Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Lou’s eccentric rebellious side found a lot to gripe about within the conservative, white confines of his neighborhood. Hyman remembered that, though outwardly polite, Lou harbored a hatred of his environment that was manifested in an ill will for Allen’s right-wing father. “The reason he disliked my father so much was because he always viewed him as the consummate Republican lawyer. He was very aware early on of political differences in people. We lived in an area that was Republican and conservative, and he always rebelled against that. I couldn’t understand why that upset him so much. But he was always very respectful to my parents.”

  Mr. Reed, along with Mr. Hyman, discouraged musical careers for their sons. “He thought there were bad people involved, which there were,” recalled Lou. However, as Richard Aquila wrote in That Old Time Rock and Roll, “adult fear of rock and roll probably says more about the paranoia and insecurity of American society in the 1950s and early 1960s than it does about rock and roll. The same adults who feared foreigners because of the expanding Cold War, and who saw the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss as evidence of internal subversion, often viewed rock and roll as a foreign music with its own sinister potential for corrupting American society.”

  Lewis enjoyed the comforts of his middle-class upbringing, but acted as if he were estranged from the dominant values of suburban American life. Lou would rewrite his childhood repeatedly in an attempt to define himself. Some of his most famous songs, written in reaction to his parents’ values, have a stark, despairing tone that spoke for millions of children who grew up in the stunned and silent fifties of America’s postwar affluence. One friend put her finger on the pulse of the problem when she pointed out that Lou had an extreme case of shpilkes—a Yiddish term that perfectly sums up his contradictory nature: “A person with shpilkes has to scratch not only his own itch, he can’t leave any situation alone or any scab unpicked. If the teenage Lewis had come into your home, you would have said, ‘My God, he’s got shpilkes!’ Because he’s cute and he’s warm and he’s lovable, but get him out of here because he’s knocking the shit out of everything and I don’t dare turn my back on him. He’s causing trouble, he’s aggravating me, he’s a pain in the ass!” According to Lou, he never felt good about his parents. “I went to great lengths to escape the whole thing,” he said when he was forty years old. “I couldn’t relate to it then and I can’t now.” As he saw himself in one of his favorite poems by Delmore Schwartz: “… he sat there / Upon the windowseat in his tenth year / Sad separate and desperate all afternoon, / Alone, with loaded eyes …”

  Another charge Lou would lob at his unprotected parents was that they were filthy rich. This was, however, purely an invention Lou used to dramatize his situation. During Lou’s childhood his father made a modest salary by American standards. The kitchen-table family possessed a single automobile and lived in a simply though tastefully furnished house with no vestiges of luxury or loosely spent funds. Indeed, by the end of the 1950s, what with the shock treatments, Lou’s college tuition, and their daughter Elizabeth’s coming into her teens, the Reeds were stretched about as far as they could reach.

  ***

  The year of his electroshock treatments, 1959, through the summer of 1960 was a lost time for Lou. From then on, the central theme of his life became a struggle to express himself and get what he wanted. The first step was to remove himself from the control of his family, which he now saw as an agent of punishment and confinement. “I came from this small town out on Long Island,” he stated. “Nowhere. I mean nowhere. The most boring place on earth. The only good thing about it was you knew you were going to get out of there.” In August he registered and published a song called “You’ll Never, Never Love Me.” A gut resentment of his parents was blatantly expressed in another song, “Kill Your Sons.” The music, he later said, gave him back his heartbeat so he could dream again. “The music is all,” he wrote in a wonderful piece of prose called “From the Bandstand.” “People should die for it. People are dying for everything else, so why not for the music. It saves more lives.”

  Chapter Two

  Pushing the Edge

  SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY: 1960–62

  Lou liked to play with people, tease them and push them to an edge. But if you crossed a certain line with Lou, he’d cut you right out of his life.

