Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  For the shows, Julian Schnabel designed a set that evoked the “greenish walls” that Reed mentions when describing Caroline’s room in the song “Lady Day.” Green also evokes the jealousy at the heart of the album’s songs—it was the album’s central theme, in Reed’s view—as well as the cirrhotic tinge that alcohol and methedrine use can lead to. Video projected onto the wall included footage shot by Schnabel’s daughter Lola, who was twenty-five at the time. Lola’s scenes featured the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner in the role of Caroline, though the footage is more impressionistic than literal, designed to convey the unsettling feel of the album rather than simply depict the scenarios the songs describe.

  In addition to the entire Berlin album, Reed performed three other songs: “Sweet Jane,” “Candy Says,” and “Rock Minuet,” selections than can be read as commentaries on the themes of Berlin. The couple in “Sweet Jane” reflect an alternate reality, one as idealistic as Berlin is nihilistic. Like Caroline, Candy in “Candy Says”—based on Candy Darling, the most gorgeous drag queen on the Warhol Factory scene—lives in an environment that is going to destroy her. Her profound alienation from herself (“I’ve come to hate my body / And all that it requires in this world”) is one source of her anguish. What would now be called her gender dysphoria results in a self-loathing that makes her desperate to escape her life. Antony Hegarty provided the lead vocal on “Candy Says,” and his otherworldly voice, simultaneously haunting and somehow reassuring, beautifully evokes Candy’s yearning for a more accepting world. Hegarty’s voice rises on “What do you think I’d see / If I could walk away from me?” and that eerie sense of emotional disassociation comes across chillingly, as does the poignancy of the feelings that motivate it. It’s a spellbinding performance. (Hegarty would eventually identify as female and take the name Anohni.)

  Reed performed “Rock Minuet” at the specific request of Schnabel; it is one of Reed’s last bloodcurdling documentations of New York’s sexual demimonde and one of Schnabel’s favorite songs. In the unlikely event that anyone present might miss the connection, images of Reed from the midseventies, blond and skeletal, appeared in the video playing behind him, an eloquent evocation of a man haunted by his own past. Among the song’s most explicit lyrics are Reed’s descriptions of a Freudian primal scene and his patricidal rage. What rendered the lyrics particularly trenchant at this performance was the fact that Reed’s mother was in the audience. As with all the other songs he sang that evening, Reed delivered “Rock Minuet” with steely, matter-of-fact conviction, conjuring the scenes of violence and depravity with bone-chilling clarity, passing absolutely no judgment.

  Reed obviously relished bringing Berlin to life onstage, and took the opportunity to deliver the songs as if they were scenes from a play, realizing in that sense the original vision that he and Ezrin had created. It’s not that his Berlin performances were theatrical. If anything, they were more minimalist than was typical for even Reed. By this time, his voice had lost some of its range, a condition that he made a virtue of by doing more with less. Every one of his gestures—a glance, a movement of his hands—seemed meaningful. Reed would often close his eyes, as if he were interpreting the songs in images within his own mind, an effect lent even more force by the video accompaniment. Rarely has an album achieved such a degree of artistic integrity onstage. All these years later, Berlin had fully delivered on its promise, made real all its terrible beauty.

  BEYOND THEIR PHYSICAL AND spiritual benefits, Reed’s studies with Master Ren led to a fertile musical connection with Sarth Calhoun, a Brooklyn-based experimental musician who had become gripped by the possibilities of computers and the electronic processing of sound. Like Reed, Calhoun had been drawn to Ren because of a fascination with the Chen style of tai chi. Ren taught classes on Sunday mornings and Tuesday evenings, and along with his private lessons, Reed would typically attend the Sunday class, though sometimes he would go to both.

  Calhoun knew who Reed was, but had never been particularly drawn to his music. “I’d never listened to the Velvet Underground,” he said. “Not only did I not care about them, but I also didn’t care about all the music that was vaguely in their category. Despite that, I was still intimidated. He’s a really strong personality. I would have been intimidated even if he wasn’t a famous guy, just by the wealth of his knowledge.”

