Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  “Basically he said being sober was beyond his wildest dreams,” recalled the member who witnessed his AA speech. “And to hear Lou Reed say that, a guy who achieved a lot, who was cool in everybody’s eyes … He was very grateful, he was just very regular. He talked about how alcohol and drugs had affected his life and how it still made him stop.” Another friend commented, “When I went to Narcotics Anonymous, Lou was there, I would see him and talk to him at the meetings, and he seemed perfectly normal. But he wouldn’t hang out afterwards.”

  Outside of his contact with people at AA and NA meetings, Lou suspended or ended most of his personal relationships. “I ran into Lou one night at a movie theater and we had a very friendly fifteen-minute talk and vowed to get together, and I haven’t seen him since,” recalled his old Syracuse friend and Eldorados manager, Donald Schupak. “I guess he was sober, clean, straight, hetero, married, lifting weights, looking great. I think one of the rules laid down was no contact with your prior life—like an AA thing. Rather than differentiating between the good contacts and the bad contacts, it was like a cult, you’ve got to cut off everyone from your past life. It says something that he’d go along with that.”

  Discipline and control were the central themes in Lou’s life, and he was characteristically unapologetic about his new lifestyle. “I’m not interested in any morality plays,” he said of his attempts to clean up. “I’m not proselytizing, but as far as my early demise goes, I’ve made a lot of efforts in the other direction. Such things you might consider dull—working out, playing basketball, keeping my head together and all that. I find destructive people very, very boring, and I’d like to think that I’m not one of them.”

  Even though Lou had quit drinking and was attending AA, Sylvia continued to indulge. She didn’t see herself as having a problem, claiming that she often went without a drink for days or even weeks without missing it. According to one friend, however, when she did get drunk, she could get crazy and out of control. In most respects, though, Sylvia was the epitome of the devoted wife, often submitting to Lou’s wishes despite her own. Now, spending much of his time far from New York and strictly limiting all visitors, Lou could successfully isolate Sylvia, who had transformed from a downtown diva into a Redbook-style housewife. Where once she had said that if he ever broke up with her, she would sue him for palimony, the now domesticated Sylvia was happy to be with Lou and was flattered by the songs he wrote about her. “Sylvia is one hundred percent for Lou,” noted Eric Kronfeld. “She’s supportive. He relies on her a lot. He’s certainly happy.”

  Sylvia was evidently just what Lou needed; he changed in ways that surprised his old friends. “Since he got married, he’s been really happy,” said Moe Tucker, “which makes me happy. Recently I dropped him a line to say we had a new baby. I didn’t expect a reply—I mean, what does he care?—but I got a very sweet letter back.” According to Lou, “Sylvia’s very, very smart, so I have a realistic person I can ask about things: ‘Hey, what do you think of this song?’ She helped me so much in bringing things together and getting rid of certain things that were bad for me, certain people. I’ve got help, for the first time in my life [he had said the same thing about Bettye and Rachel]. I’m surrounded by good, caring, honest business people. In my life, that’s a real change. I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

  Sylvia also had a positive influence on his writing. “There’s this real myth, as if by getting married you suddenly become old and senile and move to the suburbs and never do a meaningful piece of work again,” Lou said. “I envision marriage as the romantic thing it is. How can you write about love when you don’t believe in it?”

  “He transferred to Sylvia, who had got him out of his alcoholic thing and his funk, those qualities that he would have to a mother, Mom says it’s okay, I can do it,” warned a close friend. “But the moment you give that to somebody, you hate them for it, and you have to separate from them or you’re not going to grow up.”

  Lou defended himself against the charge that he had retired to the suburban married life and was no longer a relevant artistic force. “I’ve run up against resentment in the press about this. Getting married, if you’re in rock and roll, seems to strike these people as if you’d been put out to pasture somewhere in the suburbs and stripped bare of your vital organs. Whereas another point of view might be that marriage could revitalize you. It could help you, make you stronger, more insightful, more perceptive, give you even more ability to go about doing what you want to do in writing and all that. And make you a better person for it. I have a place in Jersey, so I read these things now: ‘He’s a suburbanite.’ It’s as though I donated my brain to science and I was now making rock and roll totally on a shallow field: ‘memories of the dark underbelly of New York from before.’”

  “I used to seek out extreme situations and live through them. Now I try to avoid them. I’ve discovered I’m a person who works best when there’s no tension. I like to watch other people in extreme situations. I would have made the change all along if I could have.”

  The few friends Lou still saw were characterized by extreme loyalty and a belief in, or mirroring of, his new domestic situation. Most were married. He claimed not to understand why people would want to remain single. For Lou “happily married” was the preferred state of being, and friends who messed up their marriages found themselves persona non grata at his home. Even Andy Warhol, writing in his diary, commented that all Lou was interested in was his rural retreat. Ronnie Cutrone, who visited Lou in the country, told Warhol that Lou had “always just bought another motorcycle and another piece of land.” Blairstown was great for Lou’s writing, but, as he recalled, “the great breakthrough was the computer. My main thing is rewriting. I can edit in my head pretty well, but because of the handwriting and because I don’t have the ability to contain one thought for very long, if I’m interrupted, that’s it.”

