Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Indeed, Warhol had been recording entries in his diaries for years. In several of them Lou figured prominently. But, the latest in September 1986 read starkly: “I hate Lou Reed more and more, I really do, because he’s not giving us any video work.”

  Sylvia Reed and Lou outside the church after Andy Warhol’s Memorial Service, 1987. (Bob Gruen)

  By the time Lou went to Warhol’s memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on April 1, 1987, he realized just how much he missed Andy’s vision and humor. Later, at the postservice luncheon, as his recorded voice sang VU songs over the chattering mob, Lou suddenly found himself standing on one side of Billy Name with John Cale standing on the other. Not knowing that they had hardly spoken in years, Billy drew them both into the orbit of his conversation. Lou and John talked, and John immediately felt that the tension between them had eased.

  At the same lunch the painter Julian Schnabel told Cale that he should write a memorial for Warhol. Cale spent several months working on an instrumental piece, but found writing about Warhol difficult. He was such a mercurial, dominant figure it was hard to capture him in conventional ways, and those who appreciated him feared their work would not measure up.

  ***

  Retreating to Blairstown, Reed threw himself into a protracted writing binge. Memories of Warhol and the Factory came flooding back to him. Like a man freed from a long, vague sleep, he eagerly awoke at 5 a.m. to hunch over his word processor day after day. “I suffer from insomnia, I only sleep about three hours a night,” he explained. “So that’s when I write. I get up, no one else is around, it’s relatively quiet. That’s when you can tag in. I’m not getting it from out there, I’m getting it from in here. Everything else doesn’t exist.” A shape began to coalesce in Lou’s mind. The album would be a musical sketch of his New York.

  Writing about the landscape of the city he loved, Lou looked back to the fabulous, gay Halloween parade, and friends who had died of AIDS, finding beauty, humor, and compassion amid despair and decay.

  A year later, in May 1988, when John had finished a first run-through of his memorial for Warhol, he asked Lou to listen to the piece and tell John what he thought. They got together and talked about Andy, filling in gaps in each other’s knowledge. Cale, for example, “was stunned that Lou fired Andy, I thought Andy left.”

  “We were both keen because, after talking at length about Andy, there seemed to be a great need for us to put the record straight,” Reed recalled. “The things I was disturbed about with Drella were these evil books presenting Andy Warhol as just a piece of fluff. I wanted to show the Andy I knew. John Cale and I got together in a little rehearsal place to see how it felt to play and to have some fun. John had already written an instrumental piece for Andy, a mass of sorts, but then the opportunity arose to do the bigger thing.”

  Reed and Cale quickly discovered that the musical chemistry was still there. In ten days they composed fourteen chronologically arranged biographical songs. Lou handled the majority of the lyrics while John focused on the music.

  “John and I just rented out a rehearsal studio for three weeks and locked ourselves in,” Reed said. “I wouldn’t call it working through emotions. My disposition improves immeasurably when I know I can make that guitar do what I want and not just what I hear in my head, and when I’m writing with the discipline and focus to have it come out the best it could, not almost as good as it could. There’s a craft to all this—it’s not just spewing out emotions. It’s very ordered and very specific work.”

  “I was really excited by the amount of power just two people could get without needing drums,” said Cale, “because what we have there is such a strong core idea that the simpler the better. I wanted to see if the power was still there between us, and I found out that it was, very quickly. Working with Lou again is enthralling. We’re still tiptoeing around, but in all the sessions that we’ve worked together, the results have been very exciting.”

  “It was done by osmosis,” Cale explained. “When we first sat down and started playing, there was this amazing energy—it was aggressive. We sat down and talked about all these memories we had, and then Reed shut himself in with a tape recorder running and showed up later with a kind of summation of what had happened. We sat there and bandied them around. It’s difficult for him to collaborate on that level—it’s difficult for him to collaborate period. And he admits it.”

