Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  As he started burrowing into the dark tunnel of some of his greatest compositions, the harder, colder Reed emerged. What made Lou’s work stand out was that despite portraying himself as a basket case, he was also portraying himself as a pioneer of pain, who was willing to take risks in order to bring back the pictures of his life. Like Warhol, he showed an extreme fascination with suicide; yet he claimed that he would never consider it: “It’s so easy a way—the actual process. I mean, I’ve seen so many people like that. You either do it or you don’t. And I know where I want to go. I’m in control. I know that there’s this level and then there’s this level. And I’ve seen over that level and I’m not even going to go near it. Ever. I’m in control, that’s for sure.”

  Finding Lou’s enthusiasm infectious, the studio musicians took the recording as seriously as Reed did. Jack Bruce read the song lyrics (many musicians do not bother to do this), and constructed an empathetic musical part. “Jack Bruce,” Lou recalled, “wasn’t supposed to be on the whole thing, but he went through the whole trip because he liked it a lot.”

  According to at least one musician, though, Lou was far from being in control at the Berlin recording sessions. Blue Weaver recounted how Lou was brought into the studio to record the vocal track over the instruments. “He couldn’t do it straight, he had to go down to the bar and then have a snort of this or that, and then they’d prop him up in a chair and let him start singing. It was supposed to be great, but something went wrong somewhere.”

  “Blue Weaver is an asshole,” Lou riposted. “He’s a schmuck, a fucking ass. Blue Weaver ought to keep his fucking mouth shut, because he can’t fucking play.” But in fact Lou had such difficulty laying down the vocal tracks that he finally had to overdub them later in New York. “We killed ourselves psychologically on that album,” he admitted. “We went so far into it that it was kinda hard to get out. It was a very painful album to make. And only me and Bobby really knew what we had there, what it did to us.” What it did to Reed and Ezrin was leave them strung out and exhausted. Ezrin relied on heroin, which was cheap, strong, and easily available in London, to get him through. “I didn’t know what heroin was until I went to England on this gig,” he explained later. “We were all seriously ill. I would rather have had a nervous breakdown.”

  After the recording sessions, Dennis Katz spirited Lou off to Portugal for a much needed respite. They were joined by two friends from Amsterdam, with whom, according to friends, Lou had a tryst. In a postcard to Barbara Falk in New York, Lou wrote that both he and Portugal were divine, signing off, “Ha! Ha!”

  Reed and Ezrin had planned Berlin as a double album with a gatefold sleeve and a booklet inside consisting of “film stills” of the story and lyrics. One week before Ezrin was due to deliver the final mix to RCA, he was informed that the RCA executives would not accept a double album because they didn’t think the product merited that kind of outlay. RCA’s turnaround left Bob Ezrin with the excruciating job of snipping fourteen minutes off the opus. He couldn’t help but feel that the beautifully constructed work had been butchered. Lou recalled that “when Bobby Ezrin gave me the master, he said, ‘Don’t even listen to it, just put it in a drawer.’ He went back to Canada and flipped out.”

  With his last words, “Awright, wrap up this turkey before I puke,” Ezrin checked into a hospital suffering withdrawal from both the intensity of the project and heroin. However, according to a close friend, Bob’s collapse had as much to do with rebounding from the intense involvement with Lou as it did with heroin: “Bob played the wrong game with Lou—he tried to be brilliant, to be his match. The only way to survive is to be the best you can and care for him deeply and hope that nothing goes horribly wrong. Nobody could ever be as brilliant as Lou.”

  Whatever the emotional cost, Lou had recorded the most moving, beautiful music of his career. It treated love, loss, betrayal, bitterness, and redemption in a more sophisticated manner than any other rock music. With Berlin, Lou expanded the borders of his metier, making something that would best be described as Lou Reed music.

