Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  At other times, Davis took the lead. In August of 1975, Davis brought Reed to the Bottom Line on Mercer Street to witness one of the now legendary breakout performances by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. By this point the founder and president of Arista Records, Davis had signed Springsteen to Columbia Records when he was the president of that label. Springsteen fever was running high. Born to Run was just about to be released, Springsteen would soon be on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, and his ten-night stand at the Bottom Line was a seminal event. Characteristically, Springsteen more than lived up to the hype surrounding him, delivering galvanizing performances night after night. Critics were exultant, and fans were rapturous. Springsteen blew everyone away—except, seemingly, Lou Reed.

  “I don’t think he loved it,” Davis said. “I was so enthusiastic at the transformation of Bruce that I was flying, but artists have a way of being innately competitive with each other. All I can say is that Lou didn’t look upon that moment as the emergence of a new poet laureate or a new pioneering rock spirit. He was much more measured and not overly impressed. He didn’t know why I was so ecstatic.”

  Having just a month earlier released Metal Machine Music, the polar opposite of a rousing, crowd-pleasing album like Born to Run, Reed might be forgiven for not being able to recognize a “new pioneering rock spirit” at that particular moment. Nonetheless, as was often the case, Reed may also have taken in more at that Springsteen show than he was willing to let on. Springsteen would soon become a friend, and the Bottom Line would for years be one of Reed’s favorite places to play.

  English photographer Mick Rock, who took the iconic shot of Reed that became the cover of Transformer, became another student of New York nightlife, though Rock stood in a much different relationship to Reed than Davis did. Rock was seven years younger than Reed and, in many ways, emerged out of the subversive cultural world that Reed and the Velvet Underground had shaped for the musicians and artists that followed them. His own career progressed in parallel with Reed’s and David Bowie’s, and both men perceived him not as an outsider, but as an organic part of their world. Rock viewed his role as helping those artists convey the compelling images they wanted to present to the world. “I saw them the way they wanted to see themselves,” he said. He looked like them, acted like them, and was one of them. He used the same substances and indulged the same vices they did. And, like Bowie, he’d regarded Reed as a hero since his days with the Velvet Underground. “He was my rock-and-roll Baudelaire,” Rock said. “He was so big in my mind since I was a teenager. I could see the Rimbaud in him, too—no food, no sleep, into all kinds of mischief, coming up with great art. I related him more than anybody else back to that.”

  Rock, who had studied literature at Cambridge University and started out as a writer, could talk poetry with Reed. “Look at all the poetry he wrote that he never set to music. He’d carry around these typewritten pages, and he’d show that stuff to me.” Rock worked often with Reed throughout the seventies, eventually spending half his time in New York. “In the end, I know that my pictures defined him more than anybody else’s,” Rock said. “I think I also took the sexiest pictures of him.… He was playful, and there was a thing between us. It was the seventies and we were young. We were close. It was like his door was always open to me back then. I know he in some way found me attractive, and he was certainly very affectionate with me.” Beyond that, as with Davis and his Harvard pedigree, it was not lost on Reed that Rock had attended Cambridge. “Rock’s educated, but I am, too,” Reed said. “It’s just that no one knows this about either one of us. So you’re out there doing the whole punk thing and people make a deadly mistake: they think you’re only that. The fact that I have a degree with honors and Mick has his from Cambridge—they miss that. So there’s a lot of smart stuff going on, but no one gets that it’s there. They go, ‘Oh, it’s androgyny!’”

  On Rock’s trips to New York, Reed would occasionally take him on a tour of his underground haunts. “I had been around interesting clubs in London where, shall we say, there was a mixed sexual vibe,” Rock recalled. “But Lou took me to places that were certainly darker and deeper. Sweetly, he was actually very protective of me, because if you came from London, you were going to be a bit naive when you got taken into the cultural depths of New York. I had played around in London, but that was strictly amateur time, strictly a warm-up. Like those gay clubs that started showing up in New York as the seventies rolled on—there was never a place in London like the Anvil.”