  Reed would join members of the class when they went out to brunch after their training, and at first the conversations were general, not music-related. Calhoun recalled that in one of their first talks, he and Reed argued about a Star Wars movie that Reed loved and insisted that Calhoun go see. Calhoun had already given up on the franchise. “It was really acrimonious,” Calhoun recalled. “I was like, ‘George Lucas gave us our childhood and then he took it away’—which is not even my line. Lou just looked at me and said, ‘Nobody can hit it out of the park every time, Sarth.’” When Reed learned that Calhoun created electronic music, his interest was piqued. Calhoun’s medium necessarily involved considerable technological know-how—always an attraction for Reed. As Reed was beginning to explore alternatives to rock and roll, someone like Calhoun—young, hip, from Brooklyn, conversant with rock and roll but working on the periphery of it—was inherently intriguing to him. Calhoun invited Reed to come see his band, Lucibel Crater, and Reed did, bringing Master Ren along with him.

  “We didn’t play live that often, but on two occasions, Lou and Master Ren pulled up chairs right in front of the stage and nodded their heads significantly to the music,” recalled Paul Chuffo, the drummer in Lucibel Crater and an occasional practitioner of tai chi. “I thought it was a good sign, even if it was strange that they looked like two oddball mafioso goons waiting to get their hands on us after the show. No clapping, no smiling, dead serious. And they had the only chairs in the room. I remember Lou wearing sunglasses through one of them. After the show, a grunting hello from Lou. We also had a record release party where Lou came up onstage for a solo on the continuum fingerboard, and I finally got a smile and a handshake from him.”

  Reed “was very complimentary about the band,” said Calhoun. Reed had begun to work on the music for a training DVD that Ren was making, and he enlisted Calhoun to help him with it. “I was running live electronics, and Lou was really interested in what that was about,” Calhoun recalled. “He came to my house and played some guitar and I processed it. We connected right away. He came out again, and then we did more work in his studio. It was all about him playing guitar and me processing it, either starting from drones or compositions that I already had, or from him improvising something and me processing it in real time and then editing it afterwards.”

  The two men got along brilliantly. “I learned a ton from him,” Calhoun said. “He was very good at picking something as being important and really focusing on it. Partly from working with him, I started to develop the theory that that’s what makes an artist, in a way: being able to say, ‘This is the important thing. All that other stuff—no. This is the thing.’” As Lucibel Crater began working on The Family Album, which was released in 2008, Reed expressed interest in helping out. “Basically, I think he was just looking for stuff to do that was new,” Calhoun said. “Our guitar player had quit, and Lou was always saying, ‘If you need a guitar player, you should look to me.’ So I was like, ‘All right, cool. Come out and jam.’ And he really did follow through on that. He played on the track ‘Threadbare Funeral.’ Lou had this idea that when you play music with someone, either it connects or it doesn’t. It’s just that feeling you have, and the first time I played with him, I felt that kind of love-at-first-sight feeling. I think we both felt that way.”

  In search of new approaches to his music, Reed wanted to explore further ways of involving Calhoun in his work. “One day, he called me up and said, ‘I’m doing this U.S. tour. Do you want to come along and do your processing thing with my rock band?’ That was so cool because I had this dream of processing a whole live band through my rig for years, and it was
just so weird to actually get an opportunity to do it on that level—and then that it happened in front of fifty thousand people at Lollapalooza.”

  Calhoun experienced Reed’s legendarily grueling sound checks, but he also came to understand the reasons behind them. “One of the first things I learned from him was that there’s a lot of validity in his obsession,” Calhoun said. “I remember once we were recording at his house, and we spent so long positioning the guitar mic. I’m like, ‘Come on, really?’ But he might spend forty-five minutes positioning the guitar mic and then play one take and be like, ‘That’s good.’ And he was right. Get the sound exactly right. It was like a clear-off-your-desk kind of thing. He was really into that. His space was always really neat. His studio was always really neat. His office was always neat. The whole principle is making sure your work space is in order so there’s nothing between you and what you’re trying to do. I learned from him how valid it is to take that kind of thing seriously.”

