Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  When Sylvia got there she was met by a barrage of figures. Lou would pay her a salary of $150,000 per year, but no percentages. Since Lou earned approximately $1 million a year and a standard managerial contract gave the manager 20 percent, and since Sylvia had been instrumental in bringing Lou to this level of income, she reacted negatively. She threatened to send appraisers to his apartment to assess how much of their money he had spent having his new place fixed up. It was more than $100,000, and she knew Lou had recently taken Laurie Anderson to Antigua for a week’s vacation, on which he spent $25,000.

  On the following day Lou fired Sylvia as his manager, canceling her credit cards, car service, and other accounts. Now she had no choice but to sue him for a divorce. However, one friend noted, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he and Sylvia went back and forth on this for years. Now Sylvia has left him for whatever reason, but whether he said, ‘Get out,’ whether he stomps on her, kicks her out, throws her out, beats her up, she’s not supposed to get out. She’s supposed to say, ‘No, I’m coming back.’”

  Meanwhile, Reed’s lawyer, the venerable Alan Stein, dismissed Reed as a client. “Don’t underestimate the fact that Lou was fired by his attorney,” one observer pointed out. “Alan Stein is in his seventies and he has been one of the top entertainment lawyers for years. He began to represent Lou because one of his close friends is Lou’s accountant, David Gotterer from Mason and Co., whom Lou has used for many years and who seems to be one of the few people whom he trusts. Alan is a class act. Alan represents Seymour Stein and has done for many years. So this was a heavy rejection.”

  ***

  In the meanwhile, in August 1995, just three months after Lou’s divorce from Sylvia, Lou paid a final visit to his first guitar partner Sterling Morrison, who lay in bed with a cancer that had all but left him skinless. “I arrived at his house with depressing thoughts in my head,” Lou Reed wrote in an article published in the New York Times on December 31, 1995. “The cancer had removed seven layers of skin from his body and that had made guitar playing painful, but his eyes were as alert and clear as any eyes I had seen in this world. When he played his passionate solos, I had always seen him as a mythic Irish hero, flames shooting from his nostrils. I saw my friend Sterling for the last time. He had always been the strongest one, the Warrior Heart of the Velvet Underground.”

  Sterling Holmes Morrison died of cancer in August 1995. “Finish Line” was recorded on Twilight in honor of Sterling Morrison. The Velvet Underground would never play again.

  Lou and Laurie at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, January 17, 1996. (Bob Gruen)

  In September 1995, Polygram released the magisterial Peel Slowly and See. According to Sal Mercuri, “This was the first major label restrospective for a band that has gotten little to no attention from major labels. It is a work worthy of the band’s legend and legacy, and a clinic on how to produce a box set. Polygram and Bill Levenson have earned the eternal thanks and respect of Velvet Underground fans all over the world. By way of comparison, RCA’s Lou Reed Anthology, Between Thought and Expression, now pales in execution and presentation.”

  In March 1996, the Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Patti Smith at the Waldorf Hotel on Park Avenue. In her speech she put their achievement on the same level as the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The event was tense, uncomfortable, and drained of any joy. It is impossible to know whether John Cale or Moe Tucker felt that Lou had contributed to Sterling’s death by treating him so harshly on stage during the reunion tour.

  At the ceremony, John, Moe, and Lou played a new composition by Lou called “Last Night I Said Good-bye to My Friend.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Transformation of Lou and Laurie

  1994–2000

  He met his soul mate princess later in his life and it was obvious that he loved her deeply. What a lucky guy he was to find Laurie.

  Yoko Ono

  Everything Lou Reed did was about transformation. His career is a series of transformations. That’s what makes his Collected Works so potent now. Lou has been telling us for forty years that if we line up the albums each one of them is a chapter in his great American novel, but nobody has really taken the trouble to see what happens when you look at them like that. What actually emerges? The Life of Lou Reed by Lou Reed.

