Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Lou’s affair with Shelley reached something of a climax from the spring through the fall of 1969, as is reflected in a number of songs on the third and fourth VU albums, and albeit fleetingly they really did have some wonderful times together. Lou had a charming ability to reveal an encouraging interest in what she was doing. At the time Shelley was seriously into pottery, and although this seemed far removed from anything in Lou’s world, he would apply his mind to it as if she were another Warhol, encouraging her to get an angle and go with it. He was, she recalled, heavily into his injections of methedrine from the Dr. Feelgood so many celebrities went to in the late sixties, subsisting otherwise on health foods—bee pollen, wheat husks, and other natural substances—way before it became fashionable.

  His state of mind was reflected in the recording of another album that summer in New York. The record, subsequently referred to as the lost album since it was not released until 1985, was made primarily so that they could fulfill and thus get out of their MGM contract and find a new record company that could appreciate their special talents. Ironically, according to Maureen Tucker, it was the most pleasant recording session they ever did because they were given an unprecedented ten days in the studio and were for the first time aided by a sympathetic engineer, Gary Kellgren. MGM never released the album, buried in their vaults, because they no longer believed in the band’s commercial potential.

  The break with MGM and the tricky period in between leaving MGM and finding a new record company coincided with a parallel breakdown in the relationship between Lou and Steve Sesnick.

  From the outset of their relationship Lou had formed that particular bond with Sesnick that would characterize all his relationships with managers. Essentially, Lou put himself in the position he had attained with Delmore Schwartz as the favored if often prodigal son. Sesnick in turn had always given Lou the extraspecial treatment that the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, had given John Lennon or the Stones’ Andrew Oldham had given Mick Jagger. They had a special mental affiliation, further connected by a shared love of basketball.

  However, just as Lou had turned upon the munificent Andy Warhol when the VU’s first album had crash-landed, after the commercial failure of The Velvet Underground, with tentative negotiations being conducted by Sesnick with other record companies, Lou began, perhaps to some extent urged on by chemicals, to become paranoid about Sesnick. As his “love” for Steve turned into “hate,” Sesnick, who turned out at the same time anyway to be something of a match for Lou, played his trump card.

  As the Velvets had metamorphosed from the most advanced art-rock band in the world to just another rock-and-roll band on the road, none other than Doug Yule had emerged as one of its most popular members. Bearing an appearance that put him in the category of your average perky rock star grade-B level, Doug had an innocent, friendly, unthreatening look that made him accessible to the increasingly pubescent and prepubescent rock audience to whom Lou looked and sounded too frighteningly like, as Glenn O’Brien had pointed out in 1967, “a real junkie.” Snapping that in fact Doug could replace Lou in the band and then they would really be successful, Sesnick went on a campaign to promote Doug, comparing his performance to Lou’s favorably, etc.

  In order to understand what happened you have to summon up four factors. First, these people were all very young and impressionable. Second, being in a rock-and-roll band was absolutely the single hippest thing you could possibly do in 1969. Third, they had been, or so Lou thought, hovering on the edge of success, or total failure, for a nerve-grindingly long time. Fourth, any drug, whether it be pot or speed, laid on this particular group of people, was bound to vastly magnify the fear and trembling that go hand in hand with the ecstatic exaltation of playing rock and roll live.

  Consequently, at first a confused Lou responded to Steve’s gibes that Doug was a better performer by trying to emulate Yule. Thus we stumble upon the bizarre image of the control freak Lou Reed trying to copy his clone Doug Yule and making himself, as it would turn out, sick in the process. Sterling was amazed to see Lou, who had always stood pretty still onstage to good dramatic effect, hauling out a repertoire of rock-performer moves that dated back to Chuck Berry or were picked up from the Monkees. As the Sesnick/Yule/Reed drama pressed on, both Sterling and Moe became increasingly irritated by how much Doug was turning into Lou, becoming arrogant and dominant, and how much Lou appeared to be regressing into an earlier version of Doug, becoming quiet, withdrawn, just taking the blows without complaint. The confidence that had driven Lou to attain his goals since he had become Lou Reed up at Syracuse was clearly beginning to erode. As the end of the sixties loomed up, marked forever by the shocking death of Brian Jones that summer (the first famous rock-star death of Lou’s generation, and one that chilled him to the bone lest he lose his own life in pursuit of such a high road), Lou Reed looked into his future with sad, puzzled eyes.

