Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  “By the eerie closing title track, Reed has reached some kind of reconciliation,” wrote Simon Reynolds in the London Observer. “There’s even a suggestion, in the line ‘there’s a door up ahead, not a wall,’ that he’s come to believe in the hereafter.”

  “You can call it a spiritual awakening,” Reed admitted. “The song resolves the whole album. You don’t want to come to the end of that experience still feeling splintered. You have to reconcile yourself to it. It’s inspiring to see real people facing death.

  “There’s a process going on in the record—it has a beginning, middle, and end. There’s a song—that’s repeated, but the song is transformed when it’s repeated. At the beginning of the record, the song is defining the situation and the illness from the outside—you loved the life that others throw away nightly. Towards the end of the record, the song reappears, but this time it’s upbeat, not melancholy, and it’s approached proudly. The album is about how that transformation takes place.”

  “You notice it’s not Magic and Death, it’s Magic and Loss,” Lou told critic Jim Derogatis. “I can’t emphasize enough, it’s about loss. Warhol said that it’s too bad in school they don’t have a course about love, like practical stuff. Or maybe one on loss, like what do you do with yourself, who do you ask, where do you turn.

  “For instance, with the Warhol thing, Songs for Drella, I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, we could call this a new category: biorock.’ And here’s a chance for black rappers to do their constituents a great service. They could make just like what I did trying to introduce you to Malcolm X or Langston Hughes or James Baldwin. Has it happened? No. Should it happen? I think yeah. Don’t you? Think of what an educational tool that would be for inner-city kids. They have computers and they have CDs. Then you could put graphics on the CDs and illustrate it with music and everything. I can’t imagine this isn’t going to happen. It’s so obvious. What a quick way to get kids to learn.

  “Of course you need someone to write it. Suppose Hammer did a thing about James Baldwin. Isn’t that possible? Certainly schools might order them by the batch. What an educational tool. And if it got on the radio, why not? I think Hammer should think about it. Michael Jackson should think about it. All they have to do is look at Songs for Drella, my Warhol album, this is how it’s done. It’s easy. It’s the writing that’s hard. You’re talking about sustained thought, which in America right now is not easy.”

  In 1992, Reed was informed that the French government had decided to make him a knight of the order of arts and letters. On February 18, he flew to Paris for the investiture ceremony, conducted by the French minister of culture, Jack Lang. “Some have seen you as a star of malaise, perhaps even of evil,” Lang told the rocker. “I prefer to see in you a great poet of our anguish and, perhaps, of our hopes.”

  “I’m deeply touched and moved,” Reed responded. “In a world of many negative capabilities, it is wonderful to live long enough to experience something so directly opposite and pristine, something so unilateral, which looked at from my age remains thrilling and challenging. I’ll tell you what it really is. I think the most important thing in life is art. It’s art that I turn to for sustenance. It’s the art that elevates things to the finest level where you can go for examples of greatness, and that’s what I want to try and impart.”

  Before him lay a world tour on which he would share the emotional transformation of Magic and Loss. “Death is one of the great themes,” he began to tell interviewers. “There’s a lot of what you might call violent or vicious songs in my work, but I feel compassion for the characters in them. Because I know what it’s like to be outside. I know what it’s like to have an unhappy childhood. And I delineate these people because either I identify with them or I think they deserve their moment in the sun.”

  Still, for all its promise of transformation and redemption, Magic and Loss was a doleful album that dredged up feelings a lot of people would rather forget. It was the kind of album that people owned but rarely played. And the album’s promotional concert tour in the spring and summer of 1992, though impressive in its dignity and careful detail, left Lou’s fans and critics feeling distinctly uncomfortable. According to Lou’s dictates, audiences were instructed to listen in stony silence. No one was to smoke, eat, drink, take photographs, talk, or react in any way that would break Lou’s concentration. If the ticket holders obeyed, Lou rewarded them with an uptight, controlled act, more like a recital than a rock-and-roll performance. It lacked both passion and spontaneity, except in his penultimate performance of “The Dream” from Songs for Drella.