  By this point in his life and career, Reed had grown more relaxed in how he interacted with his band. The explosive anger he used to show when a band member made a mistake was much less apparent—and even when it was, Reed would now wait before bringing down the lash. “The band would go out with Lou to dinner every night, pretty much, after the show,” Calhoun said. “It was extremely rare that he would be critical on the night after a show—only if he was really pissed or if something had gone dreadfully wrong. Usually he would hold his criticisms until the next day.” Even then, “it wasn’t like this long critique—more like, ‘What was that crazy sound I heard during the second song?’ Generally, if he said something was a problem, something had really gone wrong.”

  Calhoun also noticed and admired Reed’s “rock-and-roll attitude”—his determination to “keep it fresh” all the time. “He was really improvisational onstage. He was always trying to change the orchestration or do something different, always keep it alive. Look, it could be frustrating, too, you know? You might think, ‘Here we are doing this song, and we did it this way six months ago on the last tour, so I’m all set up and I have my sound and I know what to do.’ But Lou would be like, ‘What is that horrible sound you’re using?’ And you’d say, ‘It’s the sound I used last tour.’ And he’d say, ‘Don’t tell me what you did last tour.’ You learned really quickly that he never wanted to hear ‘But this is what we agreed yesterday.’ ‘This is today.’ He would say, ‘Today, as of four twenty-three, I want you to play a solo there.’”

  CALHOUN’S SENSE THAT REED was “just looking for stuff to do that was new” was exactly right. At one point, as the digital dismantling of the music business was fully under way, Reed wondered if it might be somehow possible to sell music the way a painter would sell a painting: create one copy that a collector could buy and own. Like so many of Reed’s wilder notions, it seemed preposterous until 2015, when the Wu-Tang Clan sold its double album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to hedge fund manager and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli for a reported $2 million. Reed was looking for new outlets for his creativity, and he soon found an exciting one.

  As Reed’s friendship with Calhoun developed and deepened, he also remained in regular contact with Ulrich Krieger, the experimental composer who, much to Reed’s delight and amazement, had transcribed and staged Metal Machine Music. Krieger and Reed had discussed the idea of performing improvised music together onstage, and they finally got the opportunity to do so. From his position as a professor at CalArts, Krieger arranged to play two nights of completely improvised music with Reed at REDCAT, the university-affiliated performance space designed by Frank Gehry. The theater was small—its maximum capacity was 240—and because the two scheduled shows on October 2, 2008, sold out immediately, a third was added for the next night. The show was advertised as Unclassified: Lou Reed and Ulrich Krieger. No doubt recalling the outraged reactions of his rock fans to Metal Machine Music, Reed made sure that the promotion for the show made it as clear as possible that the performances would include “no songs” and no singing by Reed. Instead, the show would be a “venture into deep acoustic space, drawing on new music, free jazz, avant-rock, noise, and ambient.” Pushing the idea of improvisation to its furthest point, Reed pulled Calhoun into the performance at the last minute. “I think initially Ulrich was like, ‘Why are you bringing some random dude into this?’ But Ulrich and I wound up getting along really well. I love playing with him. I think he’s brilliant. The group really connected.”

  At REDCAT, Reed played various guitars, Krieger primarily played saxophone, and Calhoun processed everything through his banks of computers. The performances ran for about an hour and were well received. Though hardly a bastion of avant-garde aesthetics, Billboard ran a smart, insightful paean to the show by Jeffrey Overwood. “Krieger’s saxophone was heavily processed into rich, electronic, glacial sweeps, while Reed’s thick distorted guitar chords took on the various characters of the effects pedals around him. Calhoun, seated behind a desk with computers and mixers, added chunky layers of subfrequency bass vibrations to the mix, which reached near-deafening volumes at various points. The performers shared minimal interaction onstage, but when their eyes locked, it provided the performance with welcome jolts of humanity.” No doubt to Reed’s delight, some audience members walked out. After all, what would be the point of doing such a show if no one was pushed beyond his or her limits? The audience might not have heard “Satellite of Love,” Overwood concluded, “but if they paid attention, they surely felt the cosmic heft of three deeply creative spirits.”

