Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  For all that turmoil, in some ways, Reed and Rachel’s life together followed a conventional domestic script. The couple had a pair of miniature dachshunds, the Count and the Duke. Reed doted on the dogs, and Fonfara, a neighbor when Reed and Rachel moved to Greenwich Village, would occasionally walk them when Reed was busy. Mick Rock accompanied Reed when he went to purchase one of the dogs and photographed him. “I have these pictures of Lou holding this puppy, and he’s so gentle with him,” Rock recalled. “I often used to threaten him: ‘I’m going to publish those pictures and ruin your image!’” On the home front, Rachel, Fonfara remarked, “couldn’t cook. She tried desperately, but she’d make a mess and burn everything. But Lou insisted on letting her try to be the hostess. And when she dressed up, she looked like Sophia Loren.”

  Indeed, Rachel’s charm and elegance were much noticed. Susan Blond, a prominent New York publicist and Warhol acolyte, recalled meeting Reed and Rachel while on vacation in the Caribbean. “I was walking along the shore with my husband at the time,” she said, “and I saw a figure in the distance and thought, ‘That’s just the most elegant person on this whole beach.’ When I looked closer, I realized this elegant woman was Rachel. Lou was with her—the two of them were there, just like we were, having a romantic trip on an island. She was wearing, like, a short, see-through cover-up, like something you’d see on a Greek statue. Maybe off one shoulder, and short enough that you could see her legs. She just looked great.”

  For the one tempestuous year that he and Reed worked together, Jonny Podell adored Rachel, whom, he said, Reed would occasionally refer to as Richard. (Richard Humphries was Rachel’s birth name.) Podell’s managerial relationship with Reed was far more complicated, in part because he was as enthusiastic a drug user as Reed was; singer-songwriter Elliott Murphy described their relationship as “a marriage made in the emergency room.” For Podell, Rachel was much easier to handle. “I totally dug Rachel,” Podell said. “She was charming and lovable—not like Lou, who was very subject to mood swings. She would come bounding into my office and say, ‘Hi, Jonny, I want to show you my new pumps!’ I’d always raise my arms and say, ‘Stop right there. Before you even come in, just let me know: are you Rachel or Richard today? I just want to get my dialogue straight.’ And she’d laugh.”

  Podell’s wife, Monica, was a prominent model at the time, and the couple was much in demand on the hip New York social scene as a result of her beauty, Podell’s flamboyance, and his client list, which included, along with Reed, George Harrison, Alice Cooper, the Allman Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “We were the hot couple in town, but Lou hated Monica,” Podell said. “Lou hated women. And Monica didn’t love Lou. I took coke. Lou took speed. I don’t know what the fuck Rachel took. One night we were going on a double date to a bar called Willy’s on Third Avenue and Eighty-Third Street. So I say to Lou, ‘Monica’s coming tonight. I don’t care how you feel about her. She’s the most popular girl in New York, and I would love it if you loved her, but whatever. You’re my client; she’s my wife. Monica gets respect. This should be fun, not a fucking world war.’”

  “Then I go to Monica,” he continued, “‘Listen, this guy is my client. I know he’s rude. I know he hates women. I know he’s a speed freak. They can’t all love you like Alice Cooper loves you or Graham Nash loves you. He don’t like you.’ So we’re at Willy’s, and within minutes Lou says something about Monica having no tits. So Monica goes right into, ‘I have little tits? At least my nipples are bigger than the pimple on your nose that you get from shooting speed, you junkie!’ And she runs out of the restaurant. I go to Lou, ‘You run after her, or I’ll kill you!’ Now it’s like a scene out of the Beatles’ Help! There’s Monica running. There’s Lou running. Behind Lou was Rachel, and behind them all was me. Hysterical. I mean, can you imagine? The drugs ruled everything.”

  Podell recalled another chaotic moment with Reed. “I was hosting a party at my apartment one night, and Dickey Betts was coming,” Podell said, referring to the guitarist best known for his work with the Allman Brothers. “Dickey was a redneck—powerfully built, strong, an angry alcoholic. He hates everything about the likes of Andy Warhol and Lou Reed—‘a bunch of fags,’ you know what I mean? He’s a macho motherfucker. And Lou’s coming to the party, too. So, again, I tell everybody, ‘Dickey, listen, Lou Reed’s going to be here. You don’t have to like him, but you do have to respect my home.’ And then, ‘Lou, Dickey Betts will be here. His money is funding our operation. Just be polite. You don’t have to like him, but when I introduce you to him, be on your best behavior.’ I don’t remember the details, but in the first five minutes they got into a fistfight. I think Dickey punched him in the face and then left. But that was Lou. I mean, ‘Just say hello to Dickey Betts and go in the other room.’ But it was like, when your parents tell you no, what do you do? Yes.”