  RCA released Berlin that July in the U.K., Reed’s strongest market, and he flew to London for the release. While there, he attended David Bowie’s retirement party at the Cafe Royale. According to Tony Zanetta, “Lou and David were ships in the night. David’s attention span is short. And it was an intense period in his career. The party was part of the promotion. We flew Don Pennebaker over to film at the Hammersmith Odeon. And we planned this party at the Cafe Royale and invited every celebrity we could think of—and a lot of them came. The famous result was Mick Rock’s picture of Lou, Mick Jagger, and David. But David didn’t have a social scene. Maybe they had a chummy reunion that night, but that was the extent of it.”

  Berlin was released in the U.S. in September. Though the album was Reed’s first solo masterpiece, at the time Berlin drew predominantly negative reviews, of which “the worst album by a major artist in 1973” was one of the more restrained. Rolling Stone pronounced it “a disaster.” Another critic lamented, “I have difficulty caring about Reed’s maladjustment,” while Bruce Malamut considered it “the most naked exorcism of manic depression ever to be committed to vinyl.” David Downing wrote in Future Rock that it contained “no hope … [The protagonists] stare straight into each other’s eyes and find only emptiness.” And Roger Klorese regretted the range of Lou’s vocals, “which sound, typically, like the heat-howl of the dying otter.”

  However, some more introspective writers recognized the spirit of Lou’s genius. “Like most of the current crop of singer-writer-players, Reed suffers from the handicaps of having a poor voice, little singing ability, and even less instrumental technique,” wrote the leading rock critic in the States, Albert Goldman. “His compositions are monotonously monochromatic, being, like most songs of the new rock theater, mere background music. But he does have the knack of twisting into sharp focus the imaginative substance of the current mania, which increasingly resembles the Berlin cabaret scene of the twenties.”

  “Berlin was full of insights you’d just as soon not have into the painful nuances of the war between the sexes,” added Ellen Willis. “It was not on any level easy to take, and it was not popular. The metaphor of the divided city (which would be picked up by seventies rock-and-rollers from David Bowie to Johnny Rotten), and a loose narrative line, provided the framework for a stark record of emotional destruction closer in tone and spirit to the Velvets’ first album than anything Reed had done since.”

  While being a token outlaw in the media, Lou could also be easily hurt. Berlin’s critical rejection twisted him into knots of Warholian resentment. During this period Lou maintained a fixed, sinister glare in public and rarely smiled. In interviews he developed his hard-line stance with rock journalists. His speech was abrupt, evasive. “Who cares about critics?” he snapped at one reporter. Another writer observed, “When he talks, he’s polite but distant, never allowing those with him the privilege of feeling quite comfortable in his presence. He also enjoyed drinking particularly fearsome alcoholic concoctions and forcing writers to partake with him.” To friends, however, Lou cried out, “Can you think of another rock star who inspires such hatred?” Some thought Berlin marked the major turning point in his solo career.

  In his defense, Reed claimed, “Before Berlin came out, Rolling Stone said it was going to be the Sgt. Pepper of the seventies, and afterward they wrote a pan and then they had a huge article criticizing the pan. It won all kinds of awards … it won the Thomas Edison award in Holland, and the best album of the year in Stereo and Hi-Fi. So critically it did not get panned, not in my book. Not unless you look at some jerk-off magazine, a tit-and-ass magazine disguised as some junior hippie kind of thing. But outside of those morons—who are illiterate little savages anyway—it did really well.

  “If the people don’t like Berlin, it’s because it’s too real!” Reed continued. “It’s not like a TV program where all the bad things that happen to people are tolerab
le. Life isn’t like that. And neither is the album.”

  In an eloquent defense of the record in Rolling Stone, Timothy Ferris shot back at Reed’s critics, noting, “Stephen Davis, writing in this magazine, characterized the record as ‘a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence, and suicide.’ Which it is. But I fail to see how that makes a bad record. Berlin is bitter, uncompromising, and one of the most fully realized concept albums. Prettiness has nothing to do with art, nor does good taste, good manners, or good morals. Reed is one of the handful of serious artists working in popular music today, and you’d think by now people would stop preaching at him.”

