Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  For his part, Davis understood Reed’s reluctance. “If I were a painter and I unveiled my painting to a gallery owner and he said, ‘If you put more blue in it, I could do better with it.…’ I mean, I’ve just created my work. It is what it is. I have a feeling that’s what Lou felt. But there is that borderline case where you don’t feel you’re compromising somebody’s art by asking them to do what they need to do to attain the commercial success they keep telling you they want. So it was frustrating. I have the greatest respect for Lou. But the simple fact is that we needed more ammunition, a song that could go to radio, if he was going to break through.”

  Despite all his resistance, the accessibility of the songs on Rock and Roll Heart, which led one wag to dub the album “Lou Reed lite,” suggests that he actually was willing to nuzzle a bit closer to the mainstream. While explaining to a pair of journalists “the merits of amphetamines over liquor”—though Reed was consuming plenty of both—he described Rock and Roll Heart as “very danceable, the kind of thing that, if you were sitting in a bar and either wanted to punch somebody or fuck, you’d probably play it on the jukebox.”

  The album’s edgiest moment comes on its closing track, “Temporary Thing,” a grippingly dramatic confrontation between lovers that Reed acts out as if it were a play. The singer’s bitter condescension and angry insistence that the relationship is “just a temporary thing” suggest, conversely, that he’s much more deeply invested than he is letting on, or maybe more than he even understands. The effect is powerful and unsettling. The track suggests, as John Rockwell noted in the New York Times, that by this point in the album, “Mr. Reed had paid his debts to Mr. Davis or his own commercial demons and felt that he could finally do his thing.” Reed, Rockwell correctly noted, “has always been torn between a desire for artsiness and outrage on the one hand and commercial success on the other, but his records have tended to fall into just one of those categories.”

  Rock and Roll Heart appeared in the fall of 1976 and made a respectable showing, but as usual, and despite Reed’s move to Arista, it did not prove to be the commercial breakthrough that part of Reed—and all of Clive Davis—had hoped for.

  13

  FUCKING FAGGOT JUNKIE

  REED’S RECORD SALES MAY have plateaued in the midseventies, but because of the success of the live Rock n Roll Animal album and the reputation he had earned for outrageousness, he became a significant attraction on the road. He did well in the United States, typically playing in theater-size halls, but in Europe he could fill much larger venues, often playing outdoor shows to tens of thousands of fans. Tours on that scale need to be run with military precision, but Reed’s drug use and general irritability typically made those tours as chaotic as the rest of his life. Admittedly, the infrastructure was not yet in place to smooth the bumps of life on the road, and for someone with Reed’s temperament, suspicion of journalists, and increasing need for sonic perfection, it was a hard go—for him and, consequently, everyone around him. “There weren’t sound systems,” Reed said of that period. “It was like the Wild West out there. The idea of being able to hear the lead singer was a whole new idea. It was like the Wright brothers and the airplane.”

  “Lou always had lots of issues on the road because he’d be surrounded by people,” Fonfara said. “When you’d look out the hotel room window, down in the parking lot there would be thirty or forty people, kids, mostly, all dressed exactly like Lou, staring up at the windows, waiting for a glimpse of him.” Reed could be rude even to the most expert, sophisticated, and supportive journalists, so when he would meet the gaggle of reporters randomly assigned to cover one of his press conferences, the results were not likely to be good. Reed became the master of the Dylan-style put-on and put-down. Like Dylan, he had decided that it was pointless to expend energy determining if a question was smart, witless, well intended, or hostile. Everyone received the same dismissive treatment, often to hilarious effect, as in the exchanges that took place at an airport press conference Reed submitted to in Sydney, Australia, in August of 1974. His hair blond and close-cropped, Reed was wearing sunglasses and sipping a pastel-colored drink as a roomful of reporters peppered him with questions:

  You said a little while ago that you sing mainly about drugs. Is that right?

  Sometimes.

