Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Quine knew he was working with a major talent: “There are people like David Bowie or Prince, people who have had millions of books written about them and are regarded widely as geniuses. I would admit that they are creative, intelligent people who have done some worthwhile things, but they are completely second-rate next to some of the things Lou’s done. I don’t even mention Bruce Springsteen, how could any intelligent person ever like him? But the other two at least could be regarded—still they’re not even close to being in the same league as Lou Reed.”

  On The Blue Mask—whose revealing working title was Heaven and Hell—Lou regained the kind of control of his work that Warhol had handed him on a plate. He chose an engineer who would specifically “not fuck around with the shit.” For the first time since 1978 and Street Hassle, Reed didn’t share songwriting credits, and he controlled the mix: “I couldn’t stand working with these engineers, and they were always trying to fuck around with me. At least you essentially got to hear what went down before this guy fucks around with it and takes the fucking guts out of it. I’d rather you heard it with the guts in than with a fucking pop sheen to it. Going back to Andy Warhol, that was the worst of anything that could happen as far as Andy was concerned, that it gets slicked up. I believe that too. If you want to hear slick shit, my God, you could just buy everybody else.”

  Lou and Bob played like jazz musicians listening and responding to each other’s music in kind. Lou had not had an experience this fine since playing with Cale. His playing and singing became more confident. You could see him pushing the music out like an action painter. To underscore the music’s spontaneity, Reed insisted on keeping the studio effects to a minimum. “He was doing live vocals, which are crucial,” said Quine, “and we’d just do it. That’s what’s really cool about that record. People are really intensely listening to each other, trying to cross barriers; they did that magical jazz thing. Something special is happening and you can hear it on the record. It still amazes me.” Quine remembered the first track they recorded was “My House.” “There was such a sense of elation and relief when he and Sylvia and I went out to dinner afterwards. We knew we had it. I wish it had gone on longer on that kind of level.”

  Apparently Lou felt the same way. “Everything shifted around the time of The Blue Mask. I was playing guitar with a sympathetic guitar player. A monumental bass player, Fernando Saunders. And Doane Perry on drums. Plus a good engineer. And I’d made some strides in the improvement of the production. I do the writing, that’s separate. But when you’re working out with the guys, doing the songs, playing, trying to bring it to life, it’s a mysterious process—recording. I’ll tell you, all really good musicians—forget about the notes they play—it’s their tone that’s important. They have a certain tone and you’re trying to capture it. They work quite hard on it.”

  The way in which Reed used Quine’s abilities to temper his own provides a perfect example of Lou Reed at his best. Reed was an enormously seductive character, not just in a sexual sense but socially. To really be with him, to play with him, was a joy for musicians of the caliber of Cale, Chuck Hammer, and Bob Quine. And Quine, perhaps more than the others, was such a perfect match for Lou because he knew how to listen to both music and words.

  Like Warhol, Lou could be warm, encouraging, even idolatrous of someone whose work he admired. Yet he could just as easily turn his praise to derision when he didn’t get what he wanted or sensed a challenge to his authority. The fear of Lou’s vituperative outbursts—or just plain abandonment—kept several of his musicians playing their best, close to the edge. Lou’s exacting standards worked their effect on Quine, who already harbored a near pathological fear of mediocrity.

  Quine worked from an encyclopedic knowledge of Reed’s guitar playing. Within a short time he became the key musician in the creation of the new Lou Reed band. Quine bolstered Lou’s faith in his own guitar playing. As a result, on The Blue Mask, for the first time since White Light/White Heat, Reed came in with some great guitar solos. Just as David Bowie had given a part of Lou back to himself ten years earlier, Quine urged Reed to take his guitar playing back to his subtle, insightful style. With Quine’s help, Reed interpreted most of The Blue Mask as guitar songs, relearning much of what he had left behind with the breakup of the Velvets. “One imagines that major chunks of his being had to be rebuilt,” commented one friend, “and that, to some degree, at least, he had to relearn how to write songs.”