  “I very much like playing with John,” said Reed. “He’s a very exciting musician. It’s fun playing with him. We play very well together.”

  They called the collection Songs for Drella.

  The collaboration was fraught with problems from the onset. Cale and Reed worked in noncomplementary manners. When Lou went into the studio, he worked from a series of lists composed by Sylvia and had everything scheduled to the second. Cale was accustomed to coming into the studio, reading through six newspapers, making a number of international phone calls, then launching himself at the work with ferocity.

  “In order for things like that to happen again between Lou and me, we had to go through that same sort of process; we had to play these things over and over just like we had in the past,” said Cale. “And we did that. But this time we kind of knew what the landscape would look like, and we were prepared for those things that we needed to be aware of—the distractions and stuff.”

  “Things would be a thousand times better without that tension,” Lou said. Drella was “an excruciating son of a bitch to write. I did it on my word processor—what a tool!—and had to do rewrite after rewrite. And all the time I was finding out more about what I really felt about Andy and trying to put that into the right words.”

  Just as Lou and John were in the middle of the album, they received the news that Nico had died as unexpectedly as Andy on July 18, 1988, after a bicycle accident on the Spanish island of Ibiza. She was forty-nine.

  ***

  Just as he finished writing the lyrics to Songs for Drella, Lou went into the studio to record his next solo album, New York.

  Lou recorded New York in the second half of 1988, working with a new guitar partner, Mike Rathke, who was married to Sylvia’s sister. Rob Wasserman was on bass; Fred Maher and Moe Tucker alternated in the drummer’s seat. Lou worked hard at getting the words, the music, and the sound right, taking longer with this record than anything else he had ever recorded.

  Lou Reed at the time of the release of New York. (Bob Gruen)

  To emphasize another new beginning, Lou chose this moment to leave RCA and sign with Sire Records, an arm of Warner Brothers that had played a major role in the punk-rock explosion ten years earlier, putting out records by, among others, the Ramones and Talking Heads. Sire was run by Seymour Stein, generally considered to have the most sensitive and intelligent ears in the industry, and certainly someone who knew and understood Lou Reed. A younger version of Clive Davis, Stein was more on Lou’s wavelength than any other record-company president he had ever worked with. Their relationship would usher in the most creative and commercially successful period of Lou’s career.

  New York was released in January 1989 and pitched Lou back into the center of the rock world, very near the top, bringing him legions of new fans and returning to him some who hadn’t bought a Lou Reed record for more than a decade. The New York Times suggested that it was finally time to “think about taking him seriously.”

  New York was his best-selling album since Sally Can’t Dance, reaching No. 1 on Rolling Stone magazine’s college chart, and getting into Billboard’s top fifty. The reviews were, for the most part, excellent. One of America’s leading rock critics, Jonathan Cott, wrote, “This record provides the perfect musical medium for Reed’s highly charged depiction of and verbal onslaught against an AIDS-stricken New York in which friends are continually ‘disappearing’—a city of abused children and battered wives; of child police-killers, teenage bigots, and racist preachers; and of thousands of homeless people panhandling, rummaging for food in trash bas
kets, and sleeping in streets, alleys, and doorways. It is a world of hypocrisy, greed, ugliness, selfishness, and degradation—in comparison, Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ is like a weekend outing to the Hamptons.”

  When Cott commented to Lou that the New York album was nihilistic and contained not one love song, Reed pointed out the redemption written into “Dime Store Mystery,” which he saw as a love song, “dedicated to Andy Warhol, whom I really miss and had the privilege to have known.”

  “I spent almost three months writing those words, and I tried to find a way to surround them properly to get the rhythm of the words working in the right way against the beat, and get the nuances in the vocals so that the listeners could hear the words—that was the raison d’être of this record. This is my vision of what a rock-and-roll album can be. Put it this way. I’m writing for an educated or self-educated person who has reached a certain level. I’m not aiming New York at fourteen-year-olds.