  Allen Hyman

  In order to continue their friendship, Lou and Allen Hyman had conspired to attend the same university. “In my senior year in high school Lou and I and his father drove up to Syracuse for an interview,” recalled Allen. “We didn’t speak to his father much, he was quiet. Quiet in the sense of being formal—Mr. Reed. We stayed at the Hotel Syracuse, which was then a real old hotel. There were also a bunch of other kids who were up for that with their parents. Would-be applicants to Syracuse. Lou’s father took one room and Lou and I took another. We met a bunch of kids in the hall that were going to Syracuse and we had this all-night party with these girls we met. We thought this was going to be a gas, this is terrific. The following day we both knew people who were going to Syracuse at the time who were in fraternities, and the campus was so nice, I think it was the summer, it was warm at the time, it looked so nice.”

  The two boys made an agreement that if they were both accepted, they would matriculate at Syracuse. “We both got in,” said Hyman. “And the minute I got my acceptance I let them know I was going to go and I called Lou very excited and said, “I got my acceptance to Syracuse, did you?” And he said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘Are you going?’ and he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, no? I thought we were going, we had an agreement.’ He said, ‘I got accepted to NYU and that’s where I’m going.’ I said, ‘Why would you want to do that, we had such a good time up there, we liked the place, I told them I was going, I thought you were going.’ He said, ‘No, I got accepted at NYU uptown and I’m going.’”

  Lewis Reed, 17, 1959. ‘I don’t have a personality.’

  In the fall of 1959, Lou headed off to college. Located in New York City, New York University seemed like a smart choice for a man who loved nothing more than listening to jazz at the Five Spot, the Vanguard, and other Greenwich Village clubs. But the Village was not the NYU campus Lou chose. Almost incomprehensibly, he signed up for the school’s branch located way uptown in the Bronx. NYU uptown provided Reed with neither the opportunities nor the support that he needed. Instead, Lou was left floundering in a strange and hostile environment. One of his few pleasures came from visiting the mecca of modern jazz, the Five Spot, regularly, but he didn’t always have the money to get in and often stood outside listening to Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman as the music drifted out to the street.

  However, Lou’s main concern was not college. The Bronx campus was convenient to the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he was undergoing an intensive course of postshock treatments. According to Hyman, who talked to him on the phone at least once a week through the semester, Lou was having a very, very bad time. “He was in therapy three or four times a week,” Hyman recalled. “He hated NYU. He really hated it. He was going through a very difficult time and he was taking medication. He was having a lot of difficulty dealing with college and day-to-day business. He was a mess. He was going through a lot of very, very bad emotional stuff at the time and he probably had something very close to a minor breakdown.”

  After two semesters, in the spring of 1960, having completed the Payne Whitney sessions although still on tranquilizers, Lou couldn’t take the NYU scene anymore.

  One of the few people who encouraged Lou during his yearlong depression was his stalwart childhood friend, Allen Hyman, who now urged him to get away from his parents. Allen encouraged Lou to join him at Syracuse—a large, prestigious, private university, hundreds of miles from Freeport. In the fall of 1960, shaking off the shadows of Creedmore and the medication of Payne Whitney, Reed took Hyman’s advice and enrolled at Syracuse.

  ***

  The
coeducational university, attended by some nineteen thousand sciences and humanities students, had been established in 1870. It was located on a 640-acre campus atop a hill, in the middle of the city. Its $800 per term tuition was relatively high for a private university. Most of the students lived in sororities and fraternities and were enjoying one last four-year party before putting aside childish notions for the economic responsibilities of adulthood. There was, among the student population, a large and wealthy Jewish contingent, generally straight-arrow fraternity men and sorority women bound for careers in medicine and law. There was a small margin of artists, writers, and musicians with whom Lou would throw in his lot, enjoying, for the first time in his life, a niche in which he could find a degree of comfort. Among many other talented and successful people, the artist Jim Dine, the fashion designer Betsey Johnson, and the film producer Peter Guber all graduated in Reed’s class of 1964.

