“In New Zealand he couldn’t perform,” said Doug Yule. “So there was an announcement that Lou wasn’t going to play but the band was going to play. Anyone who wanted their money back could have their money back. We went out and played and I sang. The audience liked it a lot. But it was not an attempt [as had been reported] to present it as if I were Lou, nor were the people told I was Lou.”
Meanwhile, in a series of frantic phone calls between New Zealand and New York, Reed was given the impression that Katz was rapidly moving to take control of his finances and tie up his recordings. The first casualty of this escalating battle was Barbara Falk. Exhausted after three years of baby-sitting Lou on twenty-four-hours-a-day call, she left the tour after Lou accused her one too many times of being in cahoots with Katz to cheat him. “Our last tour of Australia is what did it,” stated Barbara Falk. “I was exhausted—this was mid-’75, and we’d been pushing very hard, all over the U.S. and Europe, behind Sally Can’t Dance. My routine of being the bookkeeper, the bouncer, and big mama wasn’t covering the gaps. It all really started with Metal Machine Music, an album I didn’t particularly like. I didn’t tell him this, but I didn’t praise it to the skies, either. Before this I was his biggest fan and strongest support, always convincing him that he was the cult musical figure of the century to be cherished and protected. But as I said, the instant the stroking stopped—and he noticed instantly that I wasn’t carrying around the reviews of the album and passing them out to strangers on the street—he got progressively more nasty. It was awful at the end, and I had to abstain and just leave. I got on a plane and got out of Australia.”
Extremely agitated by thoughts of betrayal, Lou was unable to go on with the tour. Returning to New York, he found himself, as it were, back at square one. While he had been touring, Dennis Katz had marshaled his chess pieces and presented Reed with what amounted to a checkmate. According to Reed, Dennis Katz’s office had cut off his support payments. He discovered that he no longer had an apartment or money in the bank, then was informed that he was $600,000 in debt to his record company. Furthermore, RCA did not intend to proceed with his next album as planned.
Lou believed that the only way to face a storm was to drive right through its center at breakneck speed. Approaching RCA president Ken Glancy, Lou talked him into supporting him long enough to come up with a commercial album. Glancy, who knew Reed personally and believed in him in the same way that Katz once had, agreed to put him up in a suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel, an establishment that had seen better days but now exuded a louche charm as home for traveling rock bands and European tourists.
Lou was comfortable there. RCA picked up his room and restaurant bills and gave him $15 per day in cash. The hotel’s restaurant had the air of a department store and served bland food, but the bar pulsed with cute groupies waiting for the appearance of any rock star. While Lou was there, Dylan’s entourage was using it as a base for their Rolling Thunder tour and invited Lou to join them. He had to decline the offer.
The pecuniary difficulties strengthened the bond between Lou and Rachel. According to Lou, Rachel weathered hard times because she was “a street kid and very tough underneath it all.” They also had a lot of fun together. Lou never tired of shocking people. One day a maid came into their suite unaware that they, Mr. and Mrs. Reed, were in bed. When she saw “Mrs. Reed” lying uncovered and naked, displaying an unexpected appendage, she gave a little cry and fled. Lou, who was awake and witnessed her shock, was in stitches for days over the sighting.
The sparse setup at the hotel helped Lou focus singularly on Coney Island Baby. In between writing songs and recording, he met with his lawyers to discuss his three lawsuits against the Katz brothers. For entertainment, he listened to tapes of the comedian Richard Pryor and held court. In between Lou’s raps, Rachel and assorted visitors whiled away the hours playing Monopoly. During his stay at the hotel, a friend brought a grateful Lou a copy of the manuscript of Lou’s book of poems, All the Pretty People, that he wanted to get published. He had mislaid the collection during his recent move.
***
Coney Island Baby was first recorded from October 18 to 25. RCA was very hopeful. “They said, you can do anything you want so long as it’s not Metal Machine Music,” Lou sneered. He entered the studio with Steve Katz again as coproducer and a full complement of new musicians.
