Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  With his cleaned-up image so celebrated—and remunerated—Lou underwent a period of denial about his past. Many friends reported that, as far as Lou was concerned, he had never been a drug addict or a homosexual. He was straight, he said, and always had been. He didn’t take drugs or drink and never had. And anybody who brought up the subject in his presence was thrown out of the room. Since she couldn’t bring herself to leave Lou, Sylvia had no choice but to go along with his make-believe. In Lou’s world one lived by Lou’s rules or perished. Sylvia never seemed to accept, for example, that Lou had ever been gay, referring to Rachel, if at all, as simply another girlfriend. During this period of denial their friends found it increasingly difficult to be around either of them. As the decade drew to an end, Lou cut off his long-term friendships with the poet Jim Carroll and the painter Ronnie Cutrone, ostensibly because the two men had left their wives. Lou chose instead to surround himself with yes-men like Sylvia’s brother-in-law, Mike Rathke, who massaged his ego with their attentiveness and praise.

  Ironically, the impending collapse of Lou’s marriage did not do him any harm on the professional front. In fact, the worse things got for the Reeds, the more Lou appeared to bask in the across-the-board success he had always craved.

  By the time Lou completed work on Magic and Loss, he and Sylvia had begun to talk about getting a divorce and consulted their respective lawyers.

  Sylvia went through a particularly difficult period as she faced the facts. She knew she was going to be comfortable financially—Lou’s financial situation had changed dramatically since they had joined forces and even he openly credited Sylvia for this—but the realization that she was going to lose the glamour and drama of being Mrs. Lou Reed weighed heavily upon her. Meanwhile, her lawyer advised her not to move out of their Upper West Side apartment because that would put her in the weakened position of desertion. She told friends that she was waiting for Lou to move out, but the consensus of opinion was that Lou was not going to move out, that he had her exactly where he wanted her and could torture her to his heart’s content.

  Lou, meanwhile, was totally denying his past. “Couldn’t he just be out there like a John Lennon type saying, ‘Yeah, I did all that wacky stuff, but now I don’t do that stuff?’” remonstrated one witness to the tangled web of Lou and Sylvia’s affairs. “No. He’s just been acting like it never happened, and if anybody should bring that up, they’re bodily thrown out of there. ‘That didn’t happen. I’m straight, I’ve always been straight.’” Friends found it increasingly difficult to contend with Sylvia’s blanket acceptance of Lou’s denial, which she appeared to have bought lock, stock, and barrel. “They could never say to her, ‘But what about Rachel?’ She spoke about Rachel as if she was an ex-girlfriend.” “I’ve never heard her accept the fact that Lou was gay,” recalled another observer. “The only thing she comes out with is, ‘We don’t have sex anymore,’ which, after being married for twelve years, is to me no shocking revelation.”

  At the beginning of 1993, Lou moved back downtown—to the same block of Christopher Street he had lived on between 1978 and 1983. Shortly thereafter, Sylvia rented an apartment on nearby 10th Street.

  Sylvia had been turned into a mother figure whom Lou could order around. Indeed, it now fell to her to take primary care of her dog, Champion Mr. Sox. But anytime Lou felt the need for the mutt’s company, usually somewhere around three or four in the morning, all he had to do was pick up the phone and Sylvia would come scurrying over with the hapless hound in tow.

  “He’s got an image to keep up,” said a friend. “Beyond the fact that he’s thinking, ‘God, I’m alone, I’ve got to find somebody else.’ I’m sure in the middle of the night, that’s the reason he calls Sylvia, because that’s when it hits him—‘Oh my God, I’m by myself.’ That picture of him on the cover of Vox [in May 1993] was so awful. He looks like a ghoul. You heard this thing about his liver. I’m surprised he’s still alive.”

  Whether out of fear of loneliness or of losing a lot of money, Lou suddenly pulled an about-face with Sylvia, deciding he didn’t want to proceed with the divorce. There was no plan to resume living or even spending time together. Rumors that Lou was having a relationship with a man persisted alongside other gossip that he was going out with the androgynous artist Laurie Anderson. Caught once again in a delicate transition between image and album, Lou, aged fifty, could not proceed unprotected. As a tough and dedicated manager, an intelligent sounding board, a submissive wife, and somebody to bounce anything off, Sylvia had remained remarkably resilient. Even the self-destructive side of Reed must have realized he would, at this stage of the game, be insane to cut himself loose from her.

