Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  The Paris shows at the Olympia Theater were recorded on June 15 to 17. Asked by a member of the audience if he could repeat the name of the single new composition, “Coyote,” Lou replied, “Of course. We’re the Velvet Underground. We can do anything.”

  “I slowly made my way out of the Olympia thinking about Reed,” wrote an American critic, lra Kaplan, in Spin. “Why had he, with a thriving solo career, made this dive into his past? Now fifty-one, he’s used his two most recent records, Songs for Drella and Magic and Loss, to consider mortality. The flip side of the bitterness that Morrison expressed (though he denied the term ‘bitter,’ preferring ‘cold’) is a past yet unreconciled. And while you obviously can’t change the past, by reuniting the band gets a chance to change the ending. The Velvet Underground reunion provides an opportunity—not just for Reed, of course—for closure, for vindication. I hope that when his fists rose at the end of their show, it meant he’s found it.”

  From Paris they traveled to Berlin for two final shows. As soon as the tour was over, the Velvets joined U2 in Italy for four stadium concerts in front of audiences of up to sixty thousand. After these concerts they returned to the U.K. to play a short set at the Glastonbury festival.

  Though press reaction to the tour was soberly positive, criticism came from purists, who objected to the fact that Lou allowed “Venus in Furs” to be used for a Dunlop tire commercial in the U.K. Others viewed the VU’s opening for U2 as a further sellout.

  According to tour insiders, the group got along reasonably well until the U2 dates in Italy, when friendly relations soured. The band members had grown tired of Lou’s screaming at them onstage with a live mike in front of him. “I’ve never seen him be so uptight on stage,” Cale later commented. “And giving the fascist salute during ‘Heroin’ in Italy …” “I’m always nervous,” Lou responded. “I’m nervous about life. I’m calmer onstage, I have my guitar. Offstage, that’s something else.” Morrison too was upset by Lou’s nasty gibes. By the time they left England, he was already wishing he had never agreed to tour in the first place. Lou’s behavior was not his only beef. He was also put off by Lou’s prima donna posturing for the press and record executives. Sterling complained later, for instance, that during the tour nobody from Sire Records ever said a single word to anybody in the band except Lou.

  Making matters worse for Morrison, Cale, and Tucker was the overbearing presence of Lou’s surrogate, Sylvia. One observer opined that Lou and Sylvia had lasted so long together because she was not a nice person, that she mirrored his nastiness and encouraged that side of him, that she recharged his unpleasantness and gave it back to him. In other words, they deserved each other. Or, as one friend put it: “They were fucking each other’s brains.”

  By the time the Velvet Underground returned to the States their camaraderie had dissipated. Once home they scattered—Moe to Georgia, Sterling to his tugboat on the Gulf of Mexico, Lou and John to their separate camps in Manhattan. On the positive side, they had received a massive amount of good publicity, and both Sterling and Moe, who would each end up with something like $75,000–100,000 when the smoke cleared, had been rescued from penurious conditions.

  No sooner had Lou safely retreated from face-to-face contact with the band members than he initiated an all-out fax war. Previously a phoneaholic, Lou had now become a fax maniac, spending hours composing messages and then keening over the machine in anticipation of a snappy reply. It was the perfect mode of communication for the hermetic Reed. He began with a four-page fax to John, explaining in formidable detail that though John was a very good friend of his, Lou never wanted to play on the same stage with him again. He then proceeded to delineate all the things that John had done wrong throughout the brief tour.

  Cale, who had maintained a called-for reserve and dignity throughout the entire episode, replied, “I can understand what you’re saying, but we just got back, we’re too close to it all happening, we’re exhausted, and we shouldn’t be dealing with this now.” There was too much at stake for him to take Lou’s fax seriously. Not only was the band anticipating the release of its upcoming live album and a video of the Paris shows, but Polygram was working on the VU box set. Moreover, MTV had invited them to record an “unplugged” acoustic concert. Most importantly, a fall tour of the U.S. would reap considerable profits for all involved. Warner Brothers, whose Sire label was due to release the live album in October, was urging the band to seize the moment.