  In one of the few but important perceptive reviews, John Rockwell in the New York Times pinned both the dramatic, filmlike quality of the piece and its complex sexual overtones as impressive departures:

  “The backings are clothed in rock dress, but the form is more operatic and cinematic than strictly musical in the traditional pop sense, and the sentiments are entirely personal. While others prance and play at provoking an aura of sexual aberrance, Reed is coldly real. Berlin is a typically dreamlike saga of a sadomasochistic love affair in contemporary Berlin. But the contemporary is enriched by a subtle acknowledgement of Brecht and Weill, and the potential sensationalism of the subject is calmly defused by a sort of hopeless matter-of-factness. It is strikingly and unexpectedly one of the strongest, most original rock records in years.”

  Berlin stalled at No. 98 on the U.S. charts. “The record sales, compared to Transformer, were a disaster for a normal person, but for me it was a total disaster,” Reed explained. “The record company did a quick scurry round like little bunnies, but I went somnambulant. It wasn’t brain rot like some people think. I just kinda did no more.”

  Lou’s response to the criticism was so intense that it affected every major event in his career from 1973 to 1975. Realizing this in a moment of lucidity and honesty while performing in front of a packed audience, Lou announced, “Berlin was a big flop, and it made me very sad. The way that album was overlooked was probably the biggest disappointment I ever faced. I pulled the blinds shut at that point. And they’ve remained closed.”

  “I think Lou’s power probably ended after Berlin,” opined one friend during the second half of 1973. “He had poetry and he had something to say and he said it and then he was finished saying it. It was an extraordinary moment, but he never went beyond it.”

  Despite negative reviews of Berlin in the U.S., Lou was still riding high on the wave of publicity surrounding that album and Transformer, and he was thrilled to scale his ambitious heights further when he came up with the ideal name for his mid-seventies persona—the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal. It fit him like a skin.

  In August 1973, Lou and a new band moved up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and set about to rehearse for a tour in support of Berlin. “They rented a set of rooms at the Music Inn,” Jim Jacobs, who would design and run the stage throughout the epic tour, remembered fondly. “He was drug-induced all the time. He hated rehearsing. He resented everyone and everything. He’s not a nice guy and he can’t help himself.”

  During the rehearsals Reed drunkenly stumbled around the stage, smashing microphones and barking at the road crew. Acting as if he didn’t give a shit about the endeavor, he fomented strife among his musicians, staff, management, and friends at every opportunity. “Lou’s very good theatrically,” recalled one observer. “He’s very good at staging. He was always a great director. I noticed on several occasions he would be in the middle of a situation, and without saying anything, or really doing anything, he had everyone around him fighting. He started some big chaos or commotion. And unless you were watching very, very carefully or from a distance, you would never have known that he was responsible for it.”

  The European tour had twelve scheduled dates in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, and a handful of cities in the U.K. Despite receiving a plethora of bland or puzzled reviews and going down in rock history as a commercial disaster, Berlin did well in Britain, rising to No. 7 on the album charts by November and winning Lou a silver record. This rating was particularly good, considering that Transformer was still on the charts. Reed thought of Berlin as his version of Hamlet and dubbed himself “the Hamlet of Electricity.” The comparison applied to the European dates on the 1973 Berlin tour, which Lou and his team called the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour.

  Reed and his entourage flew into Europe and then drove from country to country. On the tour, the ecstatic but exhausted Lou, skirting drug and alcohol madness after touring continually for over a year and a half, played Hamlet to his royal-size entourage of twenty-three. Bettye, who was still holding on by her fingernails, was cast in the dual role of Ophelia and Gertrude. Dennis, who was beginning to look and sound to Lou like his parents, played Claudius; and the two young men who were hired to simultaneously run the lights and act as his bodyguards, Jim Jacobs and his partner, Bernie Gelb, became Lou’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

  They played a different city every night, often driving on to the next venue after a show. Before going on tour, Lou had gone to see Andy Warhol at the Factory to ask advice on how to do the lights for the shows with a limited budget. Warhol advised Lou to use the stark, raw lighting Albert Speer designed for Adolf Hitler’s speeches: intense white spotlights against a black background, setting the whole spectacle in high contrast. “I’ve seen Lou perform over the years, and that was close to the top of his performance peak, his stage personality,” Gelb summed up. “He had it all together. Europe was just incredible. The whole tour was sold-out. On the European tour the lighting design involved a black stage and, for the most part, straight white spots right in Lou’s face. He was the center of the illumination on the stage, and anything else you saw was reflected light. There were some other small colored effects, but basically the band on that tour wore all black and stood at the back of the stage and Lou was front and center with the lights shining on him.”