  Why do you do this?

  Because I think the government is plotting against me.

  Were you searched by our customs men for drugs?

  Oh, no, because I don’t take any.

  No drugs at all?

  Uh-uh. I’m high on life.

  And yet you sing about them. Do you want people to take drugs themselves?

  Oh, yeah. I want them to take drugs.

  Why is this?

  Because it’s better than Monopoly.

  Why is your music so popular, Lou?

  I didn’t know it was popular.

  Do you think it’s a decadent society we’re living in?

  No.

  Would you describe yourself as a decadent person?

  No.

  How would you describe yourself?

  Average.

  You’re a man of few words. Why is this?

  I don’t have anything to say.

  Do you like press interviews in general?

  No.

  You shun publicity?

  No.

  What message is it that you’re trying to get across?

  I don’t have one.

  Would it be right to call your music gutter rock?

  Gutter rock?

  Gutter rock.

  Oh, yeah.

  Where do you spend your money?

  On drugs.

  For other people.

  Right.

  Who writes these things about you if they’re not true?

  Journalists.

  [Laughter] Is that perhaps why you don’t like journalists?

  Oh, I love journalists.

  Reed delivered his responses in the affectless style perfected by Andy Warhol in his own interviews. Reed had learned well from the master: his music, attitude, and look encouraged questions about decadence, shock, and outrage—“gutter rock,” indeed—but rather than credit those questions by addressing them, Reed employed the Warholian strategy of admitting to being exactly whatever his interrogators believed him to be (“Oh, yeah. I want [people] to take drugs”), all in a tone that suggested it was the most natural thing in the world. At the same time, Reed rejected the charge of being decadent and, once again borrowing from the Warhol playbook, described himself as “average.” The reporters at the press conference grew increasingly irritated and attempted to bait him, accusing him of, among other things, hypocrisy. One asked if his “antisocial behavior”—that is, his refusal to cooperate with them—was just part of a “show business gimmick,” just an expression of his being in the “entertainment game,” a phrase Reed repeated with some amusement. But he never bit back. As with the questions about “gutter rock” and whether or not he wanted people to take drugs, Reed seemed on the verge of laughter, but never broke the numbed serenity of his character.

  On the tour in support of Sally Can’t Dance, Reed began the onstage ritual of pretending to shoot drugs. It became a staple of his shows—another example of the self-conscious, shock-the-bourgeoisie, titillate-the-suburban-masses ethos that his critics despised in him. “In the middle of that tour, Lou decided that he didn’t want to be James Brown anymore—he was going to go back to being Lou Reed,” Fonfara said. “So he’d tie himself off with the microphone cord and then pretend to shoot speed onstage. Because of his song ‘Heroin,’ he knew he was fooling the audience. Most people who didn’t know any better—and that’s ninety percent of them—thought he was a heroin addict. But anyone who did know knew he was a speed freak.”

  Reed, of course, was playing a character in these performances, regardless of his actual preference in drugs to inject. The Velvets’ “White Light/White Heat” made his fondness for speed palpable, bu
t he would enact his shooting-up ritual during “Heroin,” a far more dramatic setting for his mock needle play. For addicts, organizing their drug gear—their “works,” as the slang term has it—as they prepare to shoot up has a ritualistic, even sacred, element. Reed fully understood the power of taking that private, intensely intimate act public in a concert setting. The vast majority of his audience, needless to say, was entirely unaware of anything remotely that high-minded in his actions. Fonfara was correct in stating that Reed was becoming “Lou Reed” again, or at least the version of Lou Reed that the audience expected to see. To that extent, he was playing to the cheap seats, going for the obvious effect.

