Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  ***

  In April 2003, Reed embarked on a world tour supporting both The Raven and NYC Man. During some of the concerts the band was joined by Reed’s personal tai chi instructor, Master Ren Guangyi. Master Ren’s remarkably graceful performances of tai chi movements became part of the music on the stage every night.

  Roderick Romero saw him do The Raven in New Mexico on the Animal Serenade tour in 2004. “I was still working for Val Kilmer. We drove about two hours and got there and it was in an open-air theater—it was so beautiful. Lou played guitar and he recited the whole Raven poem word for word in that lower-cast Lou Reed voice. He had a little reader down at the base where his monitor was so he could look down if he lost a word, but it was like boom-boom-boom. It was just phenomenal and I was crying. It was packed and people were freaking out. That was because of his dedication to poetry. He loved the poets.”

  When he came off stage, whether he had sung two songs or put on a two-hour show, Lou would shut himself up in his dressing room and cry. This was of course not the crying of desolation; it was the crying of emotional exultation.

  Critics wrote that Lou didn’t give us much new music in the second half of the 1990s. Just as in the previous decade, he did not give us another record for another three years—but then look at what came out in the following years. In Lou’s case, live albums and compilations should be treated like studio albums because they are so creative they become new records in their own right. The tour was recorded and became the basis for Reed’s next live double album, Animal Serenade, which was released in 2004. I could not get through these wonderful years without Lou’s trilogy of albums on which he’d worked hard to achieve superb results: A Perfect Night in London, NYC Man, and Animal Serenade. On this last album, Lou recites The Raven with such vivid and distinct phrasing it either blows your mind or reduces you to tears. That recitation was another step in changing the way he was perceived.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lou Reed Classics

  2006–10

  When I put out Metal Machine Music, they wanted to put me in jail!

  Lou Reed

  In late 2006, Susan Feldman approached Lou with an idea that followed on from The Raven. Why didn’t he, she suggested, develop Berlin into the stage production he’d long imagined? Later that year, in December, he played a first series of shows at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, based on this 1973 song cycle.

  “The critics didn’t get it. Berlin, as Lou said, was a metaphor for division … and he tapped into that place we all try to forget,” said Willner. That is the transformative power of his rock ’n’ roll—and it will live forever. According to Lou, “Berlin is about jealousy. Talk about a universal emotion. No one has not been jealous amongst all the other things, but big time. The guy’s jealous. He is being killed by jealousy. A lot of things are going on top of it all. The green-eyed monster it is.”

  Reed was reunited on stage with guitarist Steve Hunter, who played on the original album as well as on Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, and was joined by singers Antony Hegarty and Sharon Jones, pianist Rupert Christie, a horn and string section, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. The show was produced by Bob Ezrin, who also produced the original album, and Willner, with a stage designed by painter Julian Schnabel. Caroline, a film about the protagonist, directed by Schnabel’s daughter Lola, was projected onto the stage. The concert was recorded and filmed for a projected DVD.

  During the first half of 2007, before the film was released, Lou went on his Berlin tour—one of the most successful of his career. He played at the Sydney Festival in January, then toured throughout Europe during June and July, playing at the Traffic Festival in Turin, a five-day free event organized by the city.

  Around this time a prestigious European art publisher released Reed’s stunning book of photographs, Lou Reed’s New York. Lou also gifted his fans with a CD called Hudson River Wind Meditations, which added to his portrait of the city and his new directions into music and self. All these activities attracted a great deal of press attention, and the results were a huge step in Lou’s transformation from rock icon to great artist.

  In March 2007, Lou and Laurie performed the “Lost Art of Conversation” together during one of her Homeland concerts. In April 2007, Laurie put out a film called Hidden Outside Mountains; at the same time her dream diary of drawings and texts, Nightlife, was published, in which she wrote, “Lou and I created an enormous bubble wall.” In 2007, Anderson was awarded the Lillian Gish Prize for her “outstanding contribution” to the beauty of the world, and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.

