Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  Warhol was waked, in the Catholic tradition, at the Thomas P. Kunsak Funeral Home in his hometown of Pittsburgh, and after his funeral, which was attended by family members and a smattering of Factory stalwarts (no one was sure if nonfamily would be welcome), he was buried in St. John the Baptist Byzantine Cemetery in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, next to his mother and father. On April 1, however, a memorial service was held for Warhol at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, attended by two thousand people and avidly covered by the media. The guest list was vintage Warhol, including the likes of Raquel Welch, Claes Oldenburg, the prince and princess of Greece, Grace Jones, Tom Wolfe, Sophia Loren, Robert Mapplethorpe, Calvin Klein, Ric Ocasek, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and, of course, Lou Reed and John Cale. “This day was, in many ways, Andy’s masterpiece,” said photographer Christophe von Hohenberg, whose photographs outside the cathedral eventually became the book Andy Warhol: The Day the Factory Died. “He encapsulated pop, and this day celebrated that.… There was more laughter than crying that day. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Of course, the way he died was a tragedy. But I just mean that it was an Andy Warhol event. Inside the cathedral was more solemn, but outside was like a celebration. Andy would have loved that.”

  The Reverend Anthony Dalla Villa, the celebrant at St. Patrick’s, delivered a eulogy in which he described Warhol as “a simple, humble, modest person, a child of God who in his own life cherished others.” Yoko Ono spoke as well and expressed gratitude to Warhol for the kindness he had showed to Sean, her son with John Lennon, after Lennon was murdered. Clearly, despite his famed detachment, Warhol, the victim of an assassination attempt himself, would have understood the emotional impact of such a horrific event on a young boy. Indeed, art critic John Richardson, in his comments that day, addressed that very point, refuting the notion that Warhol was “cool to the point of callousness.” Warhol was “a recording angel,” Richardson said, and the “distance he established between the world and himself was above all a matter of innocence and of art.” Against the charge that Warhol had exploited the Factory’s vulnerable lost boys and girls and watched impassively as they spiraled downward, Richardson asserted that some Factory “hangers-on” were “hell-bent on destroying themselves.” Richardson put it simply: Warhol “was not cut out to be his brother’s keeper” because detachment “was his special gift.” That, no doubt, was true, even insightful, though in citing the Biblical question that led to the curse of Cain, Richardson was making an odd statement during a service devoted to a dead person in a cathedral.

  After the ceremony, which ran for an hour, four hundred guests gathered for a luncheon in the basement nightclub at the Paramount Century Hotel on West Forty-Sixth Street, a few blocks from St. Patrick’s. The hotel had recently been purchased by Ian Schrager, who had co-run Studio 54, one of Warhol’s favorite stops, and the club where the luncheon took place had been the site of Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, a forties hot spot that became the glamorous subject of a 1945 musical starring Betty Grable. Obviously, it was as perfect a choice for the final Warhol celebration as St. Patrick’s had been for his memorial. The music of the Velvet Underground provided the soundtrack for the Paramount event, and at one point, Reed remarked, “It’s hard to believe Andy’s not going to be around. I was hoping he’d turn up and say, ‘April Fool!’”

  Singer-songwriter Eric Andersen, who had been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the sixties and had starred in the 1965 Warhol film Space with Edie Sedgwick, came to the luncheon with the actress and Warhol superstar Viva. Andersen had seen the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and admired Reed as a writer, so he thought he might introduce himself. “I noticed Lou was just standing alone, so I walked over to him,” Andersen said. “He didn’t say ‘Hello’ or ‘Hi’ or anything. He just said, ‘Andy Warhol was the only person in the music business who didn’t try to fuck me or cheat me.’ That was his opening shot.”

  As guests ate, drank, and mingled, one of the subjects that kept coming up was the notion of a tribute to Warhol involving music. The artist Julian Schnabel brought up the subject with Cale. “He said, ‘Look, you got to do something for Andy,’” Cale recalled. “I replied it would be a bit tough to do anything now. ‘No, no, let’s you and me get together and write something.’ Then he said, ‘Let’s get Lou over here.’ I thought, what the hell is Julian doing?” The photographer Billy Name also drew Reed and Cale into a conversation together, helping to break the ice between them. The two men had not been in touch, at least in part, Cale believed, because he was still drinking and Lou had gotten sober, though he also pointed out that, in his relations with Reed, it was always “three steps forward, two steps back.”