  Others’ memories of Rachel do not depict her as vivacious and outgoing as Podell’s do, but as a quiet, almost passive presence in Reed’s life. Writer Ed McCormack recalled waking up on a black leather couch in Reed’s East Side apartment after blacking out the night before. When he awoke, Rachel was watching over him in a living room distinguished by “an elegant glass coffee table, on top of which was a very strange still life: a bottle of prescription pills, a circular silver dish with twelve disposable hypodermic needles neatly arranged along its edges in a sort of speed-freakishly compulsive sunbeam pattern, and a row of test tubes filled with water, little white pills dissolving in milky bubbles within each one.” Rachel, wearing a blue silk kimono, was on the phone, speaking in a male voice and leaving a message for her sister. McCormack described her as reminding him “of Cher, only prettier… with large dark eyes, curtained between sheets of shiny black hair.” Rachel asked how he was feeling, and then explained that she and Reed had brought him back to the apartment “to sleep it off” because “You were really out of it. Lou was worried that you were so out of it you might not know what you were doing.… He doesn’t like to see his friends getting into trouble.” When Rachel turned around to walk McCormack to the door, he swiped a prescription bottle of Desoxyn off the coffee table.

  Charlie Messing, a guitarist with Peter Stampfel’s Unholy Modal Rounders, got a brief glimpse into Reed’s domestic life one night after he and Stampfel ran into Reed at a reading by a poet and painter named Camille O’Grady, a mutual friend who had an “S and M following.” (O’Grady would later open for Reed at the Bottom Line.) After the reading, Reed hung around, sitting on the floor of the loft with a crowd of about a dozen people, including a “chubby black leather/black guy” who “was offering his ass to Lou, extolling its virtues. Lou was not taking him seriously.” Stampfel approached Reed, who explained that he was conducting a study on the “long-range effects of speed” and wanted to solicit Stampfel’s views on the subject. So he invited Messing and Stampfel to his apartment on East Fifty-Second Street.

  When they arrived, Reed wasn’t there, but Rachel invited them in to wait for him. “I honestly could not tell if Rachel was a man or a woman,” Messing said. “Low voice, long hair, long fingernails, certain way of walking and sitting.… Rachel was a lot like a woman. And yet… Anyway, he/she was gracious but carefully noncommittal, and so we sat and waited together.”

  The sparsely furnished apartment had a “spotless polished maple floor,” and the two men removed their shoes upon entering. It was the holiday season, and Reed and Rachel had set up a tall Christmas tree. Otherwise, the apartment was filled with up-to-the-minute electronics equipment (including then-new digital clocks, a video camera, and a VCR) provided to Reed by his label at the time, RCA Records. Messing noticed that there were two rows of hardcover books along the windowsill, “all related to Warhol or the Beats.” Also resting on the windowsill was a “huge Physicians’ Desk Reference… the bible for pillheads. It had a photo of, and told the effects of, every pill in existence.” Near the stereo was a row of vinyl records; the front one was Aerosmith’s 1975 albu
m Toys in the Attic, which had come out earlier that year. Messing asked Rachel for something to drink, and she invited him to look in the refrigerator to see what was there. “So I shuffled into their totally clean kitchen and opened the fridge,” Messing said. “Sparkling clean inside, too. And the only contents were a package of bacon, a quart of milk, and an almost empty quart of Tropicana.” On his trip back from the kitchen, Messing peeked into the apartment’s master bedroom: “Absolutely bare except for yet another digital clock.”

  When Reed arrived home with grocery bags, he pulled out a rawhide toy for one of the small dogs he and Rachel kept in the apartment. He baby-talked with the dog, who went wild greeting him and then chased his new toy around the floor. Reed had also purchased a new pair of aviator sunglasses, which he took out and tried on. He then tossed the pair he had been wearing into a wastebasket.

