Tracks that the Velvets had never released (“Over You” and “Sweet Bonnie Brown/It’s Just Too Much” among them) made 1969 feel like a new album, while Velvets classics, including “Heroin” and “Pale Blue Eyes,” solidified the core of the band’s legacy. In those days before infinite Internet access, 1969 became a talisman, passed among fans and potential fans one to another, turning on new Velvets devotees one person at a time. By the midseventies, unless you lived in a major city with sophisticated record shops that stocked more than the hits of the day, even the Velvets’ four officially released albums (not to mention the curiosity Live at Max’s Kansas City) were difficult to find.
To that extent, 1969 was a godsend, one whose impact, like that of the Velvet Underground itself, would only truly be felt over time. Even the notoriously difficult to please Reed loved it. When Nelson gave Reed dubs of the record he had put together, Reed “couldn’t wait to hear them,” Nelson recalled. “‘I’ve got to hear “Ocean,”’ he said. ‘I remember the night we played it. I thought it was one of the best things we’d ever done. What side is it on?’ I told him, and we listened to ‘Ocean’ over and over.”
Reed also loved the liner notes for 1969, written by singer-songwriter Elliott Murphy, who greatly admired Reed and the Velvet Underground. “The Velvet Underground must have scared a lot of people,” Murphy wrote. “What goes through a mother’s mind when she asks her fifteen-year-old daughter ‘What’s the name of that song you’re listening to?’ and her daughter replies, ‘Heroin.’… I hope someday they’ll teach rock-and-roll history. I hope that the music on this album is among the more important elements of that class. I hope parents will still get scared when they find their daughter listening to this music.”
The notion of his songs being taught in a music history class and still retaining enough subversive power to frighten listeners certainly would have appealed to Reed’s literary ambitions. In fact, Reed was so struck by what Murphy had written that he asked Nelson to give him Murphy’s telephone number so he could contact him personally. Nelson did, except he did not provide Reed with the current number. Consequently, when Murphy next visited his mother, she told him that “this very nice boy Lewis Reed called.”
AS ALL THIS WAS happening, things went awry for the final time in Reed’s marriage to Bettye Kronstad. Once Berlin was released in July of 1973, Kronstad believed that her wifely duties were done. Through his behavior, Reed helped her along in that decision. He played a show in London with his new band on September 15, 1973, and that marked an end point for Kronstad. “After the show, all these people came over, and there was all this drinking, and I have no idea what was going on with the drugging thing,” she said. “Lou was belligerent. Physically belligerent. So he hadn’t changed.… I didn’t like the way he was treating me. I was hurt. So I said to myself, I’m out. I did try. But it’s not working. That’s what I said to him: we tried. It’s not working. I’m out.”
Two days later, on September 17, 1973, Reed headlined the Olympia theater in Paris, and Kronstad made her escape. Just before she and Reed were set to leave their hotel for the theater, she took off after leaving a message for Dennis Katz that she needed a plane ticket back to New York. “While everyone else was at the show, I wandered around the city in the rain, crying, until a Parisian policeman stopped me under the Arc de Triomphe and told me I should go back to my hotel and get some sleep,” she wrote. “I was twenty-four years old.” Her departure, predictably, had a damaging impact on Reed. He would collapse onstage five days later, forcing a show in Brussels to be canceled. Another show, in Manchester, would be cut short three days later.
When Kronstad returned to New York, she got a new apartment, in the East Sixties, and resumed her acting career. She worked with William Esper, a now legendary acting teacher who had trained with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater on East Fifty-Fourth Street, where Kronstad had studied for a year after leaving Columbia. The community of actors provided a social life for her until the spring term ended. “Then things calmed down,” she said. “It was summer, and everybody either went back home or on vacation. I was pretty much on my own, because the people who had been friends of Lou’s didn’t continue to stay friends with me. I wasn’t the star. He was the star, so that was the most logical and interesting place for them to go. I couldn’t go anywhere I used to go because he would be there with his friends.”
