Lou Reed: The Defining Years

Doggett

INTRODUCTION

I’ve had more of a chance to make an asshole out of myself than most people, and I realise that. But then not everybody gets a chance to live out their nightmares for the vicarious pleasures of the public.

(Lou Reed, 1979)

IN 1980, LOU REED MARRIED FOR THE second time. Four months later he released an album entitled ‘Growing Up In Public’, an uncomfortable merging of lyrical self-analysis and ersatz black music stylings. The record did not herald one of Reed’s sporadic periods of acceptance by a mass audience; as a media event, it passed almost unnoticed. For Reed, however, it was a talisman of hope: a deliberate farewell to a decade in which he had paraded his private ghouls in the public arena. Reed’s virtual disintegration during the Seventies began as a controlled chemical experiment, in which he tested the limits of his psyche and physique; eventually the sorcerer’s apprentice could no longer hold down the forces which he had conjured up, and Reed’s life became a desperate effort to muster substance out of strife.

Almost by instinct, Reed continued to function as an artist; it was what he did, whether he was master of his senses or not. Working in an idiom where success was measured by commercial acceptance, however, he found himself increasingly marginalised. What the public wanted was a freakshow, the sight of a matchstick-legged, leather-clad buffoon reeling across the stage, scarcely conscious of where he was or why. They wanted to see me die, Reed remarked in a moment of sensibility, and the compelling drama of his flight into the abyss easily upstaged the altogether more subtle pleasures of his artistic output.

Looming over him were the masks he had created - the legacy of The Velvet Underground, the uncompromising and consciously perverse art-rock band which Reed had led in the Sixties, and which had become an essential piece of every namedropper’s armoury; the figure of the Transformer, sexually ambiguous, unashamedly camp, inviting his audience to take that endless walk on the wild side; and mightiest of all, the Rock & Roll Animal, Reed’s most durable creation, a reservoir of every dubious value enshrined in the holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Under this triple threat, the private Lou Reed - the creative writing graduate who won awards for his poetry, the novelist who forced his characters into lyrics rather than prose, the obsessive chronicler of the speech and scenarios of the New York streets - lay ignored. Throughout the Seventies, Reed was reviewed as a case history rather than an artist. The adopted saint of a generation of rock critics, Reed disappointed his would-be champions by resolutely refusing to conform to their expectations. We see public figures through the opaque glass of the media, and the Lou Reed of the Seventies was caricatured as a misfit, forever failing to live up to other people’s fantasies.

By 1979, Reed had regained some measure of control over his career and his personal life. Dark hints about his consumption of drugs and alcohol remained, however, and his sexuality - which had coloured his view of the world from the first Velvets’ album onwards - was now an open book. Reed confessed publicly that he was gay, that he had always been gay, and that his well-publicised attempts at heterosexual conformity had been predestined not to succeed. A little over a year later, Reed was married, a liaison that survives to this day. He disavowed drugs, abandoned alcohol after attending AA sessions, and severed his links with the rock media. After touring to promote the ‘Growing Up In Public’ album that summer, he announced that he would no longer perform onstage. His next record, the alternately bleak and tender ‘The Blue Mask’, unveiled an artist in absolute command of his gifts; to promote it, he stage-managed a series of press conferences whereby no-one could come too close.

During the Seventies, Reed had fashioned an anarchic, near-dependent relationship with the rock writer Lester Bangs: trading insults and double shots of Johnnie Walker Black, the couple fuelled a succession of bizarre confrontations which came close to dissolving the barrier between artist and admirer, and leaving both awash in a sea of alcohol and pills, mumbling incoherently at the ceiling. Bangs took the roller-coaster of excess to its final destination; Reed cut his ride short.

Cleaned-up, and remodelled as a trim, professorial figure, Lou gradually returned to the world, issuing a run of modest, calculated albums that presented their creator as a short story writer in song, offering vignettes of adult life from the perspective of the amused voyeur. Eventually, too, he returned to the road. Gone were the shambolic monologues, the grotesque parodies of drug abuse, the sense of a life on the line: in their place Reed substituted a tight, workmanlike formalism as carefully constructed as the rest of his new persona.

The contrast - the remaking of an enfant terrible into a respectable elder statesman of rock - was almost too dramatic to grasp. After fifteen years of public exhibitionism, the revived Reed was defiantly restrained. Yet his reconstituted stage personality allowed him to stake claim to the whole of his past. The archetypal voice of experience, he could perform ambiguous celebrations of drug addiction and transvestism with the distant air of the survivor. I was all these things, he seemed to say, and I have learned to outlive them.

