Responses to the performance were mixed. The more adventurous wing of Reed’s fans, the ones inclined to reward him for any step outside the realm of what he actually did best, praised him for working with a younger band across genres. Even so, they tended to applaud the intention more than the music. Reed’s more conservative fans found the performances leaden and unmelodic. Metallica’s audience, to the degree that it paid attention to the Rock Hall show, seemed mystified. Why were their idols playing behind this old guy who couldn’t sing?
By their own lights, however, Reed and the band were satisfied. When their performance ended, they were sweaty and beaming. Their embraces were hearty and genuinely affectionate. Reed retained some reservations. “If you watch the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing, ‘Sweet Jane,’ it’s off,” Hal Willner said. “No one else was acknowledging this, but Lou and I did. It doesn’t work like that rhythmically.” Still, both Reed and Metallica were unwilling to let the partnership end. “We knew from then that we were made for each other,” Reed said. Reed was determined to record with the band, and discussions soon began about extending the collaboration. As willing as he had been to experiment, Reed never gave up on the notion that he could build on his cult following and find a new audience. Metallica had sold more than a hundred million albums. Even if a tiny portion of those fans came on board for a Reed-Metallica collaboration, that would be hugely significant. Not that Reed was desperate for money or sales, though he endlessly complained about both. But making a commercial impact with a band like Metallica would demonstrate that he was still an essential part of the contemporary cultural conversation. That was the appeal for him.
Reed’s initial idea was to record a set of some of his older songs, giving them the pulverizing treatment Metallica had dished out to “Sweet Jane” and “White Light/White Heat.” But rather than do his classics, the band would instead tackle, in Reed’s words, “fallen jewels that no one remembered.” But Reed had also built up a body of songs he had recorded with Sarth Calhoun for a project Robert Wilson had brought to him about the work of German expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind titled Lulu, after the sexually adventurous female character in two of Wedekind’s plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. (Presumably, it was purely a wry coincidence that Reed’s girly nickname at the Factory had been Lulu.) Calhoun and Reed came up with soundscapes along the lines of the meditation music they had done, and Reed improvised lyrics over them, which were then edited down to manageable lengths. Reed invited Calhoun to come to Berlin to help him and Wilson incorporate the music into Wilson’s play. However, most of it ended up never being used, and it has never been released.
“It was extremely difficult for the live band to interpret the material, and it was unworkable just to play back the recordings,” Calhoun said. “The actors very diligently learned Lou’s phrasings and microtonal pitches, but the stuff was so strong that it just kind of stood on its own. It didn’t really work with the stage production. I think Robert Wilson had already envisioned the play working with more typical Lou Reed songs, so he’d planned the whole thing with that element in mind. And now he had something that couldn’t be more different: long eight-minute, ten-minute abstract pieces. Beautiful, heartbreaking stuff, but he’d set everything up with something else.”
The Wilson piece was performed in Berlin in April of 2011 using some of Reed’s material and was well reviewed. But Reed still had plenty of music and songs left, and he was pondering what to do with them. Calhoun suggested that Reed bring the songs to Metallica. “In stark contrast to my initial views on Lou Reed, I’m of an age where Metallica was a really big deal,” Calhoun said. “I wanted an excuse to be involved in that gig, but there really was no reason why I should be. What would I do, exactly? So I just said, ‘What would be crazy is if you took these abstract pieces with all these electronic sounds and contrasted that with intense metal riffs and mind-blowing lyrics. You could do it. It would work. You could do Lulu with heavy metal guitars over it and contrast the two elements.’ Lou said, ‘I would have to hear what you’re talking about.’ So I arranged some of the pieces as songs and played different metal riffs over them. I don’t really play guitar—they were just horrible mock-ups.”