  Backed by Quine and the excellent new band, Reed was once again on his own rock-and-roll turf. Gone were the experiments with funk and jazz, and the musicians with whom he couldn’t play. Palmer would later write enthusiastically about the band. “The four musicians, especially Mr. Reed and Robert Quine on guitars, interact with a sort of empathy and lucidity one expects from a seasoned jazz combo, and the music always reaches out to invite the listener in, even at its most intensely personal level. There are no ego contests, no power plays. When he was asked why The Blue Mask succeeded so brilliantly where his other albums had been uneven, Reed said, ‘It’s mostly working with the right musicians.’”

  “I had my share of fear and anxiety,” recalled Quine. “I always bring that to the studio almost deliberately; you play better and it’s a great relief and happiness. That’s the only way I can put it. But I would work myself up into a state of fear every day for the next one because when really great stuff happens, you don’t know exactly where it’s coming from, and you don’t have a lot of control over it, so how can it happen again? Every night I’d come home, my girlfriend would see me freaking out, and I’d be frantically trying to figure something out. ‘Oh, no, this is fucked. I can’t come up with anything decent on this song, I’m screwed,’ and then it would just happen again.

  “I remember the most specific thing he really ever said on that album, The Blue Mask, was on the song ‘The Day John Kennedy Died.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna play the last chord on the song—don’t play the last chord with me.’ You could see he was getting more and more confident every day, and it was generally a good thing culminating in the end with one of the last songs we did, ‘The Blue Mask,’ where he went and took that amazing guitar solo. That was the turning point where he knew he had it.”

  Quine was happy with the results: “None of us had ever played together before, but it just clicked immediately. What you hear on the record is totally live. ‘Waves of Fear’ was one of the best things I ever did. I just let it go. The spontaneity was there. I said to Lou at the end of the song, ‘I have an idea for a solo,’ and he said, ‘Just do it.’ There are no overdubs, except one track … any mistakes that happened are on that record. If I take a solo, I stop playing rhythm. There’s no rhythm-guitar fill going underneath. It’s the way they used to do things in the fifties.”

  The method paid off especially well for Lou, who let go with his strongest guitar solos in years. “It was a turning point,” continued Quine. “You can hear it on ‘The Blue Mask’ when Lou starts his guitar solo. He did it, and there it was as good as anything he had done ten years earlier. It was like a vindication.

  “When he approached the end of The Blue Mask, I saw his confidence increasing day by day, and it was a great thing, even when it resulted in things like ‘The Heroin,’ which he did by himself. He got so exasperated with the band, he said, ‘Screw it, I’m doing this myself.’ The last few songs he took complete charge of. There was still spontaneity, but even then he saw what was possible. A song like ‘Average Guy,’ which was one of the last songs, he changed the whole chord structure and said, ‘Do it this way.’”

  “I spent a lot of time on the song order,” Reed said. “These things are important. If you can get a feeling of continuity from the album, a feeling of somebody trying to speak to you, that’s the difference between a good album and something that’s finer. I’m not above appreciating my own work. And I don’t think The Blue Mask is just a good album. It’s way better than that.”

  The Blue Mask was released in
February 1981. Lou dedicated it to Delmore Schwartz. Trouser Press compared the album to John Lennon’s Double Fantasy, commenting, “Precious few people in rock deserve the accolade of genius, but Lou Reed is surely one of them.” “The intuitive responsiveness between Lou Reed and Robert Quine is a quiet summit of guitarists’ interplay,” Tom Carson wrote in Rolling Stone. “The notes and noise soar and dive, scudding almost formlessly until they’re suddenly caught up in the focus of the rhythm … With The Blue Mask, Lou Reed has done what even John Lennon couldn’t do—he’s put his Plastic Ono Band and his Double Fantasy on the same record, and made us feel that, at long last, these two paths in him are joined.” Although a commercial disappointment—The Blue Mask reached only No. 169 on the Billboard chart in early March—Robert Palmer in the New York Times called The Blue Mask Lou’s best in years, and the first rock masterpiece of 1982.

