Transformer

by Victor Bockris

Needless to say, all was not copacetic in the studio. Lou’s father–son relationship with Clive Davis would come to a head during the Street Hassle sessions.

  After hearing an early version of the last section of “Street Hassle,” Davis suggested Reed make the two-minute track longer. Although Lou accepted Clive’s advice (“I wrote the lyrics for ‘Street Hassle’ out from beginning to end in about as long as it took to physically write it on paper”), he later complained of “being betrayed by all the evil people around me! The original producer [Richard Robinson] had walked out, I’d had to change studios because we had a fight there—and then Clive Davis came in and told me I should make a new record and throw this one away. But the record came out, and I wasn’t crazy. They were just stupid. The head of Arista was stupid.”

  Making albums allowed Lou to be the Sylvester Stallone of rock, both directing and starring in the works. “Some people make movies of people who interest them,” Reed was quoted in an Arista press release. “Andy Warhol has been doing it for years … Actually, I do it with my songs.”

  Displaying what he had learned from Warhol, Raymond Chandler, and Delmore Schwartz, Lou wrote a vivid story with short, neo-Céline-like sentences. The song, which ends the cycle about Rachel that began with “Coney Island Baby,” laments the end of their relationship. As Bob Jones, who was also at the end of his relationship with Lou, said, “At a certain point the only way to be around Lou was to be secondary to Lou, and you either had to become an acolyte—which was a role that I don’t think Lou would allow one to continue—or say good-bye. It would very much be part of the attitude of the time that one would say good-bye in a cynical way and be tough and rough about it.”

  One of the many nuggets in “Street Hassle” came from the unexpected contribution of Bruce Springsteen, who sang a few intense lines in the center of the piece. “He was in the studio below, and for that little passage I’d written I thought he’d be just perfect, because I tend to screw those things up,” Reed recounted. “Like ‘I Found a Reason,’ it is my best recitation, but I just couldn’t resist that ‘Walking hand in hand with myself’ part. I’m too much of a smart-ass. But I knew Bruce would do it seriously, because he really is of the street. Springsteen is all right, he gets my seal of approval. I think he’s groovy.”

  The most striking thing about Lou’s relationship with Rachel was how long it lasted, particularly considering that they spent virtually all of their time together. Unlike his relationships with previous girlfriends and his wife, Lou did not immediately try to push Rachel to an edge. Whether this was because he knew how much he needed her or because Rachel’s personality was able to absorb Lou’s blows without flinching, there’s no question that from late 1974 through 1977, Rachel was a mainstay of Reed’s life. And her personality permeates the albums from Coney Island Baby, a paean to Rachel that put Lou squarely on the map as the poet laureate of the gay world in New York in the seventies, to Street Hassle, which documents the sad conclusion to their affair.

  The breakdown started somewhere in 1977. A friend visited Lou one afternoon that spring to find him alone and brooding over Rachel’s disappearance. Speaking in the tone of a bereaved lover out of a broken-hearts novel, Lou was in despair and blaming himself for the break, crying plaintively that he would do anything to get her back. He was about to go on tour and remarked wistfully that they could have had such a ball together, but now everything was in doubt.

  Two days later Lou got a phone call instructing him to go to a downtown bar where a surprise awaited him. Hastening to the specified location, Lou walked in to find Rachel sitting at the bar with open arms and a sweet smile. In such moments, Lou was the most romantic of men. He swept her off her feet again and they did have a ball on the subsequent tour. But in such intense relationships, once a crack like that appears, there is little chance of real recovery.

  Although he clearly regretted it, by early 1978 Lou and Rachel were having a trial separation. Again, quite uncharacteristically, when Lou did break up with Rachel, rather than closing her out of his life with a slammed door, Reed admitted that he still had strong feelings about her and missed her. Ultimately, the relationship probably suffered more than anything else from writer’s syndrome. When a writer makes use of his mate for his material, he risks losing the indefinable essence of their connection. Rachel should be remembered in the saga of Lou Reed as the muse who helped give birth to his finest work of the mid-seventies.