One significant member of Reed’s circle did get in touch with Kronstad. “I got a message from Dr. Feelgood,” she said, referring, of course, to Dr. Robert Freymann. “He actually called me, God himself called me, and said, ‘Look, I’m calling on Lou’s behalf. Lou needs you. He wants you back.’ I don’t know exactly how I answered him, but to myself I said, ‘No. I can’t.’”
Her class with William Esper had managed to stave the emotional devastation of her divorce, but once that was done, it hit her full force. In order to try to restore herself, Kronstad traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to spend time near her Uncle Babe, her father’s youngest brother. Babe, who had served in Korea, had been a Marine training sergeant specializing in underwater demolition. Rendered quadriplegic in a tragic accident, he now resided in a veterans’ hospital. Kronstad had phoned him and explained that she was depressed and had no clear sense of what next steps to take. He had always tried to look after her at important transitional moments in her life, and this time was no different. “He said, ‘Kid, put your stuff in storage and come down here and let me talk to you,’” Kronstad recalled. “So that’s what I did, and he put me back together.”
During their meetings, she chronicled, among many other things, the dissolution of her marriage to Reed. It’s difficult to imagine what a quadriplegic former Marine from a small town in western Pennsylvania could possibly have thought about his niece’s experiences with the bisexual, drug-addled, Jewish inventor of avant-garde rock, but Babe listened patiently and seemed less interested in judging her life than in trying to understand and helping her to move forward with it.
As part of that effort, he wanted to hear Berlin. Kronstad’s copy was in storage, and in any event, she told her uncle, “Babe, you don’t want to hear that album.” He simply responded, “Yes, I do. I want to know what you went through.” She visited a local record store, found the album, brought it to the counter, and began to write out a check to pay for it. “I swear I’m not making this up,” Kronstad said. “As I was writing the check, the guy behind the counter said to me, ‘Are you sure you want this album? This is the most depressing album in the world. People are returning it.’ And here he was talking to me! I didn’t say anything. I just kept writing the check.”
She then played it for her uncle. “He was very quiet. And when he’s very quiet, he’s very angry. Very upset. He just said, ‘You know, kid, this is what happens when you don’t take care of yourself, because no one is going to take care of you in life but you. So learn from it. Learn from it.’ And he’s right, isn’t he?”
Kronstad never made an effort to reestablish contact with Reed after their divorce, nor did she follow his subsequent career with much beyond a cursory interest. Of the time she spent on the road with Reed, playing nursemaid and helpmate, she said, “Bob Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo had the best line about that sort of life. She said that the girlfriend of a rock star isn’t really there. It was awful how people treated you, just awful.”
After Kronstad remarried, her testimony was subpoenaed in a lawsuit that Reed had filed against a former manager. “I had to testify that Lou was of sound mind during the time he was with me, and so I did,” she said. “I said he wasn’t more drunk or disorderly than anybody else during that time.… Then, of course, the manager’s lawyer said to me, ‘Well, in fact, wasn’t there a time when you were so drunk and drugged out yourself that you fell off an escalator and someone had to pick you up?’ Anything they could find to discredit me and my testimony. I said, ‘Yeah, but that had to do with the seven-inch, fuck-me platform heel
s I was wearing, and my heel got caught in one of the treads of the escalator.’ That’s actually what happened. But again, I was being attacked. Whatever joy Lou brought me, there was an equal amount of pain.”
Until his death, Kronstad rarely spoke about her marriage to Reed, even privately. After that, she felt that it was important to get her side of the story out, to help shape the narrative rather than simply be a character in other people’s versions of it. Part of her initial silence was an innate desire for privacy. Part was an urge to move her life forward and not get caught up in the impossible-to-replicate glamour or luridness of those years. And part was an understandable wariness about how the more conventional people she lived among would react to knowledge of her past. “It was Lou Reed,” she said simply. “Lou Reed was the devil incarnate to many people.”
