Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  The story lends itself to opera because it’s so atmospheric, intoxicating, and tragic. In Berlin, Lulu walked the same streets as Einstein and Kandinsky when they passed through; in Paris, as Verlaine and Rimbaud; and in London, as Frank Harris and Jack the Ripper. In a terrifying world dominated by a violent religion of fear and betrayal, Lulu went from man to man for protection and money. She preferred wealthy older men until one of them married her whilst other men always hovered around her threateningly.

  Her husband’s son falls in love with her. When the old man catches them, Lulu murders him and flees to France with the son and her husband’s fortune. In the Paris of Verlaine and Rimbaud they live with the wealthy party crowd. She ends up walking the streets of London driven by her addiction to sex. One night she runs into Jack the Ripper, whose fixation was to murder prostitutes regardless of their favors. “She had no feelings in her soul,” Lou wrote. “Instead she had a hole.”

  “I worked on this thing for a while,” he recounted. “The theater people in Berlin told me there were fourteen versions of this play floating around with different angles, but I saw the main thrust in the film of Pandora’s Box.” It had the same theme of deadly jealousy as his Berlin. Everything he did was beginning to look like one enormous work of many levels.

  As Lou and Laurie channeled the complex characters in the plays and began to pin what was really going on, Lou was more than ever on his spot. As soon as he got there, he unburdened himself of Wedekind and Wilson, and started identifying deeply with his alter ego, Lulu. A whole world bloomed in his brain: people from the S&M scene, the Warhol world; those he had seen going through these changes—all of them became characters in the hardest, most emotional songs he ever wrote without exaggeration.

  On stage, Lou’s lyrics were sung by actors wearing surreal costumes standing in frozen poses moving to Wilson’s internal clocklike machines and talking in expressionless voices. The words were screened by an aural landscape of ambient music. There was a good deal of friction over the creative period of inception. Lou saw Lulu as a heroine. Wilson, who introduced the subject, wanted to go in a different direction than the already-tested Pandora’s Box. His art was not about repeating what had been done. But Lou would not budge from his landscape.

  The Wilson–Reed team would not have been possible before Lou had worked with Laurie. Unfortunately, at the time he was rehearsing for the premiere of Lulu at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

  “His health was not good at this time and he was a holy terror with the people in the theater,” said Jörn Weisbrodt. “The rehearsals had already started and things got increasingly difficult. We needed him to release more music material. I called to reason with him. On our LA call he laughed when I told him how everyone at the theater is terrified of him. He said: ‘They do know that I am just a little puppy dog, don’t they?’ And he really was. He was one of the sweetest, most loyal, kindest little dogs out there. The whole world loved his music and the whole world is richer because of him.”

  The Wilson–Reed Lulu opened in Berlin on April 8, 2011 to very good reviews.

  ***

  The same month Lulu opened in Berlin, Lou was booked into Metallica’s studios in California to record a planned album of his lesser-known gems like “Kill Your Sons.” Now, only two weeks before the sessions, he phoned his metal brothers to say he had another idea. A much bigger idea. He sent them the lyrics he’d written for Wilson’s Lulu. “I don’t like the word ‘rock opera,’” Reed told an interviewer, “but I am trying to write on the level reserved for plays or novels. I was trying to find a different kind of melodic form, but still rock.”

  “These were very potent lyrics with their atmospheric soundscapes,” Metallica singer and guitarist James Hetfield recalled. The band, who saw Lou Reed as an iconic writer and genius, spent the interim weeks working on transforming the songs, adding their heavy metal rock to his potent lyrics. “Lars [Ulrich] and I sat there with an acoustic and let this blank canvas take us where it needed to go.”

  When Lou showed up on the first Monday of a ten-day session, it was seven seconds before Lars Ulrich’s head started spinning with sound. “Lou came in with the material and Metallica bought the ticket and took the ride,” recalled Willner. “They were so courageous and open that they ended up writing and recording with him, there and then that day.”

  Reed had waited a long time to have a shot at doing something like this with the right people and said, “I did it with the best group I could possibly find.”

