“Lou was difficult,” Willner concluded. “Any artist is difficult to live with.… But if he liked you, I’ve never met a more generous person. He was sentimental about birthdays. If you were sick, he’d come see you every fucking day. He protected all his friends. It was a small circle that saw that side of him, but it was just unbelievable.”
LIKE MANY WHO WERE so geographically close to what would become known as Ground Zero—Reed lived perhaps a mile uptown from the World Trade Center—on the morning of September 11, 2001, he watched the towers burn and crumble from the roof of his building, and witnessed people leaping off to their deaths. Afterward, he struggled to make sense of the attacks and, as many people did, succumbed to some of the urban legends that quickly sprang up after the events of that day. He told me that he had heard about a Muslim family on Long Island that had warned its neighbors to stay out of Manhattan that Tuesday. After issuing their warning, Reed said, the family members mysteriously abandoned their home, never to be heard from again. There were many versions of that story, an expression of the fear that repeatedly surfaces in America that outsiders among us are secretly plotting our destruction while simultaneously enjoying the pleasures of suburban life. Reed delivered the story, however, with characteristic intensity, his eyes blazing. He clearly had no doubt that the story was true. He also described a tense confrontation he and a friend had had with a Muslim cabdriver as they dropped off donations of clothing for the victims and responders at Ground Zero.
In another sign of Reed’s growing prominence on the New York cultural scene, he was asked to contribute to a theme issue of the New York Times Magazine titled “Beginnings: An Issue About the Next New York.” The issue appeared in the November 11, 2001, Sunday New York Times, and it consisted of contributions from prominent New Yorkers about the state of the city and the direction of its future in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Other contributors included Oliver Sacks, Robert Frank, and Paul Auster. Reed contributed a poem titled “Laurie Sadly Listening,” about his watching the towers burn from his rooftop without her. He describes the scene as a kind of holocaust (“Incinerated flesh repelling”) and his sense that the world’s possibilities had suddenly evaporated: “And I had thought a beautiful / Season was / Upon us.” On 9/11, he and Anderson had been unable to communicate because phones didn’t work after the attacks, and as would so often be the case, her absence became the subject of his writing. He imagines her “sadly listening” to what he is describing, though he is unable to reach her. Like everyone who was separated from loved ones on that grim day, he wants her to know how much he missed her: “Laurie if you’re sadly listening / Know one thing above all others / You were all I really thought of / As the TV blared the screaming / The deathlike snowflakes / Sirens screaming / All I wished was you to be holding.”
In 2000, Reed had begun his second collaboration with Robert Wilson. Once again commissioned by and originally staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, POEtry was devoted to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer singularly appropriate for Reed. Billed as a rock opera, the show made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December of 2001, three months after 9/11. As devastating as the attacks were, in aesthetic terms, it seemed a perfect moment for both Reed and Poe. The city was reeling, balanced precariously on a razor’s edge, and the sense of dread that permeates so much of Poe’s writing simply felt like the psychic waters that all New Yorkers were swimming in, as Reed understood. But beyond its thematic relationship to 9/11, Poe’s writing lives in the same emotional terrain as Reed’s. Stylistically, the two men could not have been more different. Poe loved elaborate, Latinate words, many of them archaic even at the time he was using them, almost as if he were translating English into another highly personal, emotionally charged language. His rolling rhythms and relentless repetitions channel an intense musicality, but they were designed to make his words seem strange, even frightening, like the incantations of a dark religion. Reed, on the other hand, aspired to a hard-boiled concision, a language that yields nothing to the extreme behavior he often described. His words were meant to be as stoic and nonjudgmental as his singing, cool, intractable, and removed, a challenge to the listener to sustain a similar posture in the face of such outrages.