  ***

  The first half of the seventies had been a prolific time for Lou Reed. He produced six studio albums and completed a book of poems, All the Pretty People. “They have a certain progression,” Lou explained. “From the start they got rougher and harder and tougher until it’s just out and out vicious, doesn’t rhyme, and has no punctuation, it’s just vicious and vulgar.” Largely through the auspices of Gerard Malanga, who remained Reed’s astute connection to the poetry world despite Lou’s rejection of his friendship and criticism of him in print for getting the poems published, several poems were published in literary magazines, ranging from the prestigious Paris Review through Unmuzzled Ox to underground publications like the Coldspring Journal. In late 1977, shortly after he finished work on Street Hassle, Lou won a prize for “The Slide” published in the Coldspring Journal, as one of the year’s five best new poets from the American Literary Council of Little Magazines. He attended the ceremony at the Gotham Book Mart in New York and was given the award by Senator Eugene McCarthy. Lou wondered if McCarthy read his poems about S&M, noting, “He was taller than he seemed on TV.”

  Street Hassle was released in February 1978 at the commercial height of the new wave and marketed as a grand statement from the man who invented punk. It received more press than anything Reed had done before, garnering reviews from Time to Punk. It took him to the pinnacle of his career as reviewers around the world praised it to the skies. “I’m right in step with the market,” he said in Creem the week the album came out. “The album is enormously commercial.”

  An article in the NME in 1993 looked back at this period:

  “Signs of his rejuvenation were most vividly apparent on his 1978 tour de force Street Hassle, an uncompromising howl of self-lacerating disgust and poisonous venom that against all odds turned out to be one of the major albums of the late seventies. The title track ranks with anything on the more celebrated New York, Songs for Drella, or Magic and Loss. In its final heartbreaking conclusion, Lou sounds exposed and vulnerable and hurt beyond words. “Street Hassle” takes you to the edge and leaves you there—darkness below, no lights in heaven above.”

  “I keep hedging my bet, instead of saying that’s really me, but that is me, as much as you can get on record,” Reed elucidated. “I use my moods. I get into one of these dark, melancholy things and I just milk it for everything I can. I know I’ll be out of it soon and I won’t be looking at things the same way. For every dark mood, I also have a euphoric opposite.”

  Lou did a series of interviews, including an outstanding one with Allan Jones for a British magazine, Melody Maker, in which he put himself in perspective:

  “The Velvet Underground were banned from the radio. I’m still being banned. And for exactly the same reasons. Maybe they don’t like Jewish faggots … No. It’s what they think I stand for they don’t like. They don’t want their kid sitting around masturbating to some rock-and-roll record—probably one of mine. They don’t want their kid ever to know he can snort coke or get a blow job at school or fuck his sister up the ass. They never have. But how seriously can you take it? So they won’t play me on the radio. What’s the radio? Who’s the radio run by? Who’s it played for? With or without the radio I’m still dangerous to parents.”

  When another interviewer, the kid who had arranged Reed’s first solo gig in the U.S. in 1972, Billy Altman, noted, “One thing that disturbs people about your music is its lack of what might be called a moral stance,” Lou shrugged in disdain, saying, “They’re not heterosexual concerns running through
that song. I don’t make a deal of it, but when I mention a pronoun, its gender is all-important. It’s just that my gay people don’t lisp. They’re not any more affected than the straight world. They just are.”

  “Street Hassle is the best album I’ve done,” he told another journalist. “Coney Island Baby was a good one, but I was under siege. Berlin was Berlin, Rock and Roll Heart is good compared to the rest of the shit that’s going around. As opposed to Street Hassle, they’re all babies. If you wanna make adult rock records, you gotta take care of all the people along the way. And it’s not child’s play. You’re talking about managers, accountants, you’re talking about the lowest level of human beings. Street Hassle is me on the line. And I’m talking to them one to one.”