At the end of the eighties, after three years of virtual artistic silence, Reed re-emerged with a pair of albums that set the seal on his new image. ‘New York’ was a conscious effort to make a grand statement about modern city life, slyly presented as a novel-in-music which lived up to all the pretensions of its advance billing. At the same time, Reed renewed a two-decades-dormant collaboration with John Cale, which produced a tribute - part mock-autobiography, part confessional regret - to their mentor, the artist Andy Warhol. ‘New York’ reclaimed the present, ‘Songs For Drella’ the past; suddenly Reed was being treated with the respect, and awe, due an artist who had fulfilled every hint of promise he had dangled in the public’s face over the previous twenty-five years.

The effect of the double impact of ‘New York’ and ‘Drella’ has been to revive Reed’s status as A Major Artist - albeit with a career reduced to a brief list of accepted masterpieces that runs from the first Velvet Underground album and parts of the second, through ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ and ‘Street Hassle’ in the seventies, to his most recent work.

What this simplified recap of his progress ignores is any sense of growth or decay, any notion of the organic nature of artistic creation. Many artists achieve greatness for a fleeting moment, and then spend a lifetime sweating to recapture a feeling that originally arose from grace rather than hard labour. Others, a far more select band, have greatness constantly within their grasp. Lou Reed belongs to the latter category, and the story of his three decades as a creative artist reveals a constant flight back and forth between success and failure, with each step into the unknown countered by the painful threat of losing the path.

But Reed is not only an artist: he is a performer who chose for a decade or more to make his life part of the performance. A former student of both journalism and acting, Reed has constantly been aware of the need to create an effective image, and to play the part with authenticity. Under strain from chemical abuse and the tangle of his personal relationships, he discovered in the mid-Seventies that the image-mask was almost impossible to dislodge. The New Man - sexually, artistically, visually at odds with its predecessor - is a creation that Reed has found much more easy to control.

Beneath the mask lies the artist; and much of this book is devoted to unveiling him, to tracing the history of his creativity, its sources and inspirations, the evidence which supports Reed’s claim to be a major American writer. But the mask itself is also worthy of study. Few popular figures have moulded as extreme a persona as Lou Reed between 1966 and 1980; fewer still have fallen so deeply under the spell of their own media manipulation. Reed’s transformation from sexual outlaw into contented husband is either one of the most dramatic conversions since Saul’s fateful encounter on the Damascus road; or it’s as subtle and convincing a piece of conjuring as any sleight of hand by Harry Houdini. In a way, the truth is irrelevant. What matters is the journey - the path from middle-class boyhood, through the wildest excesses of the rock circus, to the settled life of the American poet - and the way in which Reed has chronicled his progress.

ONE

IN JULY 1975, LOU REED ISSUED ‘Metal Machine Music’, his seventh album as a solo artist, and his first double set. Side one tripped the listener headlong into a sea of noise, a bewildering assault on the senses that at first made evaluation impossible. From the left speaker issued the incessant howl of overloaded amplifiers, bursting out a wall of feedback that dipped and soared in intensity. Over the top swirled a mass of ear-stretching treble sound - at one moment echoing the tormented wail of a wounded animal, at another cascading in a savage parody of a psychedelic trip. Slowly the frantic burbling of random notes took on a faint air of order, as the distant shape of exotic scales formed and just as quickly dissolved into mayhem.

From the right speaker, in delicate counterpoint, came a second wave of howling, interrupted by bursts of hiss as the machinery sprang desperately to life. The effect was like having your eardrums syringed while a pneumatic drill crunched through a metal surface beside you, and a flock of rabid seagulls swooped around your head.

After sixteen minutes the noise ceased. Turn the record over, and it began again - the musical Tower of Babel whirling ever faster, broken by shrill cries that belonged in some dark mingling of the torture chamber and the dentist’s surgery. And so it continued, across this side, and the whole of another record - two albums of unrelenting, vicious sound, the threatening soundtrack of electronic machines driven past their limits of control.

