Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  It was a hasty, ill-timed move prompted, perhaps, more by emotions than foresight. “I had hardly talked to Lou for months, and I said, ‘Man, I just don’t want to talk,’” recalled Sterling. “He said that as long as I’d played with him, I’d never told him he’d played well. This was quite possibly true. I said, ‘I didn’t need to because other people told you.’ And he said, ‘Who do you think I wanted to tell me?’ It pointed out to me a real failing in me—I didn’t think he needed me to tell him. I was dumbfounded. But I was so mad at him I just didn’t want to talk. I would never tell him why. Which is a strange way to behave. You know the ‘Poison Tree’ by Blake? Like that. ‘I was angry with my friend … I told it not …’ I don’t tell you and that’s your punishment.”

  Sterling had been on a slow bum ever since 1968 when Lou had forced John out of the band. He had virtually refused to talk to Lou since. By pleading with Morrison from a weak position, Lou had begged to be rejected. And Sterling, who had an understandable if misplaced sense of revenge, snapped at the opportunity. “He was saying, ‘Oh, it was this diet I was on. Wheat husks,’” Morrison continued. “He said, ‘I take responsibility for all that. You and me, we’ll put together some new band.’ So I said, ‘Lou, from what I see, it will take at least two years to get right back to where we are today.’ I was right: it took him at least that long.”

  Lou set himself up for another horrible rejection when he called Shelley in November to congratulate her on the birth of her daughter, Sascha, and she hung up on him. “My mother was sitting next to me when he called,” she explained. “I said, ‘You have the wrong number.’ He said, ‘It’s me.’ And I said, ‘I know.’ He said, ‘It’s Lou!’ He was absolutely devastated. I can still hear his voice today. He was crushed. It was such an awful thing to do, but I was just not duplicitous by nature, and it was not in my ability to carry on a conversation and not have her know that this was Lou. But he was really astounded and shocked and hurt. It was a terrible time in his life and I think the end came for Lou and me when I hung up on him. It was as if I was saying once again, ‘I understand how rotten you feel, but I’ve done it, so go fuck yourself and die! And I’ll watch quietly.’ I completely lost my best friend when I did that, and I have just been sorry about it ever since.”

  Reed’s identity crisis was exacerbated by the undaunted progress of the Velvet Underground. Loaded received positive reviews. The band continued touring. His absence went unnoticed and unmentioned. Doug could do a fairly good imitation of Lou. There also emerged a second factor that both depressed and motivated him. Throughout 1970 and 1971, as Lou sat on the sidelines of the music scene, Cale came out with his first solo album, Vintage Violence; Nico released her third, Desertshare; and Warhol produced Trash, a commercially successful (partially Lou Reed inspired) film about a heroin addict and a drag queen.

  As Lou experienced the bends of acute withdrawal from drugs and the Velvet Underground, the rock world was going through its own difficult passage. Elvis embarked on his first tour since 1958, Elton John began his first U.S. tour in Los Angeles, and Jimi Hendrix played his last concert at the Isle of Wight Pop Festival. One reason Lou left the Velvet Underground was because he was afraid of dying. He had good reason to believe that he might. The years 1970 and 1971, the period of Lou’s exile to Freeport, took an inordinate toll on the rock-and-roll industry. Following Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Gene Vincent, Slim Harpo, Duane Allman, Junior Parker, Alan Wilson, Tammi Terrell, Otis Spann, and King Curtis, who had played on Reed’s first recorded single, “So Blue,” met their deaths through disease, drug overdoses, or, as in the case of Curtis, violence.

  In the month following Lou’s resignation, the powers that be turned their attention to the very music he was most associated with. Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a series of speeches in the fall attacking liberal Democrats as “troglodyte leftists,” charging them with “pusillanimous pussyfooting,” with an emphasis on music and media as promoters of drugs. In November, President Nixon proposed that all pro-drug lyrics be banned. In response, the president of the Velvet’s first label—MGM—canceled the recording contracts of eighteen artists accused of promoting drugs. A permissive era appeared to be coming to an end.

