impact well beyond the world of music. Years later, gay activist and writer Don Shewey would describe hearing Transformer as a college freshman in 1972 this way: “You can’t imagine how profound and delirious it was.… This butch guy talking about drugs and drag queens, sex and self-hatred, without distancing himself, opened up worlds of possibility for me, and for that I will forever be grateful.” Reed would never have described himself as a political songwriter, but he wrote a movement anthem.
Reed described “Satellite of Love” as being “about jealousy,” a theme that comes through in its gently humorous bridge about the presumably female subject of the song having “been bold” every day of the week with “Harry, Mark, and John,” Reed’s version of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The song is sweet and sad, treating emotions that Reed would typically address more corrosively with gentleness and wit. The decade’s newly emergent environmental issues also get a nod in the song (“Satellite’s gone way up to Mars / Soon it’ll be filled with parking cars”), as does the era’s fascination with space exploration. Bowie amps up the song’s doo-wop aspect with his “bom bom bom” background vocals and the luscious high notes he hits as the song fades. This was neither the first nor the last time that Reed would reach back to his early love of doo-wop, both for its romance and its lyrical rendering of obsession, subjects that always were inextricably linked for him.
The song on Transformer that would ultimately rival “Walk on the Wild Side” for preeminence, however, is “Perfect Day,” a haunting ballad raised to stratospheric heights by Ronson’s gorgeous string arrangement. Apart from its beauty, the song’s enduring appeal stems from its emotional complexity. It describes a couple enjoying all the quotidian pleasures of a weekend date—sangria in Central Park, a visit to the zoo, a movie. The song’s melancholic musical setting undercuts the idyllic scene, as do lyrics that fatally jar the mood. “You just keep me hanging on,” Reed sings, borrowing a Supremes line to describe an emotional desperation the song has entirely suppressed up to that point. Then, looking on the scene a
s if from an unbridgeable distance, he sings, “You made me forget myself / I thought I was someone else / Someone good.” Those lines, the heart of the song in Reed’s view, chillingly distill the part of Reed that longed for a conventional life, even as he courted and reveled in actions, styles, and scenes whose very point was to explode those conventional values. Reed later dismissed the Biblical injunction that concludes the song (“You’re going to reap just what you sow”) as a cliché, but its complex intent and function in this context make it anything but that. Who is he speaking to? The woman in the song? Or is he addressing that line to himself, frightened and convinced that his own excesses will eventually damn him? The line’s religious source in the context of the album’s self-conscious, self-styled decadence only strengthens its impact.
According to Kronstad, “Perfect Day” describes one of her dates with Reed. “We had plans to meet in the park,” she recalled, “and I went horseback riding beforehand. I’d been stupid and hadn’t brought my boots, because I had an appointment before I went riding. So I had sandals on and my ankles were bleeding. We’re sitting there having sangria in this very romantic setting. I didn’t show Lou. I was so embarrassed.” They never discussed what Reed might have meant by the song. “When someone writes you a love song like that and plays it for you, sometimes there’s just not a lot to say,” she said. Perhaps she also didn’t really want to know.
Transformer ends with “Goodnight Ladies,” a song that blends an allusion in its title to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and the weary, fagged-out atmosphere of a music hall evening coming to a close. The song calls attention to the theatricality of the entire album, while echoing the gay theme running through it (it’s “ladies,” not ladies and gentlemen, archly feminizing everyone who is participating and being addressed). The song’s oompah quality, in Reed’s description, and woozy, melancholy Dixieland arrangement (done by Herbie Flowers, who played tuba on the track) recall similarly self-conscious evocations of old-fashioned music hall camaraderie by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Kinks, not to mention Reed’s own “After Hours.” For those English bands (and certainly for Bowie and Ronson), such gestures combined wry nostalgia with a sense that the world had forever changed. The reassuring certainties and communal comfort that the music hall represented had utterly vanished.
The title Transformer admits multiple meanings, all without diminishing its cool open-endedness. Its definition as a device that controls voltage hints at the album’s electrical charge. It also alludes to Reed’s role as a change agent, an artist who exposes his audience to characters and situations capable of transforming them. Gender transformations, too, are in there—“and then he was a she,” as easy as that. Warhol, who lurks throughout the album, certainly was a transformer, not only in his own life but in creating an environment at the Factory, and eventually in the culture at large, in which characters in search of a new identity could find one. Everyday objects can become works of art as easily as lost boys and girls can become superstars. Finally, the album transformed Lou Reed from a confused underground icon in search of a new direction into the success that, regardless of his ambivalence, he always wanted to be.
As much as its music, Transformer’s cover generated attention and controversy. The front portrait, shot by Mick Rock before the sessions for the album had even begun, depicts a soulful, vampiric Reed looking out at the viewer, his eyes darkened with makeup, not so much defiant as blithely accepting of his own otherworldliness—another androgynous man who fell to Earth. When Rock showed Reed that shot on a contact sheet, “Lou pounced on it. He immediately said, ‘That’s the cover, Mick.’… And of course, somehow or other, that came to be the shot that defined him forever.”
