Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Lou felt Sally Can’t Dance was a mistake and that RCA had him up against a wall. As he saw it, the company heads were in cahoots with the Katz brothers to milk him for what he was still good for. Worse, they were trying to make him sound like Elton John! While halfheartedly fulfilling their expectations, Lou desperately held on to his identity. “Sally Can’t Dance … with all the junk in there, it’s still Lou Reed.”

  According to Steve Katz, Lou spent the majority of his studio time in the bathroom. Katz was becoming increasingly impatient. One weekend when Lou was staying at Katz’s house in Westchester, Steve “accidently” walked into the bathroom and caught Lou injecting methedrine. Like his brother Dennis, Steve genuinely liked and respected Lou, but began to see that drugs were taking a toll on him. Even though Lou would regularly stop taking speed to clean out his system and follow a rigorous course of diet and exercise, his personality and work were being negatively affected. “We all loved him and understood him and tried to help him. But he simply refused to be there. The drugs were becoming just too much for me to deal with.”

  To make matters worse Lou was so desperate for money he constantly hit up friends for cab fares and restaurant bills. His behavior was surprising for a man who had two international albums and a single on the charts. The truth was that Lou’s separation from Heller, divorce from Bettye, drug bills, and profligate spending habits had wiped him out. Never one to tackle financial matters like an accountant, Lou blamed the man who was handling his money, Dennis Katz. As Barbara Falk saw it: “Lou would say, ‘Dennis doesn’t get it and he’s got to have all the money.’ And then he became even more paranoid, there was a conspiracy to manipulate him and his money—full-blown!

  “By then Dennis saw the handwriting on the wall, because that last year [1974–75] he was very particular about everything. And I remember when Dennis negotiated the publishing agreement with RCA where it was a lot of money, and they got twenty percent, then there were taxes, and there was very little left for Lou. The man had no real assets.”

  Steve Katz had always taken a supportive attitude toward Lou, but he could not supply him with the creative foil that Cale, Warhol, Bowie, and Ezrin had. Steve echoed Blue Weaver: “As an artist, Lou was not totally there. He had to be propped up like a baby with things done for him and around him.”

  Nobody could escape Lou’s wrath. Not content with savaging his manager, his producer, and his musicians, Lou dragged Nico into his circle of torment. Back in 1973, Lou had told Nico that Berlin was about her. She responded so favorably that she reignited Lou’s passion. When he showed friends an affectionate five-page scrawled letter from the Parisian foghorn, Lou’s face split into a shit-eating grin as he raved that Nico’s albums Desertshore and The Marble Index and her live version of “The End” were “incredible.” Nico was not only a real star but a whole galaxy unto herself.

  Now, a year later, Lou announced that he would produce an album of his songs by Nico. No sooner had this obsessive notion taken root than Lou threw the whole operation into high gear and dispatched a ticket to the poor, spooked-out Nico. Since last seeing Lou, the former beauty had become a penniless junkie who clung to remnants of the 1960s philosophy. In March 1974, inflamed once again by the notion that the Prince of Stories would rescue her from oblivion, Nico found herself strapped into a jumbo jet high over the Atlantic clutching her harmonium, her candles, and her drugs.

  In an uncharacteristic move, the moody Lou invited the hapless chanteuse to stay with him in his pied-à-terre on East 52nd Street. She set her few belongings among his two electric clocks, each of which told a different wrong time, his stacks of electronic equipment (Lou was an early and avid fan of video games), his signed Delmore Schwartz volumes, his first editions of Raymond Chandler, from which he constantly quoted and appropriated words, his pints of coffee ice cream and cartons of Marlboros, and, of course, his supply of liquid amphetamine.

  No sooner had Lou gotten Nico established in his spot than he embarked upon the task of dismantling her personality. His first act of cruelty was to deny her access to his amphetamine while letting her know how well supplied he was. She was tortured by a blissed-out Lou from whom she received a kind of contact withdrawal. When he had the wan diva just where he wanted her, trembling and in tears, he allowed her to have a tiny taste of his medication while he sat back and watched her dissolve.