10
ONE MACHINE TALKING TO ANOTHER
ONE OF THE KEY moves Lou Reed made as he planned his follow-up album to Rock n Roll Animal was to draft keyboardist Michael Fonfara as one of the players. Reed had wanted Fonfara, who, along with bassist Prakash John and drummer Pentti Glan, was a member of the Black Stone Rangers, to go on the road with him after Berlin, but Fonfara had chosen to stay with his band, which was on the verge of signing a label deal. Ironically, John and Glan chose to leave the band in order to work with Reed, and Fonfara moved to Los Angeles with the Black Stone Rangers’ guitarist, Danny Weis. (Weis and Fonfara had both been members of the sixties band Rhinoceros, and Weis was also an original member of Iron Butterfly.) Fonfara did not turn down the second offer when Reed proffered it, and Weis was also asked to play on the sessions. Soon both Steve Hunter, who went off to play with Alice Cooper, and Dick Wagner left Reed’s band. “Steve left because he thought, ‘Well, three guitars is too much for what we’re doing,’ and eventually Dick left because he said, ‘Well, two guitars is too much for what we’re doing,’” Fonfara said. “The fact is, when Weis is on, nobody else needs to be there.” At that point, the Black Stone Rangers essentially became Reed’s backing band.
At the time, Fonfara didn’t know much about Reed, beyond Velvets lore and “Walk on the Wild Side.” He believed that he was brought into the sessions because “they wanted somebody funkier than what they had.” (Reed had been dissatisfied with Ray Colcord’s playing on the tour that yielded Rock n Roll Animal.) Initially, “Lou was in the mood to make an R & B record,” Fonfara said. “He wanted to be a Lou Reed version of James Brown.”
Reed decided to record at Electric Lady Studios, which had been built by Jimi Hendrix, whom Reed much admired, on West Eighth Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. This would be the first of Reed’s solo albums to be recorded in New York. Steve Katz was chosen to produce the new album, an obvious pick given the success of Rock n Roll Animal, which he had produced, and the fact that his brother, Dennis, was Reed’s manager. But successfully recording a crack band onstage proved to be a very different experience from working with Lou Reed in the studio. “Steve had an ear for production and he had production chops, but Lou was just way too much for him to handle,” Fonfara said.
Among other things, what Steve Katz couldn’t handle was Reed’s propensity to switch conceptual gears midproject while refusing to communicate his ideas to the people around him. Reed eventually backed off on his original R & B vision of the album, but he didn’t know exactly where he wanted to go after that, and no one else—including Katz—was in a position to take the reins. “Steve didn’t understand what Lou’s concept was going to be,” said Fonfara, “and he ended up pulling a sort of R & B album out of it, more so than what Lou wanted.… Lou was having fun when we did it, but… I think he wanted something a little more sensitive, more of an esoteric feeling to the album.”
It was not unlike Reed to start out wanting to make a “fun” R & B record, and then decide that such a project might be too frivolous and back away from it. Reed had loved R & B since childhood, and the genre was experiencing a heyday in the midseventies. James Brown’s funk, Philadelphia soul, and George Clinton’s extraterrestrial excursions with Parliament-Funkadelic were all in full flight. The late-night—or, really, all-night—gay clubs that Reed liked to frequent were already pulsing with the highly rhythmic, Latin-tinged R & B that would eventually erupt in the mainstream culture as disco. Equally androgynous and more commercially savvy white artists like Elton John, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, and Rod Stewart were starting to take R & B styles straight to the bank at around this time. But Reed lacked their self-assurance and, consequently, pulled back.
As the sessions got under way for the album that would become Sally Can’t Dance—the title itself perfectly captures Reed’s ambivalence about making an R & B album—Reed turned to Michael Fonfara as his musical director, a role that he would play for the next six years. Fonfara’s first impression of Reed was that he was “brilliant with lyrics and could write songs, but he didn’t know how to do rhythm and blues at all. It was up to us to more or less take these lyrics and put them with songs that were more like R & B than the rock-and-roll style he had been doing.” A horn section and soulful background singers joined the sessions, Fonfara recalled, “and Lou was pretty gung ho about it. We were doing the job that he wanted us to do.”
