“I think the sexual thing was not important to Lou,” Jacobs commented. “It wasn’t the real issue. He didn’t want anyone else to be getting sex, but it was more like not getting his fair share. I don’t think he really cared.”
In Paris they played the Odeon. “By then Lou could barely show up to the concert,” Jacobs reported. “You just never knew if he was going to trip on the stage. He’s not athletic, he’s uncomfortable.”
Gelb maintained a good record of keeping the fans away from Reed, who hated to be touched by them. “Only one fan was able to get to him on the whole tour,” Gelb recalled proudly. “That was in Paris. One crazy young girl who jumped onstage and wrapped her arms around Lou. I got to her three seconds after she got to Lou. I grabbed her, pulled her offstage, ripped her shirt off in the process, and threw her out in the back alley topless and slammed the door.”
In Amsterdam, Lou renewed his relationship with a man with whom he shared a number of interests. “One night in Amsterdam was the only night on the tour that he managed to get away from us,” said Gelb. “He went out with this guy who was a speed freak.”
“He would do any drug that was available,” said Jacobs. “Coke, speed, pot, quaaludes, and a lot of booze. Speed and booze were his favorite drugs. He shot a lot of speed.” The aftermath of this particularly wild night, however, threatened the next tour date in Brussels. Although Gelb and Jacobs managed to locate and transport Reed to the theater, his physical health and state of mind were significantly compromised. Jacobs recalled, “They stayed up all night doing really awful speed. The next day Lou was in the worst mood I had ever seen him in my life, and that’s truly an awful thing to say. I had to dress him. I finally got all of his clothes on. We played some games together and I finally got him into a better mood. His time came and I literally shoved him onstage. He could barely walk, he stumbled around and sang, and this audience just loved him.”
Unfortunately, drugs were just part of the problem during the stop in Brussels. “At one point he did some very odd maneuver and his leather pants ripped up the center,” Jacobs recalled. “He wasn’t wearing any underwear and he was standing onstage with his balls hanging out. Bernie ran out onto the stage with some silver gaffer tape and taped him right around the crotch. Lou was so pissed because this tape was around his balls. He sang one more song and he left.”
“We didn’t know, but just before he went onstage one night in Brussels, he did a massive dose of meth,” Gelb added. “About a half hour into the show he started going into spasms, tachycardia, and he came over to the side of the stage and he said, ‘Get me off the stage.’ So I told everyone to shut it down. Then I picked him up over my shoulder and carried him up to the dressing room and locked the door. I laid him down and managed to bring him down to a state where I wasn’t afraid he was going to die. And he was really fucked up. It was one of those things where he was saying, ‘Don’t let anyone see me, I can’t talk to anyone. Don’t let anyone in the room.’ When I felt comfortable enough that he wasn’t going to die, I stood outside the door for the next hour telling Dennis Katz, ‘Yes, I understand you are his manager, but he doesn’t want to see you now.’”
“And he would not do an encore,” said Jacobs. “They destroyed the theater. They ripped the seats up and they threw everything at the stage and they even loved that! Because he was being such a bad boy.”
Realizing that Lou was seriously endangering his health and thereby compromising the tour, and that he was losing touch with his meal ticket, Dennis Katz, who seldom joined the touring, once more assigned his most trusted assistant, Barbara Falk, to the task of tour manager and Lou baby-sitter. This relationship would last through the most hard-core mid-seventies touring and would become one of the most significant of Reed’s professional life. “Lou was getting more and more difficult to handle,” recalled Barbara Falk, who had known and worked with Lou for some time. “You could never get enough for Lou. And Dennis wasn’t perfect either. He didn’t do what Lou thought he should do. Lou resented the fact that Dennis didn’t show up. Every once in a while Dennis would have to come to a gig somewhere, but he wasn’t there hovering, saying, ‘What can I do, what can I do?’ Actually, Lou didn’t like it when he came to gigs. Because we had a routine, and I had to pamper him. The rider said, ‘Johnnie Walker Black. Don’t give to Lou Reed, give to Barbara Falk’—and I would dole out one drink before he went on. I had to practically carry him onto the stage. But when Dennis would come, he would be jolly hockey sticks and all of this stuff. And it grated—it didn’t help. Lou thought they were on totally different wavelengths altogether.
