Transformer

by Victor Bockris

“Sometimes I have this horrible nightmare that I’m not really what I think I am … That I’m just a completely decadent egoist … Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in my shoes?”

  ***

  When Lou had left the VU, he had realized he did not want to be the kind of rock star Sesnick saw him as—a Beatle or a Monkee. David had shown him a way to be a star and carry his bisexuality as a weapon rather than a burden. When Lou flew to London in July for the August recording sessions, he immersed himself in the role with the glee he had felt as a newcomer at the Factory.

  “Writing songs is like making a play and you give yourself the lead part,” Reed said in an interview about working with Bowie. “And you write yourself the best lines that you could. And you’re your own director. And they’re short plays. And you get to play all kinds of different characters. It’s fun. I write through the eyes of somebody else. I’m always checking out people I know I’m going to write songs about. Then I become them. That’s why when I’m not doing that, I’m kind of empty. I don’t have a personality of my own. I just pick up other people’s personalities. I mean seriously, if I’m around someone who has a gesture that’s typical of them, if I’m around them for more than an hour, I’ll start doing it. And if I really like it, I’ll keep it until I meet someone else who has something else. But I don’t have anything myself.”

  Lou was dazzled by David, one of his brightest disciples. Lou was also mesmerized by David’s management machine and deft manipulation of his press and fans. For a few weeks, Reed soaked up elements of the character and influence of his charismatic friend, adding them to his own, evolving day to day. “I had a lot of fun,” Reed recalled, “and I think David did. He seemed quick and facile. I was isolated. Why were people talking about him so much? What did he do that I could learn? A lot of it reminded me of when I was with Warhol.”

  The two of them cruised London’s seamy side. “Lou loved Soho, especially at night,” Bowie said. “He thought it was quaint compared to New York. He liked it because he could have a good time and still be safe. It was all drunks and tramps and whores and strip clubs and after-hours bars, but no one was going to mug you or beat you up. It was very twilight.”

  By the time Lou and David got to hang out with each other that summer, Bowie had been praising Lou Reed to the sky for years. Now it was Lou’s turn to be bowled over by David and his Warhol-like world in the high-powered, fast-moving London rock scene.

  “David is a seductive person and that is his MO,” explained Tony Zanetta. “And he used that with Lou because he wanted something from Lou. He looks you right in the eye and no one exists but you. But that’s only for a few minutes. We all went for it and I’m sure Lou did. And I’m sure Lou was ignored—not out of lack of interest, but because David was so busy. David was interested in Lou, but he wanted everybody. That’s what Ziggy was.”

  Very few artists are capable of the generosity David Bowie extended to Lou Reed in the summer of 1972. As proof of his devotion, Bowie invited Reed to guest-star at his headlining show at the Royal Festival Hall on July 8, a benefit for Friends of the Earth. At the end of the set David brought Lou Reed, dressed in black, onstage to perform “White Light/White Heat,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and “Sweet Jane.”

  After Bowie introduced Lou to British audiences, he held a day of press interviews at the top-of-the-line Dorchester Hotel, to publicize their music and images. It was at this moment that Lou Reed minced officially into glitter rock, entering in his Bowie-influenced Phantom of Rock persona, made-up and sparkling in Bowie’s designer’s jumpsuit, six-inch platforms, and black nail polish. With studied deliberation, the Phantom deposited his two cents into the gay-liberation kitty by tottering across La Bowie’s suite and firmly planting a kiss on David’s mouth. Then, announcing that Bowie, “a genius,” would be producing his next album, Lou withdrew. “People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era, and I mean that catastrophically,” Bowie pontificated. “Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost. We’re both very mixed-up, paranoid people—absolute walking messes. I don’t really know what we’re doing. If we’re the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good.”

  Bowie then put himself at Reed’s disposal, offering to help in any way he could, instructing his wife, for example, to find Lou and Bettye a flat. David’s entourage was centered around his wife, Angie, and his guitar player, Mick Ronson. This triumvirate did everything they could to make Lou and Bettye comfortable in London. However, according to Zanetta, “Lou was pawned off on Angie; she was the human contact who would take care of things David didn’t want to deal with. And Lou was one of those things. I don’t know how involved David was with the record—I think it was mostly Ronson. He had a lot of things going on, gigs, touring, shows coming up, and recording. And the Mott the Hoople thing.”

