Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  According to Martha Morrison, Sterling’s wife, Reed stayed alert to Sterling’s condition once he was diagnosed, and kept in close touch. “Lou was tuned in the whole time Sterling was sick,” Martha said. “He came to the house, and Sterling was at the Albany Medical Center for a long time, and Lou sent him flowers there, and they talked on the phone.” In a tribute to Morrison that he wrote for the New York Times at the end of 1995, Reed warmly recalled his friend and bandmate. He talked about visiting Morrison in Poughkeepsie, traveling there by train, and meeting up with Maureen Tucker at the Morrisons’ home. Morrison’s health had deteriorated, and Reed described the “extreme gauntness of his once-muscular physique. He was bald, with nothing but skin over bone. But his eyes. His eyes were as alert and clear as any eyes I’ve seen in this world.” Reed held Morrison’s hand as they spoke. They did not discuss Morrison’s condition. In his conclusion, Reed called Morrison “the warrior heart of the Velvet Underground.”

  A MONTH BEFORE THE release of Set the Twilight Reeling, the Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. It was an outrage, of course, that the Velvets had not been inducted when they had first become eligible, in 1992, but the journalists, musicians, producers, and record company executives who constituted the voting rolls of the Rock Hall took a while to move beyond the more obvious classic rock heroes that had entered earlier. Though it meant a great deal to the group’s members to be inducted, Reed, in particular, assumed a don’t-give-a-fuck posture as they took the stage to accept their induction. Reed spoke first, saying only, “I’d like to thank all the people who worked so hard to get us in. And I just wanted to say how much we regret that our friend and fellow musician Sterling Morrison couldn’t be with us.” Maureen Tucker said that she was “proud and honored,” and she, too, expressed her sadness over Morrison’s death.

  Only Cale took the opportunity to try to make a statement and to find a larger meaning in the honor the band was receiving. First, he pointedly mentioned the contributions made by two of the band’s collaborators who had gone unmentioned by Reed and Tucker. “This, of course, is shared by three other people,” he began, as he held the award in his hand: “Sterling, Nico, and Andy.” Then he went on to say, “This event makes an astonishing point to all the young musicians in the world: that sales are not the be-all and end-all of rock and roll. And everyone should be encouraged.… Inspiration and artistic freedom is the cornerstone of rock and roll.” Martha Morrison accepted on Sterling’s behalf and sweetly acknowledged that he very much “wanted to be in the Hall—and I know he would have loved this party.”

  The band members did not seem especially comfortable with one another, and, the sour taste of their European reunion still in their mouths, they performed only one song together. Taking advantage of their last bit of emotional common ground, they had composed a ballad in honor of Sterling Morrison titled “Last Night I Said Goodbye to My Friend.” It has almost a doo-wop feel, though Cale’s eloquent piano part elevates the song above any specific genre. Reed, Cale, and Tucker all share the vocals, but despite the sincerity of the feelings behind it, the song is a throwaway. But that was the best the trio could do under the circumstances. It was the last song the Velvet Underground would ever play together.

  23

  SADLY LISTENING

  IN 1996, LOU REED embarked on a collaboration with avant-garde director and set designer Robert Wilson and novelist and playwright Darryl Pinckney. Titled Time Rocker, the production was the third in a trilogy that Wilson had begun with songwriter Tom Waits; the first two productions were The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (with a text by William Burroughs), based on a nineteenth-century German ghost story, and Alice, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Time Rocker is based, very loosely, on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which, when it was published in 1895, introduced the concept of the time machine and popularized the notion of time travel.