  Metallica were totally free to express themselves, but they could not re-create what was pouring out of them. As a result, many of the tracks that ended up on the album were first takes. Nobody was steering the music so much as the moment—once they bowed to the magic and let go of the fear of losing control, they were in heaven. Lou had asked them to stamp ’TALLICA on his songs and that is what they started playing.

  He took the new way he had written and sung on Ecstasy to an even higher level on Lulu. “This is as good as my writing gets,” Lou said. “Feeling is everything to me in the power of rock. Everything on Lulu is about emotions.”

  It was an awesome exercise in improvisation and spontaneity. Lars was convinced that they were the band Lou had always heard in his head but had not been able to play with until now. No band had felt so right to him since the Velvet Underground. The collaboration got so emotional that when they were recording the album’s final track, “Junior Dad,” the two leaders of the band, James and Lars, both of whom had recently lost their fathers, burst into tears.

  Hetfield thought that Reed was a fascinating human being while Ulrich thought Lou was a brilliant musician and intellectual, “but I think he feels misunderstood. Most people have a tendency to start a conversation in a neutral position and see where it goes. Lou starts in a negative position then you’ve got to go to neutral and then to positive.” On another occasion in the studio Lou challenged Hetfield to a knife fight.

  From the beginning, Lulu allowed Lou to be honest. On the album he reached all the way back to Andy Warhol and those halcyon days at the Factory in 1966, where Lou was known as Lulu. From inside the character of Lulu, Lou Reed was able to make great art by angrily confronting what distressed him most. This is the great man at his peak, reaching for Shakespeare as he faces his mortality and working against the pain that was beginning to wrack his body. This is an album made in the ice of clarity. He is not going to leave a stone unturned. His spitting out confusion has returned in a thrilling account of apocalyptic hell, beauty and death. This is the hardest music I have ever heard.

  “I always wanted to do something on the level of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,” Lou continued. “I came pretty close on Berlin but this one, for me, from the beginning to the end, this album has so much rage that it’s thrilling. When I finally heard it back, I was beyond stunned. I listen to it and my poor heart breaks over some of what’s in it. Sometimes I find it so emotional I have to get up and turn it off.”

  But let’s go from the top to the bottom because every song and every line of this masterpiece works to create as perfect an album as Lou has ever made. The big, cool first number, “Brandenburg Gate,” opens with Lulu declaring that she would amputate both her legs and breasts, making it immediately clear that Lou is the femme fatale of the title. Lou’s Lulu has some opium to keep her straight, but he hammers home that she’s still just a small-town girl.

  “The View” cracks open the dilemma of his big story by saying he has no morals and wants to see her suicide. The most prominent and oft-repeated line in “The View” has Lou expressing to Lulu that he wants her to doubt everything she has based her life on in order to love somebody who completely abhors her. This is one of Lou’s recurring images. And he steps it up big time when he cuts from there to insist that he is everything from the root to the completed furniture, a line he learned from Naked Lunch. Lulu is Lou. His voice was remarkably alive and annealed to the lyric. Looking for her suicid
e, he never sounded more in charge or more fascinated.

  The song cycle builds steadily, but it also begins to fracture and skitter all over the psyche. “Pumping Blood” takes us to the motherlode: As he shakes his tail like a jumped-up hooker, Lulu pleads with Jack the Ripper to fuck her and rape her and cut her up. There’s blood as she swallows the Ripper’s sharpest knife like a black male’s penis. Talk about raptures of the deep! This is the ultimate confessional album and Lou’s plate is full. (It makes it as a last confession and exorcism.)

  The fourth song, “Mistress Dread,” marks a definitive shift in the story’s telling. The song’s intense drive pivots around a confessional verse. It pours out Lulu/Lou’s emotional appeal: She/he is your child sex slave who begs to be physically degraded. It ends with a plea to rip her open and release her soul. From here the album spirals down, then rises ferociously from the deep with its dark beauty.

  If we have been dividing our time between Lou’s and Laurie’s worlds, we have now been yanked into the deep end off Lou’s—the world of “Iced Honey.” So far the album has been a Blitzkrieg. But with its central number, “Cheat on Me,” it now moves into the schizophrenic bop of de Sade’s world. Why do I have sex with another person? Why do you? he asks her. I have a cheating heart that could rip us to shreds. Lulu also says his love is nothing to her.