  In the second half of March 1978, Reed played a five-night residency at the Bottom Line in New York with his favorite mid-seventies combo, the Everyman Band. Susan Shapiro described the shows in the Village Voice:

  “Onstage he’s puckish, like Chaplin, like the cover of Coney Island Baby, a live highlight. He moves like a go-go gymnast, awkwardly, authentically, uncorrupted by vanity. He’s singing ‘I Wanna Be Black,’ but it’s playful, a lie to tell the truth. ‘Satellite of Love’ and ‘Lisa Says’ top one another. The force is with him and he’s maybe taking ‘yes’ for an answer. Wallace Stevens has nailed him, ‘under every “no” lay a passion for “yes” that had never been broken.’ Then he’s given them the whammy, ‘Dirt.’”

  “People are always looking for a voice that works,” noted Henry Edwards. “It took him years to find a strong performing voice. It was in him and he didn’t let it out. Because he was so busy playing the faux junkie. I was amazed when I went to the Bottom Line in 1978 and he really was a rock-and-roller.”

  Andy Warhol wrote in his diary: “Lou was late coming out, but then he did and I was proud of him. For once, finally, he’s himself, he’s not copying anybody. Finally he’s got his own style. Now everything he does works. It took years and Lou just kept on working. He’s very good now, he’s changed a lot.”

  “Andy always understood where I’m coming from,” Reed responded. “He also said to me that work is the most important thing in a man’s life and I believe him. My work is my yoga. It empties me out. Years ago he said I was to be to music what he was to visual arts. The man’s amazing. You can’t define it, but it’s happening just the way he said it would.” The shows were recorded for a live album to be called Take No Prisoners. Reed noted, “We called it Take No Prisoners because we were doing a quite phenomenal booking in a tiny hotel in Quebec, where they’d normally have a little dance band. I dunno what we were doing there, but … All of a sudden this drunk guy sitting alone at the front shouts, “Lou, take no prisoners, Lou!” and then he took his head and smashed it as hard as he could to the drumbeat. We saw him doing it and we were taking bets that that man would never move again. But he got up and bam bam on the table! And that was only halfway through. What was gonna be the encore? He might cut his arm off!”

  The fastest mouth in rock and roll combined his Method-acting, stream-of-consciousness spontaneity, and Lenny Bruce-style wit to make a record unlike any other. The songs became background to the monologues—slapping down members of the audience, reeling off a succession of slick one-liners, throwing darts at Patti Smith or Andy Warhol, playing out every lyric for its full sexual innuendo.

  As Reed recalled, “It is a comedy album. Lou Reed talks and talks and talks. Lou Reed, songwriter, is dried-up—ran out of inspiration … Would you buy a used guitar from Peter Frampton?” Reed saved his most acidic bile for rock critics—notably John Rockwell of the New York Times and Robert Christgau of the Village Voice. “Who needs them to tell you what to think?” he railed before lecturing his audience.

  Lou’s outbursts on Take No Prisoners reveal a Lou Reed who is autonomous because he can talk back to himself. “What are you complaining about, asshole?” he asks himself, answering, “I just play the guitar.” Later he quips, apropos of a literary reference, “for those who still read,” then turns on himself, snapping, “What a snotty remark.”

  Despite the hatchet for a tongue with which he chopped Christgau and his ilk, Lou in fact continued to relate to journalists around the world as if they were his best—no, his only—friends. Bert van der Kamp recalled, “In 1978, at the end of the interview, he said to me, ‘It’s always nice to talk to you, you’re such a good friend.’ And I said to him, ‘Why did you act like you didn’t know me?’ and he said, ‘Well, I wanted to be sure it was you.’”

  Lou kept in touch with Punk’s John Holmstrom, but Reed was a tough man to have as a fan. “I would run into him occasionally, but he was very down on the magazine after we did him,” John recalled. “He’d say, ‘Oh, you blew it, it’s not as good as it used to be.’ And he was right. He was always drifting away from us, then drifting towards us.”

  When Punk held its award ceremonies in October 1978, Reed was nominated for the Punk Rock Hall of Fame Award. Lou accepted the invitation to attend the ceremonies. As John recalled the night:

  “We thought we were going out of business and we wanted to have a party and go out in style. A day or two before our party, Nancy Spungen was found dead. So New York went nuts. It was a crazy time and all the insanity focused on our event, because we were the punk event happening at the moment. TV crews came down and wanted to interview all the punk-rock stars about Sid and Nancy, and nobody wanted anything to do with this because people were shocked and horrified by what had happened.