A Rolling Stone writer described Reed at the time as looking like “an effeminate Frankenstein monster in whiteface with baleful blackened eyes.” The image became one of the iconic representations of glam rock decadence—“the degenerate side of glam,” as Rock put it—and prompted a promotional campaign that dubbed Reed “The Phantom of Rock,” a reference to the grisly novel and film The Phantom of the Opera. That cadaverous portrait was striking enough, but the back cover features a leggy vamp in high heels and lacy lingerie, a hand artfully placed near her crotch, her eyes closed, the other hand on her hip—evidently a man dressed alluringly as a woman. Opposite that image, and inspired by the gay porn magazines Reed enjoyed, stands a muscular rough trade boy (in fact Ernie Thormahlen, Reed’s friend and former road manager) in a white, formfitting crop top T-shirt, black cap, and jeans, with a pronounced bulge in his pants (according to Reed, a banana—yet another Warhol reference?—shoved down his pants). “Haven’t you seen the cover?” Reed asked a journalist in 1972. “It’s divine. There’s this very well-hung stud looking into a mirror and looking back at him is this beautiful girl. There’s a lot of sexual ambiguity in the album and two outright gay songs—from me to them, but they’re carefully worded so the straights can miss out on the implications and enjoy them without being offended. I suppose, though, the album is going to offend some people.” The images defined the twin poles of gay male stereotypes at the time, and it was widely rumored that Reed was the subject of both photos, a view that he thoroughly enjoyed. “I could have had a whole new career,” he later joked.
Kronstad took a characteristically pragmatic view of all the homoerotic imagery suffusing the album. “It’s just showbiz,” she said. “It was marketing. I thought it was clever. We were just selling the album. I was always coming from the point of view of, how do we get his career going?”
RCA was smart enough to take that perspective as well. Rather than attempt somehow to tamp down the controversy the album generated, the company exploited it. “In the midst of all the make-believe madness, the mock depravity, and the pseudosexual anarchists, Lou Reed is the real thing,” the label’s ad copy ran.
Critical response to the album was mixed, as were the individual reviews. In Rolling Stone, Nick Tosches called Transformer a “real cockteaser” and advised Reed to forget “this artsy-fartsy kind of homo stuff.” In what eventually amounted to a relatively positive review, Robot A. Hull declared in Creem, “This new album is further proof that Lou Reed has turned into something sicker than a homicidal-rapist-mass-murderer-porno editor.” As for the album’s cover, Hull continued, Reed looked like “he’s been giving rim jobs to the Fugs.… Yup, he’s a full-fledged social degenerate now, and I really don’t see how he could get any lower.” In New Musical Express, Nick Kent dismissed Transformer as “the Lou Reed Chic album.… A total parody of Reed’s former genius.” Writing in the British publication Disc and Music Echo, however, Ray Fox-Cumming wrote of Transformer, “It is his best-ever album, beautiful, sad, funny, lyrically impeccable, melodically often very pretty, and it will probably be looked back on as a landmark in years to come.”
Amid all the attention, Reed went on the road with the Tots, a hard-charging but virtually unknown bar band from the far-from-trendy New York suburb of Yonkers. Meanwhile, “Walk on the Wild Side” gradually began to draw attention and radio play on its way to becoming a hit, entering the charts more than four months after Transformer’s release. In the United States, the verse about Candy Darling was edited out of the single version, but in England, where the term “giving head” was not then current slang, it was kept in, and the song broke into the Top 10. In true Warholian fashion, Lou Reed was now not simply a legend; he was a star.
8
A CITY’S DIVIDED SOUL
A MONTH OR SO before the release of Transformer, Lou Reed received a punishing concert review in Melody Maker that focused squarely on his new relationship with David Bowie. Following a Friday night performance at the Sundown Theatre in the London suburb of Edmonton, Richard Williams began his review, “The fact is that his association with David Bowie has done Lou Reed no good at all.” Further on, Williams wrote that Reed was an original who “shouldn’t need the patronage of a second-rate plagiarist, and it’s sad that the vaga
ries of public taste and the music business have put the Long Islander in such an invidious position.… For a start, his stage persona is unconvincing. He seems to feel that he must do the expected: people think he’s bizarre, so he must act bizarre (white-powdered face, black lipstick, Monroe wiggles, and silver high heels which forced him to totter on-and offstage like a sad, aging whore).”
Sensing that the critical tide was turning before Transformer even came out, Reed began publicly backing away from his connection with Bowie and the glam scene. “I’m not going in the same direction as David,” he insisted to an English journalist. “I wanted to try that heavy eye makeup and dance about a bit.… Anyway, I’ve done it all now and stopped it.… I don’t wear the makeup anymore.” When he spoke to journalist Nick Kent in 1973, Reed described the new album he was working on as “a backlash on Transformer. Maybe I’ll do a song on it called ‘Get Back in the Closet You Fuckin’ Queers.’”
He continued, “I just think that everyone’s into this scene because it’s supposedly the thing to do right now.… You just can’t fake being ‘gay.’ If they claim they’re gay, they’re going to have to make love in a gay style, and most of those people aren’t capable of making that commitment. These kids can pretend to be as gay as can be, but when it comes down to it they just won’t be able to make it. And that line—‘Everyone’s bisexual’—that’s a very popular thing to say right now. I think it’s meaningless.”
Despite his ambivalence, Reed knew he was riding a crest; he was more of a public figure than he had ever been before. And with the momentum of Transformer behind him, he was set to play his first solo shows in New York in January of 1973 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, a dramatic moment in his career. To promote those dates, Reed’s record label, RCA, took out subway ads that displayed the black-and-white portrait on the album’s front cover (into whose eyes, according to Rolling Stone, “some graffiti genius in the IRT Fourteenth Street station had drawn a network of red veins”) and challenged viewers with the question, “Will you still be underground when Lou Reed emerges at Alice Tully Hall on January 27?”
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