  Collaborating with Wilson, a highly prestigious figure in the world of experimental theater, was another important step in Reed’s refinement of his identity as an artist. Best known for his work with Philip Glass on the groundbreaking 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, Wilson had also worked with Laurie Anderson, deepening Reed’s connection to the celebrated underground art scene in which she was a central figure. Reed wrote new songs for Time Rocker, some of which, like “Turning Time Around,” appeared on his own albums later, and he also repurposed songs, like “Cremation” from Magic and Loss. Though their collaboration would continue and they worked together without the cataclysmic disruptions that so often afflicted Reed’s partnerships, he and Wilson were not an ideal match. Whereas Wilson was a surrealist whose work strived for a nonlinear associative power, Reed was at his best when he was as direct and concise as possible. In Time Rocker, Wilson took the opportunity to unhinge Wells’s characters from chronology, exploring not so much the trajectories of their lives as the mysteries of time itself, both in the external world and in the depths of our consciousness. While Reed’s songs have their own beauty and power, they work toward entirely different ends.

  After its debut at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, which had commissioned it, Time Rocker ran for ten performances at Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it was staged by the same theater company that had performed it in Germany. The performers spoke German, with translations provided in superscript, though Reed’s songs were sung in English. Reviewing the show in the New York Times, Jon Pareles offered a smart critique that surely took the self-consciously avant-garde collaborators by surprise. He deftly pointed out that “with straightforward rock songs backing brief, abstract scenes, Time Rocker bumps into unexpected competition: music video. Mr. Wilson’s style of theater, once startling, is now available day and night on cable. Time Rocker ends up uncomfortably close to late-night MTV: an entertaining miscellany with striking effects and a sentimental heart.”

  REED’S NEXT ALBUM, ECSTASY, released on April 4, 2000, would turn out to be his last major solo effort without collaborators. By this point, Reed’s commercial fortunes had dwindled, and as one consequence, he continued to explore artistic outlets outside rock and roll. That, of course, corresponded nicely with the conception of himself that he had forged in the late eighties, when his ambitions were primarily literary and his means were concept albums. Now, with his relationship with Laurie Anderson and collaboration with Robert Wilson, his artistic identity had expanded. It would expand further in the years to come.

  Ecstasy hit with uncompromising power. Reed and Mike Rathke cranked up their guitars and flooded the album with roaring distortion and feedback. The horns that played on a number of tracks, along with Jane Scarpantoni’s cello and Laurie Anderson’s electric violin, provided even deeper levels of texture. The horn arrangements recall Reed’s fascination with Otis Redding and the Stax/Volt sound, adding melodic punch and soulfulness to the hurricane of noise on the album.

  The album’s cover art—photographic self-portraits from the shoulders up—portrays Reed with facial expressions that recall Mantegna’s portraits of St. Sebastian or Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (note its title). As in those classic works, Reed looks as if he is undergoing an exquisite, orgasmic torture, a mixture of love and pain. (Another possible inspiration is Andy Warhol’s 1964 silent film Blow Job, in which the camera focuses on a young man’s face, presumably, given the title, as someone off camera performs oral sex on him.) The assumption in those works that the agony has both a spiritual source and a spiritual goal corresponds nicely with Reed’s vision of the interplay between forbidden lust and transcendence.

  Ecstasy explores the torrent of feelings—jealousy, boredom, dependence, lust for others—that arise in nearly every long-standing relationship. Gone are the sweet hymns to Anderson as the epitome of female perfection. Replacing that sweetness, in a song like “Paranoia Key of E,” is a mutual wariness, a desperate puzzling out of why thing
s have gotten so complicated and never seem to resolve. The “E” of the title recalls the first letter of the album’s title, a reference to both the drug ecstasy and the feeling of exultation that true love is expected to deliver. The conflation of those two notions suggests that the euphoric effects of love may be no more reliable—and may last no longer—than the speedy psychedelic high that the drug provides. “It’s all downhill after the first kiss,” Reed sings on “Modern Dance,” a song that registers confusion at the contemporary ways of love, in which couples drift together and then apart, unmoored from the certainties that grounded relationships in the past. Given Reed’s dependency issues, such laissez-faire attitudes—far more characteristic of Anderson than of him—were deeply unsettling. The title track explores that theme further. Ecstasy comes and goes, raising the singer’s hopes but then disappearing. It continually eludes the singer, who, like Reed, harbors a fear of abandonment and who, in desperate need of connection, laments, “I couldn’t hold you close… / I couldn’t become you.”