  Angela Bowie, who vividly remembered, “We felt extra special, intensely alive, incredibly alert,” was amused by Lou. “David introduced us and we shook hands, kind of … Lou’s greeting was a rather odd cross between a dead trout and a paranoid butterfly. My first clear impression of him was of a man of honor bound to act as fey and inhuman as he could. He was wearing heavy mascara and jet-black lipstick with matching nail polish, plus a tight little Errol-Flynn-as-Robin-Hood body shirt that must have lit up every queen for acres around him.”

  Though they had very little money, Lou and Bettye moved into a furnished duplex in the posh London suburb of Wimbledon. Bowie was rehearsing for an upcoming tour, recording a new album of his own, and constantly working for greater international success, but took time to introduce Lou to people who would be useful to him. One contact, the writer and photographer Mick Rock, became Lou’s long-term friend. Everyone in Bowie’s set thought that Mick was brilliant and loved his work. “Mick,” one commented, “was a lot of fun because he was in the ozone.” In fact, Mick Rock was the perfect receiver for Lou Reed. Full of the good humor of the working-class Englishman straight out of a Charles Dickens novel, Rock possessed a mind that worked as fast as a camera, a charm that made people around him feel alive and at ease, and a detailed knowledge of Lou’s work. He became Reed’s primary social connection in London during the first half of the 1970s.

  “Reed was staying in Wimbledon, a smart suburb of London favored by businessmen, film stars, and respectable hoodlums, and hating it there,” Mick revealed of his first visit to Reed. “A prowler, he needed the rootless, strung-out city for stimulation. Echoes of Baudelaire. A poet of pavement and splintered nerves. His psyche was fragile, withdrawn and nurtured on gin and mascara.”

  Though he may have been uncomfortable in Wimbledon, Lou’s entrée into London’s rock world gave him a revitalized belief in himself. “People always come to me,” he told Mick Rock. “They have to because I have the power on them. I mean, they can’t stand me sitting here for too long doing nothing. Or they can’t take what I have to say. I like to make believe I’m a gun. I calculate. I look for a spot where I can really do it. Then they suddenly know I’m really a person.”

  Not that he always had such a high opinion of himself. Later he would tell Mick, “I’m so dull really. That’s why I don’t write about myself. That’s why I need other people. I need New York City to feed off. The actual state of things.”

  “Of the world?” Mick asked.

  “No, just me. Fuck the world. I’m not interested in my problems or attitudes, ’cause other people’s are so much funnier.”

  A week after the Dorchester press conference, Lou and the Tots set out on their first British tour with a show at the Kings Cross Sound in London. “When I saw Reed perform in London in the summer of 1972, the influence of Bowie’s theatrical, sexually ambiguous aesthetic was apparent; Lou wore black eye makeup, black lipstick, and a black velvet suit with rhinestone trimmings,” wrote one of Lou’s most intelligent chroniclers, Ellen Willis. “The album Transformer referred directly and explicitly t
o gay life and transvestism. The subject matter was not new, but Reed’s attitude toward it was—he was now openly identifying with a subculture he had always viewed obliquely, from a protective, ironic distance.”

  Lou was criticized for copying Bowie. “I did three or four shows like that, and then it was back to leather,” he commented after the tour. “We were just kidding around—I’m not into makeup.” These tentative forays into the glam scene were merely the beginning, however. The new, rude Lou Reed relished being grabbed onstage by both girls and boys.

  Though audiences in Britain soaked up Lou’s act, it was clear that he would have to work up some new songs to match it. The press was often critical of his material. “I’d rearranged my old songs just like Dylan and slowed some of them down, and the press branded the new versions as travesties of the originals,” Lou protested. “They’re my songs; surely I can do what I like with them. And I like them slower now.”