  “The thing about Lou’s guitar playing,” he said, “is he’s able to use all of these nonmusical elements, really screeching feedback, and integrate them into something musical. But, he does tend to ramble. I love what he plays, but sometimes it doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and an end, it doesn’t build. On The Blue Mask, Lou’s playing is as concise as Quine’s. There’s a certain kind of real raging going on within it, yet it’s all very directed towards the song.

  “There’s one other aspect of vocal influence on Lou that I remember him bringing up, which was his real and intense love of doo-wop. He pointed out one or two songs on The Blue Mask that were very influenced by fifties doo-wop records. You would never hear it just listening to the records because it’s set in the middle of this raging guitar noise. But when he pointed it out to me, like on ‘Heavenly Arms’ … That’s been a really important source for him all the way through.”

  “I suspect, and Lou admitted as much, he has a certain inferiority complex about his guitar playing. Because it is, from one point of view, very basic. But from another point of view it’s very cool because of the fact that he plays so hard and so intensely and sort of transcends his instrumental limitations: conceptually he’s got the ability to go over the top and then beyond that.

  “The thing about The Blue Mask that’s so impressive in that respect is that he really escaped his own clichés. He was in danger before The Blue Mask of becoming a total parody of himself, and he was very well aware of it. He was playing the rock-and-roll animal as a role and then the role swallowed him up, I think there was a definite sense of liberation in The Blue Mask—of having escaped from that. It was a very impressive thing to do—especially at that stage in such a long career.”

  The American critic Ellen Willis wrote in an RCA press release, “For those of us who are always confronting our own history through rock and roll, this album is more than the summation of one artist’s career; it is the spiritual record of a decade in the life.”

  ***

  Between the release of The Blue Mask in February 1982 and the commencement of work on Legendary Hearts, in the summer, the relationship between Quine and Reed was put to the test. On one occasion, said Quine, “when we were doing Legendary Hearts, he was doing the vocals for ‘Pow Pow’ in the vocal booth. He wasn’t sure what approach to take so he started going through his catalog of voices. He said, ‘I think I’ll do my Transformer voice on this one.’ It was amazing. He did his voice from Transformer, and then he said, ‘Nah, I think I’ll do my—voice,’ and he did three or four. He certainly has a handle on it, but it’s a conflict.”

  The first cracks appeared when Lou noted that in the reviews Quine was receiving as much attention as he was. Ever since Lou had fired Cale from the VU, it had been clear that he could not stand sharing credit. Quine, not restricted by the desire to be a star, singularly focused on the music, was not at first aware of the problem.

  By the early summer of 1982, Lou began working up material for the next album. However, with his confidence soaring, Lou depended less on his collaborators and often got angry when they didn’t perform as he wished. “I think of the word uptight,” said Quine. “The working title for Legendary Hearts was The Argument.

  “There started to be a slight strain in our friendship. He’s a strong and intimidating personality, but this didn’t keep me from being outspoken at various times. I have a couple of theories about Legendary Hearts. It’s more of a subdued record.”

  Before the album was completed, Lou resorted to an old tried-and-true trick. Going back into the studio without informing anyone on the record, he remixed the entire album so that his voice and his playing stood out. Some of Quine’s best playing was either mixed down so as to be barely distinguishable or cut altogether. On receiving his copy of the album, Quine smashed the cassette to smithereens with a hammer. “I got very upset when I heard the mix of that album,” he admitted. “I ended up working with him for two more years, but things were never the same after that. After I got Legendary Hearts I didn’t return any of his calls for weeks. I went out to Ohio to visit my parents. When they drove up the driveway, they saw me with a hammer smashing this cassette into a million pieces.

  “Lou calls my house in Ohio, and my mother picks up the phone. He says, ‘Hello, is Quine there?’ And she says, ‘Which Quine would you like to speak to?’ He told her which one. ‘It’s Lou!’ So I took that call, and we just took it from there. I never talked about it. I’m sure he understood.”