  Two songs on the album return Reed to the back alleys, after-hours clubs, and dockside trysts that had been part of his life for so long. “Rock Minuet” sounds as if it could have appeared on Street Hassle, the contrasting words of its title telegraphing the song’s cool elevation of the grim sexual tableaux it describes. Its arrangement is eerily formal, guitars wailing and feeding back over a simple, elegant melody enhanced by Anderson’s electric violin. Even more so than usual, Reed’s vocal is a dispassionate recitative as he chronicles a Boschean world of anonymous, sadomasochistic sex and thrill-seeking violence. As is so often true when Reed enters this subterranean realm, Oedipal desires and rivalries occupy the ninth circle of his forbidden erotic phantasmagoria. He conjures a charged primal scene with “his mother on all fours and his father behind,” while fantasizing that “if he murdered his father he thought he’d become whole.” A gay pickup turns ugly as one man draws a knife and “thought of his father” as he slices the other man’s throat. As the album posits the potential disintegration of a marriage, “Rock Minuet” limns the netherworld that waits as an alternative, as alluring as it is terrifying.

  “Like a Possum” is one of the most compelling tracks that Reed ever recorded. At more than eighteen minutes, it’s certainly the longest, outstripping even the Velvet Underground’s epic studio version of “Sister Ray” by half a minute or so. The title suggests the expression “playing possum,” a reference to that animal’s strategy of lying low, playing dead, to confuse predators and avoid attacks. But the possum is perfectly capable of coming to life and striking back, as the mature, settled Lou is capable of exploding into the thunder of Ecstasy and this song in particular. Two lines occupy the emotional center of the song: “I got a hole in my heart the size of a truck / It won’t be filled by a one-night fuck.” That yearning for stability, and the hope that love can somehow help to fill the void within him, is accompanied, as always with Reed, by the fear that he will be abandoned, that his lover will forsake him for another. He mentions his ever-shifting sense of who he is, the “different selves who cancel out one another,” and refers, however obliquely, to his bisexuality: “One likes muscles, oil, and dirt / And the other likes the women with the butt that hurts.” The oil and dirt refer to the rawness of the sexual playground into which the docks and the empty trucks parked there transform overnight, as well as the motorcycles he loved. Smoking crack, used condoms, whores, shooting drugs, and anonymous blow jobs all make appearances in the song—a roaring, nightmarish inferno of what awaits him if he cannot manage to fill that hole in his heart.

  Ecstasy stands as a searing examination of life in an unnervingly complex, adult relationship—particularly for someone whose fears and insecurities lay as deep as Reed’s. Typically, Reed stayed away from such subjects when discussing the album, retreating, as always, into talking about its sound. Speaking about “Like a Possum,” he said, “Every night, when the recording sessions were over and everybody would leave the studio, I’d grab the tapes with the guitars we’d recorded and listen to them at home. For hours at night, I’d listen to those guitars in all their eternal beauty. Of course, I listened to them loud. As loud as it can get. And I found peace.” The one personal point he conceded was in response to a question about his line that he was “the only one left standing”—which he admitted alluded, in part, to the AIDS crisis. “I’ve put my dick in every hole available,” he said. “But in a way, I haven’t lived a different life compared to many others. I mean, most of us have experiences with drugs, many of us smoke and drink too much. I am no different except for the fact that I have always been in the limelight.”

  Ecstasy ended Reed’s solo career on an extremely strong note, even if it failed to generate much attention, either critically or commercially. Despite the visibility he enjoyed with Laurie Anderson as part of New York’s cultural elite, he had become something of a museum piece, more admired than listened to. It was a confusing time for him. His only regret, he said, was that he had to promote his work personally—“Album after album, year after year. Maybe for my next record I should record one interview that you could access only via a phone number: ‘For questions about the new album, press one. For questions about the Velvet Underground and Nico, press two. For questions about my private life and other gossip, press three—and hang the fuck up.’”