  Although he was accused of aping David Bowie in his appearance and stage act, Lou continued putting the finishing touches on the Phantom of Rock. “I’m not going in the same direction as David,” Lou insisted. “He’s into the mime thing and that’s not me at all. I know I have a good hard-rock act, I just wanted to try doing something more—to push it right over the edge. I wanted to try that heavy eye makeup and dance about a bit. And how could anyone say I was letting my guitarist upstage me? He was doing it on my instructions. I told him to get up and wiggle his ass about and he did. Anyway, I’ve done it all now and stopped it. We all stand still and I don’t wear makeup anymore.” As an afterthought he added lugubriously, “They don’t want me to have any fun.”

  ***

  Rock-and-roll records are born out of tension. By the time Bowie and Ronson took Reed into Trident Studios in August to record Transformer, which would turn Lou from an underground cult figure into a rock star, the collaboration was pitched on the edge it needed. On the one side was the authentic rock-and-roll animal Lou Reed. Fast, nervous, New York uptight, Lenny Bruce-like, sarcastic, hard, aggressive. On the other was the sensitive, high-strung Bowie, articulate, exotic, and strong, but not as sharp or hard as Lou. He was more of a dreamer. Between them stood the sturdy Mick Ronson—Ronno to his friends—from the shipbuilding town of Hull. Ronson could neither understand a word Lou said nor make his own densely crafted argot communicable to the wired little weasel. Lou seemed at times to be cracking up over convoluted private jokes told in another language altogether. Yet Ronno was the glue that cemented the three disparate figures to each other. “Ronson’s nasally electric guitar, which he played through a half-closed wa-wa pedal, provided Transformer with its instantly identifiable matrix,” wrote Jon Levin. “The underrated Ronson provided the string and brass arrangements, as well as the all-important piano parts, from the languid arpeggios of ‘Perfect Day’ and ‘Satellite of Love’ to the comedic ‘New York Telephone Conversation.’ Lyrics aside, the music is almost perfect: Herbie Flowers’s acoustic bass, acoustic guitars, a muffled electric, and jazzy brushes on the drums, all supported by Ronson’s subtle, chillingly simple violin arrangements. Reed has credited coproducer Ronson with making the greatest contribution to the completion of Transformer.”

  The impact of Transformer’s sexual content has been forgotten. It is hard to conjure up the shock resulting from David Bowie’s confession of bisexuality in the Melody Maker interview of January 1972. The news catapulted Bowie into the front ranks of sexual role model for a generation or two as Ziggy Stardust (inspired by Warhol’s cast of the play Pork). He became an icon anyone could lust for. When David took his Ziggy Stardust act into the Rainbow, a huge former cinema in London, on August 19, Lou described the show as “the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Bowie made bisexuality extremely hip, and Reed—who had sung lyrics such as “sucking on my ding-dong” as early as 1966—felt comfortable with the glam scene. In 1972, the lines “We’re coming out. Out of our closets, out on the street” (from “Make Up”) weren’t simply a camp gesture, but were associated with the Gay Liberation Front’s campaigning slogan—a rare political statement from the normally apolitical Reed.

  The album had its rough edges and raw patches in the making. All three men were under a lot of pressure when they laid down its tracks. Bowie and Ronson, who were also recording with Mott the Hoople, were due to play concerts that month in London and New York. Their time was split between rehearsing and recording. For Reed, whose career depended on the outcome, every moment in the studio was vital. The fast, furious, drug-induced pace of their collaboration would have a lot to do with the album’s ultimate success.

  David was characteristically modest about his intentions: “All that I can do is make a few definitions on some of the concepts of some of the songs and help arrange things the way Lou wants them. I’m just trying to do exactly as Lou wants.” Bowie was at the core of the production; it was his encouragement, like Warhol’s, that brought Reed to the fore as a solo artist.

  Bowie, who was more fascinated by Warhol than Reed, pulled out of Lou’s nervous head a series of vignettes about the artist’s life that were worthy of Reed’s greatest role models—Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, and Jean Genet. Bowie got him to sing them at the top of his form. Enjoying himself, Reed was able to invent different attitudes and personalities for the album that found their way into the songs “Vicious” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” “I always thought it would be kinda fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn’t met before, or hadn’t wanted to meet, y’know,” Lou joked. “The kind of people you sometimes see at parties but don’t dare approach. That’s one of the motivations for me writing all those songs in the first place.”