  The Anvil was a notorious leather bar on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Tenth Avenue that featured live sex shows, most notably including fist fucking, drag queens, and a downstairs room packed with male patrons openly having sex of every variety. The Anvil gained sufficient notoriety that celebrities frequented it for the sex shows, and sightings of famous visitors were common. “Freddie Mercury got his look from a guy who used to dance on the bar at the Anvil who had a mustache and wore gold shorts with suspenders and a cap,” Rock said. “Of course, Freddie had been down to the Anvil and seen him and grabbed the image.”

  Rock found his Anvil visit memorable. “There was some stuff going on that even shocked me, and I thought I was hip and unshockable. Lou did live that kind of life. Talk about sex and drugs. And finally, of course, we’re also talking about a lot of dead people. I mean, Lou collected people, and I met all kinds of bizarre characters.… I took photos in his apartment during that Desoxyn period, let’s call it. He had immersed himself deep in the underbelly of New York—no doubt. He liked to dip into the belly of the beast.”

  Like Davis, Rock saw Reed’s invitation to explore his night world as a gesture of friendship, combined with a writerly interest in anything that might stir his imagination. And, according to Rock, Reed’s fondness for strange characters extended beyond the sexual demimonde. “He introduced me to a friend of his who was apparently from a very wealthy family, and Lou said, ‘This man is the greatest B and E man in New York’—which is ‘breaking and entering,’” Rock said. Reed would soon refer to this character in one of his songs. “Apparently, the guy was a master,” Rock said, “and he didn’t do it for the money, because he didn’t need it. It just was his thrill in life.”

  Reed also explored the sexual underground with Erin Clermont, the Syracuse friend he stayed in touch with intermittently throughout his life. He would often phone her in the middle of the night and come by her apartment in the Village for a visit. Other times they would head out—to Plato’s Retreat, a well-known and relatively mainstream sex club, or to the notorious gay club Hell Fire, among other places. They attended meetings of the Eulenspiegel Society, an organization designed to educate and provide social interactions for people interested in BDSM—bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism. “It’s very buttoned-up,” Clermont said of the Eulenspiegel Society. “Nothing happens at the meetings; they’re like mixers. It’s no Hell Fire—everyone wears clothes. You have conversations with people. There was a guy there who was begging to come clean my apartment on his hands and knees. I laughed, but if you laugh, they like it, so I was perfect. I took his card; I think it said ‘sex slave’ on it.”

  “Lou and I did watch a bit of porn together,” she continued. “I’m one of the small group of females who like gay porn. There was this one gay filmmaker, Fred Halsted, who made L.A. Plays Itself, which is considered a fine film aside from its incredible topic, which is fisting. And we’d go up to Forty-Second Street and look at the peep shows, which wasn’t gay. I know the big question is, ‘Do you think Lou was gay?’ I do not. I think he was inter. He was bisexual, I guess, to a certain degree. But primarily his focus was women. He liked women, and not just for sex. That was part of his neediness. I think he got the emotional succor from women that he could not get from a man. But I saw our adventures as a walk on the wild side. Experiencing those parts of New York and doing things. It was the seventies.”

  WITHOUT QUESTION, THE MOST significant character Reed met on
his late-night rambles through the city was the mysterious Rachel, the transsexual male who would become his live-in lover for three or four years in the seventies. “It was in a late-night club in Greenwich Village,” Reed said, describing the first time he met Rachel. Reed had been in a romantic, methamphetamine haze. “I’d been up for days, as usual, and everything was at that superreal, glowing stage. I walked in there, and there was this amazing person, the incredible head, kind of vibrating out of it all. Rachel was wearing this amazing makeup and dress and I was obviously in a different world to anyone else in the place. Eventually I spoke and she came home with me.”

  It was not exactly a Hollywood-style meet-cute, but it did turn into something like a Lou Reed dream date: “I rapped for hours and hours, while Rachel just sat there looking at me, saying nothing.… Rachel was completely disinterested in who I was and what I did. Nothing could impress her. He’d hardly heard my music and didn’t like it all that much when he did.” Very quickly, the couple became inseparable. “At the time I was living with a girl, a crazy blonde lady, and I kind of wanted us all three to live together, but somehow it was too heavy for her. Rachel just stayed on and the girl moved out.… Rachel knows how to do it for me. No one else ever did before. Rachel’s something else.”