  Meanwhile, fans, rock critics, and members of the Velvets were left trying to figure out just why Reed had deserted them. Strange rumors floated around the New York rock scene, such as: Lou really was dead and his manager had murdered him; he had cracked under pressure and split for parts unknown; he had finally succumbed to the lure of heroin. When the more mundane truth, that he had gone home to Long Island to live with his parents, emerged, one cynic quipped, “Oh, well, he writes all his best songs on Long Island,” echoing Cale’s sentiment that Lou wrote best in reaction to his parents. Meanwhile, according to his greatest champion, Lester Bangs, “Lou Reed, sitting at home in Long Island, probably watching Hollywood Squares, showed neither his face nor said a word.”

  The explanations Lou offered for his surprise departure were quite rational. He cited poor relations with the band, his manager, even the audience; a chronic lack of money; unendurable touring; and near categorical lack of acceptance. In truth, however, it was Reed’s fragile emotional and physical state, exhausted and overburdened with these pressures, that was broken rather than aided by severe drug use. “I know a lot of people who experiment with a lot of these things as methods to solve problems or find outlets or whatever, but, when you find that they don’t really work very well, you move on to something else,” he told Lester. “Like I haven’t got any answers but the same ones everyone else has: yoga, health foods, all of that.”

  Lou began to quietly reconnoiter New York. Meeting with old friends and checking on his connections, many of whom were shocked by Reed’s confused state, Lou tentatively tried to re-establish himself. “I met Lou at the Factory,” recalled the writer Glenn O’Brien, who was working for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. “He was living with his parents. He came around the Factory and he was really pathetic. I don’t know what he was on, but he was really out of it. He was my hero, but it was like his life was over. So I thought, ‘He’s a great poet and a great writer. I’ll get him to write for Interview.’ And he turned in this thing that was so embarrassing that I was really shocked. I had suspected that he had been on psychiatric drugs when I met him. It was like it was written by somebody on Thorazine. It just didn’t make any sense at all. Then I had to call him up and say maybe you really didn’t want to do this. He was kind of apologetic. ‘Well, oh yeah, you know I knew it really wasn’t good.’ It was horrible.”

  Toward the end of 1970, Reed was asked to contribute an essay to a book called No One Waved Goodbye, about the deaths of Brian Epstein, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. Lou penned a sober reflection full of images of himself. It was a much more successful piece than he had done for Interview, and good therapy too. “One cannot get to the top and switch masks,” it read in part. “Your lover demands consistency, and unless you’ve established variance as your norm a priori you will be called an adulterer.”

  Among many key points Lou made in this best written and most revealing of his prose pieces was that the rock audience was the most changeable of all audiences, and that anyone who dared face them should wear armor. “Or, as my analyst puts it, don’t depend on anyone, not your lover, your friend, or your doctor.”

  “I must redefine myself,” he added, “because the self I wanted to become is occupied by another body.”

  To state that a person as complex as Lou Reed had a nervous breakdown is tricky because one immediately wonders if all eight Lous had the breakdown or was it just five, etc. However, in the opinion of a number of long-term friends who knew him before and after this period of exile in Freeport, Lou went through some kind of internal process that undermined the confidence he had had when he’d arrived as an authentic rock-and-roll animal on the Lower East Side back in 1965. Signs of his shaky self-image come from his own account of finally acc
epting his father’s overtures to work for the family business, albeit as a typist at $40 a week, rather than the heir to the throne, and in an even more revealing incarnation as a trash collector on Jones Beach, although that assignment only lasted for one day.

  ***

  Reed’s story is not possible to understand unless one is aware of the extremely sensitive, easily hurt, vulnerable sides of his personality that were bound up in his deeply buried roots with his confused sense of himself as a homosexual who, because of the 1950s mentality he grew up in, desperately wanted to be heterosexual, and a little boy who felt that he had never gotten enough attention from his mother.