  Not to say that such gestures couldn’t have a significant impact. Suzanne Vega first saw Reed, whom she had barely paid attention to previously, perform at Columbia University in 1979, when she was taken to the show on a date. “Lou was smashing things, lighting cigarettes, and throwing them at the audience and pretending to shoot up, tying up his arm and all that,” she recalled. “He played ‘Caroline Says II,’ and that verse is so clear, it’s like a play: ‘Caroline says / As she gets up from the floor / You can hit me all you want to / But I don’t love you anymore.’ That’s so brilliant. That’s the whole story right there. I was like, I didn’t even know you were allowed to say things like that on a stage. It just had never occurred to me. I came away from that night thinking, wow, he really tells the truth about things. After that, whenever he played in New York, I would go see him.” Vega’s epiphany is especially significant when one considers that “Luka,” her best-known song, would be about a victim of abuse.

  REED’S DRINKING AND DRUG use, of course, played a role in how well life on the road went for him and the band. “If he didn’t do too much, he’d be right on the money. He’d be great,” Fonfara said about Reed’s use of speed. “But if he did a little too much, he’d get nervous, he’d be cranky before we went on. Then once we got onstage, he’d be fine.”

  Of course, getting onstage presented its own set of challenges. “We’d be staying in a hotel, and Lou would call me in the morning and say, ‘Meet me down in the courtyard,’” Fonfara said. “So I’d go down, and there would be these white-jacketed waiters with big jeroboams of Dom Perignon and a guy squeezing fresh orange juice, and we’d drink mimosas until we could hardly walk. Then he’d say, ‘Well, now we’ve got to go to the gig.’ I’d look at him walking across the floor, and I’d think, ‘I can’t even get up. How can he do it?’ But he could handle a lot of booze. Eventually, that’s what put his liver over, I think.”

  Reed’s taste in alcohol was not always so refined. Primarily, he was a Scotch drinker, and he preferred Johnnie Walker Red to anything more top-shelf. “Of course, when people found out he liked Scotch, they would present him with the high-end, single malt stuff,” Fonfara recalled. “He would look at me and say, ‘Here, you take this,’ and he’d hand me a beautiful bottle of Glenmorangie or some other brand worth twenty times what he was drinking. He’d say, ‘Fonf, you can have this wimpy stuff for people who don’t know about Scotch. Give me the good industrial stuff!’” And occasionally Reed wouldn’t make it to the stage. On August 5, 1975, he was scheduled to perform at the Wellington Town Hall in New Zealand, but the promoter, Ron Blackmore, abruptly canceled the show. Blackmore told the Evening Post that Reed had “a very, very personal problem that should never have damned well happened. It’s so personal and serious that I can’t even tell you about it off the record.” Reed made up the show the following night, but many of the more than two thousand fans who had bought tickets for the previous night failed to show up.

  The audiences, too, used the occasion of a Lou Reed show to act out their own excesses. Reed told his friend Eric Andersen that audiences “at Tom Jones’s shows would throw roses, panties, and hotel room keys. On my European tours, they’d throw loaded syringes onstage.”

  “For the most part, the audiences were terrific,” Fonfara said, and hearing tens of thousands of people screaming “Loooouuu” night after night was exhilarating. But if the band was extremely late or didn’t even show it was quite another story. And if Reed sensed a problem of any kind, he wouldn’t hesitate to cut the show short. That created its own problems. “That was one thing Lou was never afraid to do,” Fonfara said. “If he thought things weren’t going right, he’d snap his fingers and tell the roadies to get the band off the stage. So we had a number of riots, and it would take an awful lot of police to calm the people down.” It seemed as if every country eventually got its own Lou Reed story. “We did some gigs in Japan where all these black belts would be holding arms in front of the stage,” Fonfara said. “I had my elbow shattered once by a group of kids who leaped on me. In Europe, they would throw bottles and shoot fireworks like Roman candles at the stage. We were playing in Glasgow once and I got knocked out cold by a quart bottle of wine.”