  However much more accepting society has become of sexual expression of all kinds over the past four decades, it’s impossible to conceive of another highly visible star of Reed’s stature openly presenting a transsexual as his significant other at that time. While Rachel identified as a woman, she had not had her male genitalia removed, and it is not entirely clear whether she had undergone hormone treatments to grow breasts, though some people think she had. Reed and just about everyone else who knew her alternated between male and female pronouns in referring to her, less for ideological reasons than simply out of confusion over what would be the most appropriate term in any given situation.

  Even the physical descriptions of Rachel varied from observer to observer and situation to situation. The most notorious of those was Lester Bangs’s vicious and homophobic takedown of Rachel, whom he met in a Detroit hotel room while interviewing Reed on his tour promoting Sally Can’t Dance. Rachel, Bangs wrote, was “a strange, somewhat female thing.” It got worse from there. “You simultaneously wanted to look away and sort of surreptitiously gawk,” Bangs continued. “At first glance, I’d thought it was some big dark swarthy European woman, with long rank thick hair falling about her shoulders. Then I noticed that it had a beard, and I figured, well, cool, the bearded lady, with Lou Reed, that fits. But now I was up closer and it was almost unmistakably a guy. Except that behind its see-through blouse, it seemed to have tits. Or something.… It was grotesque, it was abject, like something that might have grovelingly scampered in when Lou opened the door to get the milk and papers in the morning, and just stayed around.… If the album Berlin was melted down in a vat and reshaped into human form, it would be this creature.”

  One of the first generation of prominent rock critics, Bangs had been a significant supporter of the Velvet Underground, but, as so often happened with him, his hero worship degenerated into obsession and, finally, a desperate need to tear down his idol. His goofy—and sneering—description of Rachel expressed the adolescent sensibility that characterized all his writing. Still, being the focus of Bangs’s attention somehow appealed to Reed in a way that was at least in part masochistic. In a series of articles and interviews, the two men sparred and debated, insulted and battled, baited and chided each other in ways that, for all their self-indulgent bluster, assumed their mutual importance—and self-importance. Reed’s bearing, reputation, and cultural stature demanded that people tiptoe around him—a suggestion that Bangs, in his bull-in-a-china-shop way, gleefully took as a provocation. Reed enjoyed that bravado. Typically, beyond whatever other substances Reed may have ingested before their confrontations, he and Bangs were drunk to the point of incoherence. Still, Reed remarked to Bangs at one point, “You know, I basically like you in spite of myself.” Later, though, after Bangs died of a drug overdose in 1982, Reed explained to guitarist Robert Quine, who was a close friend of Bangs, that Bangs’s comments about Rachel were part of the reason he had come to detest him. “Do you understand, Quine? This is a person I was close to,” Reed said. “And he is calling her a creature and ‘thing.’”

  It’s telling, however, that as different a figure as Rachel was from Bettye Kronstad, Shelley Albin, and Reed’s other female paramours, she was called upon to play a very similar role and was expected to comport herself in a similar way. While Rachel accompanied Reed virtually everywhere, she was invariably described as quiet, attentive to Reed, and reluctant to say much of anything in his presence. Bangs reported that Rachel had been introduced—or, more likely, described—to the production staff at the Detroit venue as “Lou’s babysitter.” For all his adolescent condescension about Rachel, Bangs allowed that there was “a sense of permanency, even protectiveness, about the relationship.” Reed’s substance abuse problems determined that he needed a minder, and whether that person was female by birth or predilection was insignificant. As Erin Clermont put it, “She took care of things for him. She was an assistant, but also probably gave him blow jobs, I would guess.” Meanwhile, when Clermont asked Reed about Rachel, he replied, “Listen, she’s more beautiful than any fucking woman.”