It wasn’t long, however, before Steve found Lou impossible to work with. And, stonewalled by Reed’s amphetamine abuse, he quit. “There was no other way. Each day a new head trip. Finally I said to him, right in front of all the musicians who’d gone through this, ‘I give up! If you’re gonna play these games, I know you’re gonna outwit me. I’m just your producer. I acknowledge that you’re much smarter than I am—there’s no point in playing these games.’” Asked “What’s better than sex?” that week, Lou replied, “Facts!”
Steve recalled, “The drugs had taken over and things were completely crazy. I felt that Lou was, at the time, out of his mind. So I had to stop the sessions. I had someone in authority at RCA come to the studio and verify that I could not make an album with the artist—that was that.”
During the recording of the album, Lou was so enmeshed in lawsuits with the Katz brothers it is amazing that he was able to concentrate on his work as well as he did. He thrived on conflict.
When Lester Bangs asked, “What do you think that the sense of guilt manifested in most of your songs has to do with being Jewish?” Lou snapped, “I don’t know anyone Jewish.” But he went out of his way to make anti-Semitic remarks about Dennis Katz, telling one astonished interviewer, “I’ve got that kike by the balls. If you ever wondered why they have noses like pigs, now you know. They’re pigs. Whaddaya expect?” The lyrics to “Dirt” refer to someone who said shit tasted good for money. “I was specifically referring to my manager-lawyer at the time,” Reed explained.
Reed and Katz sued each other for breach of contract. “There was a suit and a countersuit,” Falk explained. “And by then, according to Dennis, it was black-and-white—Lou was a jerk and Lou was a … and don’t even mention his name. This artiste he had extolled. And then Lou called me. He even asked me to manage him. I said, ‘You don’t want me to manage you.’ I said, ‘Lou, I will always tell the truth. I know that you feel hard done by, and in some ways you were, but I don’t know if it was illegal. There may be things I don’t know about. If you want to know anything, I’ll tell you.’ And I had a meeting with his lawyer at the time. And he was in my face with his finger. and blah blah blah. I said, ‘I’ll be glad to tell you anything you want to know.’ But he was trying to say that Lou was drugged-out half the time and didn’t know what he was signing away and he was taken advantage of. But I said Lou was very bright and it was my impression that he was aware of what was going on.”
Several years later, in an attempt to redeem himself before the eyes of the public, Lou published in Punk magazine the defendants’ memorandum of laws concerning his suit with Steve Katz and Anxiety Productions. It read in part:
The relationship between an artist and his chosen producer is an intimate employer–employee relationship. The shocking bitterness and personal animosity with which Katz, the employee, regards Reed, the employer, is written in bold letters throughout Katz’s Affidavit. For example, he calls Reed:
—confused, self-destructive and immersed in the drug culture (Katz Aff. p. 16)
—an irresponsible drug-induced musical meanderer (p. 17)
—financially irresponsible (p. 20)
Reed was convinced serious errors had been made. “I went over things with a microscope and found it so interesting. I’ve got three lawsuits going,” he attested. “Everything from misrepresentation to fraud and back again. The management I had then had me in a cocoon in paranoia: when you’re ripping somebody off that much, you don’t want them outside talking to people.”
“I was a bit erratic before,” he admitted. “You get tired of fighting with people sometimes. And t
o avoid going through all of that, I mastered the art of recording known as ‘capture the spontaneous moment and leave it at that.’ Coney Island Baby is like that. You go into the studio with zero, write it on the spot, and make the lyrics up as the tape’s running and that’s it. What I wanna get on my records, since everyone else is so slick and dull, is that moment.”
In October at the club of the moment, Ashley’s, on Lower Fifth Avenue, Lou met the man who would help bring Coney Island Baby to fruition. Godfrey Diamond, a talented young engineer in his early twenties, would become his next producer. Diamond admitted that he “really wasn’t a huge fan of his up to that point. I guess I was too young. But I really loved the banana album and Transformer. ‘Satellite of Love’ was a work of art.” Diamond returned to the Gramercy Park Hotel with Reed that night to listen to his new songs: “One thing that really impressed me is that he always goes for the tough edge, the risky stuff. I thought he was a real warrior, with such courage.”