  Despite the bright commercial prospects of his continuing involvement with the band, Lou drove a spoke into the wheel of the whole project. Perhaps his rekindled animosity toward the band had to do with intensifying problems on the home front. For one thing, Sylvia had rented her own apartment on East 10th Street. At her house-warming party in August, Lou made it obvious he was pissed off. Accompanied by Mike Rathke, who was in the process of divorcing Sylvia’s sister, Lou turned up a couple of hours late. He entered the flat without a word or glance to anybody and sequestered himself in the kitchen, feeding on the assorted food and glaring ferociously at anybody who dared enter the room. A short while later he departed without saying a word.

  Perhaps the most telling response to Lou’s antisocial behavior came from the ever loyal and loving Moe, who was becoming increasingly alarmed by Lou’s salvos in the fax war. Even though reports were circulating in the media that the band was definitely scheduled to tour in October and November, the fax battle heated up through the end of September. Lou demanded that he be given complete control of producing any records the reunited band released, with particular emphasis on the MTV unplugged album. Sterling was sequestered on his faxless tugboat, leaving John and Moe to take the brunt of the attack.

  It wasn’t long before Lou took the game one step too far. He sent Moe a nasty note, charging her with being ungrateful for all he had done for her. Although Moe was a tough alley cat who did not need to be defended, when Lou sent the fax chastising her for being ungrateful, so far as the others were concerned, that was it. The time had come to unplug the channels of communication as if—fuck you—forever. The scales finally fell from Moe’s eyes, and she decided to stand up for the band. On listening to the live album, mixed adequately by Lou’s man Rathke, and studying the video, she realized where the weakness lay in the group and why Lou was so insistent on controlling the production. Lou’s failing ability to sing and his less than inspirational guitar playing had not been completely covered up in the live record and video. She figured that Lou’s need to produce any VU product came in part from a desire to protect himself from the discovery of his musical shortcomings. Realizing that she would rather get the music right than cover it up, Moe sided with John in issuing a definitive negative to Lou’s demand. As Cale pointed out in one of the many reply faxes he sent to Reed, their communication had from the outset revolved around a series of ultimatums from Reed to the band. They had to draw the line somewhere, otherwise they simply dissolved into Reed’s backing band and a third-rate rock group.

  In the midst of all this, as a sure sign of his schizophrenia, Lou spent a weekend at Cale’s Long Island place as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on and their friendship was unaffected. Later, in the first week in October, Lou attempted a reconciliation, sending John a fax saying how much the group meant to him and that that was a reason why he had been so insistent about producing the MTV unplugged album. John replied, “Lou, I didn’t realize how much it meant to you, let’s cut the crap and start playing.” The next day a fax came back from Sylvia, the thrust of which was: It’s a good thing you’ve seen the sense, and, of course, Lou will have to get the producer’s fee. When Cale simply refused to go along, he received a final cold-blooded fax saying, “Good luck in your future career,” signed Sylvia and Lou.

  While Lou had been manning the fax machine, Sylvia had been working behind the scenes booking and unbooking the tour, designing a cover for the live album, and worrying about her financial settlement with Lou. However, in light of the conflict with
John, Sterling, and Moe, the three people to whom he had been referring back in June as among his few real friends, there were those in the VU camp who seriously worried that Lou was finally going over the edge. He seemed, they mused, to have little sense of how much harm he had done to himself with his record company by blocking the potentially lucrative VU tour. They also wondered how his U.S. fans would respond to the return of the solo Lou, and indeed what he could possibly do to follow up Magic and Loss that could stand up to what he might have done with the Velvets.