But in the themes Reed and Poe explored, the two men could hardly have been more alike. Guilt, obsession, violence, and self-destruction run through the veins of both bodies of work. Predictably, Reed was especially gripped by the 1845 short story “The Imp of the Perverse,” in which Poe wonders why we are drawn to actions that are damaging to us—not despite the fact that they’re damaging but precisely because they are. It’s what Joseph Conrad later called the “fascination of the abomination,” a phrase that could arguably sum up the entirety of Reed’s work. Writing about his attraction to Poe and his appropriateness to the turn of the twenty-first century, Reed said, “Obsessions, paranoia, willful acts of self-destruction surround us constantly. Though we age, we still hear the cries of those for whom the attraction to mournful chaos is monumental.… Who am I? Why am I drawn to do what I should not? I have wrestled with this thought innumerable times: the impulse of destructive desire—the desire for self-mortification.” A fascination with decay—the source of the term “decadence”—is another obsession Poe and Reed shared. The belief that there is some kind of original sin, some corruption at life’s core, haunted both men, and rendered Poe an ideal subject for Reed.
Just over a year after the performance at BAM, Reed released The Raven, an audio version of the theater performance, as a double CD. (A single-CD version was also available for less hearty fans.) Here was one of Reed’s strategies for avoiding what Willner called a “proper Lou Reed record” after the heartbreaking experience of Ecstasy. Still, The Raven is an extraordinary collection. It includes readings of Poe’s work and Reed’s songs, notably a somber reworking of “The Bed” from Berlin and a strangulated performance of “Perfect Day” by the sexually ambiguous singer Antony Hegarty, whom Reed had taken under his wing, like a younger version of Little Jimmy Scott. David Bowie, Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth Ashley, Amanda Plummer, Ornette Coleman, Steve Buscemi, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and, of course, Laurie Anderson are just a few of the artists who participated in the project.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of The Raven was Reed’s decision to rewrite some of Poe’s work and add his own words to it. It seems like a shockingly arrogant move—and, in part, it was—but Reed did it with a kind of modesty, if with mixed results. As he was working on POEtry, he was struck by how often Poe’s ornate word choices sent him to the dictionary, and he was concerned that audiences wouldn’t be able to properly follow the language without some help. In that sense, the desire to adapt Poe was a pop decision, though Reed never would have thought of it in these terms. In this relatively high art context of a classic American writer reinterpreted by world-class actors and musicians, Reed could allow himself to do to Poe what he would never permit to be done to his own songs, despite decades of urgings by record executives.
“I saw it as a can’t-win situation,” Reed told the New York Times. “I knew people would say, ‘How dare he rewrite Poe?’ But I thought, here’s the opportunity of a lifetime for real fun: to combine the kind of lyricism that he has into a flexible rock format. I really like my version of it. It’s accessible, among other things. And I felt I was in league with the master.… Particularly now, with the anxiety and everything else that’s permeating our lives right now.” In that same conversation, Reed offered one of his more articulate, least defensive and evasive explanations for his obsession with sound and technology. “I’ve spent the better part of my life, the way a great saxophonist will try to find the perfect reed or a violinist will look for the perfect violin,” attempting to identify “the best tube, the best speaker, the cone, the wood, the string, the pickup, on and on and on.” If sound was Reed’s chosen method of conveying meaning, then the sound had to be perfect.
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THIS IS TODAY
REED HAD BEEN PRACTICING tai chi since the early eighties with a master known as Leung Shum, with whom he worked for fifteen years, until Shum retired. It was part of Reed’s recovery, a way for him to integrate his physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It tied in nicely with some of the spiritual concerns that had always been part of his life, including his interest in the possibility of the world beyond. Even as Reed’s writing concentrated so fiercely on the here and now, the impulse toward redemption always wove through it. Spiritual discipline provided a focus strong enough to keep his attention away from more dangerous attractions.