“Lou was feeling more and more alienated—as if Dennis didn’t care enough about him. Dennis was getting paid and we weren’t. He had a Bentley and a this and that. And we owed everybody. Band members were always knocking at my door because they had family at home and they weren’t getting paid. It was always borrow from Peter to pay Paul, and who can I put off the longest. But Dennis always got paid. And I think Lou started to resent that.”
Actually, Dennis Katz was the least of Lou’s worries. To maintain the ferocious pace of touring, he had resorted to a wide variety of pharmaceuticals. “He was like Lenny Bruce,” recalled Falk, who was astounded by the extent of Lou’s involvement with drugs. “He used to carry around all these medical books about speed. And go into libraries. And in Europe where you could get works in drugstores. He was carrying all this around. He also had an enormous sense of fun and wit and chumminess. But he was usually coming up, down, or sideways. We had this mother–son thing, but it was also like a twisted marriage. He thought it was cool to have a girl—they didn’t have girls on the road back then. I used to have to carry him around. He was very light. I would drag him, behind the shades, through immigration; I could have sworn he was asleep a couple of times.”
The combined efforts of Gelb, Jacobs, and Falk aided greatly in the struggle to keep Reed sober. The trio’s greatest success, in fact, lay in convincing him to swear off booze for the bulk of the European tour. “At the beginning of the tour in the States he was drinking really heavily,” Gelb remembered. “At shows, at rehearsals—always bottles of Scotch or bourbon hidden in the amps and the PA. And one day we put our foot down—he was smashing equipment, breaking things, being a jerk: the alcohol did terrible things to Lou—and somehow we convinced him. lt seems incredible that he would agree to stop drinking, but it was necessary. We were ready to drop him. He’s a real survivor. He had good sense. He partied, met friends, got high. But he didn’t get drunk for the rest of the tour.”
By the time the show found its way to Britain toward the end of the tour, Lou was relatively clean and the show had honed itself into an incredible performance. After the Brussels show he had learned his lesson, and the English tour, where they were doing a city a night, demanded everyone’s undivided attention. “He drove the fans nuts,” Bernie Gelb said. “The Liverpool show—Jesus, that was the hardest show I ever had to get out of. The fans surrounded the hall, and they were tough there: every time we tried to leave, they would throw rocks at us. We were pinned in the back alley, there was an IRA bomb threat. There were twenty steps up to the front of the building, and I ended up driving the car up the steps, slipping out the front, and driving back down the steps. It was like a movie, like driving on the stairs in Rome or something. It was really insane.”
Audiences across the country reacted in much the same way, making it abundantly clear that Lou Reed had become a major solo rock-and-roll star. “Lou was the mascot of people who liked to get down and dirty,” Jacobs noted. “It was very difficult with Lou. He was on speed at the time and his sexual ambiguity was always difficult. You didn’t know whether he would get drunk and be with a man one night or get drunk and be with … But it was always very exciting to be involved on that total level.”
“Lou is brilliant,” concluded Bernie Gelb. “He’s as highly intelligent as any musician I have ever met. He can talk about any subject you want to talk a
bout. But like all great stars, Lou had a great ego. At the end of the day, for all the good times spent watching him operate, Lou just isn’t the nicest guy to ever walk the face of the earth. But he lived a very dramatic lifestyle.”