  It should come then as no great surprise that Lou was blown away and to some extent woken up again musically in January of 1971 by the release of John Lennon’s powerful solo single “Mother.” With its opening bell and pitiful refrain, “Mother you had me but I never had you,” it summed up much that Lou had been struggling to express ever since his first published piece of prose at Syracuse in which his mother seduced him. After a period spent largely in the company of his dog and his rolling inner thoughts, in 1971 Lou sprang into action.

  Doug Yule once remarked that the best and worst things about Lou were his willpower and drive, that once he set his mind on a notion, he had an unusual ability to take it to its conclusion. Apparently this referred as much to the reshaping of his psyche as his career. The first firm step Lou made on the comeback trail was in finding a collaborator or mate who would accompany him on the hard task of returning to himself and New York to, as it were, face the music. This new companion, whom he met in a department store, was a young woman in her early twenties named Bettye Kronstad. Bettye had grown up on Long Island in a mode similar to Lou, middle class, Jewish, suburban, and was at the time they met attending acting classes where she referred to herself as Krista. Ironically, this was Nico’s real first name, which must have sent a flash through Lou’s brain. However, the person Bettye most reminded him of, with her string of pearls and elegant clothes, was the young Shelley Albin. In other words here was a girl whom he could, he presumed, make over into whatever image best suited him. Skinny, flat chested, sexy, and most fittingly of all an actress, Bettye bore a look that was becoming popular at the beginning of the 1970s. She resembled a glamorous starlet in Andy Warhol’s 1971 classic film L’Amour.

  No sooner had he found Bettye than Lou reacted as he always did when he found a new playmate: he totally overreacted, throwing himself into the affair with all the supportive charm and encouragement he could muster. Soon he had pitched Bettye onto an impossibly high pedestal from which she could only, in time, fall. From Lou’s point of view, however, it was a totally positive development. It unleashed in him a whole new series of poems, which celebrated his relationship with Bettye.

  “I think I am in love,” Lou announced in a poem called “Bettye.” “I seem to have the symptoms (ignore past failure in human relations / I think of Bettye all the time).” Another piece, “He Couldn’t Find a Voice to Speak With,” began, “I am sorry, princess, I am so slow in loving / Believe me, it is inexperience.”

  “Bettye,” Lou announced in the trendy magazine Fusion, “is not hip at all, and I want to keep her that way. I believe in pretty princesses.” He underscored the sentiment in a poem he published in the same magazine, but worried that he might sound like a “bisexual chauvinist pig.”

  Everyone who met Bettye remembered her as the kind of woman whom Reed’s parents would have chosen for his wife. “I met Bettye once,” recalled Gerard Malanga. “She was a very sexy-looking Jewish babe, but quiet. And Lou kept her in the background. She wasn’t voluptuous, she was very thin and taller than Lou, at least five feet nine inches. She was a stylish babe, she knew how to dress.” With her conservatively styled hair, string of pearls, and elegant clothes, Bettye lived in a different world from the violent landscape of Reed’s writing. She reminded Lou’s more skeptical friends of Betty in the Archie comic books. “Some part of Lou really does like stability and the old cozy kitchen and homey living rooms,” concluded Sterling Morrison.

  Meanwhile, several other developments in Lou’s life helped further lift his spirits. He launched a successful lawsuit against Sesnick to win back songwriting credits and copyrights on Loaded. Reed eventually won the lengthy battle to gain sole copyrights to the songs on the two albums, The Velvet Underground and Loaded, that listed the credits to the band collectively. “Lou really did want to have a whole lot of credit for the songs, so on nearly all of the albums we gave it to him,” Sterling Morrison commented a decade later. “It kept him happy. He got the rights to all the songs on Loaded, so now he’s credited for being the absolute and singular genius of the Underground, which is not true. There are a lot of songs I should have co-authorship on, and the same holds true for John Cale. The publishing company was called Three Prong because there were three of us involved. I’m the last person to deny Lou’s immense contribution, and he’s the best songwriter of the three of us. But he wanted all the credit, he wanted it more than we did, and he got it, to keep the peace.” However, Lou found moral justification in the decision of the court and soon afterward was also able to free himself from his management contract with Sesnick, although in the process he lost the rights to the name Velvet Underground. “Every song on the album was written by me,” said Lou. “And no ifs and buts, nothing about it. But I had to go to legal lengths to establish it.”