Tai chi works on the principle of balance, but most of the practitioners in the United States concentrate on the more sensitive side of the discipline. However, Ren GuangYi, the tai chi master with whom Reed began studying after Shum retired, specialized in the Chen style, which is far more explosive and which, for a time, was thought to have become extinct, part of a knowledge system that had been lost. For Reed, encountering Master Ren was a revelation. In Ren’s practice, Reed’s rock-and-roll side—his love of noise and feedback, his affection for motorcycles and speed, his fascination with brutality and violence—found expression, and he became a devoted practitioner and a student of Ren’s. Tai chi is about the relationship of polarities and extremes, and in Master Ren, Reed found an ideal guide to a wild side he had never realized existed in the discipline.
“He combines the very beautiful form, the great control, the focus, and a really, truly remarkable fajing [explosive power],” Reed said about Master Ren. “When I saw that combination of grace and power, the fast and the soft, the yin and the yang, that’s what I’d been looking for.… From the minute I saw Master Ren do fajing, I thought, I will study this forever.” When one thinks about the contradictions that battled within Reed his entire life, the appeal of a discipline that allowed profound expression to all of it—as rock and roll did—becomes apparent.
When Reed first approached him, Master Ren, a bit like Laurie Anderson in this way, had no idea who he was. “At the beginning, I didn’t know his music,” Ren said. “I was talking to a friend and I said I was teaching a musician now, his name was Reed. Later he came and said to me, ‘Do you mean Lou Reed?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I said, ‘I’m not kidding.’ He says, ‘Wow, he’s very, very famous!’… After I tell people I teach Lou Reed tai chi, they don’t believe me.”
Reed took Master Ren on the road with him, exposing audiences across the United States and Europe to the master’s deft movements as Reed and his band performed, lending his songs an extraordinary interpretive element, an intense physicality, and an even more complex spiritual dimension. Reed also performed a riveting version of “Sunday Morning” on Late Night with David Letterman accompanied by Master Ren.
For his own practice, or “bodywork,” as he liked to call it, Reed composed music that he eventually released in 2007 as Hudson River Wind Meditations. “I had made it for myself,” Reed explained. “Just for a number of different uses and meditation bodywork, tai chi. And I would also just leave it on all day… because it absorbs the outside sounds that might be irritating otherwise.… People started saying to me, ‘Can I have a copy of that?’ ‘Can you put that music on?’… We just put the music out on the theory that you probably have your own meditation you’re doing, and this is a great music to do it to, rather than me putting the voice on it.”
Reed and Laurie Anderson also studied meditation with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a renowned master of Tibetan Buddhism. Rinpoche was born in Nepal and directed the Tergar Meditation Community, an international network of meditation groups. He was a successful author and a quiet evangelist for the benefits of meditation. He encouraged his students to accept the essential nature of suffering in every life, but to achieve a detachment from it as well. That’s a central tenet of Buddhism, of course, but Rinpoche expressed it with an intelligence and casualness that both charmed and encouraged his followers. Anderson, in particular, became an ardent devotee of Rinpoche. She would often quote his recommendation that in difficult times, it is important to feel sad without being sad. Such koan-like expressions are similar to the detached observations Anderson would make in the surreal narrative monologues that were such a central element of her work. But Reed, too, was quite taken by Rinpoche. No doubt Rinpoche’s easy ability to relinquish control of experience held a compelling allure for Reed, who, for better or worse, always gripped his life so tightly. Reed jumped in feetfirst after meeting Rinpoche, and looked up to him uncritically, as he did with all the various guides who came into—and eventually left—his life. “He’s just wonderful and I love him,” Reed said. “I think of him as a friend who, for whatever reason, teaches me things. If I could learn one-thousandth of what he knows in my time left, that’s what I want.” Rinpoche’s teachings, like those of Master Ren, would remain an important aspect of Reed’s life until his death.