The artist who issued this record was at the commercial pinnacle of his career. Emerging from a year of camouflage, recuperating from the nervous exhaustion which had forced him to quit The Velvet Underground on the brink of some measure of success, he had found himself a cult figure, at last given credit for artistic developments which had originally been scorned. He capitalised on this sudden notoriety by writing a song which traded explicitly on his relationship with Andy Warhol’s avant-garde circus, and was duly rewarded with his first hit single. His new-found status as the poet of perversity - ‘The Phantom Of Rock’ was the cunning label applied by his record company - allowed him to follow through with a concept album that told a sorry tale of addiction, obsession and suicide. Then he toured America with a guitar-heavy band of sessionmen, churning out brash parodies of his Velvet Underground trademarks, and found that the public demanded two live albums documenting the experience. Between them, he manufactured ‘Sally Can’t Dance’, a sly mixture of self-mockery and frank confessional that was packaged like a soft porn mag and greeted as an exhibition of sleaze. For the first time in his life, Lou Reed was not only playing popular music but also enjoying real popularity.

Perhaps ‘enjoying’ was overstating the case, however. Outside the sales charts, Reed was showing every sign of self-destruction. Already renowned as the grim chronicler of drug addiction, Reed began to live out the grossest implications of his songs in real life. Onstage, he produced a syringe, pumped up a vein and proceeded to inject himself with drugs - or not, as it was difficult to see from the stalls. Either way, it didn’t really matter. Reed could scarcely tell the difference himself: observers noted that he stumbled incoherently across the stage, while in private he alternated between dark periods of silence and the incessant babbling of a mind beyond control. His once chubby features took on a deathly pallor; his limbs grew stick-like and weak; his hands shook; his left eye, always prone to laziness, veered alarmingly out of sync as if contemplating an existence of its own.

When it seemed as if his body could take no more, and his name was being prepared for the obituary columns, Reed began to put on weight. He toured Europe, was hit in the face by a brick during the first song of a performance in Rome, and was forced to abandon his next shows having apparently suffered a nervous collapse. Completing ‘Metal Machine Music’, he set out on another exhausting transcontinental trek, to be followed by a sweep across Europe as part of an ill-conceived multi-artist festival package.

In New Zealand, the wire broke, and Reed’s career tumbled to the ground. Physical inability had prevented him from completing his concert arrangements reported the Wellington Evening Post, Reed had a personal problem of such magnitude that he was unable to perform. Promoter Ron Blackmore elaborated: Reed had a very very personal problem that should never have damned well happened. It’s so personal and serious that I can’t even tell you about it off the record. If you could imagine what it is like to get a call from the other side of the world and be told that your mother was not only a drug addict but a hooker, and that she’d hooked some of your friends, then you might be able to understand how he was feeling.

Back in America, RCA Records released ‘Metal Machine Music’. It was subtitled ‘An Electronic Instrumental Composition’, albeit in type that was dwarfed by the picture which Reed had chosen for the front cover. It showed the artist frozen in awkward, distracted pose, his emaciated body clad in studded black leather, his hair bleached blond and cut severely to the shape of his head, his eyes as ever hidden beneath the insectile wrap of impenetrable shades. The shot echoed the cover of ‘Rock And Roll Animal’, the first of the overblown live albums that turned Reed into a superstar. And on the back the promise was explicit: framed by a single spotlight, Reed stood onstage, arms perched camply on hips, displaying a full set of darkly painted fingernails.

Maybe some of Reed’s stadium followers, having swilled beer and quaaludes to prepare themselves for the show, did follow these clues too strictly and delude themselves that they were buying another concert album. But it seems unlikely: no sooner was the record in the shops than the press reacted. ‘Metal Machine Music’ received universal derision - aside from the ever-loyal Lester Bangs, whose Creem review greeted it as the greatest album of all time. But people read Bangs as a humorist, not a guide, and everyone knew he worshipped at Reed’s feet. The rest of the media, depending on their attitude to Lou, treated it as a jest too far, or used it as an excuse to slice his reputation to shreds. Even the trade mag Billboard, always sympathetic to the lamest product in its efforts to boost commercial activity in the industry, was forced to admit: Recommended Cuts: None.

Not in business to finance failure, RCA began an exercise in damage limitation. The presses were halted; both the stereo and quadrophonic mixes of the album were effectively removed from distribution. In Britain, the album was cancelled. RCA imported a batch of unwanted American copies for the benefit of the curious and prurient; otherwise, as an RCA spokesman euphemistically put it, We’ll just let it wash through the system in a low-key way.