  The foundations were now laid for Reed’s emergence into the world. “It was just obvious that whatever it was, I had to have control,” he concluded. Control became his mantra over the course of his entire solo career.

  He received an offer to turn Nelson Algren’s famous novel about heroin addicts and hookers, Walk on the Wild Side, into a Broadway show, which didn’t pan out, but led to his writing “Walk on the Wild Side.” And most importantly of all, as it would turn out, with Bettye by his side he started revisiting New York. Through the auspices of his old Factory friend Danny Fields, he met a couple named Lisa and Richard Robinson, who had set up a salon for rock writers centered around their apartment called Collective Conscience.

  In the confusing transition between the 1960s and 1970s that would lead shortly to both glam and then punk rock, many of the rock writers associated with the Robinsons’ group would have a vital impact on the rock world. Henry Edwards, for example, wrote for the New York Times. Richard Meltzer became, for a short time, almost as famous in rock circles as some of the stars he wrote about. Scribes like Patti Smith, Jim Carroll, and Richard Hell were beginning to move from writing into music. Lester Bangs and David Dalton were also having a vital impact.

  The Robinsons and Fields, who were both trying to build a power base for themselves in the rock world, welcomed Lou into their fold with open arms, extending to him and Bettye the special attention normally reserved for Warhol superstars like Jackie Curtis or the up-and-coming Patti Smith.

  Lou, who was still undecided about the exact path he intended to pursue now that he was getting back on his feet, naturally took to the Collective Conscience salon and basked in their recognition of him as a writer. This was pointedly underlined by his first public appearance in New York that March, when he gave a reading at St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project. Standing behind a lectern in front of the church’s nave, Lou commenced his reading before a top-of-the-line downtown crowd, consisting of poets like Allen Ginsberg, Warhol people, the Robinsons’ coterie, and various fans of the VU, with his most famous lyrics. Then, egged on by his audience’s enthusiasm, punching the air, he launched into a series of poems about Bettye and concluded the reading with a number of new poems with gay themes. At the end he grabbed the opportunity to announce that he never intended to sing again because now he accepted that he was a poet, adding that if he ever did anything as foolish as returning to rock and roll, the ghost of Delmore Schwartz would surely haunt him.

  Meeting up with his old friend Allen Hyman, Lou demonstrated just how far he had drifted fr
om the sensibility of his parents and his Freeport self. “We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years and he called me up and said it was time we got together again,” Allen recalled. “So he came out to the house with this girl, Bettye, and we were sitting in the living room and my brother Andy was there also, because Lou and Andy were very friendly. I was very fascinated because the Velvet Underground was one of my favorite rock-and-roll bands, and I wanted to know about ‘Heroin,’ and how he had come to write this music. He communicated to me how he had been addicted to heroin at the time, and I had no idea that he had been. We were talking about his obsession with drag queens. It was like he was more attracted to the lifestyle, rather than being involved. It sounded so outrageous.

  “Lou and Andy were jamming and we were having a good time. Then suddenly his girlfriend said something to him and he started beating her up, slapping her around. And Suzanne, my wife, got so upset, she said, ‘Stop this, what are you doing?’ And it was clear that he wasn’t kidding around. She’d interrupted a song or something like that, and he started smacking her around. My son, who was maybe four or five years old, was really upset by this whole thing going on, and Suzanne said to Lou, ‘You’re going to have to leave.’”

  According to Lou’s favorite writer on the downtown scene, Richard Meltzer, Lou used to needle Bettye constantly about his “gay past” and drive her crazy by telling her how much he missed sucking cock. Worse still, he started to lash out at her violently on the slightest provocation. Friends also recalled the bruises and black eyes Bettye hid behind dark glasses.