  In September 2007, Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by Julian Schnabel, was shown at the Venice Film Festival, where it was positively received. According to Holly Gleason in American Songwriter, “With a Julian Schnabel film capturing the staging of Berlin—its own sort of Rorschach of the subconscious dream-states and impressionistic scenes the work evokes merging with the initial performances of the album once most charitably deemed ‘challenging’—it seems Reed’s reviled-at-the-time-of-release work is being vindicated. Not that he works for approval; indeed, he works to scrape all that’s inside him to be written.”

  In 2008, Lou’s collected lyrics were re-published as Pass Thru Fire. They included in the book’s final lyric about Lou and Laurie, “Power of the Heart,” a marriage proposal. Laurie was in the middle of her Homeland tour when she took the whole of April off. She was in California, feeling lonely and wondering about her future. She called Lou, listing things she had never done, like learning German and getting married. Lou proposed they get married the following day. On April 12, 2008, they both flew to Boulder, Colorado, and got married in a simple ceremony in a friend’s backyard. The Stone: Issue Three by Laurie, Lou, and John Zorn (who originally introduced them) was released in the same month. Friends thought Lou and Laurie were a match made in heaven, because she had her Buddhist philosophy, he had his tai chi. She was one of the greatest underground artists of all-time and so was he. Now, together with their dog Lulabelle, they were a family.

  From May to June 2010, Laurie and Lou would curate the Vivid Sydney festival in Sydney where they put on a twenty-minute concert for dogs, which was largely inaudible to the humans in attendance. Laurie was the M.C.: “Let’s hear it for the small dogs, the mediums and the big boys. We don’t actually know what kind of music dogs like. So we suggest for your first piece you get down to your dogs ears or pick them up and see which way they are going.”

  By the end of April 2008 they both headed out on big European tours. Laurie continued her tour of Homeland and Lou began his second Berlin tour in support of the DVD of the original concert at St Ann’s. Homeland was performed in Moscow on April 26, 2008, then in Toronto in June.

  ***

  In the same summer, Metal Machine Music also burst into life again. Back in 2002 Lou had received a letter from two musicians in Germany: Ulrich Krieger (saxophone) and Sarth Calhoun (electronics). They told him that they had studied Metal Machine Music and appreciated it as a great piece of music. At first Lou could hardly believe them. They explained that they were playing a new type of music called “metal machine music,” having transcribed the piece for symphony orchestra. When they sent him tapes of their performances he was won over.

  In early October Lou played two recorded concerts in L.A. with Krieger and Calhoun of Zeitkrafter. When the live recordings were released, Reed, Krieger, and Calhoun would be called the Metal Machine Music trio.

  In April 2010 the live recordings of the 2008 concerts were released under the title The Creation of the Universe. “[This] features the man handling guitars and electrics alongside Ulrich Krieger (tenor sax, live electronics) and Sarth Calhoun (live processing, continuum fingerboard), taking MMM’s original compositional ethic to spectacular new heights,” wrote Kris Needs in Clash. “They cross a high tech ghost of the original assault with heaving new emotional input from Lou and the band.” He found it reassuring that
Reed’s contrary, ever-questing spirit remained undiluted by age and trends.

  Lou kept saying to Willner, “Can you believe this? When I put out Metal Machine Music, they wanted to put me in jail.”

  “I belong to those people who constantly have been victims of libel and slander,” he told Max Dax. “Every fucking journalist in the world thinks he can write me off. Whenever I changed direction or recorded albums such as Metal Machine Music or Berlin, these muckrakers would assume that I did it just to fulfill a contract. It’s an uncomely experience to get hit with when you’re weak and vulnerable. I mean, there have been record stores in the U.S. that have boycotted my albums. It felt like book burnings. These Babbitts hate everything erratic or incalculable. May they burn in hell.”