  Lou maintained a high profile at the end of 1993 and into early 1994. He had started having an affair with the coolest performance artist in the world, Laurie Anderson, who bore a resemblance to the young Shelley Albin. They met at an arts and music festival in Munich. Lou invited Laurie to sing “A Dream” from Songs for Drella. “I was astounded when she did it exactly the way I would do it rhythmically, with just the right pauses,” he recalled. Back in New York, both Lou and Laurie, who were normally reticent about their personal lives, were outspoken to friends in praise of their relationship. For Laurie it was, she said, “wonderful.” They were both great storytellers who enjoyed listening as much as talking on the rare occasion they found the right person. As writers, they shared a fascination with computers as the tool of their trade. Lou was the funniest person Laurie had ever met. As for Lou, he pulled out all the stops saying that Laurie was the kindest person he’d ever met, as well as being “incredibly sexy, vibrant and beautiful.” They were spotted smooching in the back of limousines and in restaurants.

  At first, Sylvia welcomed the affair since it helped quell rumors that Lou had dumped her for an older black guy, a guard at the Natural History Museum, with whom he regularly had breakfast at a local cafe. In November, Lou and Laurie went to the premiere of The Black Rider, an opera by Robert Wilson, William Burroughs, and Tom Waits, and smiled for the cameras at the dinner party after it.

  Lou had a high opinion of Laurie as a musician and engineer. In an intriguing collaboration that harkened back in more ways than one to Lou’s meeting with Cale back in 1964, they began considering an album of duets on which Anderson would accompany Reed’s guitar with her electrified violin. Lou described the style of the songs as “Lou and Laurie music.”

  The majority of Lou’s acquaintances—he had few friends—predicted that based on Lou’s track record the relationship simply could not last. However, Reed has made a career of finding rebirth through collaboration, which is essentially a marriage that begins when the collaboration begins and ends when it ends. The proof of it is its child: the work. In the long term it is the work one remembers.

  The twin talents that made Lou Reed stand out are as a writer and a collaborator. That a man of his complexity could in his early fifties find another writer with whom he could make love and work is an engaging introduction to the last quarter of his life.

  ***

  “When Lou met Laurie and her world,” a friend recalled, “it was like the Buddhist World Factory up there. It was a spiritual trip. She is a very spiritual person, so she took him into that envelope. It wasn’t like she was guiding him; it was just he adored her and suddenly they were in this new world together.”

  Laurie’s massive studio perched on the top two floors of 530 Canal Street had twelve large windows on each floor providing a commanding view of the entrance to New York via the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River. Legend has it that the renowned theater director Robert Wilson had found his basic image for Einstein on the Beach by the view from these windows. It was also a perfect place to take photographs. Imagine bringing the great Lou Reed into this space. The rock and roll world Lou lived in was a cold, dangerous place, populated by parasites and creeps. The art world Laurie reigned in was rich in nurturing relationships on an international stage. As it turned out, he would fit into it and it would fit into him perfectly. There was a lovely symmetry in recalling how Lou began his adventures with Warhol and watching him complete them with Anderson.

  When Lou landed in the world of Laurie Anderson, he was like the Beast in Jean Cocteau’s movie La Belle et la Bête. He housed inside himself a great warrior prince of a po
et—handsome, witty, and romantic to his core. However, for many years a great curse had sealed him in a bestial form so frightening, no one dared approach him. The only way he could be released was by a kiss on the lips from a beautiful princess. When Lou Reed met Laurie Anderson, he met the beautiful princess.

  From his perspective, Lou could not have met Laurie at a better time. Not only could she be his soul mate along the Himalayas of transformation; but, in Laurie’s world, Lou would find almost everyone he needed to grow in new directions. They commenced lengthy conversations about everything which would lay down the backbeat of their romance. To begin with, they spoke the same language. According to Laurie, they first conversed by playing music together, soon became best friends, and got involved in doing things Lou had never done before like butterfly hunting, kayaking, and meditation. When they were in New York they made a point of staying in touch with the population of their downtown art world by constantly attending concerts, plays, and art openings. Laurie noticed how much Lou showed his appreciation of everything. They soon became like John Lennon and Yoko Ono twenty years earlier, the King and Queen of the New York scene.