  Meanwhile, with the release of the live album, MCMXCIII, in late October, the searchlights of the press were once more turned upon him. “Following a quarter century’s hiatus, the reunited Velvets are less concerned with re-creating what was than with exploring what could have been and what might still be,” wrote a reviewer in Rolling Stone. “With the exception of Neil Young, there isn’t a rocker who understands as well as Reed does that stylistic extremes have more in common than either edge shares with a safer middle ground. Reed’s streetwise eye for detail and ear for everyday poetry find common spirit—and frequent challenge—in Cale’s conservatory-trained experiments with dissonance, decibels, and repetition, while the jittery precision of Maureen Tucker’s garage-band drumming is as crucial to the Velvets as Charlie Watts’s is to the Rolling Stones. After the professorial tone of Reed’s recent tours and the elegiac turn of his nineties albums, the physical rush of this music has him sounding like a man possessed.”

  In public Lou put on a good face, appearing in Manhattan at a party for the live album and video that Sire Records threw at Nell’s on November 3. Looking healthy and rested, he maintained a definitive distance between himself and everybody else except a male companion and bodyguard.

  Reviews for the video were not so favorable. “Four chronologically advanced musicians performing basic, broody adolescent rock songs with about as much passion as a quartet of railway announcers,” wrote Roger Morton in the NME, “makes for a strange spectacle. Sawing away at his violin, the curatelike Cale deports himself with bizarre solemnity. Morrison just stands there and follows the notes. Maureen Tucker whacks out the mono-beat with at least some commitment. And Reed croaks on, seemingly viewing it all with detached amusement. The whole thing has the deadening atmosphere of an angst-pop masterclass.”

  On November 11, Lisa Robinson reported in her New York Post column that the VU would once again disband. “We won’t continue because John Cale and I and other members of the band can’t agree on certain things,” Reed told her. Phoning Lisa from Buenos Aires where he was on a brief tour, Cale countered, “He’s a control freak. I wanted to try and create new music—more songs like ‘Venus in Furs,’ ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties.’ I don’t want to just go in and become some third-rate rock-and-roll band. We didn’t contribute anything to ourselves on this tour; we didn’t step outside ourselves again and reach for that extra bit.” As far as John was concerned, the saddest thing about the whole “reunion” was that, despite stated intentions to the contrary, Lou had never really rejoined the band, comporting himself throughout as Lou Reed, never a member of the Velvet Underground.

  Reed’s reply: “I didn’t want to get involved in writing any more songs unless I knew that I would be involved in the production of anything that came out of it. I am a control freak, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to music and writing, and I want it to exist on the level I know I can deliver, and I won’t settle for anything less.”

  It soon became apparent though that, despite Lou’s apparent determination to slay his dragon once and for all, history would in fact simply repeat itself—only this time on a much larger scale than in 1970. Whereas twenty-three years earlier, when Lou had first left the group in a dispute over control of the sound (Reed and Sesnick were mixing and remixing, and remixing, Loaded at the time), the band retained a tight coterie of die-hard fans, they now maintained a much higher profile and a gigantic international following. In the interval they had also come to be judged as the second most influential band of the 1960s. And maybe, as Dimitri Ehrlich wrote in Mademoiselle, “of the seventies, eighties, and nineties too.” In that magazine’s survey of other musicians’ interest in the upcoming VU boxed set, Billy Idol, who had recently released a cover of “Heroin,” exclaimed, “I like the stark perverted vision of the Velvet Underground. It was the most shocking music I ever heard.” Gordon Gano of Violent Femmes said, “Their music hit me like an electric current. They have both an expression of vulnerability and also an incredible swagger.” And Margot Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies (whose cover of “Sweet Jane” dominated the soundtrack of Oliver Stone’s masterpiece Natural Born Killers in the summer of 1994) concluded, “I think we have the same mood as the Velvets. Their approach was to get the groove and not worry about making everything perfect.” On first seeing Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story, Andy Warhol had chuckled, “It makes it look so clean, and it was so dirty.” In truth, the dirty realism of 1966 had given way to the magazine glamour of 1995, which had turned the band into a part of history—i.e., an imagination of the past. In the last five years of the twentieth century, that imagination was undoubtedly allowed to expand. Each country conceived the band in a reflection of its own history. To Florian of Kraftwerk they had a heavy German Dada influence from the twenties and thirties. In France, where they had significantly chosen to record their live album, they were looked upon as romantic saints. In Japan they were seen as science-fiction monsters. In Italy they were communists. In Czechoslovakia they were dissident revolutionaries. In Scotland, etc.