  In a major summation of Neil Young’s career, Neil Young and the Haphazard Highway That Leads to Unconditional Love, Nick Kent wrote that at the dawning of the last decade of the twentieth century “it became increasingly clear that Dylan, Reed, and Young were now well and truly the three leading lights out of their aged but unbroken generation of mythic rockers.”

  Still, though isolated and in control, Lou had himself to contend with—and in his own judgment he shit on himself because his self wasn’t good enough. That constant torture outweighed any criticism that could have been inflicted on his work. In Magic and Loss, he had summed up his existential situation. He was stuck with himself and a rage that could hurt him. It was the same feeling he had had at Syracuse when he was reading Kierkegaard. What stretched before him but fear and nothing?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In Which Lou Reed Cannot Put On the Velvet Underwear

  1990–96

  Just say that John Cale was the easygoing one and Lou Reed was the prick.

  Lou Reed

  Throughout Lou’s solo career, he had been haunted by the Velvet Underground and had repeatedly toyed with the idea of re-forming the band. But his attitude toward John Cale made that impossible. During the first half of the eighties, as Lou’s star rose and John’s fell, their relationship languished. As Mary Harron pointed out, “John Cale, who was as brilliant as Lou Reed, has been more consistent [than Lou), but throughout his solo career he has not simply avoided success, but tried to throttle it with both hands.” After Lou married Sylvia in 1980, the door that slammed shut on Lou’s past closed Cale out.

  However, in 1978 a typical young VU enthusiast, Phillip Milstein, started publishing What Goes On: The Velvet Underground Appreciation Society Magazine, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the second half of the 1970s so many VU-influenced bands were on the scene that Sterling Morrison commented, “I didn’t really think about my years with the Velvets much until recently, when the climate seemed the same again. With new wave, the music went back to the people who were kind of screwing around on records, who knew they couldn’t possibly achieve mass appeal, and didn’t care. I was looking at all these little punk bands and thinking, ‘Well, there goes us again.’” Even Moe Tucker felt the effect of this proliferation: “Stuck out here [Tucson, Arizona] in the middle of nowhere, the only friends we have are my husband’s from work. But quite a few of them have heard of the Velvets, and they’re impressed.” By 1983, Britain’s leading music publisher, Omnibus Press, had published the illustrated history of the group, Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story, by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, which went on to gain an impressive readership, being published in, apart from the U.K., Japan, Germany, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and the U.S. Meanwhile, on college campuses a new generation of rock-and-roll fans discovered the Velvets albums. In The 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide, another longtime fan, Billy Altman, wrote, “The Velvets’ influence hovers over all current music seeking to do more than entertain. Reed’s songwriting rang with an honesty and compassion that few songwriters ever reach.” By 1985, there were so many bands proud to be indebted to the VU, and so many Lou Reed clones, a radio station in Los Angeles ran a popular program called the Battle of the Lou Reeds, and a radio station in Austin, Texas, had a “Sweet Jane” contest. Many new, postpunk, and
experimental bands, previously relegated to college and alternative charts, began to break into the mainstream.

  By 1985, British bands ranging from the Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and Simple Minds to a host of other chart-toppers paid tribute to Reed and the Velvets. Morrissey, then lead singer of the Smiths, for example, was called a ‘reasonable postliberation version of the early Lou Reed.” The Scotsman Lloyd Cole owed a large debt to Lou Reed, as his singing voice evoked Reed and his material was redolent of what the Los Angeles Times called the “sparse, beat-ear expressionism of the Velvet Underground.” Jim Kerr, Simple Minds’ lead singer, claimed Reed as one of his greatest influences.