Around five o’clock on the morning of the day Reed and Godfrey finished Coney Island Baby, Lou took Diamond over to Danny Fields’s apartment for an immediate judgment. Fields had become the critic and authority on the downtown music scene, and Lou regularly sought his opinion. As soon as they got there, they plugged in the record and took a seat in Fields’s living room. To Diamond’s dismay Danny pulled out a newspaper and appeared to be engrossed in it. Lou whispered to him that Danny always did this so you could not see the expression on his face while he listened to your record. After a tense (for Diamond) forty-five minutes, Fields snapped shut his paper and declared, “Great! Not one bad song.” They stayed there until 8 a.m. when Diamond had to go to work.
All that remained was for Mick Rock to do a photo session for the cover, and Lou had completed one of his finer solo recordings. RCA was as pleased with the results as he was.
Danny Fields with Lou and Rachel in New York, 1976. (Bob Gruen)
As soon as Lou completed Coney Island Baby, like a musician on tour well oiled after playing six weeks of dates, he went straight into another project equally dear to his heart. Andy Warhol, who was in 1975 at the height of his game once again, had just published his best book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. It was full of advice about how to tackle the very problems that most beset Lou. Inscribing a photocopy of the proofs to his old disciple with “Honey, from Andy,” Warhol seduced the prolific Reed into writing an album of songs based on the book for a projected Broadway show. It was a dry run of sorts for Songs for Drella, Reed’s posthumous homage to Warhol, which he would release in 1990. According to Bob Jones, “Lou used to talk at great length about Andy and how Andy was somehow the ultimate figure of idealization. I remember Lou telling me that Andy was the strongest man that he’d ever met—physically. That he could leap over buildings in a single bound. He was absolutely crazed about it. He said Andy had arms like steel. For Lou, Andy was also, I remember him saying, like Aristotle. Like Aristotle and Leonardo and Andy. I remember a conversation in which I said surely you don’t think Andy is as great as Leonardo. And Lou said, ‘Absolutely, much greater than Leonardo, much more interesting and smarter.’”
“I see him all the time,” Lou explained. “I’ve talked to him more than probably anyone I’ve ever talked to. He showed me how to save a lot of time.”
Jones went to the Factory with Lou once when they were both speeding: “I remember sitting on the table and having Bob Colacello making fun of Lou in a catty way. And Fred Hughes coming around and Lou disappearing into the back with Andy. Coney Island Baby had just come out and he was bringing Andy a copy.
“Andy was a little bothered by him. They had had hard times together, had difficulties and arguments. Lou was pretending a greater closeness to Andy than those who were around Andy had so that Lou’s attitude was, “I’m closer to Andy than you would ever be, Bob or Fred.” And actually Bob and Fred resented that and were condescending about Lou. But Andy wanted to keep his distance from Lou.”
Lou wrote his adaptation of Andy Warhol’s Philosophy overnight. “I was so surprised,” Warhol admitted. “He just came over the next day and had it all done.” “I played the songs for Andy,” Lou explained. “He was fascinated but horrified. I think they kind of scared him.”
***
In many ways, in his Rock ’n’ Roll Animal incarnation Lou was more completely the controlled self he wanted to be. During this period he reached his artistic maturity and was able to best collaborate with the differing selves he had picked up along the way. “Realism was the key, the records were letters, real letters from me to certain other people who had and still have basically no music, be it verbal or instrumental, to listen to,” he wrote in the liner notes to Metal Machine Music.
Describing heavy-metal music, he wrote it was “diffuse, obtuse, weak, boring and ultimately an embarrassment.” Responding to criticism about ethnic or racial slurs in his lyrics (he actually backed off from including “I Wanna Be Black” in the collection Sally Can’t Dance for fear of a backlash), Reed snapped at one trembling interviewer, “What’s wrong with cheap, dirty jokes? Fuck you, I never said I was tasteful. I am not tasteful.”
