The title track, which closes the album, borrows the name of a 1962 regional hit by the Excellents. By 1962, doo-wop had lost most of its cultural relevance, and even the artists who emerged from its influence, like Dion DiMucci and the Four Seasons, had been touched at least as meaningfully by rock and roll. The Excellents’ “Coney Island Baby,” however, was among the last classic expressions of the form—all wistfulness, earnestness, and youthfulness. A true aficionado like Reed would have appreciated that. The song’s reference to an amusement park in an urban setting—Brooklyn, Reed’s birthplace—only enhanced its evocation of an innocent teen romance that would soon be as much an anachronism as the song’s perfectly constructed harmonies. Reed wanted to tap that purity, that sense of perfect love as it can only be experienced in adolescence, for his hymn to Rachel.
Over a spare, meditative guitar-bass-drums arrangement, soulful backing vocals, and an impossibly slow tempo, Reed’s vocal delivery in the song’s verses is essentially a recitation, which lends it an extremely intimate feel, as if he were struggling to find the words for the memories he’s recalling, giving voice to them in real time as they emerge in his mind. He thinks back to high school and talks about wanting to “stand up straight” and play football for the coach, the “straightest dude” he ever knew. He conjures a John Wayne world of stoic masculine virtue: strong, silent, undeniable. Performing the song onstage, Reed would sometimes evoke Green Bay Packers coach (and fellow Brooklyn native) Vince Lombardi by name, as well as the declaration “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” which is frequently—and incorrectly—attributed to him. As his spoken introduction to “I’m Waiting for the Man” on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live demonstrates, Reed was not above drawing life lessons from football, and the stark, black-and-white thinking of that quotation is not much different from the unforgiving street code by which many of Reed’s characters live and die. To play football for the coach is to be willing to live according to your beliefs—and to be willing to be judged on how uncompromisingly you’ve done that.
In Reed’s case, the song seems to be simultaneously about a desire to please and outrage his father, impulses that warred within him his entire life. Against the desire to live up to the standards defined by the coach, Reed presents a haunted vision of a nighttime self alone and lonely in the “midnight hour,” a morally degraded figure who, far from striving to live up to clearly defined principles, has put his soul “up for sale.” That character’s sleepless memories drift back not to afternoons on the high school football field but to “all the things that you done,” to having made “every different scene,” to never being able “to be no human being”—all those references more lurid and harrowing for remaining entirely unspecified, the listener’s imagination all too readily filling in the gaps. As if channeling Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, the singer declares that New York is “something like a circus or a sewer,” a moral cesspool in which it’s all too understandable that some people have “peculiar tastes.”
To resolve the tension in the song, Reed once again turned to doo-wop, proclaiming, “The glory of love / Might see you through.” “The Glory of Love” is an R & B standard recorded by the Five Keys, the Platters, and the (happily named) Velvetones, and its title alone is something of a doo-wop statement of purpose. In Reed’s “Coney Island Baby,” the glory of love is embodied in the devotion of a “princess… / Who loved you even though she knew you was wrong.” Beyond the trope of the good girl who falls for the bad boy, “wrong” in this case suggests “gay,” “perverse,” or “addicted,” as well as alluding to Reed’s penchant for falling for women—in marked contrast to Rachel—whose tastes in virtually all regards tended to be far more conventional than his own. The song is an experiment, according to Reed, in “using those kinds of pop doo-wop phrases and trying to actually breathe meaning into them beyond the cliché.”
Reed ends the song dramatically, with the sort of radio dedication he heard so often growing up. “I’d like to send this one out to Lou and Rachel, and all the kids, and P.S. 192,” he intones, reaching back even to the local Brooklyn public school he loathed. “Man, I swear I’d give the whole thing up for you.” It’s unclear what the singer would be willing to give up for his love—or for the presumed groundedness, the realness, the normalcy, of the kids at P.S. 192. His ambitions? His fame? His art? His success? All of it?