  Perhaps the most extreme event occurred in Portugal. According to Fonfara, the band was “supposed to play in this huge Christians-and-lions-type stadium. As we were getting close in our limos, Lou could see people were scaling the walls and climbing on each other’s shoulders to get in for free. He flipped and decided that the band wasn’t going to go on, so we drove away. They rioted so bad we couldn’t get out of town. The streets were filled with gangs of thugs looking for Lou and the band.

  “So the audiences loved Lou as long as he’d go on. But it was like Sly and the Family Stone back in their day. They had all these great fans, but when they didn’t actually turn up for the show, the crowd would turn ugly.”

  Things could turn ugly on the streets as well, given Reed’s look and propensities. Fonfara believed that Reed’s interest in martial arts had its origins in one edgy night in Sweden. “We were walking down the street in Stockholm, and Lou was dressed especially poufy—earrings, face painted, everything. A couple of Russian sailors started to push him around. So I took them out. After that, Lou followed me like a puppy, begging me to teach him how to do that. I’d been in martial arts maybe ten, twelve years—I did three kinds of karate, two kinds of kung fu, and I was a kickboxer. Lou was quite impressed. I didn’t even have a scrape on my knuckles. I used my feet. Anyway, they were down, and I took Lou back to the hotel. He was just, ‘You’ve got to show me how to do that.’ So when we got back to New York, I got him into a martial arts club, and we started working out. He became fanatic—Lou was fanatical about everything. We’d work out for a couple of hours, and I’d be ready to leave, and he’d say, ‘I want to go another two hours.’ He got pretty good at it and started getting himself into shape, but he’d have constant relapses into speed and booze.”

  Reed continued to experiment onstage, most notably with his tour in 1976 in support of Rock and Roll Heart. For those shows, he performed in front of a phalanx of television monitors, many of which he had found on the street with the help of Mick Rock and guitarist Jeffrey Ross. Obviously, it was an idea well ahead of its time—an introduction of randomness into his stage presentation—as well as a smart nod back to Warhol and his fascination with media. As Warhol and Paul Morrissey had during the Exploding Plastic Inevitable events, Reed had Mick Rock feed imagery from backstage into the monitors, providing a meta aspect to his shows. Bathing himself in a flood of images somehow rendered his music that much more unsettling.

  Reviewing one of the New York shows at the Palladium, John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times that “the mood was only enhanced by forty-eight black-and-white television monitors that half surrounded him on the rear in three squat banks of sixteen each. In quaint moments, most of the sets glowed blankly, and a few picked up real programs; during the music, they all pulsed together in abstract patterns.” Rockwell also described the emotional impact of Reed’s singing, which is easy to frame as minimalist without understanding the power that his small gestures unleashed. “Mr. Reed’s singing remains about the most dramatic instance of a voice that fails by most ordinary standards of musicianship and yet functions superbly as a communicati
ve instrument,” he wrote. “His ability to skirt the notes consistently is an act of near genius, and tone quality is almost an irrelevant category. Yet the very instability of pitch lends an ominous undercurrent to the sound, and the phrasing, with its quick bursts of anger seemingly unrelated to the text, is as chilling as ever.”

  Still, Rockwell concluded that the show was a disappointment. Backed by a band that consisted of saxophone, keyboards, bass, and drums, Reed apparently did not play guitar until the very end of the show. While Rockwell complimented the band’s technical skills (“as fluent an ensemble as Mr. Reed has had”), he took issue with the music as a “rather faceless, jazzish idiom” that lacked “a true rock aura.” It’s telling that as punk was beginning to strip rock down to its absolute basics, Reed began to reexplore his youthful fascination with jazz and toured with the most elaborate staging of his career—yet another example of his refusal to allow external forces of any sort to dictate his direction. But if you’re insistent on not following trends, are you really immune to them? Are your choices then as much a function of trends as if you’d blindly followed them? Reed’s musical progression would raise those questions time and time again. Nonetheless, jazz continued to move in and out of his music through the end of the seventies—an era in which “jazz-rock” entered the musical lexicon as fully as punk did.