  But once the idea of a Warhol tribute had been broached, it was only a few days before Cale contacted Reed, and “Lou and I started to discuss doing a collaboration.” Cale told Reed, “Look, I’ve got these few songs and I’m stuck with them. I thought maybe you’d be interested.” Things moved quickly from there. Reed may have been surprised to hear from Cale, but “I think he was more surprised how easy it was to get back into working than anything else—just as I was that things started off in one direction and rapidly grew in strength. The ideas were really good.”

  That was the start of Songs for Drella, Reed and Cale’s tribute (or, as Reed might put it, epitaph) to their departed friend. Drella, a conflation of “Cinderella” and “Dracula,” was a nickname coined years before by Ronnie Cutrone, an artist and Factory stalwart, to capture the contradictory halves of Warhol’s personality. From the outset, Reed and Cale had a specific idea in mind. “First of all, we wanted to see if anyone anywhere had done a rock album that teaches you something about the life of whomever, and there wasn’t any,” Reed said. “We thought what an amazing learning tool this would be.… I was thinking there must be an album to tell you about Malcolm X, for instance, or Martin Luther King… and then you can play it in school and make learning fun.… I think John had the idea, ‘Why don’t we do an album about Andy’s life that’s really positive?’ because we felt very positive towards Andy, to say the least, and there were all these terrible negative things. We thought it would be great to do the Andy we knew.”

  St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn Heights, which three years earlier had hosted the American premiere of Cale’s The Falklands Suite, teamed up with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and commissioned Reed and Cale to perform Songs for Drella. Reed described their work as “a hundred percent collaboration. John and I just rented out a small rehearsal studio for three weeks and locked ourselves in.”

  Though he and Warhol had not stayed in close touch, Cale had never experienced the deep ambivalence toward him that Reed had. “I don’t think Lou could have had a clue how I felt about Andy,” Cale said. “I had always felt emotionally close to Andy—always. And he always welcomed me whenever I showed up at the Factory.” The process of working on Songs for Drella brought some realizations to Cale about his own history. Reed had pushed Cale out of the Velvets at roughly the same time he got rid of Warhol as the group’s manager. Consequently, Cale was unaware of much that had gone on between Warhol and Reed. “There were a lot of things I didn’t know until we came to write Drella twenty years later about how Lou had treated Andy,” Cale recalled. For his part, Reed, speaking about the Factory at around the time of Warhol’s death, said, “I watched Andy. I watched Andy, watching everybody. You’ve got to understand. I was never part of it. I was not a great friend of Andy’s.”

  Reed’s and Cale’s differing perspectives on the past created an underlying tension in Songs for Drella. The presence of Cale, a partial witness to Reed’s rejection of Warhol (not to mention a person who had experienced a similar fate at Reed’s hands), made it impossible for Reed to simply flip the script and claim an undying devotion to Warhol, as he might otherwise have done. Instead, Reed was forced to grapple with the consequences of his own behavior, and that is the most gripping aspect of Songs for Drella. Nor was that process
a one-way street. The Andy Warhol Diaries were published in May of 1989, two years after his death and four months after Reed and Cale first performed Songs for Drella at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights. The diary’s passages about Reed expressed precisely the passive-aggressive ambivalence that Reed felt about Warhol.

  After seeing Reed at the Bottom Line in March of 1978, Warhol described himself as “proud of him. For once, finally he’s himself, he’s not copying anybody. Finally he’s got his own style. Now everything he does works, he dances better. Because when John Cale and Lou were the Velvets, they really had a style, but when Lou went solo he got bad and was copying people like Mick Jagger.” Warhol’s visit to Reed’s rent-controlled Christopher Street apartment (six rooms, $485 per month) later that year prompted this reflection: “And oh, Lou’s life is everything I want my life to be. I mean, every room has every electronic gadget in it—a big big big big TV, a phone answerer that you hear when the phone rings, tapes, TVs, Betamaxes, and he’s so sweet and so funny at the same time, so together, it’s just incredible. And his house is very neat. He had a maid come in… well, I guess it does smell a little of dog shit, but…” At a dinner celebrating Warhol’s fiftieth birthday in August of 1978, Reed gave him “a great present, a one-inch TV, and he was so adorable, so sober.”