  Every song is so fantastically strong and complete, nothing can be denied. If Lulu turns its back on Ecstasy and Twilight, its twisted passion is honest and not totally without hope.

  The second side opens with “Frustration,” in which Lou finally breaks down the wall between the sexes. He sings it in one male and female voice, with a contradictory perspective. As his body is filled with pain he says at once he thinks about killing her but can’t get over her creepy eyes. Then he describes himself like a girl without sperm. He wants to hurt but also marry her. He ends it on a brilliant turnaround that finds him vomiting on the ground and seeing Lulu as the figure of male authority. We are clearly in the middle of the final chapter of Lou’s novel. Despite it being a commissioned work, Lou could not write anything without putting himself into it. Thank God he did, because Lulu takes us deeper into the magic and mystery of Lou and Laurie.

  In “Little Dog” Lou admits that he has always seen himself as a pathetic little dog. Taking off from the sentiment of “Pale Blue Eyes,” Lou throws out his “When he’s up, she’s down” routine. He portrays himself as squeaky clean while she snorts up some powder. In a further attempt to attain his desires he offers to buy her anything she wants. The giant song at the center of the second side is “Dragon.” Lulu dumps on everything Lou once adored. The song is a celebration of rejection. From suggesting that thinking about her makes him feel like dying, he graduates to insulting her most private parts, which underlines the song’s conclusion that being extremely rejected is a marvelous sensation.

  Lou Reed never wrote anything as powerful and majestic as Lulu’s final song, the nineteen-minute “Junior Dad.” After he begs her to kiss him on his lips, to change him from the Beast to Prince Charming, he tells her their affair is now completed and that she is the greatest disappointment to him. This magnificent roiling and, at times, classical rock composition, funereal and stunning, plays on for another four minutes after Lou’s singing has ended.

  Lulu is the single-most outstanding work in the Lou and Laurie saga. If we see it as an exorcism, it had been made by both of them. Lou could not possibly have exercised his alchemy here without Laurie to encourage and receive it via Lou’s Talking Book or in person. Bearing in mind that he was beginning to feel sick at times, it would have been unthinkable to make such a naked confession without Laurie’s involvement.

  The girl on the cover of Lulu has a lifelike face but the butchered body of a mannequin. Somebody has broken off both of her arms. According to Zorn, Lulu was “a record which shocked just about everybody. He had more courage than just about anybody I know.”

  Lulu entered the U.S. and U.K. album charts at 36, which was a fantastic finale for Lou Reed. It entered the Top Ten on the German, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, Croatian, Czech, and Russian album charts. It made the Top 20 in Austria, Denmark, Holland, Finland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. During its first week in America, it only shifted 13,000 copies but, in its first two weeks, worldwide sales of Lulu were over 100,000. Death threats from Metallica fans were hurled at Lou with maximum ferocity.

  Lulu was Lou Reed’s highest charting album since 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance. And to reach that success with this kind of uncompromising Shakespearean vision was the greatest compliment his international audience could have given him. American reviews insisted the album was a disaster and stomped on it as “Turgid Weimar schlock” and a “Horribly conceived circle jerk.” Some “brilliant” critics even called it the “Worst Album of All Time.” But Lulu was not a disaster. It was his greatest hurrah. What a move. Eight years after The Raven, Lou found a port of entry through Lulu and totally nailed it with Metallica.

  A perceptive fan saw it more bluntly: “Lou and Metallica are having violent sex at times bordering on non-consensual.” He was impressed by how the emotion in Hetfield’s vocals communicated the same sense of abuse as the music. Lulu also received extraordinarily good reviews from some of the more intelligent American publications like The Atlantic magazine: “I love Lulu,” James Parker wrote, “because of the sound of Lou’s voice with Metallica: his moody electro-drones beneath their guitars, and his desiccated half-singing over their riffs. Metal vocals traditionally embed themselves in the grid of the song: Lou has his own metrical sense, a rambling across the beat, and in this highly determined context, invigorated by the hog-bellows of Metallica’s James Hetfield, it sounds magnificent.” David Quantick in the British magazine Uncut wrote, “Everything on this immense album is intense, exciting, loud and generally all three. What you don’t get is a rock band trying to play Velvet Underground songs; what you do get is a very big and horrible noise with lyrics and vocals that completely match.”