  Even Reed’s hard-core European fans had a hard time adjusting to this new rock-and-roll regimen. “At the Hammersmith Odeon in London, Lou wanted respect,” wrote Adam Sweeting. “It was announced that petulant Dame Louis would leave the stage if people shouted requests at him. Amusingly, Reed would sing, ‘Does anyone need another self-righteous rock and roll song?’ during ‘Strawman,’ in the show’s second half, but sadly it wasn’t self-mockery. By the end of the concert the crowd’s enthusiasm had thawed Reed, who returned for some nostalgic encores—‘Sweet Jane,’ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll,’ ‘Satellite of Love,’ even ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ It would be a pity if the man who wrote those ended up drowned in his own pomposity.”

  “The whole evening felt more like watching a play or being at a poetry reading,” commented another reviewer. “By the time his Louness strides on the stage the audience is practically cowed into submission.”

  “I’m trying to move the audience in a certain direction; I do want to take them with me,” Reed explained. “But I also must do for myself. It’s not a matter of choice, it’s just the way it has to be. And I’m willing to lose part of the audience if that’s what it takes. Although I certainly hope they come along on this little trek. Because this is where my ambitions lie.”

  American reviewers were blunt. “I love Lou Reed. I hate Lou Reed. I want to invite him to dinner to meet my family and then kick him out the door,” wrote Dan Aquilante in the New York Post that May. “At Radio City Music Hall Tuesday night, the man barely kept me awake. Then he made me sit up and listen. It was one of the best and worst concerts I’ve seen.”

  To the members of the new generation of Lou Reed fans who complained that an album about death and loss was bound to be depressing, Reed argued, “Look, this piece isn’t called Loss, it’s called Magic and Loss. I think the record is a perfect example of transforming a difficult situation into something more positive. People who like to listen to music where the lyric and music engage them intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually will get something from the music.” However, during his live shows he did seem more interested in challenging than entertaining his audience.

  “The problem is, you feel more like a voyeur than a spectator, and we’re never really involved with what’s going on,” wrote Neil Gowans. “Magic and Loss may well work beautifully in the comfort of your own home, but in a live setting it just doesn’t cut it. Uncle Lou just seems altogether too impressed with himself, and apart from the odd flash of humor, such as ‘Harry’s Circumcision,’ the whole thing is just too deadly serious for my taste.”

  Andrew Mueller, reviewing the concert video, had a similar reaction. “Magic and Loss is indeed a fine album, a brutally detailed examination of death and grief, but there are limits, and they fall well before this grim muso workout.”

  During the tour Lou picked up his relationship with U2 and their singer Bono. In July he joined them onstage at Giants Stadium in New York, performing an oddly touching version of “Satellite of Love” in which he came across as dignified but fragile. In Reed’s face you could see the horrifying price he had had to pay for his success, existing, as the German film director Rainer Fassbinder had pointed out about Warhol, “as a shell. Destroyed by his own work.”

  Two images of Lou in October and November 1992 perfectly summed up his conundrum vis-à-vis the public. In October, Lou played at Bob Dylan’s thirtieth anniversary
concert at Madison Square Garden. Publicly, he was now a great Dylan fan. Privately, he muttered that he didn’t understand why Bob always got these kinds of honors and he didn’t.

  Lou chose to perform “Foot of Pride” from The Bootleg Series box set. “I chose ‘Foot of Pride’ because I just got back from an eight-month tour,” he said. “Once a day I would listen to it and just fall down laughing. I always go out and get the latest Dylan album. Bob Dylan can turn a phrase man. Like the album Down in the Groove, his choice of songs. “Going Ninety Miles an Hour Down a Dead End Street”—I’d give anything if I could have written that. Or that other one—‘Rank Strangers to Me.’ The key word there is ‘rank.’”

  The concert consisted of some thirty superstars singing Dylan songs. The challenge was to make the song yours. Lou was arguably the only one who succeeded.

  “Looooo,” the audience bayed at Reed, who looked onstage more than ever as if he should be staring down at them from the side of Mount Rushmore. He broke into an astonishing version of “Foot of Pride.” Reed ended with a burst of feedback and then stood onstage for a moment grinning as if he knew he had just played an original version of the song. No one dared rush him off. “It proved at a stroke that the old sod’s still got rock-and-roll balls,” confirmed one observer.