  The change in the lyrical content of his songs was not the only by-product of his new life. Reed also toned down his image in an “average-guy” motif. “Some people like to think I’m just this black-leather-clad person in sunglasses, and there’s certainly that side of me; I wouldn’t want to deny my heritage. But I’m not saying I’m a primitive. I work really hard to make my songs sound like the way people really talk. My concerns are somewhat similar to what Sam Shepard and Martin Scorsese are doing, talking about things that people growing up in the city go through. I’m trying for a kind of urban elegance, set to a beat.”

  In his Blairstown retreat Lou found himself trying once again to reinvent the setup he’d had at Syracuse—going so far this time as to summon the ghost of Delmore Schwartz. One night at the cabin Schwartz put in an appearance via a Ouija board. The incident did inspire a song, “My House,” in which Lou claimed Delmore Schwartz occupied a guest bedroom. “Something very strange happened,” recalled Reed. “After a while we just had to stop, it was becoming too much for me to handle.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The New, Positive Lou (The Blue Lou)

  1981–84

  I think he loves his lives and I think he hates them.

  Robert Quine

  Lou was married to Sylvia.

  He had the ghost of Delmore Schwartz living in his house.

  All he needed to complete the triangle he had thrived on since Shelley and Lincoln was a third person.

  In 1981, Sylvia found that person in the guitar player Robert Quine.

  Quine was from Akron, Ohio, where the deejay who gave rock and roll its name, Alan Freed, got his start. Though he had gone to law school and become a member of the Missouri bar, Quine had never practiced. Instead, in the early seventies he moved to New York to pursue his love affair with the guitar. A staunch Velvets fan who had devoured the band’s San Francisco performances in 1969, Quine developed a slashing, tense style. “Lou Reed became such a big influence on my playing,” he recounted. “He was a true innovator on the guitar who was never appreciated at the time. I
completely absorbed his style. I’ve always liked those basic, simple rock-and-roll changes.”

  In the mid-seventies, Quine worked with Richard Hell, formed the Voidoids, and recorded their groundbreaking album Blank Generation. Quine’s spare, impeccably timed sonic assaults were in the vanguard of punk music. As Robert Palmer wrote in the New York Times, “Robert Quine’s solos were like explosions of shredding metal and were over in thirty seconds or so.” Unlike any other guitar superstar, Bob dressed conservatively and adopted a laconic, indifferent stance onstage and off. He could have passed for a retiring shoe salesman or pious cleric. His head was mostly bald. His tight facial features were shielded by the trademark black sunglasses he wore clamped over his sensitive eyes like a visor. A cigarette perennially dangled from his lip. The purest of musicians with the highest of standards, Quine let his music speak for him. As soon as he played a single, inimitable note on his guitar, there was no question that Mr. Quine was in control. If an artist’s work can be judged by how quickly it is recognized, then Bob Quine was one of the all-time greats. By 1977, his playing was so inspired he had developed a cult following.

  “Around October 1977 we were playing at CBGB’s,” Quine recalled, “and I didn’t know Lou was there, but he was at the front table. We had done a pretty good set and I was walking by the table and he grabbed me and said, ‘Man, you’re a fucking great guitar player.’” Then he sat Quine down at the table and proceeded to lay into the band, snarling, “That is not a band you’re playing with. I hope you know that. Music is about domination and power. You should just fucking dominate these people, they’re not musicians. You should go over to the other guitar player and put him out of his misery.” Somebody passed the table and Quine looked away for a second, at which point Lou said in a very low, serious voice, “When I’m talking, listen, goddamn it. When I’m talking to you, you look me in the eye, goddamn it, or I’ll fucking smash you in the face, and I’m serious, I’m deadly serious.”

  Bob Quine, the guitar player who would pick Lou up, dust him off and start him all over again in the early 1980s, particularly on The Blue Mask. (Marcia Resnick)

  It was not until four years later—by which time Lou had stopped drinking and married Sylvia—that Quine got his opportunity to play with his hero. Sylvia made the connection, calling Bob on the phone, inviting him to have lunch with Lou at some anonymous restaurant near Reed’s flat. On the same cold March day in 1981 that President Reagan was shot, Quine met Reed for lunch at one of those glassed-in restaurants that decorate the lower expanse of Seventh Avenue in the Sheridan Square area. Lou was just checking Bob out to make sure he was not an asshole. “He was not interested in talking about old Velvet Underground days,” Quine recalled. “We talked about guitars, this, that, and I guess he assured himself that I was an okay guy. Then we went back to his apartment on Christopher and he had some new guitars.”

  As Lou showed Bob his guitars, he discussed plans for his new band, mentioning that he wanted to play more guitar himself. “That’s absolutely great!” Quine exclaimed spontaneously. Before Bob left, Lou said he wanted Bob to be in the band. “He pretty much said, this is it and I could count on him. I was alarmed by the last album he had done, Growing Up in Public, which was my least favorite of his, but he said he didn’t want to do anything like that again. He wanted a whole new band, he wanted to play guitar, he wanted a new record company.”