  “Last time they were all love songs,” he snapped, “this time they’re all hate songs.” Reed would play Bowie and Ronson the bare bones of the song, and together they would craft its eventual setting. Bowie and Ronson were attuned to what Lou’s songs needed, and their arrangements reinforced his material.

  Whereas Cale had drawn together the lyrics of “Heroin” and all the great songs on the first album, that task now fell to Ronson. Ronson wrapped the lyrics in confident, sparring music that leaped out of the speakers and grabbed you around the throat, just as the Velvets’ music had. “Mick Ronson was really instrumental in doing the album,” one observer confided.

  Ronson described their approach: “We are concentrating on the feeling rather than the technical side of the music. He’s an interesting person, but I never know what he’s thinking. However, as long as we can reach him musically, it’s all right.” Reed’s reaction to the collaboration with Bowie and Ronson was ecstatic. “Transformer is easily my best-produced album,” he exclaimed. “Together as a team they’re terrific.” “Transformer was a very beautiful album that David did out of love for Lou,” concluded Bowie’s friend Cherry Vanilla. “What you have to worry about is insanity,” Lou mused to friends later. “All the people I’ve known who were fabulous have either died or flipped or gone to India, Nepal, and studied and gave it all up, y’know, the whole trip. Either that, or else they concentrated it on one focal point, which is what I’m doing, which is what I think David is doing.”

  Though Lou and David managed to create a brilliant mix, they attempted to outdo each other in performing the roles of “tortured, creative artists.” Angie Bowie, who frequently visited the studio, was often confronted with the sight of David curled into a fetal ball beneath the toilet bowl in deep depression, or Reedian tantrums so violent that she fled the studio before their velocity blew her out of the room. These throwbacks to childhood did not, however, faze the musical partners. Whenever David retreated to the john, Lou claimed he knew exactly how David felt and insisted that nobody disturb him. David in turn often talked Lou out of deep depressions. “David Bowie’s very clever. We found we had a lot of things in common. He learned how to be hip. Associating with me brought his name out to a lot more people. He’s very good in the studio. In a manner of speaking he prod
uced an album for me.”

  When Lou entered David’s world, the British charts had been dominated by Marc Bolan’s T. Rex, Gary Glitter, Slade, Alice Cooper, The Sweet, and Elton John. When Transformer was recorded and mixed, the single biggest star in the U.K. was David Bowie.

  Whereas Reed’s first solo album was a jumble of material the Velvets never recorded and patchy love songs, Transformer was much more of a unified whole. Its subject, introduced by the album’s hit single, “Walk on the Wild Side,” was the world of Andy Warhol after the 1968 attempt on his life as detailed in “Andy’s Chest,” and in particular the polymorphous sexuality of the early seventies in Warhol’s films Trash and Heat.

  Despite brief euphoric moments Lou had experienced during the making of Transformer, the album’s release marked the end of the Bowie–Reed collaboration. “Once that album was done, I don’t remember David ever mentioning Lou,” said Zanetra. “Or wanting to go see Lou or wanting Lou to come see this. David was always hot and cold with people. I think he was always intimidated by Lou. Because Lou was sharp and David wasn’t. David never pursued Lou the way he pursued lggy. He would come and go with Lou.”

  In October, Lou and the Tots toured Britain. Lou’s Bowie-influenced stage act, combined with his new material, propelled him into the pop limelight. Dressed, as one observer put it, “in leather and charisma,” he delivered a series of devastating performances to rapt audiences. “I’m the biggest joker in the business,” he said. “But there’s something behind every joke.”

  After the tour, and before Lou left London, Mick Rock did a photo session with him that would supply Lou with his first successful solo publicity image. Lou had always had an image problem. The VU had a glowering, grungy glamour that had not meshed that well with mass rock audiences. Lou and Mick came up with a brilliant solution. Combining his love for science fiction and horror and mixing it with his electroshock experiences, in Mick Rock’s cover photo for Transformer, Reed turned himself into a rock-and-roll Frankenstein.