***
At the beginning of 1976, Lou made a definitive break from his recent past. He no longer relied upon Katz to steer him through the twisted path to international superstardom. He no longer looked to Warhol for approbation and permission to be Lou Reed. Now, instead of hiring a new manager for the seventies, as so many of his peers were doing, he elected instead to hire a booking agent to oversee his increasingly profitable touring career, one Johnny Podell. Wrote Reed chronicler Peter Doggett: “Fast-talking, all skin and bone and at that time in his life very fond of cocaine, Podell was a man of the streets, and Lou adopted him as the latest in a succession of bosom buddies–comminglers, just as he had done Katz, Heller, Sesnick, and Warhol before him. At Ashley’s, the music biz bar and restaurant on Fifth Avenue at 13th Street where Lou and Podell hung out with their friends, the regulars quipped that their business relationship was ‘a marriage made in the emergency ward!’”
Having, for all intents and purposes, rid himself of Dennis Katz—although their lawsuits would rage on for two years—Lou, in the enthusiasm of the moment, proceeded to talk up John Podell to the press. “I’m not unmanageable,” he said. “Not true. It’s just that I’ve never hit on the right people before. John Podell, my new man, is great. He got an MA in business psychology at twenty-one, and he’s as good at practice as he is at theory. He doesn’t handle my money, I’ve got all new people to do that, but he gets all the rest together. It’s a whole new show now on that front. Anyone who was connected with me on a business level before is out. My accountants, lawyers, record-company manager, his brother quote producer—all out. With Johnny you’ve got a tiger by the tail. He’s ready to go. The product is there. I like that. I’m the product and I call myself the product. Much better than being called an artist—that means they’re fucking you, they think you don’t know from shit. This time I’m doing it for real, because it seems that’s what’s supposed to happen.”
Around the beginning of 1976, Lou’s new status was made evident when he moved with Rachel and the new addition to their family, a dachshund named the Baron, into a furnished Upper East Side apartment building on 52nd Street a few doors down from the reclusive Greta Garbo. Although Lou did not make much of his famous neighbour, choosing to play the connection down, all his so-called two-bit friends were soon referring to Lou’s new nest as “the Garbo apartment.” “He lived for a time near Greta Garbo in an apartment in a high-rise with a doorman,” recalled Bob Jones. “To me it seemed very glamorous—actually it was two rooms. But there was always the drug addict’s lifestyle. There was nothing in the fridge except coffee ice cream. There were records in boxes and things, but that was it.” The apartment fit the Lou Reed mold, furnished with electronic equipment, guitars, stacks of tapes, and a few personal items, such as the plastic plant that he insisted on watering.
&nb
sp; “Lou was then wearing the A-head’s uniform,” Jones noted. “When you went out of the apartment, the uniform was quite set—it was a white T-shirt tucked into blue jeans worn with a belt. Boots or shoes, black. A cap of some sort. And very tight, a black leather jacket.
“Lou was getting into gay porn magazines. I remember having the same kind of interest in them as I did in the gory police stuff. It was not erotic to me but I was looking at another world. Because it was forbidden it was interesting—fascinating.”
Lou’s new dog, the Baron, bore a resemblance to Seymour. Lou, admitting that “underneath it all I’m just a sentimentalist,” expressed the same kind of gentle, obsessive feelings toward him. “The Baron is a miniature dachshund with a forceful personality,” noted a friend who visited Reed that January. “He justifies his name by his great ability to corner great chunks of the apartment in which he resides, and subjects all those who enter, including his co-inhabitants, to the random exhibition of his caprices. Mr. Reed, one of his co-inhabitants, is enamored of him. They have an excellent relationship based on Mr. Reed’s acceptance of his menial role in the Baron’s life.”
Reed explained, “I’m here to feed him, walk him, act as chief thrower of chaseable objects and general dog’s body—what an apt description! At first it was difficult, but now that I have learned the wisdom of the Baron’s way, all is well. He’s a total exhibitionist. This morning he displayed a full stem for us, the disgusting little beast.”
When Lou wasn’t in the studio, rehearsing for a tour, or voyaging around the city in search of characters or materials, he spent his time at home, writing songs, playing music, and receiving a stream of visitors ranging from his drug dealers through recording engineers and journalists to guitar players and assorted drug buddies. Ed Lister and Bob Jones would go around to see him and shoot speed. Lou was constantly worried that the police would come to his place looking for Lister—and on one occasion they did, because Lister had left a stolen car in Lou’s parking space.
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