  Perhaps it’s most indicative of the complicated messages, visual and otherwise, that a transsexual embodies—and certainly embodied in the seventies—that Rachel conveyed wildly contradictory meanings. She was beautiful, womanly, and feminine; she was clearly a man and often described as showing stubble. She was not only quiet but virtually never spoke; she was vivacious and friendly. Reed believed that Rachel had no idea who he was when they met, and he was charmed by that. Others on the scene claim that Rachel was triumphant about landing in a relationship with a rock star like Reed. Of course, none of those descriptions precludes the others. It’s perfectly possible that Rachel, like anyone else, was outgoing with certain people or at particular times, and withdrawn and silent at others. For all its pretenses to rebellion and openness, the underground rock scene—and certainly the mainstream music business—was hardly free of homophobia and misogyny. Far from it. And however wild and determined a character Rachel might have been, moving through that world, even as Lou Reed’s girlfriend, would have called for some deft manipulations. She could not possibly know whom to trust and of whom to be wary. A silent watchfulness must often have seemed to her the most effective strategy. If Rachel did take hormones, it’s likely that she could have looked or seemed feminine at some times, more masculine at others. What’s interesting is that very few of the descriptions of her seemed to allow for that range of possibilities. Each person, including Reed, seemed to believe that his or her version of Rachel was who she was in some essential way.

  Even if Rachel wasn’t aware of who Reed was when they met, it’s inconceivable that she would not have quickly figured it out and become excited about what being involved with him could potentially mean. Reed’s demeanor at around that time would have ensured that. “When Lou walked into a room, if everyone didn’t stop talking and look at him, he’d make sure they did,” Michael Fonfara said. “He dominated a room. That is just the way he was. He demanded that kind of thing.”

  Clive Davis lived with his wife and children in an apartment on Central Park West, and he regularly invited Reed to the Thanksgiving brunch he would host so that his guests could watch the Macy’s parade floats make their way downtown. Reed would invariably attend, accompanied by Rachel. “It was an amazing picture,” Davis said. “Maybe fifty or sixty people. Eggnog and bagels. Most of them families with younger kids. The parade is going by. And there were Lou and Rachel. But Lou was very approachable, very down-to-earth, very good company.”

  Reed dedicated his next album, Coney Island Baby, to Rachel. Though he had been convinced that Metal Machine Music would put an end to his career, that obviously did not prov
e to be the case. To his credit, Ken Glancy, the president of RCA Records at the time and a believer in Reed, recognized that, as had happened with Berlin, the career damage that Metal Machine Music had caused could easily be reversed as long as Reed released another, more mainstream album soon afterward. Glancy exacted a promise from Reed that his next album would be nothing like Metal Machine Music, and everybody decided to move on.

  Released in January of 1976, Coney Island Baby is perhaps the most romantic album of Reed’s career, reflecting a desire to distinguish it as starkly as possible from Metal Machine Music. If that album gave expression to the grinding, inhuman, metallic assault of the modern age, this one tapped into the deepest recesses of the human heart, the wish, the belief, the conviction that “the glory of love / Might see you through.”

  The album’s cover, a soft-focus, black-and-white portrait of Reed taken by Mick Rock, is the polar opposite of the hard-edged, leather-clad figure that Reed had presented in recent years. His hair is neither close-cropped nor blond, but gracefully styled and its natural dark brown color. He is not wearing sunglasses but is covering one eye with a bowler hat and peering at the camera—and the viewer—as if he were trying to determine how much of himself to reveal. He is not smiling, but neither is he flashing the intimidating scowl that had become his signature expression. His pale white skin blends seamlessly into the photo’s white backdrop, creating a sense of vulnerability, as if the hard outlines of his body had dissolved, his impregnable studs-and-leather physical fortress now a thing of the past. He is wearing a black-and-white tuxedo-style shirt and bow tie, a parody of formality that had become fashionable in the seventies. The outfit reveals his collarbone and some of his chest and shoulders, a feminine look that further adds to his vulnerability. He looks something like a mime, a particularly introspective vaudeville hoofer, or Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp—all highly aestheticized images, once again in stark contrast to the gritty street realism that had more recently been his mode. Across the light-colored block capitals of the album’s title is Lou Reed’s signature in stylized script, another self-consciously personal touch, as if, in opposition to the contempt of Metal Machine Music, each fan was getting a personally autographed copy of this much more friendly work.