  In 1981, after reading an article about Reed in People, Warhol wondered why he hadn’t been invited to Reed’s wedding to Sylvia Morales the previous year. “They had a big reception and everything,” he wrote. The next month, he saw Lou and his new bride on the street in Greenwich Village. “She’s nothing special,” Warhol wrote of Sylvia, “just a little sexy girl. I told him that I’d just been reading about him in People and I asked him why he doesn’t come over and see us, and he said it’s because he doesn’t know any of the people anymore, and then he asked if Ronnie was still around, and I said yes, and then if Vincent was still around, and I said yes, and if PH was still around, and I said yes, so it was funny.” Warhol ran into Reed at a party for Ronnie Cutrone and described him as looking “so glum, so peculiar. His wife looks more Puerto Rican every time I see her. I don’t know if Lou is big or not. Rolling Stone gave his album [Legendary Hearts] four stars, but was it a hit? Ronnie said Lou’s in AA so I guess he’s not drinking. But Sam the next night was telling me that he saw Lou at the Ninth Circle drinking, but maybe he was just there picking up boys. But then he lived in that neighborhood, anyway, so maybe he was just hanging out. Ronnie says that when he goes to visit Lou in the country that he’s always just bought another motorcycle and another piece of land.”

  Warhol sat in the same row as Reed at the MTV awards in 1984 but reported that Reed “never even looked over. I don’t understand Lou, why he doesn’t talk to me now.” The following year, Warhol complained, “I just don’t understand why I have never gotten a penny from that first Velvet Underground record. That record really sells and I was the producer! Shouldn’t I get something? I mean, shouldn’t I? And what I can’t figure out is when Lou stopped liking me. I mean, he even went out and got himself two dachshunds like I had and then after that he started not liking me, but I don’t know exactly why or when. Maybe it was when he married this last wife, maybe he decided that he didn’t want to see peculiar people. I’m surprised he hasn’t had kids, you know?” Finally, in September of 1986: “I hate Lou Reed more and more, I really do, because he’s not giving us any video work.”

  No question, Warhol was equally catty—or worse—about many people in his diaries, but his comments got under Reed’s skin. Just as he had begun to revise his hostile feelings toward Warhol, Warhol’s own anger toward Reed had come into public view. In a musical response, Reed and Cale wrote “A Dream,” a haunting recitation by Cale of many of the passages from Warhol’s diaries about him and Reed. The words about Cale are positive (“He’s been looking really great / He’s been coming by the office to exercise with me”), while his comments about Reed (“You know I hate Lou”) are often stinging. The “hate” line was particularly important to Reed. “When John was doing the reading,” he said, “I kept telling him that when we get to that line, ‘I hate Lou,’ you gotta say it like a kid. It’s like the way a little kid would say it.” The swirling, hallucinogenic roar that Reed and Cale, on guitar and keyboards, respectively, conjure to accompany those words gives the song a surreal atmosphere.

  Perhaps the two incidents that haunted Reed the most were when Warhol called him a “rat” (“The worst thing he could think of to call me”) when Reed fired him as the Velvets’ manager, and the time years later when Warhol asked him why he hadn’t phoned or visited the hospital after he was shot. “‘Why didn’t you visit me? Where were you?’” Reed remembered Warhol asking. “Which was something that’s bothered me over the years. But he said it more than once.”

  According to Reed, the song “A Dream” was “John’s idea. He had said, ‘Why don’t we do a short story like “The Gift”?’ But then he went away to Europe. He goes off to Europe saying, ‘Hey Lou, go write a short story.’ But I thought, no, not a short story; let’s make it a dream. That way, we can have Andy do anything we want. Time and dimension and reality won’t matter. Let me tell you, man, it was really hard to do. But once I got into Andy’s tone of voice, I was able to write for a long time that way.” In “Hello It’s Me,” which concludes Songs for Drella, Reed addresses Warhol directly, speaking in his own voice. He admits his remorse (“I’m sorry that I doubted your good heart”), acknowledges his sense of loss (“I really miss you”), but finally, characteristically, can’t entirely relinquish his own sense of injury: “But I have some resentments that can never be unmade / You hit me where it hurt, I didn’t laugh / Your diaries are not a worthy epitaph.”