One day, Calhoun accompanied Reed and Laurie Anderson to Dia:Beacon, the art foundation in Beacon, New York, about an hour north of Manhattan. On the car ride, Calhoun played the mock-ups he had done for Reed on his phone. “I said, ‘This is what it could sound like if you had Metallica doing this material with you,’” Calhoun recalled. Reed said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” So a week before Reed was to fly to San Francisco to begin working with Metallica in their studio, he sent them the demos and suggested that they scrap the previous idea of working on earlier songs of his and attack this new material.
Initially—and understandably—Metallica was stunned by the songs Reed had sent them. Wedekind was a writer obsessed with sexuality and the interface of erotic obsession and self-destruction, and such themes were hardly foreign to Reed. They were not, however, Metallica’s typical fare, to say the least. In many ways, Reed’s lyrics were the least of the problem. In signing on to work with Reed on his earlier songs, the members of Metallica knew what they were likely to be getting. But this music was another matter entirely. By the standards of Metallica’s brutally formulated thrash metal, these tracks were drifting and formless. “Lars and I listened to the stuff,” vocalist James Hetfield said, “and it was like, ‘Wow, this is very different.’ It was scary at first, because the music was so open. But then I thought, ‘This could go anywhere.’”
“He was defensive, ready to roll his eyes,” Ulrich said of Hetfield’s initial reaction. “Then you could see this weight lifted off his shoulders. He felt a connection. He had not expected that.” Reed also made it clear that he was not treating Metallica as if its members were hired hands. He wanted the band to bring the firepower that had made its reputation, and to help shape the arrangements to the band’s own strengths. “It’s so easy, because we’re not trying to change anyone,” Reed said of the collaboration. Ulrich agreed: “It wasn’t ‘This is my shit, do as you’re told.’ Lou understood we were going to give him something nobody else would… almost like two languages. We have m-e-t-a-l in our name. But we can go fucking anywhere and do anything.” Meanwhile, Calhoun got his wish. Reed brought him out to the sessions to help communicate their musical ideas to the band. Hal Willner also joined them as one of the album’s coproducers, along with Reed, Metallica, and engineer Greg Fidelman, who had previously worked with Metallica. “It was crazy,” Calhoun said, “because, like, now I’m showing James Hetfield a riff I wrote. I mean, ninety-nine percent of the riffs on the record were written by Metallica, but even if for half an hour I’m teaching him a riff I wrote, like, how is that even happening?”
As they had at the Hall of Fame concert, Reed and Metallica locked in relentlessly. “They were so into the project,” Calhoun said of Metallica. “They completely rose to the challenge. They’re, like, one of the greatest bands that has ever been. If you’re going to try to do something crazy, why not? It’s Metallica. It was an insane experience, because it was this huge meeting of two totally different working aesthetics, two totally different ideas about what music is. But they connected in the same place: power, clarity, intent.
“Metallica, they’re a thoroughly composed band, by and large. Their live shows sound very much like their records. Whereas Lou would never want to do that. When Metallica makes records, they spend a long time, do a lot of overdubs, a lot of getting everything perfect. That’s part of why they’re so amazing. But what’s crazy about them is that they could walk into a room, pick up their instruments, and just start playing whatever, and Metallica comes out. It sounds just perfect. And Lou capitalized on that, because he’s a first take–best take kind of guy. So a lot of the songs on the album were literally first takes. It was, like, improvised metal. They could do that. You would think that would be impossible because metal�
�s all about these precise changes, but I think they were really into this idea of, ‘Whoa, we can just make a record in four weeks instead of a year? We can just let it flow out?’ I remember James saying, ‘I don’t know how I’d go back to making records the old way now that I’ve done this.’ They were really affected and willing to follow Lou’s lead. They were super respectful of him as this great genius who was leading the charge.”