That Reed would bring the deepest and most sentimental of his musical tastes to bear on his relationship with Rachel, going so far as to mention her by name in the title track of his album, suggests the seriousness of his feelings for her. Rachel, “a tall, exotic person with cascading hair, arching eyebrows, and hands whose fragile elegance is enhanced by two glinting diamond rings,” one critic wrote, “has put the heart back into Lou’s rock and roll.”
It would take decades before American culture would begin to grapple with the notion that gays, let alone transsexuals, experience love in anything like the romanticized terms then reserved for heterosexuals. Yet there was Reed doing just that on an album released in America’s bicentennial year, and managing simultaneously to express all his conflicted feelings about his own sexual identity and desires. It is one of his greatest achievements as a songwriter. As vulnerable as he seems in the song, however, Reed heard it as a statement of defiance. “Saying ‘I’m a Coney Island baby’ at the end of that song is like saying I haven’t backed off an inch,” he said, “and don’t you forget it.”
JUST AS ROCK N Roll Animal erased the career damage done by Berlin, Coney Island Baby succeeded in making Metal Machine Music seem like some kind of bad dream from which Reed had miraculously awakened. Reed himself may have felt that Metal Machine Music “made it that much harder for Coney Island Baby to prove itself,” but, in fact, it made it much easier. As with Berlin, fans wanted to forget about Metal Machine Music, and Reed called his new album “a continuation of what I was doing with the Velvet Underground”—in other words, exactly what his fans were hoping he would do. And the critics, ever eager to proclaim that “Lou Reed is back!” loved Coney Island Baby. John Rockwell called it his “best album in years”; Lenny Kaye described it as a “self-renaissance.” In a rapturous lead review in Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson concluded that when Reed sang about wanting to play football for the coach, “he is expressing the profound dream of the damned—and his loss is given greater intensity because both he and we know that such wishes were impossible from the very beginning. So we reaccept it. And it hurts all over again.”
Nelson’s final comment? “You can play on my team any day, Lou.”
12
THIS GENDER BUSINESS
AS INSIGHTFUL A CRITIC and as visionary a record executive as he was, Paul Nelson didn’t understand that Lou Reed had no desire to play on his team. Reed took the team of sophisticated critics and sympathetic executives who supported him entirely for granted, as well he might have. To him, the imagined world of the high school football coach represented something else entirely—a realm of male-defined normalcy, epitomized by his father, that would forever elude him. Reed would alternately seek to gain entry to this world and to outrage it. In the case of “Coney Island Baby,” he did both, and brilliantly.
While the album succeeded in changing the perception of Lou Reed by the public and within the music industry, it was hardly a blockbuster. It rose to number forty-one on the Billboard album chart—a respectable showing, particularly for him—but nothing dramatic. Reed worked hard by his own standard to sell the album, doing as many interviews as he could bear. But as was so often the case during this period, his emotional and physical condition did not make him the most effective messenger for his own work. Understandably, he was under a great deal of stress. He was massively in debt to RCA, drowning in lawsuits with his former manager Dennis Katz, still drinking prodigiously and shooting speed, and involved in a highly public relationship with a transsexual. That’s enough to make anyone’s behavior erratic, and for someone as prone to walking a
long the ledge as Reed was, it was enough to tip him into the pit.
For a New York Times interview with John Rockwell, Reed showed up late, “complained vituperatively” about the executive office his record company had selected as the site for the interview, and insisted on relocating the chat to the bar at the Algonquin Hotel, where, Rockwell wryly noted, “a couple of drinks improved his mood marginally.” Rockwell concluded that Reed, for all his scary posturing, is “the Don Rickles of rock, but the humor gets lost in translation.”