  Roderick Romero recalls a series of encounters with Lou in 2008: “We were at dinner one night, Lou and I and my ex-wife Anisa in New York on the West Side, and he just kind of broke into it like, ‘Roderick, have you really listened to your record Small Town on good speakers?’ He’s a scientist, right? So it’s like I said, ‘No, not really.’ So he said, ‘Okay, let’s go. Where’s the check?’—he always paid for everything. So we went back to his house, back when he could drink a little wine. We had one bottle of wine—we all drank red wine—and he put it on his speakers, which were state of the art. They were really bizarre-looking, tall and triangular. We sat in three chairs and we all closed our eyes. He turned off all the lights and listened to the whole album, which is very rare as this is a 62-minute album, and I never heard my music that way. Both of us cried. It was really cool and at the end Anisa’s mind was blown because she was like, ‘I’m listening to my own album with Lou Reed and he loves it this much that he brought us to his house to listen to it on a perfect stereo. Who gets to do that?’ That’s how much our friendship meant to each other.

  Following pages: Lou interviews his friend Roderick Romero in his apartment overlooking the Hudson River, New York, 2007. (Karen Moskowitz)

  “Lou interviewed me. When we did our first interview together, he interviewed me about an album I made called Small Town with my band Sky Cries Mary. It was on Myspace, but the audio is real-time, and the visuals are photographs of us hanging out in the studio, talking. They were beautiful, but he was asking Karen Moscowitz, the best photographer out of Seattle at that time, ‘How are you shooting this? What’s that camera?’ And Karen, of course, is a pro, and she says it’s this and this and he says, ‘That’s interesting.’ And he really got down to detail with it and I was like, ’Oh, I hope he’s not going to crush her, scare the crap out of her and make her run away.’ Because when he started asking questions you were scared because he was so intense and it seemed like he just knew everything. But if he didn’t know it, he would ask.

  “The only time Lou really came down on me was when we did this interview with me about my album Small Town. We talked about it for weeks until I suggested, ‘What if we do something like the radio show you do with Hal, but in our case we’ll just post it?’ So he thought I was going to show up with all the recording devices, the sound system. He was like, ‘That’s fucked up, Roderick!’

  “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, Lou Reed is yelling at me?’ I was gonna die right then. I really wanted to shrivel up and die. Like, can I climb into the toilet? You do not want to be yelled at by Lou Reed. We had talked about it for weeks, but his guitar tech Stewart was great. He jumped in and said, ‘Lou, no. This was all me. Roderick and I talked. We’re taking care of this. That’s why I’m here. Roderick’s OK. Let’s do this.’

  Lou took a step back, had some tea, and then we nailed it. It was a beautiful interview.”

  ***

  The combination of these four albums—Berlin, The Stone/Issue Three, Hudson River Wind Meditations, and The Creation of the Universe—and one film, Blue in the Face, in which Lou starred, plus a number of long interviews in different languages, was a step in the transformation of Lou’s image. He was stronger than ever in his convictions and his work, and the audiences who flocked to his concerts all over the world found Lou Reed in tip-top shape. His literary agent Andrew Wylie said, “Lou’s lyrics are really interesting to read, absent the music. He is comparable to François VilIon. He is as good as they get on the page. You don’t get better than Lou as an artist.”

  “Let’s not forget that Lou Reed was the man who made Metal Machine Music,” says John Zorn. “He lived in the Village most of his life. He loved to improvise. He had Ornette Coleman on his records!”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lou Is Lulu

  2011–12

  Lou’s vocals sometimes sound as if they are being delivered by a Laurie Anderson character.

  David Quantick, Uncut

  Laurie’s Homeland album was released on June 22, 2010 (nine months earlier than Lou’s Lulu). Lou was more in evidence on Homeland than on the earlier albums, playing on two tracks and helping to produce the album. He had presently come up with the name of Fenway Bergamot for Laurie’s ventriloquist, who was known as Laurie’s “Voice of Authority,” a central figure in Homeland with whom Laurie shared the cover.