Of course, issues arose in the studio resulting from the different work styles of Reed and the band. Reed’s instinctiveness and go-from-the-gut impulses proved a stark contrast to Metallica’s far more methodical approach. It wasn’t a tussle, really; ever deferential to the master, Metallica just wanted more direction. As they were recording “The View,” Hetfield was having trouble with the countervocal he was doing to complement Reed’s characteristically deadpan narration. More specifically, he was having a hard time getting inside Reed’s telegraphic lyrics (“I am the root / I am the progress / I’m the aggressor / I am the tablet”)—their meaning, as well as their cadences, which, as Reed’s lyrics often do, ignore the beat and move haphazardly across bars. There was another complexity as well. “I think Lou and Metallica met equally, but, if anything, Metallica seemed a bit cowed by Lou,” said Lenny Kaye. “Which really makes me chuckle. And Lou probably chuckled inwardly, too, because he knew he had the goods, that no matter how dark Master of Puppets is, it’s not as dark as ‘Sister Ray.’”
“You gotta mean it,” was Reed’s direction to Hetfield about his vocal on “The View,” as the two men stared each other down. “Give me a clue,” Hetfield said. “What do you want me to mean? And these lines don’t rhyme. There’s five syllables in this, two in there.” Still, at the end of the stark, black-and-white video for the song made by Darren Aronofsky, who directed the films Black Swan and The Wrestler, one can see Reed applauding Metallica’s performance. “Bravo, bravo!” he says. “Encore!” That a major director was hired to do a video and that Reed agreed to edits that would keep it under four minutes indicate the degree of commercial expectations everyone held for the album.
Whatever other problems arose seemed to be taken in good spirits. Lars Ulrich said of Reed, “One time, I had to point something out to him… and he got hot and bothered. He challenged me to a street fight, which is a pretty daunting proposition because he’s an expert in martial arts and is never too far from a sword. The good thing about me is I can do the hundred-meter dash faster than most forty-eight-year-old musicians.” But the sessions included moments of profound connection. “Things just kept falling into place,” Calhoun said. “If you want to be mystical, that’s when you feel like you’re tapping into something. You see weird coincidences, and you know you’re on the right path. Those sessions had that quality to them.”
Lulu concludes with “Junior Dad,” a nineteen-minute track that’s easily one of the strongest songs on the album and, in some ways, one of Reed’s great moments. The music moves at a glacial pace and retains the beautiful, melodic quality of the original tracks Reed had done with Calhoun. Metallica adds a note of grandeur. As the song’s title suggests, Reed’s lyrics explore the complex Oedipal dance in which fathers and sons inevitably engage. As he neared seventy, perhaps it seemed pointless to Reed to continue to rail against his father in his music, though in other contexts, he continued to do so. Perhaps it made more sense to explore the extent to which he had become a “Junior Dad,” a reflection of his own father, standing in judgment of himself.
The song begins with the image of a man drowning and pleading to be saved—a son, presumably, begging his father to rescue him. “Pull me up,” Reed sings. “Would you be my lord and savior? / Pull me up by my hair / Now would you kiss me on my lips?” The father responds cruelly: “I will teach you meanness, fear and blindness / No social redeeming kindness or state of grace.” By the end of the song, Reed sings, “The greatest disappointment / Age withered him and changed him / Into junior dad.” As Reed’s own father neared death, the song suggests, he seemed an object of pity, a mighty, fearsome man reduced to a juvenile version of himself. But age had withered and changed Reed as well, and not relieved the fear that he was in fact the “greatest disappointment” that he believed his father believed him to be. The horror he had always felt about his father’s imagined vengefulness was there, along with an unnerving empathy. When Hammett, whose father had died a few months earlier, and Hetfield first heard the playback of the completed track, they wept. “After that,” Hammett said, “anything Lou wanted, he had me. I’d play it.”