For a Rolling Stone interview, Reed was in even finer form, as revealing of his private life as he would ever be in such a situation. At dinner with the reporter Timothy Ferris, he rattled off “a chain of racist and anti-Semitic remarks calculated to ‘clear the air.’” (Such provocations were characteristic of Reed at the time. He told one friend that he needed to get a “nigger comb” to tame his unruly hair, and explained to a reporter from Creem that “nigger music—pardon me—soul brothers and their turbulent rhythm” takes over the music scene when there’s “nothing happening.”) Then, in an extremely unusual gesture, Reed brought Ferris back to the Upper East Side apartment he shared with Rachel, whom the reporter described as Reed’s “live-in boyfriend.” Reed poured Ferris a “water glass of bourbon” and showed him a tape of interviews he had done with transvestite street hustlers. “He picks them up—on Tenth Avenue, the lowest rank in the hierarchy of New York whoredom, where they hustle motorists headed for New Jersey who mistake them for women—brings them home, [and] makes recordings and Polaroids (one of which was the basis for the Sally Can’t Dance cover),” Ferris wrote.
While this assessment was essentially accurate, Ferris overlooked the fact that, New Jersey suburbanites or not, at least some of those horny motorists were there precisely because those street hookers were not women. That was the attraction. Nonetheless, Reed’s habit of photographing, filming, and interviewing these men was long-standing and, among other things, demonstrates that, to one degree or another, Reed’s relationship with Rachel occurred within the context of a larger fascination. Speaking of Rachel, photographer Mick Rock said that he had pictures of Reed “with similar characters, and those do not get published. They’re buried, and I show them to nobody. But yes, I have all these other pictures, too.”
The tape Reed showed Ferris featured a drag queen discussing a character named Arman, whom she described as a “glass-coffee-table queen.” Asked about that term, she explained that Arman “lies under the glass coffee table on little velvet pillows, and you gap yourself over the coffee table and shit onto the glass while his face is pressed up against it. And then afterward you can make him eat the shit off.” Clearly amused and titillated, Reed pressed for more details about the encounter, which his guest matter-of-factly provided.
To assume that Reed was entirely out of control at the time is perhaps the only way to understand why he would show a tape like that to a reporter for a major national magazine—an interaction that inevitably resulted in a huge, all-caps headline that read, “WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR AVERAGE INTROVERT MEETS THE GLASS-COFFEE-TABLE QUEEN.” It certainly explains why, in the future, Reed would typically flat-out refuse not only to discuss his personal life but to comment on things he had previously said in interviews. On a few occasions, Reed would almost sheepishly admit to having done too many interviews while drunk or stoned. The anger he would often express to reporters was, in part, a projection of the anger he felt toward himself for having allowed himself to lose control. He was embarrassed and humiliated and, consequently, lashed out. He once warned Jeffrey Ross, who was in his early twenties and playing guitar in his band, “You’re going to get interviewed, and you’d better figure out who you are right now, because that’s who you’re going to be forever.” That was a fate Reed viewed as a kind of hell, all the worse because he had condemned himself to it with his excesses.
To his credit, Ferris rendered the scene in a completely understated way, allowing Reed’s jaw-dropping anecdotes to speak for themselves. And Reed suggested a more sensible reason for why he might have been so open with Ferris. “The critics think I’m that tape,” Reed explained. “That’s why I get such bad publicity. They assume I am what’s on a tape like that, which they find offensive. It’s not me, though I don’t find anything wrong with it at all. If only they knew that not only am I such a worthless churl as to write songs about these things, but on top of that, I stole it all. Stole it from the people.”
It’s possible to believe that for Reed, such encounters, at least in part, constituted a kind of research, his questioning of the hustler and fascination with the answers an aural version of his voyeurism. But the scatological nature of his interests—he eagerly grilled his visitor with questions about Arman’s habits—attests to his extreme state of mind. A young artist and enthusiastic Lou Reed fan named Duncan Hannah, who hung out in the back room at Max’s and was introduced to Reed by Danny Fields, reported that Reed’s approach to him consisted of this invitation: “Well, look, why don’t you come back to my hotel with me?… And you can shit in my mouth.” When the young man demurred, Reed asked, “Does that, does that repulse you?” Assured that it did repulse him, Reed offered a compromise: “Well, I’ll put a—I’ll put a plate over my face, then you can shit on the plate. How’d you like that?” That didn’t work either. Hannah was gobsmacked. “I was really depressed because I’d imagined something really different,” he said. “It wasn’t like it was in the books: ‘God, I met my hero and we were talking about Raymond Chandler!’ Instead, it was, ‘Can I shit in your mouth?’”