  To add to his amusement, Lou made a point of filling his apartment with a motley assortment of people: inarticulate and exhausted engineers lay sprawled across the furniture in various states of ugly-snoring sleep; eager young journalists astonished to be in the company of two living legends. According to Nico’s blurred account of the three days she spent holed up with Lou, her final exit was precipitated by Lou’s torturing her one too many times. Having been raped as a child amid the ruins of Berlin by a sergeant in the U.S. army, she lived in fear of male violence. She fled the chic doorman building, Lou’s meanness, and any chance of being with Lou again. In her three-day stopover, Lou had succeeded in bringing her to her once proud knees and, having done so, evidenced a total lack of interest in her for the rest of her short life. He not only avoided producing a single track by her, but he refused to write or give her any more songs. The Lou Reed–Nico debacle marked a decisive turning point in her career, which plunged downward from its already low point.

  Lou’s harsh treatment of Nico occasioned at least one furious phone call from Cale, who harbored the Nico episode as a bone of contention between them throughout the decade. “Right through the seventies I hoped Lou would write her another song like ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ ‘Femme Fatale,’ or ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ but he never did,” Cale said. “I’d tell him I was working with Nico on her new LP, whichever it was, and he’d just say, ‘Really?’—nothing more, not a flicker of interest. He could have written wonderful songs for her. It’s a shame and I regret it very much.”

  In April, seeking friendship elsewhere, Lou took a trip to Amsterdam to visit the brother and sister he had befriended the previous year and collect an Edison award for Berlin. However, he returned in three days, his anger and frustration flashing on dangerous levels. He had, he told one friend bitterly, made another mistake.

  With Nico gone, Lou turned his attention to Barbara Hodes. Barbara had lived with him intermittently since early 1974, but she had known him since 1966. A sexy, intelligent woman in the fashion business, she offered him loyalty and support and was much closer to his level mentally than Bettye had been. He never forgot how she had sought him out during his 1971 exile and encouraged him to make a comeback.

  Lou with Barbara Hodes in New York, 1974. (Bob Gruen)

  Lou brought the full force of his personality to the rock-and-roll stage that year, the only place he could really unleash himself. In May and June, accompanied by an entourage of twenty-four people, including Hodes, Reed embarked on a tour of Europe that took him through Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium, France, and back to Britain. The climax of each show was Lou’s rendition of “Heroin,” to which he now added a theatrical twist. Extracting a syringe from his pants pocket and lashing the microphone chord around his skinny arm, he mimed the ritual of injecting the deadly poison. Although this was an act, Reed made it so convincing that some press people vomited. Others feared for his life. The image of a skeletal, peroxide-blond Lou Reed shooting up onstage became one of the emblematic images of rock and roll in the early 1970s.

  “Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock and roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a bad joke,” wrote Lester Bangs in his most famous definition of his hero and bête noire. “Lou Reed is bound to be the best rock-and-roll star in America for the next five years, at least,” wrote one addled, if accurate, devotee in Philadelphia’s underground weekly, The Disturbed Drummer.

  Hav
ing alienated Nico and Barbara, Lou desperately needed a companion who could keep pace with him as the pace quickened. Like his mentor Lenny Bruce, Lou had a little-boy side to his character who was frightened of being left alone lest he inadvertently do himself, or the building, harm. In fact, throughout the most dangerous years of his life, Lou would be alone only when he prowled the streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.

  That autumn, back in New York, Lou met a tall, exotic drag-queen hairdresser from Philadelphia named Rachel (née Tommy). Rachel, a stunning half-Mexican Indian raised in reformatories, prisons, and on the streets, would become his nursemaid and muse through the mid-seventies.

  “It was in a late-night club in Greenwich Village,” Reed later rhapsodized to Mick Rock. “I’d been up for days as usual, and everything was at the superreal, glowing stage. I walked in and there was this amazing person, this incredible head kind of vibrating out of it all. Rachel was wearing this amazing makeup and dress and was absolutely in a different world to anyone in the place. Eventually I spoke and she came home with me. I rapped for hours and hours, while Rachel just sat there looking at me, saying nothing. At the time I was living with a lady and I kind of wanted us all three to live together, but somehow it was too heavy for her. Rachel just stayed on and the girl moved out. Rachel was completely disinterested in who I was and what I did. Nothing could impress her. He’d hardly heard my music and didn’t like it all that much when he did.”