  “Supposedly when you get older, you get something from all of it before, or you drop dead and that’s the end of it,” Reed mused. “I think I know about certain things better than other people. And I’ll fight for it. And I don’t think that’s being difficult. I mean, it sounds tacky, but it’s like being true to your vision.

  “In New York, the Lou Reed image doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned. This is me speaking as directly as I can to whoever wants to listen to it.”

  In the New Musical Express, Sean O’Hagan wrote the best review in the British press, describing the album as “one of the hardest, strongest, most cohesive, and perfectly realized rock statements of 1989. ‘New York is like this huge person that’s shaped me as much as genetics,’ Lou Reed tells me in that same deadpan drawl that is his consistent signature. ‘This album is a result of a convergence, if you like, of everything that went before.’ That means all the learning, all the mistakes, all the twisted fuck-ups from a legendary life. Like his friend Keith Richards, Lou Reed is an individual for whom the term survivor is an understatement. Personal survival is measured against impending social and global collapse with AIDS, pollution, and the death of the American dream at the top of the agenda. In this doom-laden context, you keep asking yourself why New York is such a, at times, hilarious record. ‘Good, good, I’m glad you got to that. People who say, “Oh, Lou is just bitching on and depressin’ everybody,” they’re missin’ the point. I mean, it ain’t about moral admonishment. Shit, I walk away fast from all that stuff. It’s funny and urgent.’”

  “People don’t talk enough about Lou’s wit,” said Penn Jillette of the magician duo Penn and Teller. “Like the tension in a horror movie, there’s tremendous proper use of wit.”

  The album was popular for a while. Four months after its release, Rolling Stone put Lou Reed on the cover of their May 4 issue. The New York Times published the lyrics to “Hold On” from New York on the op-ed page on May 10.

  While most of the reviews for New York were positive, a few cutting ones slipped into the press. “Unfortunately, the product (as record companies call their output) at hand displays just how unsubtle and fuzzy the new Lou Reed’s social awareness is,” commented the Nation’s music critic. “There’s ‘Common Ground,’ a muddled anti-anti-Semite attack on Kurt Waldheim, the Pope, and Jesse Jackson. Vet homilies of ‘Xmas in February’; and the jejune pseudomyth called ‘Last Great American Whale.’” Rolling Stone and Daily News video critic Jim Farber said, “The 9 million printed raves try to excuse his indefensibly clunky lyrics with some of the most ornate rationalizations in rock-critic history. Apparently, critics feel the need to take this record as seriously as it takes itself.”

  “Bon Jovi did New Jersey and Lou Reed does New York,” sniped the innovative guitarist Glenn Branca. “Gimme a break! Lou Reed has been dead for at least ten years. This is a simulacrum; this is not a real person!”

  Lou was greatly buoyed by the success of the album, but he played it cool, speaking down to the audience in interviews as if he had been planning this all along. Unfortunately, this spectacular success was hobbled when, near the beginning of the international tour in support of the record, Lou slipped and fell coming offstage after a sound check, breaking his ankle. He was in a cast for six weeks, and the tour was cancelled.

  Despite being stopped in his tracks by the accident, Lou had much to occupy himself with through the remainder of 1989. A major retrospective boxed set of his solo career was in the works, and he turned his attention to it. At the same time, Walt Disney’s publishing arm, Hyperion, approached him about releasing a book of his lyrics and poems, and Lou felt that in conjunction with the boxed set this was finally the right time to put out a book he had been thinking about for thirty years.

  ***

  The same month New York was released, January 1989, Reed and Cale staged two workshop performances of their Warhol suite at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn under the auspices of the church and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Songs for Drella is a brief musical look at the life of Andy Warhol,” ran the program notes for the initial performances, “and is entirely fictitious.” In the small church they created the most enlightened of memorial services for Andy Warhol. They played the fourteen songs in chronological order, gradually building up a prayer-service atmosphere that was perfect for the moment and the setting. Backstage after the show, Billy Name held court once again, finally introducing Lou to his other guru, La Monte Young, whom Reed, incredibly, had never met.