Reed’s success in Europe, especially the U.K., where Berlin lingered in the charts’ Top Ten and Transformer remained a steady seller, may have been obvious to the fans, but to many journalists and celebrities, including the icons of mainstream rock, the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal persona relegated Lou to second-class status. Feeling that he had done his time in the trenches and had been an extraordinary influence on younger bands, Reed resented being eclipsed by rock stars of the stature of Bowie and Jagger. “He never got over the idea that he wasn’t Mick Jagger or he wasn’t David Bowie,” said Jacobs. “He was always overshadowed because they were better performers. Lou was not a good performer. He doesn’t have a good voice. What Lou has is a devoted following of people who appreciate and love his work. When we got back to America, he was really fighting with Dennis. We were pretty tight, we lived together basically for that whole six-to-eight-week period, but then there was nothing left for us. There wasn’t anything to do, and I was saying goodbye to Lou and he was saying good-bye to me. We just got tired of each other. I got tired of taking his shit.”
The Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour continued playing across the U.S. through the summer. As Lou’s popularity soared, however, the aggression of his audiences followed. The primarily male audience erupted at each concert in chants of obscenities and endorsements ranging from “Lou Reed motherfucker!” to “It’s your life, cocksucker!”
Reed began to act out in an increasingly crazed manner. “He was drinking so heavily again, he would go piss in the corner of the room and just drive you crazy,” recounted Barbara Falk. “He did it up against the wall in some place in Canada. I think he pissed under the table one time on drummer Prakash John’s foot. And Prakash was fastidious.”
“I know why you’re all here,” he yelled at a bunch of friends, fans, entourage members, fellow musicians, and journalists in a hotel bar late one night. “You just want to get the headline story ‘Lou Reed OD’s in Holiday Inn,’ don’t you?”
***
In the autumn of 1973, Lou finally worked out a divorce agreement with Bettye, with the help of Dennis Katz. “When they split up,” recalled Barbara, “she talked to Dennis a lot. And Lou’s assistant Ernie and I had to up and m to pack stuff up in the apartment. I don’t remember if he had started doing speed then.”
Everyone who had ever spent any time with Bettye knew of her sweetness and emotional generosity. But Lou, who had moved into a whole new realm of existence, had come to resent her. The marriage, he said, had “kept me off the streets. And that’s when I really started gaining weight. Then one day it dawned on me that it was all like a movie, and the thing about movies is that if you don’t like ’em, you can always walk out. And as soon as that became clear, it was all very simple. Now I don’t get headaches anymore and I’m poorer.”
Lou later complained to friends that no sooner had he started earning money than he started losing it. “Sometimes you’re better off without anything,” he said. “Make a fresh start.” Looking for someone to blame for his financial problems, he found Bettye as the obvious target. “Everyone should have a divorce once, I can recommend it,” he snapped sarcastically. The alimony payments forced him to leave his Upper East Side apartment and live temporarily in hotels.
As soon as Lou shed the skin of Bettye, he went into self-destructive overdrive. His first thought was to go back on speed again so he could lose some weight and wail once more. For a while he had the drug sent to him from Amsterdam. When he resumed his steady use of methamphetamine, his physical and mental breakdown accelerated. His speed habits got a boost after a chance meeting between Lou and his old Syracuse friend and Eldorado bandmate Richard Mishkin. Mishkin introduced him into a speed circle that centered on a man who would become a major influence on Lou in the 1970s, Ed Lister. “I remember when I introduced them, it was a Sunday morning and I drove him down to Ed’s house,” Mishkin recalled. “Lister was one weird motherfucker. He was the largest user of speed that I had ever encountered. He would use needles meant for horses, deep-vein stuff so that he could get more in and just would use so much it was unbelievable.”
Ed Lister came from an upper-middle-class family in upstate New York. He lived in and owned a brownstone that doubled as a shooting gallery. An accomplished thief, Lister also used the house to store and fence stolen merchandise in order to fund his lifestyle. “He would go steal cars and drive through the suburbs,” Mishkin recalled, “and he’d have a long pole with a grasper on it which he’d use to open people’s mailboxes and steal credit cards. Then he would dress up in a priest’s outfit—Lister was a master of disguise—and go round to the department stores and buy everything. So he was a fence. If you wanted something, you could buy it from him.”