  Ever the gracious host, Reed first chided Stampfel and Messing for not phoning ahead; he didn’t have time now for the discussion of speed and its effects. Then he relaxed and sat with the two men on a large futon in the living room. He played them test pressings of Coney Island Baby, which would come out a month later, in January of 1976. After Stampfel left, Messing hung around until some of Reed’s other friends arrived, and everyone decided to go to dinner at the Carnegie Deli. Messing didn’t have enough money to cover his meal. On his way out, like Ed McCormack with Reed’s bottle of Desoxyn, he swiped the pair of sunglasses that Reed had thrown in the trash. Decades later, he would sell them on eBay, after “a fierce bidding war,” for $250.

  The complex nature of Reed and Rachel’s relationship—who is taking care of whom?—played out in public as well. On Thanksgiving Day in 1976, Reed had lunch with Rachel and a British journalist at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel after a show the night before at the Santa Monica Civic Center. Rachel was sick with an “infected lung,” and Reed asked the journalist to feel Rachel’s head to see if she was running a fever. “How is it that I’m the voice of reason?” Reed asked Rachel. “I’m running after you. It really seems that way. It’s me who tells you to put your coat on, and it’s you who should be looking after me. We’ll end up this tour hating each other!” Rachel replied, “No we won’t.” The journalist noticed that despite Rachel’s illness, she “left the table several times to check that all [was] well at the theater, organized the car to take Lou to the gig, worried whether Lou’s two traveling companions—his miniature dachshunds, the Count and the Duke—[were] behaving themselves in the hotel bedroom… and made several calls to New York—acted, in fact, the perfect aide-de-camp.”

  Jeffrey Ross, who played guitar in Reed’s band when he was in his early twenties, described himself as having been “adopted” by Reed and Rachel. “As soon as you met Rachel/Richard—whatever—you were struck by a couple of things,” he said. “One was vulnerability. Another was this almost maternal concern for Lou. I know a lot of rock stars and girls, a lot of people who were famous, and you watch the way their partners behaved, as if somehow this is their fame, this is their success. Rachel wasn’t like that. Rachel was Lou’s partner. Rachel really cared for Lou. By ‘vulnerability,’ it was a sense I had that she could be hurt easily, that she was eager and excited about everything that went on around Lou in a let’s-make-this-better kind of way. Not like, ‘I can be famous through this,’ but a pride in Lou and concern for him. She was like nonstop energy and enthusiasm, coupled with making sure that Lou’s comfort zone was never disturbed.”

  In all these stories, Rachel conducted herself in the traditional way that Reed liked his partners to comport themselves in public. She was quiet and deferential, “gracious and carefully noncommittal”—very stereotypically wifely, in fact. She did not draw attention away from him, but did whatever she could to make his life easier. She essentially disappeared when he came on the scene, and worked to his benefit in the background. But however well Rachel presented in these situations, Reed had evidently found in her someone whose secret life rivaled or perhaps even exceeded his own—which likely only drove his level of interest in her higher. Reed may have, in part, been joking about having to look after Rachel, but to the degree that he did have to, it was likely both a source of attraction and a problem—the bottom line was, “It’s you who should be looking after me.” If Reed and Jonny Podell had a marriage made in the emergency room, Reed and Rachel had one that drew its power from the vivid inner realms of their psychological lives—and, regardless of everything else, their profound affection for each other.

  AFTER CONEY ISLAND BABY was released and failed to alter Reed’s commercial fortunes in any appreciable way, he pondered his options. He was shopping a manuscript of poems and making noises about possibly working with John Cale again. But despite his debt to RCA, the managerial lawsuits plaguing him, and his perennial substance abuse, Reed’s cultural standing was as high as it had ever been, thanks in part to the punk movement burgeoning around the Lower East Side of Manhattan, most notably centered on the club CBGB, on the Bowery where it intersects with Bleecker Street. Aware that he was the movement’s spiritual godfather, Reed kept a close eye on it, often going to hear new bands and following their development, both artistically and commercially. These bands may have been his artistic inheritors, but he nonetheless felt competitive with them. It was fine to be seen as an important influence, but he did not want to be shoved to the sidelines by a new generation of rebels. By his own reckoning, he had not yet achieved what he deserved commercially—far from it. In fact, he was at a financial low point, finally living at the Gramercy Park Hotel with Rachel, with RCA picking up the tab.