  “That was as much fun as I could ever have,” Lou, who spent the day blissfully bonding with his fellow performers, enthused backstage. “As much fun as anyone could legally have.”

  Backstage, the atmosphere was friendly and surprisingly low-key and amusing, even with a procession of notables that included Martin Scorsese, John McEnroe, Tatum O’Neal, Penny Marshall, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, Shirley MacLaine, Lenny Kravitz, Sean Lennon Ono, Jakob Dylan, Carly Simon, Sinead O’Connor, and Neil Young. The entrepreneur Donald Trump forced his way into a conversation between Tom Petty and Lou Reed; he left them bemused by his hearty endorsement of their “jamming.”

  However, the event was somewhat marred for Lou by two incidents. The audience booed Sinead O’Connor when instead of performing her allotted Dylan song, she recited a passionate statement about war by Bob Marley. Lou thought the crowd’s behavior was absolutely reprehensible. “You’d think that if any audience would be responsive to protest music, it would be Bob Dylan’s. She’s a real artist, and now they say Madonna’s attacking her, which is totally ridiculous.” An interviewer from the Howard Stern radio program, Stuttering John, who made a point of asking celebrities embarrassing questions, approached Lou backstage.

  STUTTERING JOHN: Can I ask you a question for ninety-two point three KRock?

  REED: Yeah.

  STUTTERING JOHN: Do you still masturbate?

  Lou turned away, then turned back and grabbed Stuttering John by the throat. Shocked, John did not resist. Lou held John’s throat tight for several seconds, then let go. Meanwhile, an MTV girl dashed up, crying at the hapless radio geek, “You insulted him!”

  “He looks at me,” John recounted the story the following day on Stern’s show, “looks the other way. Looks at me and grabs my neck. He woulda punched me. He was choking me!”

  Stern snapped, “He’s such a jerk. This is the guy who’s gone downhill since ‘Heroin.’ He was horrible, right? He’s been horrible for years.”

  For the most part, however, Lou was granted the attention due his work and accepted the responsibility that came with it. In November he accepted an invitation to be a keynote speaker at the CMJ Music Convention in Manhattan opposite Jesse Jackson, whom Lou had attacked on the New York album. Black and Jewish tempers in New York City had recently become frayed by the accidental killing of a black child by a Hasidic Jew and violent reprisals in which a Jewish man had been killed by a black mob. A hushed audience hung on Lou’s every word. He rapidly veered from defending Sinead O’Connor’s recent attack on the pope to a protest of the not-guilty verdict in the Crown Heights murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, reserving his venom for black leaders who refused to condemn the anti-Semitism. “I wish my tax dollars didn’t go to support anti-Semitic rantings,” he thundered. “Where is the Rainbow Coalition?”

  A Village Voice writer gave him Rockbeat’s “Light’s On but Nobody’s Home” award, explaining, “Reed departed from the topic of censorship to denounce Leonard Jeffries and fault black leaders for not standing up to ‘hatred.’ Hewing to passion not reason, he invoked his elderly cousin Shirley (‘Much to my disbelief, she contributes monthly to the NAACP’) and cited the New York Post’s Mike McAlary’s comparison of the Crown Heights verdict to the Rodney King trial. Reed then issued a challenge to Jesse Jackson: ‘Before Shirley writes another check, and I’m sure she will, I’d like to know how very much elation black leadership feels for this occasion … of murder by mob, murder by trial, murder by jury … Or is it really time to light the torch that sets the flames that brings Brooklyn sizzling to the ground? Because as we’ve all heard, the Jew is smart—he won’t burn down his own house.’”

  On March 2, 1992, Lou Reed had celebrated his fiftieth birthday. As each decade passed, he honed and focused his vision. In the sixties a defiant Lou was ready to try for the kingdom. In the seventies he went to hell and came back. In the eighties he studied his reactions to society’s madness. Throughout all three decades he worked on his writing skills. In the nineties he established a comfortable but engaged identity. He had achieved his original ambition to be the Kurt Weill of rock and roll and produced a canon of work that few rock musicians could rival. If rock had a Mount Rushmore, surely Lou Reed’s face would glare down from its craggy heights next to the heads of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Paul Simon.