  The three musicians found the shows deeply gratifying, and a double CD of the concerts titled The Creation of the Universe was released in December of 2008 on a label Reed founded, Best Seat in the House. The album’s title evoked Reed’s conviction that the work he was doing with Krieger and Calhoun was somehow elemental, a kind of pure, primal sound that resided at the heart of all his musical efforts, indeed at the very heart of sound itself. Reed proposed a tour. But what to call the group? Based on the original billing at REDCAT, they considered Reed Krieger Calhoun but quickly rejected it. Reed came up with the idea of calling it Metal Machine Trio, often abbreviated MM3. That would make it a lot easier—and, in very relative terms, more lucrative—to book a tour. The irony can’t have been lost on Reed that, after nearly ending his career, Metal Machine Music had somehow become a commercial asset three decades later. Still, with the group’s name, Reed had a larger point to make. For Reed, “MM3 came as a late artistic confirmation,” Krieger declared. “He had been right all along. Metal Machine Music had come home. Completely unexpected by him, a younger generation of musicians now got it.” Once again, Reed’s most extreme sounds had found their proper place and their true audience.

  25

  METALLICA

  WHILE REED WAS WORKING with Metal Machine Trio, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was planning to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. Despite his resistance to pretty much everything the Hall of Fame represented, Reed frequently participated in its events. He delivered a scorching performance of “Sweet Jane” backed by Soul Asylum at the concert at Cleveland Stadium honoring the opening of the Hall in that city in 1995. He gave speeches inducting Dion, Leonard Cohen, and even Frank Zappa, whom he had publicly disparaged early in his career, into the Hall at the organization’s swanky induction dinners. Reed also appeared and performed, of course, when the Velvet Underground was inducted in 1996. No doubt he admired the artists he inducted, but he also had one eye on his legacy, possibly believing that cooperating with the Rock Hall’s powers that be might somehow ease his own induction.

  To celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Rock Hall organized two nights of concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York, to take place on October 29 and 30, 2009. It was a characteristically grandiose evening, with artists like Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash serving as house bands, performing their own songs, and playing with special guests. Somehow it was determine
d that Reed would perform during the hard rock portion of the second night, backed by Metallica, who would also support Ray Davies and Ozzy Osbourne. While Osbourne’s collaboration with Metallica made perfect sense, Reed’s (and Davies’s, for that matter) was more problematic. It rested on the assumption that the noise extravaganzas of the Velvet Underground, the guitar orchestrations of Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal band, and the sonic blitzkrieg of Metal Machine Music all contributed to the development of heavy metal—or, in its upscale version, hard rock—that Metallica was part of. That’s a stretch, but Reed certainly deserved a place in the two concerts’ retrospective look at the history of rock and roll, and that’s where he ended up. And to be fair, the idea wasn’t entirely indefensible. Metallica’s lead guitarist, Kirk Hammett, told Rolling Stone that year, “I can clearly draw a line from Ray and Lou to what we’re doing now.”

  To their mutual credit, both Reed and Metallica fully committed to the collaboration. Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, said that the group told Reed, “We’re your backing band. We can go this way. We can go that way. Tell us what you would like.” Reed took them up on that offer. During rehearsals, Reed listened to Metallica’s heavied-up arrangement of “Sweet Jane” and told the band that it sounded “too militaristic.” “You need the hop in there,” he explained. On the other hand, Reed also encouraged Hammett to solo more freely on the song, no doubt having the extended Rock n Roll Animal version in mind. Reed and the band performed two songs at the concert—“Sweet Jane” and “White Light/White Heat”—and leaned into them hard. Reed deeply believed in sonic impact, and having a band with Metallica’s hurricane force behind him clearly was a thrill. “They’re as powerful as you can get,” Reed said of the band. Metallica, meanwhile, took a kind of filial pride in performing with Reed. Within the context of the sixties-oriented Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, metal was still regarded as an outlier, a slightly embarrassing misfit son. To be part of such a visible event—let alone to back one of the most lauded critical darlings in rock history—was a form of validation for Metallica. Ulrich declared, “It says a lot about the Hall of Fame that in 2009 there’s a place for what we represent at this kind of party.” The members of Metallica obviously had one eye on their own legacy—and understandably so.