Reed’s question—“Does that repulse you?”—suggests that the shock factor of his seduction was as much the point as getting Hannah to agree to his request. That certainly is the impression one would get from Jonny Podell, the high-flying New York booking agent who managed Reed for a year when his relationship with Rachel was in high gear. Asked about Reed’s relationship with Rachel, Podell replied, “You want me to tell you my real feelings? I almost feel bad saying this, but I mean it with real love. I think Lou was a total act.… Look, we all present a certain way, and for me, he was Lou from Long Island seeing how far he could rebel against Daddy the accountant. I thought he became a drug addict because it was cool and rebellious. I thought he wanted to be with a guy—or a guy-girl—because it was shock and awe. Lou’s feelings about music were real, but the rest was shock and awe.” Even Reed’s friend the Rolling Stone writer Ed McCormack, referring to the shock treatments to which Reed’s parents had subjected him, speculated that “one had to wonder if his very public relationship with Rachel was yet another way of letting Mom and Dad know that they had not ‘cured’ a fucking thing.” Reed himself would later observe that “I always thought one way kids had of getting back at their parents was to do this gender business. It was only kids trying to be outrageous.”
Mick Rock, who spent a lot of time with Reed and Rachel and took the best-known—and best—photographs of them together, had a different take. “I never regard other people’s relationships as being my business.… But to be quite honest with you, Lou was so high a lot of the time, I don’t even know what he would have been capable of.” To Michael Fonfara, Reed suggested otherwise. “We used to have this joke going,” Fonfara recalled. “Lou would say, ‘Michael, you don’t know what it’s like until you’ve been with a guy.’ And I’d say, ‘No, Lou, you’ve got it backwards. You don’t know what it’s like until you’ve been with a proper woman.’ We had this argument going for a couple of years. I never put Rachel down. Rachel and I were good friends. But Rachel had an extra life in addition to the one she lived with Lou. And that was the drag-queen-on-the-street life.”
Fonfara also touched on the persistent rumor of street violence that surrounded Rachel. Reed, he said, “knew how tough she was. He knew how good she was with a knife. She was pretty swift.” Clearly, Rachel, along with the B and E expert to whom Reed introduced Mick Rock, was part of the world of criminality that fascinated Reed. It wa
s even rumored that Rachel had killed a man in prison. Writer and artist Richard Sassin recalled a jealous and “very stoned” Rachel drawing a switchblade on a female friend of his backstage at the Bottom Line, warning her, “Don’t ever look at Lou like that again!” The friend lived in the same Upper East Side building as Lou and Rachel, and Sassin described often seeing Rachel sleeping in the lobby all night, “beat up and locked out of their apartment. I never saw Lou hit Rachel. She would be curled up as much as she could on the small lobby couch with black eyes or a swollen face. I asked if she was okay once, and she told me to fuck off, so we just ignored her after that.”
An entry in Andy Warhol’s diary for Sunday, December 19, 1976, provides another glimpse into the rougher life that Rachel may have been leading. “Lou Reed called and that was the drama of the day,” Warhol wrote. “He’d come back from a successful tour, he was a big hit in L.A., but he said Rachel had gotten kicked in the balls and was bleeding from the mouth and he wanted the name of a doctor. Lou’s doctor had looked at Rachel and said that it was nothing, that it would stop, but Lou wanted another doctor to check. I said I’d get Bianca [Jagger]’s. But then Lou called back and said he got Keith Richards’s doctor to come over. I told him he should take her to the hospital. I was calling Rachel ‘she’ because she’s always in drag but then Lou calls him ‘he.’”
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