The success of Rock n Roll Animal meant that Reed had a sizable audience awaiting the release of his next album, and Sally Can’t Dance, which came out in August of 1974, became the highest charting album of Reed’s career when it rose to number ten. It was his first (and only) Top 10 release. No doubt partly because of the album’s success—and partly because he believed that he had lost control of the album in the studio—Reed would disparage Sally Can’t Dance more strongly and consistently than any other album he put out. “This is fantastic: the worse I am, the more it sells,” he told Danny Fields in Gig magazine. “If I wasn’t on the record at all next time around, it would probably go to number one.” That was a hypothesis he would soon test.
Though it didn’t sell well as a single, the title track on Sally Can’t Dance proved an effective advertisement for the album. Since most of Reed’s new fans were unaware of Berlin, they probably didn’t need reassurance, but for anyone who did, “Sally Can’t Dance,” with its pumping horns and catchy riff, suggested an album that was upbeat, of the moment, and even lighthearted. RCA supported the album’s release with a thirty-second television ad featuring a disaffected Reed glumly staring at the camera while the chorus and part of a verse of “Sally Can’t Dance” play and famed voice-over genius Don Pardo encourages viewers to “sing along with Lou!” as a bouncing ball highlights the lyrics. According to one of the spot’s producers, a more elaborate shoot and ad were planned, but Reed was so high and incoherent when he arrived at the studio that a more bare-bones concept was rushed into effect. Nonetheless, the ad won the 1974 award for best commercial from Art Direction magazine.
“Sally Can’t Dance” notably offered a checklist of expected post–“Wild Side” references for a Lou Reed single—mentions of hip New York hot spots like St. Marks Place and the gay nightclub Le Jardin, allusions to drugs (meth, in this case), and a whiff of the trash-glam underground—all without posing the slightest threat. Even the album’s cover—a pouty portrait of a bottle-blond Reed, his hair close-cropped, wearing dark sunglasses, his head seductively tilted to one side—was designed to titillate rather than menace, an expression of the easy, off-the-shelf decadence that had, rightly or wrongly, troubled so many critics about the artist’s solo work. (Evidently the look was inspired by a photograph Reed had taken of a transvestite street hustler he had picked up.) The album’s title, too, was reassuring. For one thing, it suggested heterosexual desire from that bitch of a rock-and-roll animal. In addition, starting with Little Richard and Wilson Pickett, Sally had been enshrined as a delectable rock-and-roll name. The entire culture was awakening to dance music, and if Sally couldn’t dance, there had to be a funny story behind that incapacity.
Other songs on the album explored darker themes, most
notably “Kill Your Sons,” which, though a relatively inert track on the album, would go on to become a roaring staple of Reed’s live shows. The song had its origins in 1970, when Reed recorded it on acoustic guitar as “Kill Our Sons.” In that incarnation, it was a folkie antiwar song—a generational battle cry and somewhat of a cliché—about old men sending young men off to war to die while living lives of ease themselves. For the version on Sally Can’t Dance, Reed transformed that sociopolitical context into a psychological one, and the song became a vicious denunciation of his parents for subjecting him to electroshock therapy. It’s Reed at his best: simultaneously biting, sardonic, rageful, and poignant. He sneers at “two-bit psychiatrists,” savages the straight lives of his parents and sister, wryly compares the treatment he received in two different mental wards, laments being ignored by his family after a drug freak-out, and reports that his brain was so rattled by the convulsive shocks he received that he “couldn’t even read” afterward. The song is funny, frightening, and, ultimately, devastating—and its power was totally lost amid the laid-back lounge R & B on Sally Can’t Dance.
Lou Reed Page 21