  “The media were always more interested in promoting those aspects of punk. They could have said, for example, that Lou was a great artist who expressed himself differently. But they had to focus on the ridiculous, shaving Iron Crosses in the side of his head. Which to us was not the point. Punk to us was more the attitude: you do what you want artistically and any other way, lifestyle-related, and screw you. Not that you have a tawdry or decadent lifestyle and get nasty about it. It was more like the ultimate individual against perversion.”

  What had been intended as a humorous ceremony deteriorated into a horror show owing to the hysterical intervention of the local press. The audience started breaking the furniture and throwing it at the stage and booing.

  Legs McNeil remembered “Lou laughing a lot. We gave him an award. I don’t know what for. I’m sure it was really amateurish and stupid. It was the Punk Awards!” But Holmstrom saw a different reaction: “Lou accepted the Hall of Fame award. But he wouldn’t come up onstage, he just took it and walked out. We had a big falling out over the awards ceremony. It was a disaster, it was horrible. Before the thing he had said, ‘If you embarrass me, I’ll never speak to you again.’ And he was embarrassed. That was the last time he ever talked to me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mister Reed

  1978–79

  I’ve probably had more of a chance to make an asshole out of myself than most people, and I realize that. But then not everybody gets a chance to live out their nightmares for the vicarious pleasures of the public.

  Lou Reed

  Lou could hardly have presented his next incarnation more dramatically than with the infamous live album Take No Prisoners, released in the U.S. that November 1978. A third of the double album was devoted to Reed’s Lenny Bruce—inspired running commentary. Disguising his ravaged singing voice by either screeching and whining out lyrics, or, more often, talking over the music, Reed filled the two albums with anecdotes, jokes, and insults that reflected his state of mind. Meanwhile, the band managed to keep up with Lou, drifting in and out of songs as singing gave way to monologue. “It presents a portrait of Lou Reed more authentic and vivid than any documentary or any amount of interviews could possibly achieve,” wrote Allan Jones, “and exploits more fully than on any previous recording the full impact of his often pathologically cruel—but incessantly hilarious—humor.”

  Although Take No Prisoners was more of a retrospective of Lou Reed than of his music, he was as enthusi
astic about the results as his fans. “I think of it as a contemporary urban-blues album. After all, that’s what I write—tales of the city. And if I dropped dead tomorrow, this is the record I’d choose for posterity. It’s not only the smartest thing I’ve ever done, it’s also as close to Lou Reed as you’re probably ever going to get, for better or worse.”

  By November 1978, Lou was ready to go back to work. In a remarkable confessional interview in Creem magazine, he announced a new level of ambition: “My expectations are very high … to be the greatest writer that ever lived on God’s earth. In other words I’m talking about Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky. I want to do that rock-and-roll thing that’s on a level with The Brothers Karamazov. I’m starting to build up a body of work. I’m on the right track. I think I haven’t done badly. But I think I really haven’t scratched the surface. I think I’m just starting.”

  As the year neared its end, Lou had a feast of work on his plate. He was writing his next studio album, The Bells. For the first time since leaving the Velvets, Reed wrote songs in collaboration—composing tracks with the guitarist, singer, and songwriter Nils Lofgren, Don Cherry, and various members of his band. Interestingly, and perhaps uncharacteristically, he also shared credit for those tracks on the album sleeve. In addition to the new record, Lou was planning a spring and summer tour of the U.S. and Europe. The 1970s were the zenith of Reed’s career in Europe; Street Hassle was popular and Take No Prisoners was soon to be released.

  The same month Take No Prisoners came out, Lou added another guitarist to the band. Chuck Hammer, a twenty-four-year-old prodigy from Santa Barbara, felt that he had mastered the guitar to the point where he could approach his hero on the grounds of being a “qualified disciple.”

  “As a guitarist coming out of the seventies, you either work with Bowie or Reed,” Hammer declared. “I also admired John Cale a lot.”