  And just as Lou had profited most in the aftermath of the original breakup, so would he undoubtedly profit in these reflections. From Lou’s point of view, breaking the band up again was just as strong a career move as getting them back together. Like all the so-called “great artists” of his era he was a selfish bastard, but—to paraphrase Bill Graham on Mick Jagger—that cunt could sure write some motherfucking beautiful songs, which in fact, whether one likes it or not, transcended any concerns a sensitive fan might have had about the effect of the fallout of all this bullshit on John, Sterling, and Moe, who could obviously have had their lives dramatically changed had Lou chosen to soldier on with them. In time, all that will be remembered are the sounds and words. Lou’s life, or wife, notwithstanding.

  In the aftermath of the Velvet Underground’s unpleasant public break-up debacle, Lou was thrust into just the kind of position he had particularly thrived on throughout his career—a 100 percent shift in the public’s view of him. Suddenly, a lot of the same people who had been praising Magic and Loss as if it were a play by Samuel Beckett started to joke—grimly—that nobody was going to be interested in Lou’s divorce album. Only a year earlier at the end of 1992, Lou had stood at the pinnacle of his long, hard, diamond-in-the-rough career. As he surveyed all that was his and looked forward to the Velvet Underground reunion European tour—sure to be one of the great events in rock history—he was a man who had, somewhat like Elvis, dreamed all his childhood dreams ten times over. He was more successful than Delmore Schwartz had ever been. He was more successful than Andy Warhol could ever have expected him to be. He was worth several million dollars. And he had truly done it his way and meant every word he had ever written.

  Lou Reed had upset all the fans in the U.S. who had looked forward to seeing the Velvet Underground. His last trilogy of solo albums had left off with the depressing Magic and Loss. Where could he go from there? He claimed to be working on a novel. Allegedly, he approached Warner Brothers with the suggestion of making a covers album. Warner Brothers had been fully informed of Lou’s behavior during the collapse of the VU reunion and cannot have been particularly impressed with how he had undermined the commercial potential of the live album by refusing to tour with the band. Their response was negative. How could he have the effrontery to go on the Tonight show, bumping the VU, who had been scheduled to play the gig? How could he do his own lame version of “Waiting for the Man” with his band of
bozos who made rock ’n’ roll musicians look like uninteresting carnival freaks, when he could have stood next to John Cale, whom he had known for thirty years? His “Waiting for the Man” was less exciting than John’s on the album. After the performance Lou looked distinctly vulnerable.

  It was difficult for John to work with Lou on the box set after the break-up of the band but in 1995 Polygram Records released Peel Slowly and See, the best box set of Velvet Underground music ever put together. It came out just after the tragic death of Sterling Morrison.

  Cut to the summer of 1995: Lou was still restrained from recording by the twin demons of his divorce from Sylvia and Sterling Morrison’s approaching death. When Lou met Sylvia, he was tottering on the edge of a career that was not expected to sustain itself through another decade. When he started instigating a divorce, Lou’s stature and finances were at an all-time high. It is hard to understand why he felt the need to erase his wife so brutally. In the final settlement, Sylvia was compensated within the strictures of the law but her life was changed drastically. After her fifteen-year, single-minded devotion to improving Lou’s life and career, Sylvia was driven out of the rock business. The senselessly cruel need to destroy those who helped him most, particularly women, had been a constant with Lou since his marriage to Bettye.

  At the same time that he was fighting with John, Moe, and Sterling, Lou was brawling with Sylvia over getting divorced or not getting divorced. Having decided not to get divorced, he started considering the financial settlement. Many people who knew Lou were sure that Sylvia could not last much longer. Not only did Sylvia take it for granted that she would continue to manage Lou, she started thinking about managing other stars too. When Kurt Cobain overdosed in his Rome hotel during the first week of March 1994, Sylvia rang Lou suggesting they should send flowers and a note. No, Lou replied. He wanted to talk about their financial settlement. She should come over.