  In the spring, just as John and Lou were putting the finishing touches on Songs for Drella, Warhol’s Diaries were published. Despite the caution he had taken in not talking to Andy, Lou was mentioned some fifteen times in caustically negative entries from the 1980s. Asked if it bothered him to read “I hate Lou more and more,” Reed replied, “Not at all. I know Andy; he’s like a child. He would have said that in the way a child says, ‘I really hate you!’ It’s not meant like real hate.”

  Although both Lou and John thought the diaries were an unfitting epitaph to Warhol, they realized how much they captured the artist’s quirky personality and decided to use them in an added song. What they came up with was an imagined diary entry, “A Dream,” in which Cale employs the same storytelling voice he used in “The Gift.” “It was John’s idea,” said Reed. “He had said, ‘Why don’t we do a short story like “The Gift”?’ But then he went away to Europe, saying, ‘Hey, Lou, go write a short story.’ But I thought, no, not a short story, let’s make it a dream. That way we can have Andy do anything we want. Let me tell you, man, it was really hard to do. But once I got into Andy’s tone of voice, I was able to write for a long time that way. I got to the point where I was able to, you know, just zip-zip-zip away—just because I really liked that tone so much. It’s certainly not my tone of voice at all. I really don’t talk that way. I had to make myself get into that way of talking.”

  “A Dream” was essentially a cut-up of quotes from the Warhol diaries.

  “When John was doing the reading, I kept telling him that when we get to that line, ‘I hate Lou,’ you gotta say it like a kid,” said Reed. “It’s not like, ‘I fucking hate Lou Reed, I really hate that son of a bitch.’ It’s more like, ‘Oh, I hate Lou; oh, oh, I really do.’ It’s all in the nuance, and that’s why the production both during the performances and on the record was so critical—especially on that cut.”

  In November 1989, Lou and John performed the completed Songs for Drella to a larger audience at BAM.

  The BAM shows got excellent reviews and set people thinking about a VU reunion again. However, Moe thought Lou still wasn’t interested because “he’s worked so hard to get his own career going, and especially with the success of his latest album, I really don’t think he’d want to plunge in and have everybody talking about the Velvets again.” Cale saw it differently. “For the time being I’m really happy with the results; now that we’ve accomplished that and shown that we can do it, we can move ahead to something more challenging. Collaboratively, I think Lou and I could
come up with something very imaginative that would be more in the form of a dramatic situation. We’re really efficient, and I think we could do anything. I don’t think there’s a limit.”

  Songs for Drella were released in April 1990. Reed and Cale shared songwriting credits and split the money fifty-fifty.

  Cale realized the deep significance of the work for Lou. “I think Drella was a way of healing that for Lou, and he had to do it right or be seen to be guilty of opportunism. But recording Drella with Lou was very difficult. There was a lot of banging heads. It was exhilarating, and working with Lou is never dull, but I wouldn’t want to go through it again. I’m much more interested in the spontaneity of playing live.

  “Lou felt that I didn’t appreciate how much effort he had put into the words. He never actually said this to me … personally. The comment was made to a lot of other people. That was a shocker; it’s very difficult to fight with, or argue. If someone thinks that you don’t really appreciate what they’re doing, well, then what can you say? It’s just a very sad and disappointing turn of events. I mean—and whether you actually base it on anything substantial or not—it’s just the clincher.”

  In the liner notes to the album, however, Cale wrote, “Songs for Drella is a collaboration, the second Lou and I have completed since 1965, and I must say that although I think he did most of the work, he has allowed me to keep a position of dignity in the process.”

  Although after completing Songs for Drella Lou swore that he would never, ever work with John again, the album would eventually lead to the re-formation of the Velvet Underground.

  Chapter Twenty