  Some of the negative reviews of Lulu would pick out “Junior Dad” for due praise. “Lou had previously recorded ‘Junior Dad’ with Laurie Anderson and John Zorn,” wrote Quantick. “Lulu’s version is gorgeous, melancholy and recalls my two favorite Lou Reed tracks: ‘Street Hassle’ and ‘A Dream’ from Songs for Drella.” On this epic song, Lou’s vocals sometimes sound as if they are being delivered by a Laurie Anderson character. “Junior Dad” lifts Reed out of pop culture into something closer to opera. On “Junior Dad,” the words “psychic savagery” take Lou back to his electric shock treatments in the summer of 1959.

  This is the greatest album Lou ever made. In one truly memorable line he tells Laurie that she is more masculine than he is. Lou takes the hard confessional of “Little Dog” out on the astral plane. The imp is ripping himself apart. He is doing what he said he should not do. The magnificent music of the finale “Junior Dad” plays on well after the lyric has been delivered. Lou holds his listeners in the palm of his playing, as the music floats onward like smoke, like rain filtering through the night. He leaves himself out there with it, vulnerable but safe inside it. It’s as if he’s looking back over all the songs, all the chapters of all the books he wrote on records. Lulu is about life, it’s about death, and it’s about rebirth. As the ensemble winds on, the playing becomes so awesome it pulls us down and wraps us up in the heart of his musical life.

  You might think no two albums could sound more different than Laurie Anderson’s Homeland and Lulu, except that they came from the same big place: America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And from the same bed. Lulu stands as Lou Reed’s last testament. It cross-references the works that came before it. On the one hand, it’s about Lou’s eternal fascination with the femme fatale. But if you focus on what the album tells you about their relationship in Lou’s head, you have to gasp and wonder what the hell was going on.

  With the spontaneous bop prosody he learne
d from Kerouac, Lou taught Metallica how not to think, not to look back or second-guess, but to move forward—which is the basic lesson of On the Road and Pass Thru Fire. “We’ve been forever touched and changed by the experience,” Hetfield stated, echoing Ulrich’s comments that he was “invigorated by how awesome the record turned out.”

  “On tour, Lou had a pre-show ritual. When he was ready, he would extend his hands in front of him. We would then each put our hands on top of his. Then Lou would start chanting, ’Success, success, success!’ and we’d all lift our hands and let go. He liked to be connected with his band, and we were a team,” recalled Kevin Hearn, Lou’s then band leader.

  “Offstage, Lou loved to go out for dinners to just shoot the breeze and laugh. He had so many great stories. On tour, he would go to movies, plays, and art galleries. He had an insatiable appetite for art and loved to check out new music, although he once scolded me for not having enough Otis Redding on my iPad. He was so funny. On one of my visits to his Chelsea office, I was moved when I saw that he had framed and hung up one of my drawings on the wall.”

  Lou had a particular empathy for the china-doll city of Dresden because of how the British and Americans firebombed the city, killing 25,000 civilians. Lou and his band played one of their last open-air shows in Dresden in June 2012. That night, the sky looked like a Lou Reed photograph: black and smudged white, with burning edges. The band was about to begin the last song of the night, the heartbreakingly personal “Junior Dad.” They had been playing for three hours and everybody in the audience and on stage was united by the same immersion in the moment. Lou had his band with him, plus two of the Metal Machine Trio and other musicians. Everybody on stage was glowing, totally focused, and warm. Except Lou. They had turned it into a spoken-word piece and the musicians were there to give him a base drone and react to him.

  Lou stood there with an army of musicians behind him. He looked as if he were wearing a medieval leather jerkin, with bare shoulders and arms. The camera kept pulling away then finding him again. There was a certain fragility in his stance, but when you looked closely, he stood so still and so full of the song, so tender and tough, you could not help but cry out to him.