  Lou spent most of his time with Jim Jacobs and Bernie Gelb, who took possessive care of him. Jim immediately connected with Lou, finding him wonderful to be with, bright and witty. “I thought that he was a first-rate intellect and a qualified and very fine American poet,” Jacobs recalled. “I enjoyed listening to his music every night, because he was so crazy and so out of tune all the time. Lou really preceded punk rock by ten years. He was also very ambitious. And I cared about him.” Gelb had similarly strong feelings for his charge: “I carried Lou offstage, I walked him to his dressing room and got him to the shows and l drove his car. Lou and Jim and I traveled separately from the band. And thus there was some jealousy from the other members of the entourage. But we were having a good time.”

  Uncharacteristically, Lou paid little attention to what was going on around him. Spending his time sleeping in the car, he allowed everything to be done for him. “He had no control and he didn’t want it,” said Gelb. “He was totally uninterested. He just wanted to show up, he wasn’t interested in the opening act, didn’t want to sit around too long before or after the gig. I think by the time we got to Europe we didn’t even use him for sound checks. Lou would just show up, walk on, do the set, and split. Then he’d chill out and get in the car and go back to the hotel. He never asked a question or got involved with anything and was very cooperative. He did whatever we asked him.”

  Reed painted his face a stark white, blackened his lips, eyes, and hair, donned a black-on-black costume, and employed a number of props such as sunglasses and a leather jacket. His jerky, stumbling movements were combined with a catalog of rock clichés borrowed from classic performers like Jagger, Bowie, and lggy Pop.

  The three-week European tour met with universal success thanks, to a degree, to the supercharged band, led by the guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. Their twin guitar riffs gave Lou’s music a heavy-metal sound it had not had before and perfectly encased the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal onstage. Many Reed classics, suc
h as “Sweet Jane,” Rock & Roll,” “Waiting for the Man,” and “Heroin,” became current again. “The band cooked,” Gelb agreed. “They were fabulous. When I say Lou wasn’t in control and he didn’t pay attention to the details, that was true for everything except for onstage.” Every show was sold-out, and the crush of fans caused riots.

  The consensus was that Lou’s shows were either brilliant or terrible, depending on how stoned he was. When he was on, he moved effortlessly from song to song like a spellbinding spinner of tales performing in shamanistic ritual. When he was off, he had no rhythm, no flow. One moment he would be standing stock-still at the microphone, and the next he’d careen across the stage on a collision course with the amplifiers. Often he stuttered and stopped. The more outrageous Reed became on-stage, the more the audience applauded him. One Dutch journalist who interviewed Lou a number of times in the 1970s, Bert van der Kamp, commented, “There were people in awe of him, and he would act the part. He could hardly stand on his feet and they had to push him out onstage. People were very fascinated by this over here.”

  When the tour reached Paris, Bettye emerged briefly from the background to play out her final tragic scene. During the first part of the European tour her presence was subdued. She still made a desperate overture to Lou, which roused him to a final act of cutting her off. Gelb, with Jacobs, steadfastly ignored Bettye, giving total allegiance to Lou. But even Gelb was surprised how quickly and irrevocably Lou turned on her: “Bettye made it a third of the way through, but then I saw the day he turned on her. It was in Paris. Nico came to visit. He turned on Bettye and the next day she was a nobody, a stranger to him. He had the ability to turn on you so completely and quickly as if he was turning it on and off. It was amazing. I have never seen anyone else cut someone out of their life so efficiently.”