  To facilitate his fresh start, Reed elected to drop Arista in favor of RCA, the company he had left in 1976 in the wake of the infamous Metal Machine Music. His superstar success was enough to persuade them that, once again, Reed was a good investment.

  A few months later, as Lou was getting ready to record the album, he sent Quine a cassette of himself playing the songs on acoustic guitar. A few days later he had Quine and the producer, Sean Fullan, ferried to Blairstown by limousine for a day-long visit. “That was a very nervewracking time for both of us,” Quine explained. “We had never played together so we were both ill at ease. We’re walking around kind of putting it off as long as possible, then we sat down to do it. I said, ‘Well, maybe I think I can do this here.’ I had a basic sound on ‘Waves of Fear’ down, and he was just surprised and happy. He pretty much liked everything I did.”

  Lou soon glommed on to Quine with invasive energy. A phone-aholic, Lou would call Quine fifteen times a day. Soon they were meeting for lunch regularly at a coffee shop on the corner where Lou lived. “I remember at the beginning of it I ran into them a couple of times just hanging out together, going out to eat Chinese food, stuff like that,” said Robert Palmer. “Which is very unusual—I’ve never run into Lou sort of hanging around the Village the way you would run into Quine or somebody.” Passionate, generous, vulnerable, Bob was the perfect and much needed musical foil for Lou. On top of that, he was as opinionated and articulate as Reed. For someone who was as easily bored as Lou, Quine’s mind provided a big relief. They had endless discussions.

  Lou needed receivers—people he could talk to endlessly through the day and night in person or on the phone—just as much as he needed musical collaborators. And Quine, who was, if anything, more articulate and opinionated than Lou, fit the mold almost too well for his own good. Lou loved to talk to Bob. “We hung out for about six months and we got to be pretty good friends,” recalled Quine, adding, “which may have been a mistake in the long run. Who knows if you should become close friends with the people you work with. But we would go to see horror movies all the time; 3-D was making a comeback and we’d go see all the trashy 3-D horror movies. And he’d drag me to see the crappy kung fu movies in Chinatown. He’d want to watch ten in a row, but I couldn’t absorb any more after three or four.”

  As they spent more and more time together, the friendship spilled over into other areas. Lou had suffered from insomnia for many years. Quine had discovered an over-the-counter pill, Unisom, which he turned Reed on to with positive results. Lou was gratified.

  At first, their shared love for EC Comics bonded them as much as their love for the guitar playing of James Burton. When Quine showed Reed his collection of vintage horror and science-fiction comic books, in particular a patently gory and offensive series put out by EC Comics, “Lou really lit up. A typical comic would be a guy jealous of another team player on the baseball team would put poison on his spikes and spike the guy and he dies. So the other guys on the team find out about it and invite the guy to a midnight game, and the last few shots are these players playing baseball with this guy’s body parts. His intestines are the baselines, his limbs are the bat, head the ball.”

  Quine also visited Lou and Sylvia out in Blairstown: “As a general rule we’d just hang around. It was sort of like a cabin, but a gigantic cabin with a second floor. Very rustic. It was very nice. But personally I like being close to the ocean, and being in the woods surrounded by ponds, it makes me claustrophobic. He had his motorcycle and in the winter he had his snowmobile. I was fairly terrified of the motorcycle. I took one ride with him and decided never again. His eyes aren’t that good. We’d sit around and listen to records. I don’t think we jammed too much, but he had some nice old ancient Fender amps and stuff out there. They must have been from when he was a kid. And he had a jukebox in his house with a lot of nice oldies on there. He had boxes of singles in the closet. Pinball. Pool. And he had those dogs.”

  Reed’s comfortable relationship with his musicians made for spontaneity and a raw vitality missing from some of his previous albums. A week before going into the studio Lou got together with Bob and ran through the songs once. Everybody knew the songs up to a point, but nothing was too structured. Quine remembered how liberating this approach was: “I was free to come up with whatever I came up with. Total freedom. We went in with no rehearsals.”

  In October 1981, they went to RCA’s studio in New York, a gigantic barn of a room used by symphony orchestras playing live together, and recorded the tracks for The Blue Mask in one or two takes. Quine and Reed brought all the anxi
ety and fear they could muster to the sessions. The spark immediately ignited the band. Quine had never done a record like this before. “We went in and ran the songs down and started doing them. He was playing a lot of open chords in D, which was very nice, but to try and get a second guitar part to complement that was difficult. So I dropped my tuning a whole step. When he was playing an open D chord, I was playing an open E chord. That’s partly the reason why that album sounds the way it does.”

  “I hadn’t played guitar for a while,” recounted Lou. “I started playing guitar again because of Bob Quine. Quine was real good about encouraging me to play guitar. I cannot play with just anybody. Oft-times I would not play guitar rather than get involved in playing with people I’d clash with, where it just wouldn’t work. I need somebody who really understands that little simple thing that I do and likes that stuff. And they’re hard to come by. So when I ran into Quine, who understands that and plays that way, he really freed me up and gave me a lot of encouragement. He’d say, ‘Lou, come on. You can take the solo.’ With some other people, if I took a solo, they’d go, ‘Oh my God,’ and just hope it would end.”