  Lou had moved into an expensive Upper East Side apartment. However, when Morrison visited him to check it out, he was stunned by the glimpse of his colleague’s private life. “He was paying an outrageous amount of money for it,” recalled Sterling, “so I thought I’d go over and see what this place looked like. Well, you know how those high-rise apartments are—they’re real barren. And this was totally unfurnished, nothing except some kind of pallet that he had pushed up against one corner. And a tape recorder and some old tapes and I guess a notebook, and an acoustic guitar. There was nothing in the fridge except a half-empty container of papaya juice. I mean nothing, not even vitamins. It was just the picture of isolation and despair. He is the despairing type. So maybe it helps him.”

  In fact, 1970 looked as if it really was going to be the year in which the Velvet Underground rose above ground, not in the least because they signed a new recording deal with the great Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records. Ertegun, perhaps the most cultured and intelligent man in the industry, had midwifed many of the greatest musical artists of the century through Atlantic. His enthusiastic endorsement of the VU was a potentially huge factor in the coming year’s success. Furthermore, that summer they were scheduled to record their first studio album for Atlantic, Loaded, to be released in the fall, and to play a six-week engagement at Max’s Kansas City, the first time they had played publicly in NYC since 1967. What better way could Lou Reed have begun the new decade?

  Lou, however, was not one to seize upon the positives in a situation as much as the negatives. He soon turned what looked like it could have been a happy year into another sad one. Mind you, in this instance several outside factors contributed to his despair.

  If Lou had begun the second half of the VU’s career in the fall of 1968 as the dominant lion in the band, he approached the summer recording sessions in almost exactly the opposite state. Fragmented, weak, fragile, exhausted, levitating above his bed, stoned out of his mind, incapable of making it home alone night after night, are just a few of the words and phrases used to describe Lou’s state by those who knew him best in 1970. And as one dollys in on his position like a movie camera squaring off for the big final shot, one can easily see why. Whereas in 1968 he had strong support from Sesnick, Yule, and Tucker, and at least acquiescence from Morrison, as he approached the recording of Loaded, Reed and Sesnick were hardly speaking. Morrison had picked up his college studies where he had left off in 1965 and, apart from having little time and sympathy for Lou, was spending all of his time not playing or recording, reading Victorian novels. Yule, whose head was permanently wrapped in clouds of illusions partially created by Sesnick that he was now the star of the band, thought everything was fabulous. And Maureen Tucker got pregnant. She had to take a leave of absence and was replaced for the unbelievable fee of $6 per day by Doug Yule’s brother, Billy. Suddenly the sensitive Lou, to whom everything hurt, was, as he saw it, surrounded by a band of ravenous baboons who wanted nothing so much as to see him wither away. Steve Sesnick put it more directly. “I don’t care if you live or die,” he told Lou flatly one day. According to
Sterling, Lou found this cold slap in the face hard to take. Reed was, as some witnesses at the Factory had once said, as tough as stainless steel, but he had been taking a pounding day in and day out for four years straight, and he was as near to the end of his tether as he could be and still write and perform such classics as the great autobiographical “Rock and Roll” and the triumphant “Sweet Jane,” the two greatest songs on Loaded.