In New York, the Village Voice, forum of the artistic and radical communities, printed what was said to be a statement of regret from the artist: A lot of people may feel ripped off, Reed allegedly said, and I understand and apologise for this. But the damage was done: within weeks, Reed’s manager Dennis Katz, a staunch supporter throughout the troubled years of commercial success, terminated their relationship.

Strangely, Reed reacted to this tempest with apparent insouciance. Journalists expecting to be faced by a personality in the final stages of disintegration were startled to find the artist combative, confident, and anything but regretful. I didn’t apologise for it, he told Melody Maker’s Caroline Coon. If you read the apology - well, I don’t talk the way the apology was written. The apology the record company put out was meant for rock dealers.

In place of the apology came the apologia. I’ve got something here that I mean by heavy metal, he boasted. I had to wait a couple of years so I could get the equipment, now I’ve got it and it’s done. I could have sold it as electronic classical music, except that it’s heavy metal, no kidding around. The album was probably one of the best things I ever did… I find it very relaxing. And to Lester Bangs he explained how he had submitted the album to the head of RCA’s classical division: He loved it. He said we really must put it out. I said no way, because it seems hypocritical, like saying, the really smart, complicated stuff is over here in the classical bin; meanwhile, the shit rock and roll goes over here where the schmucks are. Bangs tracked down the elusive Red Seal man, by this time the former head of the label, and reported that he had viewed Reed as… not too well connected with reality. But I had to handle him with kid-gloves because he was an artist in whom the company had a long-term commitment. I couldn’t tell him it was just a bunch of shit.

By this stage, however, Reed was in full flight - boasting that each side of the album clocked in at precisely sixteen minutes and one second, to preserve its conceptual unity; crowing that the album contained frequencies that are dangerous… they’re illegal to put on a record; avowing, to anyone who dared to question the artistic content of the piece, that he had laced his feedback howl with the melodies of classic composers: There’s all kinds of symphonic rip-offs in there, running all through it, little pastoral parts, but they go by like - bap! in five seconds. Beethoven’s Fifth, or Mozart… The Glass Harp… Eroica. I used pretty obvious ones. But there’s about seventeen more going at the same time. It just depends which one you catch.

Suitably impressed, the writers proclaimed that they had followed Reed’s advice, and that maybe ‘Metal Machine Music’ was, after all, a piece of classical art. Well, maybe. It’s certainly true that within the frantic atonal gabble of noise, there were snatches of melody - some Eastern in flavour, some hinting at 1967 experimentalism like Pink Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’, and some, no doubt, replicating the more subtle cadences of the giants of serious German music.

The effect was strictly coincidental, however: throw enough random notes into the air, and the ear will want to translate some into recognisable tunes. The more notes are available for consideration, the more ‘difficult’ you can imagine this classical composition to be.

A more blatant source of inspiration was the world of the avant-garde, as Reed acknowledged to Lester Bangs: I’ve been thinking about doing it ever since I’ve been listening to LaMonte Young. I had also been listening to Xenakis a lot. Two names we’ll return to in a later chapter, and to whom Reed had been introduced by fellow Velvet John Cale. What Reed neglected to mention was that Cale had prefigured the ‘Metal Machine Music’ sound, with Lou’s aid, as early as 1965; while the impression of a myriad melodies fighting for attention had been achieved by that doyen of the avant-garde, John Cage, who overdubbed dozens of harpsichords playing different pieces simultaneously.

Reed’s assertion that each portion of his composition lasted for a second over sixteen minutes was equally shaky, as anyone with a stopwatch could determine. Three of the four sides do endure for something near to the announced time, but the fourth runs out of steam after less than fourteen minutes - though Reed did make sure that the needle drifted across the final millimetres of the record into a locked groove, which repeated the closing moments of hiss and distortion as long as the electricity supply was maintained.

In a conscious effort to present ‘Metal Machine Music’ as a single, unified composition, Reed not only left the individual sides untitled, but offered his own perverse parody of classical liner notes. His first piece of published prose for more than three years, the ‘Metal Machine Music’ ‘Notation’ was a remarkable combination of arrogance, bluster and inadvertent confessional. The prose was fractured and ungrammatical, full of clauses and phrases left marooned in mid-sentence, their meaning unclear. The subject shifted from Reed’s complaints about the tedium of most heavy metal, to the symmetrical genius of his creation, to pathetic puns on his own album titles, to incoherent babblings about the gap between drug professionals (like Reed himself, of course) and those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush. Besides constant reminders that No one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself… I love and adore it. I’m sorry, but not especially, if it turns you off… Most of you won’t like this, and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you. Reed cemented élitism in his final line, the classic boast of the amphetamine head: My week beats your year.