  Hal Willner, who coproduced Ecstasy with Reed, was jolted by the album’s commercial failure. “To this day, I have never worked harder on a record,” Willner said. “He wrote those songs and he woodshedded. We did that whole thing where we went and listened to eighteen guitars and changed the pickups and changed the amps. I just love that record. And it got a great reaction. And then nothing. Nothing. It freaked me out, and I think it broke his heart because he never really wrote another record after that. That was the last, shall we say, proper Lou Reed record.”

  Willner would go on to become, in his description, Tonto to Reed’s Lone Ranger. They developed a working relationship—and a personal closeness—that Willner thought of as a traditional artist-producer bond, though it was much deeper than that. They had come a long way from when Willner first approached Reed years earlier about contributing to one of the conceptual projects he was a master at organizing, this one devoted to the music of Kurt Weill. Titled Lost in the Stars, the compilation came out in 1985 and features performances by Sting, Van Dyke Parks, Marianne Faithfull, and Carla Bley, along with Reed’s sprightly reading of “September Song.” When, in their first telephone conversation, Willner suggested that Reed perform the song, Reed slammed the phone down. But Reed thought about it and, a short while later, called Willner back, and the two men began discussing how Reed’s participation in the project—and his performance of the song—might work. “So you’re a real producer,” Reed joked at the end of the conversation, a compliment that forged a connection between the two men that would last until the end of Reed’s life.

  Of course, the relationship was not always smooth sailing. As Reed had in the past, Willner had serious problems with substance abuse. At one point, he had accidentally set fire to his apartment, and Reed paid to send his possessions to storage. Reed had asked Willner to do some work on Set the Twilight Reeling, but Willner was in no condition to do it. “I was at the end of my chemical era,” he said. He did go see Reed perform at the Beacon in 1997, and the two men hung out together and had a great time. Later, Willner joined Reed as Reed was working on some songs, and afterward, Reed called him. “You’re not right,” Reed said, implying that Willner was still using drugs and that, as a consequence, Reed couldn’t be around him. “He kind of wrote me off,” Willner said. “He talked about the money he had invested in me, and he was totally right. I wasn’t right. I don’t know how he picked that up—that I was still going to have some adventures. I was freaked out. I went and paid him the money he had invested in me. Then we didn’t talk for two years.”

  As Reed began working on Ecstasy, he thought about Willner again. Fer
nando Saunders, Reed’s bassist, called Willner and told him that Reed had been asking about him. Willner ran into Reed at the Knitting Factory, a downtown club, and “he was just hugs. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re great. You know, I don’t like many people. Please, let’s stay friends.’ That probably has a lot to do with how I got through that difficult time. Then he asked me to work with him on Ecstasy.” The two men would be in continual contact, working together professionally and socializing constantly. Like so many of the people close to Reed, Willner noted his friend’s fear of isolation. “It’s weird not getting those phone calls,” Willner said after Reed’s death. “He hated being alone, so he would always be in touch. Sometimes it would be scary, because you’d come back from a trip, and I would wait a few days before calling him, because the minute you did, he’d be like, ‘Coming out to the movie at eleven tonight? What else are you doing?’ He would go do anything with you—movies, restaurants.”

  Willner understood the complaint about Reed’s brusqueness—recall that Reed slammed the phone down on their first conversation. “Look, Lou could be short with people,” Willner said. But he believed that Reed’s behavior had to be seen in the context of the amount of contact that artists like him have coming at them every day, particularly since Reed made a point of living his life in New York as openly as possible. That made him seem accessible, even though he wasn’t. “People would go, ‘I saw Lou Reed on the street when I went to New York, and I went up to him and he was an asshole,’” Willner said. “I would say, ‘Was he a bigger asshole than Bob Dylan was to you?’ ‘Oh, I’ve never seen Bob Dylan.’ Right. ‘What about Miles Davis—was he nice to you?’ Lou was just out there; he was on the street. How would you like people coming up to you going, ‘Oh, Lou, you changed my life’? What the fuck do you tell them?… Who knows what it’s like to be Lou Reed?”