SUSAN FELDMAN, THE ARTISTIC director of St. Ann’s Warehouse, had been approaching Reed over the years about staging a version of Berlin, but Reed had never consented. Friends, too, including Julian Schnabel, had also encouraged him to do it, professing that Berlin was his favorite of Reed’s albums. “This record was the embodiment of love’s dark sisters: jealousy, rage, and loss,” Schnabel said. “It may be the most romantic record ever made.” Reed always resisted the suggestions, however. He preferred to move on to new projects, and the prospect of revisiting Berlin was painful. The failure of his and producer Bob Ezrin’s plan for some kind of dramatic staging of Berlin, their “movie for the mind,” had been a signal disappointment decades earlier. The negative reviews didn’t help.
As 2006 approached, however, and he did not have any major new projects lined up, Reed decided to pursue Feldman’s suggestion. Before he heard her urgings, “I couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to do it,” Reed said. “I had put Berlin out of my mind. It was disappointing, what happened to it, and I didn’t want to go through all that again.” In December of 2006, Reed performed Berlin in full for five nights at St. Ann’s Warehouse. He had assembled an extraordinary band for the performances, including Steve Hunter (who played on the original album) on guitar, Fernando Saunders on bass, Rob Wasserman on double bass, Rupert Christie on keyboards, Tony “Thunder” Smith on drums, and Sharon Jones and Antony Hegarty on backing vocals. In addition, a horn and string section joined the group, along with a choir, Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Hal Willner oversaw musical direction on the project, along with Bob Ezrin. Ezrin appeared onstage conducting the musicians while wearing a white lab coat with “Berlin” written vertically on the back in large capital letters. Julian Schnabel, who had previously told Reed he wanted to make a movie of Berlin, designed sets for the shows and filmed them. During the performances, Reed fully inhabited the songs, creating intense emotional drama out of the grim, destructive story of Jim and Caroline, the two doomed speed addicts at the heart of the album.
The more than three decades that had passed since its original release served the album well. No one was shocked any longer by the descent of Jim and Caroline into violence and suicide; debates about lyrical content and the extremes that hip-hop and heavy metal had gone on to explore made the hand-wringing over Berlin seem silly. Reed, too, had continued to push boundaries in his own work, and the stature that he had achieved since the early seventies made the revival of Berlin seem like just another honor that a great artist deserved as he neared old age. At around this time, veteran artists began to explore their back catalogs for albums that fans would like to see performed in their entirety. That had rarely been done in the past, though of course Reed had done it with both New York and Songs for Drella. For many artists, it had become a way to freshen up their live performances, which had increasingly become economically important as CD sales began to decline. Also, as rock artists entered their sixties, an age at which it had once seemed inconceivable that they would still be performing, they became concerned about their legacy. Despite his protestations
to the contrary, Reed had been thinking about his legacy from the time of the first Velvet Underground album. The commercial failures of Set the Twilight Reeling and Ecstasy made the prospect of a new album less enticing. For all those reasons, performing Berlin was something of an ideal project.
While he would never admit it, Reed regarded the renewed interest in the album as a vindication. When one writer asked him about Rolling Stone’s positive review of the Brooklyn shows (“The triumph was all Reed’s, and too long in coming”), Reed brushed it aside. “Rolling Stone? Who cares?” he said. “That’s not who I’m writing for.” In another interview, he even downplayed the personal importance of Berlin. “It was just another of my albums that didn’t sell,” he said. Hal Willner had a sense of Reed’s true feelings. Reed took Berlin on tour, and one stop was the Royal Albert Hall in London. Reed asked Willner to go on stage first to say a few words. “I go out and I was like, ‘Turn your cell phones off, please, and no flash photography,’” Willner recalled. “But then I just look around and it’s the Royal Albert Hall. It was like one of those old Max Fleischer cartoons: you look out into the audience and everybody’s famous. There’s Peter Gabriel. There’s Annie Lennox. There’s Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig. So out of nowhere I say, ‘Here’s some words none of us ever thought we’d hear, and I get to say them: ladies and gentlemen, now at Royal Albert Hall, Lou Reed’s Berlin.’ And Lou just bounded onto that stage. What a moment of validation. It was just encouraging in every way that he got to see that.”
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