  In 1992 Reed’s record-label bio read: “Just as there is only one Marlon Brando, one William Burroughs, one Miles Davis, and one Tennessee Williams, there is only one Lou Reed.”

  Much as Lou had transformed himself professionally, he remained stuck in the same groove personally. Just like everyone else who had taken on the onerous task of being his manager, Sylvia, despite all her hard work and great success, fell afoul of Lou’s temper, increasingly drawing his resentment and wrath. Sylvia, in turn, harbored her own resentment, which, as she exercised the power of her position, she was increasingly willing to show. In the midst of all the rock and roll, Lou and Sylvia started reeling from the blows their psyches had been delivering to each other. The competition between them reached an impasse over the question of having children. As Sylvia approached thirty, she told Lou the time had come for them to have children, characterizing it as a great adventure. Lou, however, saw the question of children through realistic eyes. Though admitting that it might be fun to have a small version of himself to kick around, he rejected the proposition. Sylvia was not pleased, and consequently Lou, perhaps fearing an accidental pregnancy, stopped sleeping with her.

  Stated one friend, “There’s no way Lou would ever have children, he’s the archetypal classic constant child. At least he can admit that it would be a big disaster if he had children. So at least it’s better that he’s aware of it.

  “During 1992, Sylvia was very, very insecure, and Lou is the person who hones in on every insecurity, attempting to undermine you in every possible way. It’s so sick. She’s insecure and overcompensating for it in a lot of ways, so it’s strenuous to be around her sometimes because she’ll be flaunting her money around. They’re really getting in the bucks now.

  “Sylvia had gained a whole bunch of weight during the marriage. Then she lost a lot of it on the summer of 1992 European tour as a result of nervous exhaustion. She was really overworked and overstressed because of everything that was going on with Lou. In one way she was just coming to the realization that it was all going to be over, because the likelihood of their having an amicable break was slim. It’s like John and Yoko. Yoko wanted to get divorced from John at the end, but then realized that John couldn’t let her manage his business if she wasn’t married to him.”

  During their final years on the Upper West Side they had separate bedrooms. Sylvia professed to be stunned
by the development, telling friends that Lou used to like her and she couldn’t understand why he did not seem attracted to her anymore. They started to live separate lives, going out with friends rather than each other. Despite the deep fracture, Sylvia continued to play, if anything, a stronger role in Lou’s business affairs.

  Worse than the lack of sexual intimacy was Lou’s growing tendency to use Sylvia as a psychic punching bag. A comparison of photographs of her in 1978, the year they met, and 1992, the year Lou reached his great climax, is starkly revealing. The sultry, sexy girl he had picked up at his S&M society had turned into a rumpled, overweight hausfrau who looked as if she had spent years being beaten mentally, spiritually, to a pulp.

  Now that Lou had Sylvia more trapped than he had ever had a woman before, he could torture her all the more for it. After ten years of being Mrs. Reed, with all the glamour, power, and wealth that went with the title, she had nowhere to turn. Not allowed to make any friends during their marriage, she had also alienated most of the people she dealt with in business matters by becoming rude and aggressive. It was a tendency that would grow worse over the coming years.

  According to one close friend of the blighted couple, Sylvia “obviously still does feel this great loyalty to Lou, she obviously still does find him attractive. She definitely thinks he’s Mr. Big Musical Genius. Almost all great artists are complete jerks as people when it comes to how they treat other people. Their primary concern is their work. They’re married to their work; anybody else emotionally involved with them has to play the role of, at best, a cherished assistant.”

  Lou, meanwhile, continued to manifest the arrested emotional development that is often the bane of rock stars. Though he could be a most charming person at social functions so long as he was the center of attention, he became a petulant eight-year-old when the spotlight faded, often insisting on leaving precipitately when the conversation turned away from him.