  In a head as schizy and hyper as Lou Reed’s, who can say what finally tipped the scales against him that summer. “Lou loves to dramatize,” explained Ronnie Cutrone, one of Lou’s Factory friends. “He loves to be the orphaned child, the orphaned genius.” Certainly a lot of factors were piling up against him, although everybody who saw him play at Max’s said he was great, but what brought him down may well have been the final curtain on his relationship with Shelley, which came down that spring when she too got pregnant, by her husband, in a definitive choice to stay with her family rather than move in with the hapless Lou. Lou finally had to accept that Shelley would no longer be available to him, that she had chosen her family over him. “He had too many places to go,” she said. “He was very narcissistic, and I knew he could never pay attention to a child.”

  The rock world was in a state of flux. In July the Beatles’ single “The Long and Winding Road” and the Bob Dylan album Self Portrait represented reflective views of those who had been undisputed leaders. It was obvious that something new was going to come along soon and surprise everyone, but in the summer of 1970 there was little indication of what it might be or where it would come from. Lou was working very much from out of his own complex, paranoid, and, some would say, drug-addled mind. He told Moe that he had been levitating several feet above his bed.

  Reed’s own memories of that summer are engraved in his harsh, bitter monologue: “There were a lot of things going on that summer. Internally, within the band, the situation, the milieu, and especially the management. Situations that could only be solved by as abrupt a departure as possible once I had made the decision. I just walked out because we didn’t have any money, I didn’t want to tour again—I can’t get any writing done on tour, and the grind is terrible—and I’d wondered for a long time if we were ever going to be accepted on a large scale. Words can’t do justice to the way I got worked over with the money. But I’m not a businessman. I always said, ‘I don’t care about it,’ and generally I’ve gotten fucked as a result of that attitude.

  “I hated playing at Max’s. Because I couldn’t do the songs I wanted to do and I was under a lot of pressure to do things I didn’t want to and it finally reached a crescendo. I never in my life thought I would not do what I believed in and there I was, not doing what I believed in, that’s all, and it made me sick. It dawned on me that I was doing what somebody else was telling me to do supposedly for my own good because they’re supposed to be so smart. But only one person can write it and only that one person should know what it’s about. I’m not a machine that gets up there and parrots off these songs. And I was giving out interviews at the time saying yes, I wanted the group to be a dance band, I wanted to do that, but there was a huge part of me that wanted to do something else. I was talking as if I was programmed. That part of me that wanted to do something else wasn’t allowed to express itself, in fact was being cancelled out. And it turned out that that was the part that made up 90 percent of Lou.

  “I plugged into objective reality, and I got very sick at what I saw, what I was doing to myself. I didn’t belong there. I didn’t want to be a mass pop national hit group with followers.

  “It simply requires a very secure ego to allow yourself to be loved for what you do rather than for what you are, and an even larger one to realize you are what you do. The singer has a soul but he feels he isn’t loved off-stage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only on stage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia.”

  What Lou had lost in the confusion and transition of the previous year was his confidence and that elusive “it” of rock that he had gone hand in hand with throughout the 1960s. You can hear it on the unique Live at Max’s Kansas City, which was recorded by remarkable coincidence on the last night Lou played there on a cheap cassette by Warhol superstar Brigid Polk, accompanied by Gerard Malanga. The record has been praised as a Warholianly accurate transcription of the night’s performance, and that it is, but Lou sounds ineffably sad and, to paraphrase one of his greatest other songs, “Venus in Furs,” as if he had not slept peacefully for a thousand years. Obviously to some extent the gloomhead personality that comes across on the album was caused by something that only he, and his parents, who were on their way in from Long Island to pick him up even as he played, knew, that this was it. This was the last night he would ever play with the VU.