  The Syracuse campus looked like the perfect set for a horror movie about college life in the early 1960s. Its buildings resembled Gothic mansions from a screenwriter’s imagination. Indeed, the scriptwriter of The Addams Family TV show of the 1960s, who attended the university at the same time as Lou, used the classically Gothic Hall of Languages as the basis for the Addams Family mansion. The surrounding four-block-square area of wooden Victorian houses, Depression-era restaurants, stores, and bars completed the college landscape. A pervasive ocher-gray paint lent a somber air to the seedy wooden houses tucked away in side streets covered, most of the time, with snow, wet leaves, or rain. The atmosphere was likely to elicit either poetic contemplation or depressive madness. It provided a perfect backdrop for the beatnik lifestyle.

  The surrounding city of Syracuse presented no less smashed a landscape. The manufacturing town got dumped with snow seven months of the year, and heavy bouts of rain the rest of the time. Only during the summer, when most of the students had scattered to their homes on Long Island or New Jersey, did the city receive warmth and sunshine. A thriving industrial metropolis popularly known as the Salt City, also specializing in metals and electrical machinery, it was two hundred miles northwest of Freeport, forty miles south of Lake Ontario on the Canadian border, and five miles southwest of Oneida Lake. Syracuse was aggressively conservative and religious, but at the time of Reed’s arrival it was fast turning into the academic hub of the Empire State. The city proudly supported its prestigious university, whose popular football team, the Orangemen, was undefeated during Lou’s four years, and its residents turned out in great numbers for athletic events. Despite high academic standards, Syracuse was still primarily seen as a football school. “Where the vale of Onondaga / Meets the eastern sky / Proudly stands our Alma Mater / On her hilltop high” ran the opening verse of the school song, a ditty Lewis, as many of his friends called him, would not forget.

  As a freshman, Lou was assigned to the far southwestern corner of the North Campus in Sadler Hall, a plain, boxlike dormitory resembling a prison. However, much of his time was spent in the splendid, gray-stone Hall of Languages, which overlooked University Avenue and University Place at the north end of campus and housed the English, history, and philosophy departments.

  Syracuse University had excellent faculty and academic courses. Though Lou may have sleepwalked through much of the curriculum, he threw himself into the music, philosophy, and literature studies in which he excelled. In music appreciation, theory, and composition classes, Lou soaked up everything, even opera. First, Lou tried his hand at journalism, but he dropped that after a week when the teacher told him his opinions were irrelevant. However, Lou quickly immersed himself in philosophy. He devoured the existentialists, obsessed over the tortuous dialectics of Hegel, and embraced the Fear and Trembling of Kierkegaard. “I was very into Hegel, Sartre, Kierkegaard,” Reed recalled. “After you finish reading Kierkegaard, you feel like something horrible has happened to you—fear and nothing. That’s where I was coming from.” He also loved Krafft-Ebing and the writing of the beat generation, particularly Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. To complete his freshman image, he took imagistic inspiration from the brash, tortured figures of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and, most of all, Lenny Bruce.

  To his advantage, Reed already had the perfect agent to introduce him to the university, the smooth operator and prince of good times Allen Hyman, now entering his sophomore year. Another pampered suburban kid who drove both a Cadillac and Jaguar, Allen was generous, full of good humor, and sharp-witted. Furthermore, he genuinely appreciated Lou and was willing to put up with a lot of flak to remain his friend. Hyman was well connected with the straight fraternity set and eager to introduce Lewis to his world.

  However, a highly uncomfortable introduction came about when Allen tried to get Lou to rush his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu (aka the Sammies). “Hazing was a really horrendous experience and most people were very intimidated by it,” recalled Hyman. Inductees were forced to drink themselves into oblivion and were often humiliated physically, sexually, and mentally by the fraternity brothers. When Allen told Lou stories about what he went through to join a fraternity, Lou shot him a hard look, snapping, “What are you into—masochism?”

  “He had said that he didn’t want anything to do with it and that it was fascistic and disgusting,” Hyman recalled, “and he couldn’t believe anybody would be willing to go through hazing without killing the person who was hazing them.” However, typically perversely, Reed agreed to attend a rush session.