Reed’s own father had died of cancer in 2005 at the age of ninety-one. Reed would occasionally visit him when he was in a hospice in the Bronx, but they never truly reconciled. At the service after he died, Merrill delivered a eulogy. Reed did not speak, and he did not stay long. His mother, too, had entered a hospice on Long Island, and Reed was closer to her. He would visit her more frequently but, as with his father, only if his sister was there. Merrill had to assume the primary responsibility of caring for their parents, given Reed’s complicated relationship with them. Toby, as Reed would always refer to his mother, would light up when her son came to visit, and they would eat lox and bagels with Merrill. Reed would speak calmly to Toby and try to make her feel better. He could be playful with her. If she felt she was not being treated well at the hospice, he would speak to her in a soothing voice. “Why are you angry with people, Toby?” he’d ask, smiling gently. “You can’t take out a machine gun and kill them just because you’re angry!” Toby never lost her insecurities, her feeling that, because of the shock treatments, she and her husband had done something terribly wrong, something that made their son resent them so. Reed was incapable of being around either of his parents for extended periods, but, particularly with his mother, he could occasionally locate feelings of something like love.
THE GOOD FEELINGS, OPTIMISM, and high expectations of the Lulu sessions began to wither as word spread about the project. “The record got bad reviews before it was even recorded,” Willner said. “Metallica’s fans went nuts.” When the album was released for streaming in October of 2011, the response grew only more vicious. While Reed’s fans, for the most part, had no use for Metallica, they were accustomed to his frequent left turns and were content to ignore the album. Age had something to do with that as well. Much as Reed’s fans revered him, they were well past the point of living and dying with every one of his releases. Not so Metallica’s fans. The band members themselves may have been well into their forties, but many of their fans were still in their teens, and they regarded Lulu as a betrayal of the worst kind. “It was more spiteful than anyone was prepared for,” Ulrich said. “Especially against Lou. He is such a sweet man. But when Metallica do impulsive riffing and Lou Reed is reciting abstract poetry about German bohemians from a hundred fifty years ago, it can be difficult to embrace.”
That Reed’s lyrics deviated so dramatically from Metallica’s postadolescent apocalyptic pronouncements and veered into deeply disturbing sexual territory only made matters worse. Asked if the band had reservations about some of Reed’s lyrics, like “I swallow your sharpest cutter / Like a colored man’s dick,” from “Pumping Blood,” Ulrich responded, “I understand that to some thirteen-year-old in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, it can all seem a little cringeworthy, but to someone raised in an art community in Copenhagen in the late sixties, that was expected.” To the band’s credit, Metallica never stopped defending Lulu or turned on Reed. A couple of years after its release, Ulrich wrote, “I played the record for my kids yesterday in the car, and it sounded as relevant and more intense than ever; it sounded incredibly potent, very alive, and impulsive.… Twenty-five years from now, you’re going to have millions of people claiming they owned the record or loved it when it came out. Of course, neither will be true.… In some ways, it’s almost cooler that people didn’t embrace it, because it makes it more ours, it’s our project, our record, and this was never made for the masses, and the masses didn’t take to it.
It makes it more precious for those who were involved.”
Of course, it didn’t feel like that at the time. Both Reed and Metallica were stung by the response. Plans to tour in support of the album were scrapped. It clearly was not a fight Reed and Metallica were going to win, so the best strategy seemed to be to back away from the project. Calhoun said that he and Reed had discussed releasing their original version of Lulu once the Metallica version was out. “Maybe that would have served the material better,” Calhoun said. “Who knows? I think we all had such high hopes. We expected there to be criticism, but maybe not monolithic criticism. I know Lou was disappointed not to be able to tour it.” For Reed, it seemed like another setback—just as Set the Twilight Reeling and Ecstasy had been. If he couldn’t make something happen with a band that had sold a hundred million records, what hope was there to make an impact?
The album attracted some notable fans, however. According to Laurie Anderson, “David Bowie made a big point of saying to me, ‘Listen, this is Lou’s greatest work. This is his masterpiece. Just wait: it will be like Berlin. It will take everyone a while to catch up.’ I’ve been reading the lyrics and it is so fierce. It’s written by a man who understood fear and rage and venom and terror and revenge and love. And it is raging.”
Lou Reed Page 46