  After the show, during which he played an unusually large number of ballads, he announced to Steve Sesnick that he was leaving the band. Sesnick’s immediate reaction is unrecorded, but it can be imagined to be one of relief. Now he, like Lou in 1968, was in control. As if by some seismic consciousness sent out by Lou’s levitating body, not only had Brigid Polk recorded this last show, but Maureen Tucker had come in from Long Island to see it. She was the first to get the news from Sesnick and hurried off to find Lou, whom she discovered sitting by himself, waiting for his parents, at the top of the stairs that led to the restaurant’s third-floor offices and dressing rooms. Putting her arm around him, she tried to persuade Lou to reconsider, but he remained firm, if extremely depressed by his decision. Meanwhile, Yule was in shock—he typically had no idea at all that anything was wrong—and Morrison, engrossed in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and a cheeseburger, remained in the dark until he suddenly saw Lou looming up saying, “Sterling, I’d like you to meet my parents,” and introducing Toby and Sidney Reed. Sterling, catapulted out of the nineteenth century back into the twentieth, was instantly filled with intense paranoia, since Lou’s parents had only ever entered his consciousness through Lou as horrifying specters there expressly for the purpose of carting him off to the loony bin. Mumbling a hasty hello, he watched in amazement as the trio walked away, pondering the strange introduction’s meaning with the silent question, no doubt nicked from Thackeray, “What in the world can this portend?”

  Chapter Ten

  Fallen Knight

  1970–71

  I’d harbored the hope that the intelligence that once inhabited novels and films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.

  Lou Reed

  Lou had as complex and problematic a relationship to his past as he had to his present. One of his music companies that held the copyright to “Heroin,” for example, was called Oakfield Music, after the street on which his parents still lived in Freeport, and no less an authority on Lou Reed than John Cale had pointed out that Lou’s best music had always been made in reaction to his parents. Thus, returning to his parents’ home at 35 Oakfield Avenue in August of 1970, after having so dramatically resigned from the VU, can be seen from several viewpoints. On the one hand, Lou was returning to a sanctuary. His parents had always been good to him. They would be good now. On the other hand, according to long-term friends, Lou’s parents were the only people he appeared to really fear. And he was returning on their terms and at least to some extent on his, a failure. The VU had not become commercially successful. He had no money.

  There is no doubt that the fall of 1970 was a confusing and depressing time for Lou. Having turned his back on the scene that had supported him for the previous six years, unplugged himself from his music and his drugs, and started seeing an analyst again, he was making himself frighteningly vulnerable to the demons of schizophrenia—the lures of heaven and hell—that plague people who dedicate themselves to an artistic métier. And the fear came down on him like a black cloud making him, in his own words, “sad, moody, amazed at my own dullness” while still “spellbound by the possibilities.”

  In this fragile state Lou had little time, after spending his first forty-eight hours at home
locked up in his room asleep or having nightmares, for respite since the world he had so arbitrarily left kept on turning, as he saw it, on him.

  September was a terrible month. Jimi Hendrix, a guitar player Lou greatly admired, though claimed to be better than, died. Loaded came out and smashed him over the head with its back cover, showing a photograph of Doug Yule alone in the studio surrounded by instruments with the clear implication that he was the resident genius of the VU now, and giving credits for all the compositions exclusively written by Lou Reed to the band jointly—with Lou’s name third, after Yule’s and Morrison’s. When he put it on the turntable, he was horrified to discover that Sesnick had remixed the album, butchering, in Reed’s opinion, not only several of his compositions, but the whole concept of the record. “The end of ‘Sweet Jane’ was cut off, the end of ‘New Age’ was cut off, the guitar solo on ‘Train Round the Bend’ was fucked around with and inserted,” he said. “How could anyone be that stupid? They took all the power out of those songs.” Looking at the song listings, he realized that their sequence had been changed so that the thematic structure of the album, an element Lou considered vital to the presentation of material, was entirely missing. “Secondly, I wasn’t there to put the songs in order,” he complained later. “The songs are out of order. They don’t form a cohesive unit, they just leap about. If I could have stood it, I would have stayed with them and showed them what to do.” As if that were not bad enough, when Lou went back into New York in September to try to persuade Sterling, whom he had known since his halcyon days at Syracuse, to re-form the band, Morrison was not even interested in discussing the subject with Reed.