  From the outset it was clear that he intended to make a strong impression. Reed came to the socializer in a suit three sizes too small and covered in dirt. It was a radical departure from the blue blazer, smart tie, and neatly combed hair of the other rushees. Allen immediately realized how much Lou was getting off on being outrageous. When one of the brothers criticized Lou’s appearance, Reed riposted, “Fuck you!” and his fraternity career came to an abrupt end. Hyman was asked to escort his friend out immediately. Walking Lou back to his dorm, a chagrined Allen hung his head regretfully, but Lou, far from being despondent, appeared exhilarated by the event. “I guess this isn’t for you,” Allen said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Lou replied. “I told you I wouldn’t get along with those assholes. How can you live there?”

  Another freshman trial that Lou failed was with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. As part of his freshman course requirements, he had to choose between physical education and ROTC. (In those days it was common to join ROTC in order to be able to go into the army as an officer and a gentleman.) Claiming that he would surely break his neck in phys ed or else kill somebody in ROTC, Lou attempted to evade either requirement, but in the end grudgingly signed up for the latter. ROTC consisted of two classes a week about how to be a soldier and possibly a leader. However, Lou’s military experience was almost a short-lived as his fraternity stint. Just weeks into the semester, when he flatly refused a direct order from his officer, he was unceremoniously booted out.

  But Reed managed to make an impact on his freshman year with his very own radio show. Employing a considerable boyish charm to overcome the severe doubts of program director Katharine Griffin, during his first semester Lou hustled his way onto the Syracuse University radio station, WAER FM, with a jazz program called Excursions on a Wobbly Rail (named for a wicked Cecil Taylor piece that was used as his introductory theme). The classical, conservative station, Radio House, was situated in a World War II Quonset hut tucked away behind Carnegie Library. Freezing his balls off through many icy Syracuse evenings, hunched over his ancient machinery like some WWII underground resistance fighter for two hours, three nights a week, Lou blasted a mélange of his favorite sounds by the avant-garde leaders of the Free Jazz movement Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, the doo-wopping Dion, and the sexually charged Hank Ballard, James Brown and the Marvelettes. The mixture presented the essence of Lou Reed. “I was a very big fan of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp,” he recalled. “Then James Brown, the doo-wop groups, and rockabilly. Put it all tog
ether and you end up with me.”

  Unfortunately, the Reedian canon was not appreciated by the station’s staff, and numerous faculty members, including the dean of men, lodged complaints about the—to them—hideous, unintelligible cacophony that was Reed’s program. And the authorities’ reaction was not Lou’s only problem. Disguising his voice, Allen Hyman would often call Lou at the station and harass him with ridiculous requests. On one occasion, “I asked him to play something he hated and I knew he would never play,” Allen recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not going to play that, forget it.’ So I said, ‘Listen, if you don’t play this, I’m gonna fucking have you killed. I’ll wait for you myself and I’m gonna kill you!’ And, thinking it was some lunatic, Lou got scared. Then I called him back and told him it was me and he screamed at me, saying that if I ever did that again he’d never speak to me.”

  As it turned out, Allen’s pranks didn’t last long enough to lose him Lou’s friendship because before long Griffin, ever vigilant in her duties as WAER’s program director, concluded that “Excursions on a Wobbly Rail was a really weird jazz show that sounded like some new kind of noise. It was just too weird and cutting edge.” Before the end of the semester, she unceremoniously dumped it from the air, causing Lou considerable anguish.

  In retrospect, Griffin and her contemporaries realized that Reed was simply ahead of his time. “Most of us who were in power on campus were children of the fifties,” she explained. “Kids in those days wore chinos and madras shirts, a clean-cut Kingston Trio kind of thing. Lou looked more like what a rock person from later in the sixties would look like. Lou was presaging the sixties and seventies and we just weren’t ready for it. He was right on the cusp of two generations. A little too far ahead to be admired in the fifties.”