  Similarly, quite a few American bands had, by the mid-eighties, brought the Velvets’ work a degree of fame. Ric Ocasek of the Cars was often compared to Reed in voice and delivery, and the singer also claimed many of the same beat-generation roots as Reed. Georgia’s R.E.M. with Michael Stipe also drew Velvet comparisons and often performed such Velvets material as “Femme Fatale” and “Pale Blue Eyes.” The Violent Femmes’ Lou Reed-derived vocal style put them on top of the college charts in 1986. More cutting-edge eighties rockers were bands like Scotland’s Jesus and Mary Chain, who developed the Velvets’ love of feedback and drone. Contemporary groups like Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, the Cowboy Junkies, and Sonic Youth would bring the Velvet influence into the 1990s. This new attention to Reed’s work helped sell his back catalog, and placed him in the company of the greatest rock legends. In an article about artists as visionaries, Robert Palmer wrote in the New York Times, “the best artists—such as John Lennon of the Beatles, Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan—broke down the barriers, creatively reimagined present-day conditions, and future possibilities, and redefined themselves with almost every record release.”

  Meanwhile, material the Velvet Underground had recorded while under contract to M.G.M. was discovered in Polydor’s vaults and was remixed and released with the title VU by the company’s new owner, Polygram Records, in February 1985. “The Velvet Underground were so far ahead of their time,” wrote Lynden Barber in Melody Maker, “that hearing them now it seems scarcely believable that they’re not a contemporary group.” “These guys were a great rock-and-roll band,” commented Stereo Review in 1985, “and it’s good to hear from them again, even fifteen years after the fact.” Cale, Morrison, Nico, and Tucker also agreed to be filmed for the English-television South Bank Show, which was doing a special on the band’s history (aired in 1986), but Reed refused to be interviewed. A brief interview with Lou in front of a graffiti-covered building on the street in New York, wearing leather and sunglasses, was purchased from another source. In September 1986, a second compilation of Velvets tracks, Another View, was released. “Yet another surprisingly upbeat, energetic brace of previously unreleased material from this seminal New York band, circa 1969,” wrote a critic in Playboy. “And believe it or not, Lou Reed actually sounds as if he’s enjoying himself here.”

  VU and Another View created a flurry of rumors of a reunion. Lou flatly refused to take part, snapping, “It’ll never happen.” However, Lou’s business entanglements with his former partners multiplied as sales of the VU catalog increased internationally. While the publishing royalties poured into Lou’s coffers, the other band members threatened a lawsuit.

  Cale’s New York-based British lawyer, Christopher Whent, who brought to his profession a sharp legal mind wedded to a love of music, made it his goal to straighten out the VU’s tangled legal affairs. He took on representing Maureen and Sterling as well as John. Lou admitted that the distribution of VU royalties had been unfairly biased in his favor, and was willing to share some of what was legally his with the others. This gesture opened channels of communication with Morrison that had been closed for years. “The band went into the black with the record company in about ’83,” said Whent. By 1986, he delivered renegotiated contracts to his clients, and they started to receive royalty payments, which considerably improved the lots of Morrison and Tucker. “It’s not a bad chunk of change. Not enough to live on. But a comfortable settlement.”

  Still, Lou displayed an ambivalent attitude to the VU, cutting off every interviewer who asked, “Will there be a reunion?” with answers like “I don’t believe in high school reunions.” John thought Lou would never come around: “I don’t really know what that sixties period means to Lou. He’s spent so much time saying it was a time of sophomoric activity.”

  ***

  In the aftermath of Andy Warhol’s death, the artist’s stock had risen tremendously. Between 1989 and 1990, a retrospective of his work traveled to museums around the world. In June 1990, the original members of the Velvet Underground, along with Factory manager and photographer Billy Name, the Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, and the prominent art historian David Bourdon, were invited by the Cartier Foundation to Jouy-en-Josas, a small French town twenty miles southwest of Paris, for the inauguration of the Andy Warhol Exposition, at which Lou and John were to perform Songs for Drella.

  When he arrived at the festival site, Lou was so overwhelmed by what he had seen, though he insisted to the last minute that a reunion was impossible, he realized that it would be churlish not to respond in kind to the efforts of the organizers. And so it was that Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker occupied the same stage for the first time since the late summer of 1968.