  “I was always dissatisfied with the mix on Legendary Hearts,” said Robert Palmer. “Both on the album and live it seemed like Quine was not quite loud enough. And I think the songs are stronger on The Blue Mask. It’s more focused and it’s got a sharper sense of cutting. Having made that breakthrough with Quine on The Blue Mask, it seems like Lou then started being a little self-conscious. When he gets self-conscious, he starts exercising control. It seemed like there was more and more of him exercising control and less of the music itself controlling it, which you got the impression happened on The Blue Mask.”

  ***

  Nineteen eighty-three brought new albums from the Police, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and a $28-million contract to the Rolling Stones. In February, Lou returned to the road. The tour started at the Bottom Line in New York. There were no drugs or alcohol allowed in the dressing rooms. One night’s show was filmed for video release as A Night with Lou Reed. (Another Quine-era video, entitled Coney Island Baby, recorded at the Capitol Theater in New Jersey, was issued in 1987.)

  The shows sold out and got an overwhelming positive response from critics and audience alike. The New York Times review gushed: “The new Lou Reed quartet is one of the most distinctive and powerful bands in all of rock.” Once again, Lou was upset by reviews that singled out Quine for the same amount of praise as Lou got. In collaborating, Lou was good at sharing the work, but never the praise.

  “The music was just ferocious,” Palmer recalled. “And you’d look at Quine standing there with a bemused expression on his face ripping the stuff out of the guitar and Lou too. There was definitely a sense of Quine pushing Lou as a guitar player, and they were really digging that, I felt. I didn’t really feel anything competitive between them.”

  What was surprising, however, was that much of the material was reworked Velvets and Lou Reed hits. The set included sixties favorites like “Sunday Morning,” “New Age,” and a closing medley of “Sister Ray” and “Rock & Roll.” There were also a few improvements, and perhaps an attempt to disguise his commercial turn. Andy Warhol, in the audience the first night, wrote, “Lou’s lyrics you can understand now, and the music was really loud. He did a lot of familiar songs, but you didn’t recognize them, they sounded different.”

  Legendary Hearts was released in March 1983 to mixed reaction. At best, the press embraced the virtues of a new Lou Reed. “Much of the tension that has made his records and songs compelling, and often unsettling, derived from the apparent dichotomy between his more or less conventional roots and the succession of bizarre roles he has chosen to play,” wrote Robert Palmer in the New York Times.
“But recently the two Lou Reeds, one a literate craftsman, the other a self-styled ‘monster,’ have been coming together.”

  At their worst, the reviews accused Reed of being exactly what he was: over forty, married, contrived, sober—all unacceptable states by rock-and-roll standards. “Lou ended up doing album after album of reissues of the same song,” said John Cale. And Chris Bohn, writing in the NME, saw a more subtle desperation in Reed’s latest attempts: “You can always tell a bad Lou Reed song by the level of urgency he imparts it with.” Melody Maker dismissed Reed’s work altogether for being “so out of touch and unreal that it’s shocking … The most insulting appalling release in years by any major artist.” Legendary Heart’s sales were pallid.

  The cover of Uptight, the book about the Velvet Underground that played a role in bringing them back into prominence again, published in Britain in 1983.

  After the resounding success at the Bottom Line, and coaxed by an RCA record offer, Lou decided to take the show to a few cities in Europe where he could fill stadiums. In September 1983, Reed, Quine, Saunders, and Maher flew to Italy, where the local RCA Records branch was to tape the shows for a double album—Live in Italy—to be released in Europe in early 1984. The album material was taken from dates at the Verona arena and Rome’s Circus Maximus, where the band played in front of thousands of screaming fans.

  Live in Italy wasn’t the finest achievement of the Reed–Quine partnership, though it was still a powerful, if slightly monotonous, double live album. Reed fired up “Kill Your Sons” as if the scars of the past would never disappear, while Quine helped create a storm of guitar noise on a memorable fifteen-minute melody of “Some Kinda Love” and “Sister Ray.” In effect, Reed was presenting a greatest-hits show—half-Velvets, half-solo—performed with enough grace to give the concerts a craftsmanlike air.