  In the fall of 1994 Lou bought a large apartment with big windows overlooking the Hudson River. It was in the heart of Greenwich Village at the corner of 11th and West Streets.

  This is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the world, lined by cobblestone streets, Brownstone houses, and dark Dickensian alleyways. For a romantic dreamer like Lou, it was also full of ghosts. Only a few blocks away was the White Horse Tavern, Delmore Schwartz and Dylan Thomas’s favorite bar. The streets were walked by stunning young models, male and female movie stars, movie directors, and writers and artists of every persuasion, such as Lou’s friend Julian Schnabel. Boutiques and bookshops abounded along the cobblestone streets, as did candlelit restaurants, small theaters, and nearby cinemas. The area is protected from the grinding howls of building machines and ambulances that operate without cease by a drop down to river level just west of Seventh Avenue. The hustle and tension of the city falls away as you penetrate deeper into this hidden paradise. The whole neighborhood is graced by an early morning and late afternoon orange light specific to New York. It is a perfect place to take photographs. That fall, Laurie moved in.

  “It’s just such a great miracle when things do work in a relationship and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons,” Laurie recalled. “I think Lou has probably made me a little tougher. And by that I mean if I’m sort of talking around something, he just goes, ‘Why don’t you just say what you really think? OK? You don’t have to be nice or pretend.’ So that’s been very interesting. And maybe it’s almost the opposite thing that he’s learning from me. You know, I’m kind of like, ‘You don’t really have to say that straight out. You can maybe take another turn around before you do it.’ But of course the best thing is that I never know what to expect from Lou. It’s great to be with someone who’s always surprising you with his opinions and thoughts. That’s very exciting.”

  The whole theme and forward thrust of this final section of Lou’s life is a celebration of the extent to which Lou and Laurie became one by making all their works about each other in one way or another. The first signs we see of this phenomenal development, which led both of them to become much greater artists than they were when they met, are in the question-and-answer conversational formats of their parallel albums. My attempts to show the reader the essence of the exchanges are just that. It’s possible that I am wrong. I can only invite the reader to check out the sources themselves, which is the whole point of biography.

  Anderson was working with Brian Eno on her first studio album in five years, Bright Red. Lou collaborated on one song, “In Our Sleep,” which was released in three formats as the single off the album. They wrote, sang, and recorded it together. As Stephen Holden noted in a profile of Anderson in the New York Times, “A repetitive chant that goes ‘In our sleep as we speak / Listen to the drums beat,’ finds a comfortable space between their minimalist styles and can be read as a deadpan love song evoking the depths of a relationship that both describe in glowingly romantic terms.”

  According to this writer’s interpretation, Laurie gave us the first inside view of their romance on her unusually personal album Bright Red, released in 1994. Bearing in mind that we are honoring Reed’s request that we treat his albums like chapters of his novel, we are also reading Laurie’s albums like parallel chapters of the Lou and Laurie saga. One of the great ironies of Lou’s career, particularly during his years with Laurie, was that he angrily refused to answer any personal question about their relationship while using the relationship as the source of the majority of the songs on the albums Set the Twilight Reeling and Ecstasy, as well as other albums. The publication of the 2008 edition of Reed’s collected lyrics, Pass Thru Fire, reveals the extent to which Lou always wrote most brilliantly about the traumas of his intimate relations with his lovers. It is harder to make the same case with Laurie Anderson’s music because, until Bright Red, she did not write exclusively personal albums as Lou did. Perhaps the lyrics on Bright Red had nothing to do with Lou at all. They were all about William Burroughs or Herman Melville, but in that case why would Lou Reed answer the questions she posed on Bright Red on his answering album Set theTwilight Reeling?