  The band’s first re-formation was, Nick Kent wrote, totally unexpected. “Everyone ate separately on their first day together, while Lou Reed announced flatly at a press conference during the same afternoon, ‘You’ll never get the four of us together on one stage again … ever. The Velvet Underground is history.’ At the same event, however, John Cale showed himself more open to such a possibility. ‘So many ideas were left unfinished in the Velvet Underground. If it’s possible to do it again, I think we should really take the bull by the horns … I think we have a lot left to give.’”

  Sterling Morrison found himself in an awkward position. The French journalist Christian Fevret, who had met him in his Paris hotel the evening before the opening, recounted, “He was tired, anxious, and suddenly became very agitated. He wanted to know what Reed and Cale were playing the next day. ‘What a blow for me! What am I supposed to do? Stand at the back of the stage and watch them play—paralyzed by bitterness and rage?

  “‘And what are people going to think? That I can’t play guitar anymore?’

  “It’s another stab in the back, the most cruel yet, for somebody who thinks that his role in the band has been horribly underestimated by history. On the most important day, he is put to one side and humiliated.”

  Still, he wanted it on record that “he held nothing against Lou Reed,” added Nick Kent, “He just wanted to play with the Velvet Underground once again. He even brought his guitar over. Only Lou Reed didn’t want to play with them.

  “Lou Reed quite rightly has his own slew of bitterness regarding the Velvet Underground; only he more than anyone else was openly nursing them pretty much up to the last minute. Whatever, he was clearly overtaken by something approximating the spirit of glasnost at midday on Friday; for, as some two or three hundred guests were arriving, Reed broke a ten-year silence with Morrison, inviting him, Cale, and Tucker all to have lunch together.”

  Fevret, with an appropriately fine sensibility, set the scene: “11:30. On the balcony of a private house, isolated at the back of the park, three silhouettes were chatting. The vision of Cale, Morrison, and Tucker together was already a bit of an event for those who managed to see it. Three minutes later a pair of dark glasses, curly hair, and a leather jacket came forward timidly. He shook Sterling Morrison’s hand nervously, even a little reluctantly. The four of them sat down at a balcony table and didn’t leave until lunch was over.

  “3:30. Lou and his wife, Sylvia, drove a few hundred meters across to an open-air stage. Cale and Reed were supposed to be playing in ten minutes. ‘I think it would be nice to ask Sterling and
Moe to come up onstage for a while,’ said Lou. There was an astonished silence in the car. Even Sylvia Reed was choking. ‘And what about doing “Pale Blue Eyes”?’ he reckoned, before someone discreetly mentioned that John Cale hadn’t been around when they recorded that one. It would be ‘Heroin’ then.”

  Noted another observer: “In the late afternoon of June 15, 1990, two musicians strolled onto an open-air stage in Jouy-en-Josas. One clutched an electric guitar; the other took up position behind a simple display of electronic keyboards. Lou Reed, clad in his uniform shades, leather jacket, and blue jeans, nodded curtly to his companion; and John Cale, hair shaved severely above his ears, fringe flopping decadently over his eyebrows, began to play their canny evocation of Andy Warhol.” After a few songs from Drella, Reed announced, “We have a little surprise for you. I’d like to introduce Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker.” There was a moment of stunned silence before the Warhol audience knew that they were about to see something that, according to Lou Reed, was never to happen: a reunion of the original Velvet Underground.

  They then proceeded to play a seventeen-minute version of “Heroin” to an audience of some one hundred and fifty handpicked journalists and art people. Since it was in the open air, in the daytime, they had not rehearsed and Sterling had been reduced to borrowing a guitar, it had more impact as history than music. The most important thing that happened was that, like people who had once had great sex and suddenly realized they could again, they were stunned by playing together.

  “That was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had in my few years on Earth!” Lou, who was reportedly moved to tears, exclaimed to Maureen. “That was extraordinary! To have those drums behind me, that viola on one side, and that guitar on the other again, you have no idea how powerful that felt. I moved up into the pocket between you, John, and Sterl and … holy shit!”