  The implication of that last line is that Songs for Drella would provide the epitaph that Warhol deserved. “It’s emotionally honest, which is something I’ve tried to be on all my records,” Reed said. “I mean, if there’s a thing that is negative toward me, I don’t take it out. If it works in the context of the project and if it’s true in the context of the project, I leave it in.” Cale explained, “Lou comes to terms with himself in songs. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s most satisfied when he’s written a song ’cause it’s worked out all these tensions that are in his head.… It’s like somebody discovering their identity.”

  Reed gave Songs for Drella the subtitle A Fiction precisely to grant himself some emotional and thematic leeway in writing the lyrics, “so that if I decided to take poetic license with certain facts—like, did it happen on Eighty-First Street or was it actually Seventy-Third Street?—I wouldn’t have to be called into account for it.”

  Having the character of Warhol speak in his own voice from his own perspective in the song successfully humanizes him, but significantly, Reed and Cale also had him address the issue that John Richardson had raised in his eulogy: the notion that Warhol was somehow morally responsible for the self-destructive actions of so many of the Factory regulars, most notably Edie Sedgwick, who died at twenty-eight of an accidental drug overdose in 1971. When Edie: An American Biography, a gripping oral history of Sedgwick’s life by Jean Stein and edited with George Plimpton, appeared in 1982, it was a massive best seller and became a central text in the indictment of Warhol as a callous manipulator. In “It Wasn’t Me,” which Reed sings, the character of Warhol responds to such charges. “The problems you had were there before you met me,” Reed sings. “I know she’s dead, it wasn’t me.” The song is powerfully emotional, with Reed playing a stately theme on guitar and Cale providing texture in a variety of keyboard voicings, including church organ. No doubt those particular attacks on Warhol resonated deeply with Reed, who endured similar charges for his morally neutral depictions of drug use in his music, particularly in “Heroin.” Speaking about “It Wasn’t Me,” Reed said, “You’d have to be in Andy’s shoes before casting the first stone.… What was he supposed to do? Have a little counseling session for thirty people? I mean, like, everybody was free, white,
and twenty-one. If they had been looking for counseling, they wouldn’t have been there, right? Anyway, he did make suggestions. Suppose I say to you, ‘Oh, don’t do that. That’s really bad,’ and you don’t listen to me. Have I fulfilled my obligation? Well, he did that a lot. I don’t think it’s fair to put such a burden on him.”

  Songs for Drella’s arrangements are necessarily spare, relying on only Reed’s electric guitar and Cale’s keyboards and electric viola; plans to orchestrate the songs had been abandoned. “I was really excited by the amount of power just two people could do without needing drums,” Cale said. “When we started work, I was always, in the back of my mind, wondering, ‘Where the hell does the backbeat go?’ And by the time we finished it, I was saying, ‘Thank God we don’t have one!’” While the music certainly gets noisy at points, the absence of a rhythm section put the emphasis squarely on the words, which is exactly where Reed and Cale wanted it: it was essential that the audience be able to make out the lyrics. “In this particular show, we’re throwing an amazing amount of information at you,” Reed said. “Usually, when people go to rock-and-roll shows, they expect to hear songs they already know, and the lyrics aren’t really that important. In my case… there is no show without the lyrics, and no one’s heard them before. It’s really like going to a concert.”

  Songs for Drella was performed twice at St. Ann’s Church in January of 1989, as a work in progress, and then for four nights in November and December at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), as part of the Next Wave Festival. The Andy Warhol Diaries had not been published by the time of the St. Ann’s dates, and “A Dream” was written between the two sets of shows. At the performances, Cale and Reed sat on opposite sides of the stage, and images and text were projected onto a large screen behind them. That was it. (While very different in tone, the format nodded to Warhol’s multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable, during which the Velvet Underground would perform as films and images were projected onto them.) The performance was about an hour long. The goal, Reed explained, was “to get you as close to the music and the words as possible, with as little showbizzy glitz going on as there could be, and to introduce you to our friend Andy.”