  “I thought Rachel was a mermaid,” Lou wrote in a poem, “The Chemical Man.” “Fins on Second Avenue. Will these pills bring relief. I am the chemical man.” “Imagine,” urged Steve Katz, “a woman in a man’s body, getting by as a juvenile delinquent. Understanding Rachel was a question of understanding a person’s orientation. I found her wonderful, and very quiet. That whole thing about, was Lou a homosexual, was he straight? … Rachel was physically gorgeous for any sex. Straight men were coming on to her all the time.”

  From Shelley Albin through Nico, Bettye, and Barbara Hodes, Lou maintained a pattern of dating blonde-haired women with theatrical personalities. Rachel introduced an abrupt change. Not only was this a guy—very evidently a guy when he would stay up for a couple of days, forget to shave, and be drinking—but Rachel’s coloring was dark and brooding. What Rachel had in common with her predecessors was a complete acceptance of Lou Reed across the board, an adoration of the little boy in him, and, most important of all, stamina. “I enjoy being around Rachel, that’s all there is to it,” Lou explained. “Whatever it is I need, Rachel seems to supply it, at the least we’re equal.”

  According to Bob Jones, “Lou was having a sexual relationship with Rachel. Rachel would come out of the bedroom with just a wrap around her and Lou would have just come out. They slept in the same bed, Rachel slept naked in the bed. Speed is the biggest aphrodisiac. Also, you can go for hours. It is very tactile and very erotic. You make out for two hours without coming, and you want to fuck daily. So I think Lou was having sex. There was never any talk about having sex, but it would be inconceivable that he would go three weeks without sex. In fact, it would be inconceivable to go a week without sex. Inconceivable.”

  With Rachel around, Lou never had to be alone. She did not speak much, but when she did, she put it across. Lou knew how to use her and benefited enormously from the relationship. “I think Andy’s fascination with drag queens was behind Lou’s interest in Rachel,” said one close friend. “The thing that Lou comically got wrong was that Rachel wasn’t a Warhol drag-queen type. The Warhol drag queens had a feminine side, or a drag-queen side. Rachel was sort of Native American, there was a very stone-faced-Indian aspect to Rachel. Rachel didn’t really have a woman’s attitude.”

  Mick Rock took a photograph that captured their relationship: clad in matching black leather, tottering on pencil-thin legs, the couple embrace. Lou in front faces the camera with a stoned smile on his face, Rachel, with a black hank of hair to her shoulder blades, supports him with a look of serene passion, her hands cupped possessively over his cock and balls.

  Those who met Rachel found a tall, sweet person with a stoic nature. “In my experience of Lou,” longtime friend Dave Hickey wrote, “all these supposed digressions from the ‘norm’ were just bullshit. Anyway, if you took that much speed for that many years, you don’t know what the hell you are. Physically, you cannot get an erection. Whenever he’d start talking about his prowess, I’d know for sure he wasn’t getting it up, and therefore going to extremes. Psychologically I don’t think he’s oriented one way or the other. But he had the brilliance to dip in and out of deviance and play with it, make an illusion of it.”

  Lou with Rachel, his muse from Metal Machine Music through Take No Prisoners and the subject of Coney Island Baby, 1975. (Gerard Malanga)

  However, Lou’s sexual preferences had become important to his fans. Reed’s roadies were constantly asked if their leader was bi. “Bi? The fucker’s quad!” one joked in a bon mot that bounced around the rock world.

  One observer believed some of his more outrageous behavior was a deliberate ploy to boost his hard-edge image. Commented Hickey, “He was careful to observe all the feedback the ‘Lou Reed persona’ got in the press. He read an enormous amount of magazines. He knew he was carrying the weight of his image of the Velvet Underground; he knew Lou Reed had to be Lou Reed. If Lou Reed is supposed to take drugs and have a weird sex life—well, then, it has to be.”