  According to “Speechless,” the opening song on Bright Red, Laurie said she had never been in love and believed she never would be, but that changed drastically as soon as she became involved with Lou. Responding to his pressing need to unload his emotional burdens in her lap, on the album’s title song,” she was soon assuring him that she would always be there and never leave him. Not only that, but Laurie said she was already carrying his despair in her heart. That is a heavy commitment to make to anybody. The strange thing is that on “Puppet Motel” she quickly found herself flung into a muddy cauldron of horror straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. Before she could shake herself loose of this deep nightmare, on “Freefall” Lou started sending her letters designed to distract her mind. She was reduced to asking him to clarify his last request. After being knocked into another apocalyptic doom-filled adventure on “Muddy River” she only escaped by assuring Lou that they would attempt to put it all back together again. On “Poison,” Lou started a fight, then hopped out of bed and made it downstairs to fool around with the girl who lives directly beneath her. He left Laurie listening endlessly to their “music” until she wondered if she was going out of her mind. Next thing, on “In Our Sleep” Lou and Laurie are back in the sack and talking to each other in their sleep. “Night in Baghdad,” “Tightrope,” and “Same Time Tomorrow” boil down to a series of pleas to remember her and start again regardless. By the end of the album, Laurie was harping on the theme that would endure through all the music she made while living with Lou: is there any point at all in going on?

  ***

  Through the summer of 1994, Laurie was on a twenty-six-date book tour for Stories from the Nerve Bible. The album Bright Red was released on October 25, 1994.

  They also learned how to accommodate each other’s recording and touring schedules. This was not at first easy for Lou, who had never sustained a relationship with an independent woman. However, according to friends they displayed a teenage passion for each other and things were remarkably good between them. The majority of 1995 Laurie spent on a series of tours in support of Bright Red, The Puppet Motel CD-ROM, and her new spoken-word album. In the fall of 1995, Reed finally picked up his guitar and went back into his New York studio “The Roof,” where he started recording the new album. He got the idea for the title, Set the Twilight Reeling, after taking pictures of the New York skyline at night from the roof of his splendid new apartment on the corner of 11th and Hudson. Laurie was in and out of the sessions. It helped to have a partner who understood the details of his work, Lou said. “Laurie understands when I’m in the studio at five in the morning and knows exactly what I’m talking about when I call to say this happened or that
happened—and vice-versa. It’s a great relief to have that kind of compassion and back-up available, to have someone who understands what’s happening and actually helps you get through it.”

  Set the Twilight Reeling was released in February 1996. Laurie got some answers to the questions she had posed on Bright Red: On “NYC Man” Lou started off saying: Listen, enough with the angst. I’m a New York City guy. If you don’t want me around I don’t want to discuss it. Just say the word and I’m gone. On the other hand read the lyrics to “Trade In”: I just went through a tough time killing my old self so that I could be a new man for you! So tighten up and get it straight, I want to marry you. Listen, I need your help, you’re the best person ever—just light me on fire to kill my old self and we’ll get the job done. When Laurie staggered back with a singalong on “Hang On to Your Emotions,” “Ha … ng on! Bla bla, blabbity bla … When the shit hits the fire we’ll be there,” then he got humorous on “Hookywooky.” When Laurie invited all her ex-boyfriends over for a party on the roof of her studio all Lou could think of was throwing them off one by one. Sometimes she was so civilized he wanted to throw up.

  The truth was Lou had never previously had an artist girlfriend. Laurie was always about to arrive—or on her way out the door. She was a professional traveler. Her career was taking off too, and Lou was frightened of losing her to the divinity of music audiences and the world at large. At this stage Twilight descended into its final approach to making himself a wife: On “The Proposition” he says, You can go anywhere you want, whatever happens, we’re going to be together. On “The Adventurer” Lou tells her, You’re the most fantastic person I ever met in my life. You’re amazing. You have no fear. Everything you do is perfect! I’m going to feel bad when you’re gone but I understand because I do the same thing. You’re my one true love, my adventuress.