  At around this time, Clive Davis invited Reed to join him and Arista A&R man Bob Feiden at Feiden’s modest beach house on Long Island. “We’ll listen to music, we’ll relax,” Davis told him. “It’s totally isolated. It will really be fun.”

  “Clive,” Reed responded, “you don’t understand. If I ever get a tan, my career would be over.”

  It’s unclear who approached whom about Reed moving from RCA to Arista. Reed always claimed—and took palpable pride in asserting—that Davis contacted him. “There was just me and Rachel… living at the fucking Gramercy Park Hotel on fifteen dollars a day, while the lawyers were trying to figure out what to do with me,” he said. “Then I got a call from Clive Davis… and he said, ‘Hey, how ya doing? Haven’t seen you for a while.’ He knew how I was doing. He said, ‘Why don’t we have lunch?’ I felt like saying, ‘You mean you want to be seen with me in public?’ If Clive could be seen with me, I had turned the corner. I grabbed Rachel and said, ‘Do you know who just called?’ I knew then that I’d won.”

  Davis claimed that Reed got in touch with him, complaining about his financial situation at RCA and wanting to see if there might be a place for him at Arista. Davis, then in his midforties, had already become a music industry legend. He had founded Arista Records, and the label instantly became a success story. Notably, as the punk rock scene began to attract attention, Davis signed Patti Smith, whose incendiary debut album, Horses, came out in December of 1975 and became a sensation. That John Cale produced the album, that Smith was hailed as a poet as well as a rock star, and that the Patti Smith Group frequently performed Velvet Underground songs did not escape Reed’s attention. With his keen industry perception, Davis certainly understood the value of having both the hottest star on the punk scene and its most seminal influence on his label. That Davis and Reed were friends made the business relationship all the easier.

  In a sense, both Reed and Davis wanted the same thing. Their difficulties arose in determining how to get there. Davis was adventurous in his signings, but he never took on artists he did not believe could be commercially successful. He viewed the music industry as a business, and while he strongly supported the need for important songwriters to take left turns, he also believed that having hits was a significant part of what made those left turns credible, or even possible. “Lou doesn’t sell albums, but Clive believes in him,” an Arista publicist said, and t
hat was true. Overlooked in that statement is that what Davis believed in about Reed, rightly or wrongly, was his eventual ability to sell records. Certainly, he took Reed seriously as an artist and would never have attempted to force Reed to do something he didn’t want to do. Nor would he have been able to, according to Reed. “I didn’t make a record because I couldn’t have it my way,” Reed said, alluding to his days before the Arista deal. “But I got lucky and met Clive. And now I’ve got my way—top to bottom control all the way.”

  Jonny Podell, who became Reed’s manager at around this time, summed it up this way: “Lou had relevance. He wanted mass popularity.” Then he added a key phrase: “On his own terms.” Like so many artists who are not hit makers, Reed viewed his second-tier commercial status as the result of record companies that didn’t understand him and, for that reason, couldn’t promote and market him properly. Despite occasional moments of accepting his status as a cult artist, he would feel this way until his death.

  Reed’s and Davis’s expectations collided when Reed completed Rock and Roll Heart, his first Arista album. Knowing that Reed was hoping for greater commercial success, Davis suggested that the title track had radio potential and could do well if Reed was willing to do some additional work on it. “I felt it was a little sparse for radio,” Davis said. “So I said, ‘Can you sweeten it up a little? I really feel this could be a radio record with just a little tweaking.’”

  Reed allowed that Davis had “good ears,” but he was having none of it. “I’m a control person,” Reed said. “I fought so hard to get things to the point of having that control that I wouldn’t relinquish it.… I’m like a brick wall sometimes.” Davis established a solid rapport with Michael Fonfara, and over the years he would occasionally solicit Fonfara’s help in dealing with Reed. “Clive is a genius,” Fonfara said. “He would call me into his office once in a while and basically say, ‘Lou’s not listening to me. You’re his bandleader. Won’t he listen to you?’” No, he would not. “Every once in a while,” Fonfara recalled, “Lou would say, ‘Yes, I know you’re giving me the perfect commercial way to present my stuff. I don’t want it perfect. I want you to mess it up for me. If you can’t, I’ll mess it up myself.’ He used to demand wrong bass notes, ones that just don’t belong. He’d say, ‘I don’t care if it’s wrong. It’s there.’”