  The music of Homeland’s opening song, “Transitory Life,” could have picked up from “Junior Dad” at the end of Lulu—or vice versa. In both songs, the music evokes a magic world. “Transitory Life” is a trance song with images of a trembling mouse and her grandmother’s bed inside her ear. Laurie asks where all the female infants have gone, concluding that change is constant. The song creeps inside your ear, introducing the theme of the album.

  “My Right Eye” is about meditation. Laurie started crying now but was quick to point out that while the water from her right eye indicated how much she adored Lou, the water from her left eye indicated just how completely she could no longer listen to anything he had to say. Laurie is using a small quiet voice and her dark heart is at the center of her sound. Then wham, right there in the middle of the song, she asks Lou to forgive her for not matching his expectations. She explains there are too many things he left behind in the night that are still entombed in her heart for her to see clearly where they stand. And later, in a telling statement, she portrays the gulf that lies between them: she cries from both eyes, but while the tears from one represent love, tears from the other represent rejection.

  Then on the third song, “Thinking of You,” she blurts out five times in a row that she cannot believe how blessed she is to have such a beautiful lover. On the words “fear and strife” her voice lifts. Her phrasing is as exquisite as it needs to be. But then the final verse ends with another wham, Laurie is declaring she has pushed Lou out of her mind and that he cannot reach her anymore.

  Homeland is a very powerful album. There are so many good lines in these beautiful stories. We are, of course, in Laurieland. On “Strange perfumes” she pins its center with the great question, what happens to love when it has gone. OK, now flip to another channel for “Only an Expert.” This is a really top-notch Laurie Anderson number. It takes up a lot of space on the album because we’ve just been to the heart of our problem, and it takes us out of the interior of Laurieland. The lyrics of “Another Day in America” cover three pages. A dream about a lost world, this fantastic and superb song tells a story about living in the U.S. at the beginning of another new era in 2010, with the tragic but ironic voice of Fenway Bergamot narrating the story. Cutting to “Bodies in Motion,” we hear a dirge about lost love, full of Laurie’s tender empathy, power, and fear. She really takes good care of Lou on this one, which returns to her initial promises on Bright Red to always love him. Here she reaffirms her devotion from the start. The screaming birds on “The Lake” sound just like the children screaming on Berlin. The twelfth and final song, “The Beginning of Memory,” is an eerie funeral dirge. It’s transporting, transforming, formal, deeply emotional, and inspiring. It’s heavy. It’s a heavy album about the big freeze-out. And Fenway Bergamot is on its cover, looking older and as if he, too, has been battered by the blues.

  ***
/>
  Eight years after The Raven, Robert Wilson came back with another project he thought Lou was made for. This time he requested that Lou pin the femme fatale. They would of course go, he said, for the no. 1 femme fatale of all time: the notorious Lulu.

  Lulu originally came to life in two plays by the ground-breaking German playwright Frank Wedekind. This writer came to prominence around the same time as Oscar Wilde in the 1890s. His subjects were the unspeakable realities of sex. His first play, Spring Awakening, was about the sex lives of children. Earth Spirit was the first of two plays about the sex life and murder of a sexually irresistible courtesan for the ages, Lulu. She was another Imp of the Perverse. Since her creation, Lulu has been produced on stage so many times it’s impossible to count. Two great extrapolations of the play are G. W. Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box, starring the immense and tragic American movie star Louise Brooks, who played her like a flapper, and Alban Berg’s dark and doom-filled opera Lulu (1937).

  No sooner had Lou accepted the commission than he summoned to his side his significant other to figure out how to write Lulu. Laurie joined him in rooting out the essence of Wedekind’s plays and the script Robert Wilson was having written. According to friends, Lou and Laurie were drawn most closely and tenderly together by working on Lulu. The plays had been translated into English from incredibly stilted German syntax and words. At first, that distant world and its arcane language seemed unreachable. Then, as Lou and Laurie worked through the material, the violent story of Lulu’s life of abuse and lust began to emerge.