  When Sally Can’t Dance was released in August 1974, it got a lot of press. “Lou is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people,” wrote Robert Christgau in the Voice. “I mean, what else are we to make of this grotesque hodgepodge of soul horns, flash guitar, deadpan song-speech, and indifferent rhymes? I don’t know, and Lou probably doesn’t either—even as he shits on us, he can’t staunch his own cleverness. So the hodgepodge produces juxtapositions that are funny and interesting, the title tune is as deadly accurate as it is simply mean-spirited, and ‘Billy’ is simply moving, indifferent rhymes and all. B +.”

  “‘Billy’ is unusual even for unusual Lou,” wrote Paul Williams in the SoHo Weekly News. “It’s a ballad about an old school friend and what became of him—and, by extension, about what became of Lou as well. It works. This album, with ‘Kill Your Sons’ and ‘Billy,’ is among other things an acknowledgement of Lou’s middle-class Long Island roots.”

  In an open letter in Hit Parader, Richard Robinson revealed an unlooked-for empathy, calling Katz’s production “admirable” and telling Lou that it was “the closest thing you’ve been to being heard in some time.” But Robinson regretted Sally’s lack of depth, energy, and rock-and-roll craziness, which had him virtually unable to distinguish one track from another.

  As if to mock everything Lou stood for, Sally Can’t Dance became Reed’s biggest-selling album internationally and stayed on the charts for fourteen weeks, becoming the only American Top Ten LP of his career.

  With Sally’s success, Lou became even more disillusioned with the charade his career had become, exhibiting a new level of raw self-loathing. During interviews at the time, Reed either went into Warholian catatonia or degenerated into verbal war. Lou’s cynicism reached its zenith when he said to Danny Fields in Gig magazine, “This is fantastic—the worse I am, the more it sells. If I wasn’t on the record at all next time around, it would probably go to number one.”

  After the album came out, Lou denigrated it, the musicians, and the producer. However, as Katz pointed out, Lou would work with some of them for years. According to Lou, “Sally Can’t Dance wasn’t a parody, that was what was happening. It was produced in the slimiest way possible. I like leakage. I wish all the Dolbys were just ripped out of the studio. I’ve spent more time getting rid of all that fucking shit. I hate that album. Sally Can’t Dance is tedious. Could you imagine putting out Sally Can’t Dance with your name on it? Dyeing my hair and all that shit? That’s what they wanted, that’s what they got. Sally Can’t Dance went into the Top Ten without a single, and I
said, ‘Ah, what a piece of shit.’ … I like the old Velvets records. I don’t like Lou Reed records.”

  Reed attempted to justify the animosity he generated with a Warholian protestation of innocence. “I’m passive and people just don’t understand that. They talk and I just sit and I don’t react and that makes them uncomfortable. I just empty myself out so what people see is a projection of their own needs.”

  Lou retreated into his private world, finding refuge and solace in his relationship with Rachel and the group of addicts who centered around Ed Lister. Bob Jones, his only fan in the group, spent a lot of time with Lou in 1975, becoming Lou’s on-again, off-again drug supplier as well as playmate throughout the long, hard summer: “One of my biggest clients right away was Lou. I would get prescriptions from Lister, from Turtle, from Rita, from Marty, and I had a network of pharmacies I would go to. And another thing that was always difficult was getting syringes, I used to be the big syringe man. You had to go to the Upper West Side for syringes. You’d go to a drugstore and buy them by the box.”

  Standard practice for the group was to shoot up first thing in the morning and then at some other point late in the day. The shots were so strong as to he considered lethal by conventional medical standards. A forged prescription of Desoxyn, for example, would consist of a bottle of one hundred yellow pills, of the highest (15-mg) potency. The ordinary recommended dosage, adjusted of course to meet the needs of the individual, was fifteen to twenty-five milligrams orally per day. The Lister amphetamine circle, on the other hand, would habitually use ten to twenty 15-mg pills at once and inject them directly into the bloodstream. These men were not messing about.