Ed Lister was the leading member of a large New York speed scene made up of a bizarre cast of characters with whom Lou fit right in. One of its prominent members was the Turtle, who went to Columbia University. The Allen Ginsberg figure of the group, he was loving, gentle, and maternal. Turtle’s apartment was a popular spot for the others to go sit in and talk for six to eight hours on amphetamines. He had a lot of records and books, and he always seemed interested in other people. Turtle distinguished himself by spending more time in jail than anyone else. Bob Jones, who was also on the speed scene but unlike most of the others had an appreciation of Lou’s music, described the relationship between Turtle and Lou:
“I don’t think he liked Lou very much, although Lou sort of liked him. He was too gentle for Lou. He didn’t have any of these macho pretenses, but he would shake his head in great sadness and say, ‘Mike was shot the other day at Eddie’s apartment.’ He had a way of saying it that was very gentle. I think Lou wrote a song or two about Turtle. Another thing that was interesting was Turtle was gay and everyone around him was gay.”
Reed and Lister immediately hit it off, primarily because Lou was fascinated by Ed. “It’s not hard to believe they became friends, because Ed was a doll—a very charming guy,” explained Andy Hyman, who had also been introduced to Lister by Mishkin. “And an extremely good-looking guy. A little like a young Michael Caine—big and powerfully built. Lou had a very romantic view of Lister. Lister came from a very rich family. Lister was a very educated man. Lister was godlike.
“There was a doctor who was the original Dr. Feelgood. He’s dead now, or else he’s in his late eighties. He was very old then. He was the guy who provided the amphetamine for the cast of Hair. On several occasions I saw Lewis at his office. The few times we actually sat down and had some conversation was in the waiting room. He was friendly then.”
Lister, for his part, treated Lou abysmally, noted Jones: “He said that Lou couldn’t sing, that nobody liked his music, and that he could understand why. He said, ‘The guy’s tone-deaf’ and ‘Who would listen to that shit? No wonder his records never sell.’ He liked people like John Denver.
“Everyone just thought Lou was a bad singer and a pain in the neck. He was only a big shot to me, and I think he liked to have me around because he recognized that kind of adulation. I was the only person who would both bring him drugs, shoot up with him, and let him talk about rock-and-roll without sort of walking out of the room.
“Lou spent quite a lot of time proselytizing shooting up. He said, ‘You’re not really taking speed unless you’re shooting up. You think you’re taking speed, but you’re not taking speed.’ Somehow, though, Reed managed to retain a semblance of control.”
“Lou, for the most part, used drugs very wisely,” commented another friend. “The man really knew his own capacity. He would take pure methamphetamine hydrochloride and grind it down and include the whole experience in his music. Then after a month or two he’d decide to clean out his system. He’d stop entirely and move on to health foods and lifting wei
ghts. He knew exactly how to gauge the limits of his tolerance.”
The popular sentiment in many amphetamine circles at the time was that speed was good, that it didn’t harm one’s health, and that the euphoric effects were perfectly natural. The only drawbacks, they argued, came through vitamin deficiency. As a result, Reed and the rest of the group would regularly ingest fistfuls of vitamins while shooting up—without, however, bothering to eat. The effects of chronic speed use and poor diet had particularly strong consequences for Lou, whose hands would become so dry that his fingers and fingernails cracked and bled. This made playing the guitar a near impossibility. He also experienced what the speed group called “a wandering jaw,” where his mouth would unconsciously open and his jaw would hang loosely against his neck. Although he managed to cope with speed’s physical assault, Reed succumbed to the radical personality changes it induced. He would go from being a nice boy from Long Island to a paranoid maniac, hallucinating about Machiavellian plots. Real and imagined slights elicited violent reactions. Taking his reviews seriously, he wanted to kill the writers, no matter how much they adored him. His free-floating hostility reduced most communication to the basics, even to the point of threatening old and dear friendships. According to Mishkin, ever since they had left Syracuse, “Lou was never nice to me, and now he was more extreme. It was a straight line of development. But that was the speed, it made everyone awful. Your life loses meaning outside of the drug. Everything has to do with getting high and then getting more of it and then getting down without going crazy and then getting high again.”
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