There were other overt drug references, albeit imprecise ones: "The agreement one makes with ‘speed’. As way of disclaimer, I am forced to say that the possible negative contra indications must be pointed out… hypertense people etc. possibility of epilepsy (petit mal), psychic motor disorders, etc., etc., etc." The front cover referred the record buyer to two handbooks of pharmaceutical medicine; the back displayed the chemical make-up of an amphetamine-based concoction.

Why would Reed so blatantly reveal that ‘Metal Machine Music’ was inspired as much by chemicals as by classical conceits? For the same reason, perhaps, as he allowed his brainchild to be packaged between photographs taken a year or so earlier, portraying an artist inevitably linked in the public eye with severe mental and physical disorders. Gradually, Reed began to let some of the answers slip. He hinted, for instance, that one impetus behind the project had been to break his managerial links with Dennis Katz. It was a giant fuck-you, he explained to Lester Bangs. A year later, caught off-guard at a Ramones CBGBs show by the correspondents of Punk magazine, Reed went a stage further: I put out ‘Metal Machine Music’ to clear the air and get rid of all those fucking assholes who show up at the show and yell ‘Vicious’ and ‘Walk On The Wild Side’.

By 1977, another piece of the puzzle had been uncovered; Reed told Allan Jones, It was all so BORING. Then along came ‘Metal Machine Music’. It was like a bomb. The idea was good in itself, but for the full impact you had to go through all the motions of execution. And finally, when the critics thought they had spotted the belated renaissance of Reed’s muse on ‘Street Hassle’, Lou let down another veil: There were rumours that I couldn’t stand tours because I was on dope and my mind was going. I put out ‘Metal Machine Music’ precisely to put a stop to all of it. It wasn’t ill-advised at all. It did what it was supposed to do.

To put a stop to all of it: that’s what motivated ‘Metal Machine Music’. Nine years earlier, Bob Dylan found himself locked into an enervating series of contractual commitments - one murderous tour after another, each one greeted by the seething rage of folk purists unable to think beyond the iconic status of Dylan’s acoustic guitar. After the tours loomed a TV spectacular, another album, a film, a novel, more tours - and then Dylan fell off his motorbike. He was dead, rumours suggested, or brain-damaged; finally, it was established that he had broken his neck. There was a motorbike crash; there was a neck injury; but the rest served Dylan with an appropriate excuse to break the headlong, amphetamine-fuelled progress of his career.

Reed entered 1975 a captive of his own careless image-mongering. Grown lazy and cynical on the easy fruits of success, he had succeeded in persuading the world that he was a drug-raddled fool; then, for precarious months, he tottered on the edge of confirming his own mythology. The New Zealand incident - the personal problem of such magnitude that he was unable to perform - was a hiccup in Reed’s relationship with his partner of several months, Rachel, who, rest assured, reappears later in our story. A night of separation merely confirmed Reed’s dependence; built into a full-blown psychodrama, it allowed him to slip out of the rest of his tour.

‘Metal Machine Music’ broke another section of the straitjacket. It effectively sabotaged Reed’s commercial standing, which was based on music which he hated, and which in one case - ‘Lou Reed Live’ - he had attempted to prevent being released. Yet at the same time it won him endless publicity, on his terms: anxious to watch Reed slip down for the third time, the press allowed him rein to lay waste to his image as the Rock & Roll Animal, and recreate himself as the champion of the avant-garde. Appalled by what he viewed as commercial misjudgement, manager Dennis Katz fled the sinking ship.

Meanwhile, Lou Reed had already begun work on ‘Coney Island Baby’, an album that demonstrated such artistic control that it was impossible to imagine its creator had ever relinquished the barest hold on reality.

Moreover, Reed, as a longterm admirer of LaMonte Young’s Dream Music, and a man of immense humour, particularly when aimed at the music industry, relished every agonising second of ‘Metal Machine Music’ - an album which does, after all, repay repeated listening without exploring any areas previously unknown to the avant-garde. The most commendable aspect of the entire project, however, was Reed’s very survival. He designed the album to deflate a myth, at the risk of ending his career. The myth dissolved, right on schedule, and the album merely added to another legend: that of Reed as an artist who lived every second of life to the extreme. Far from registering him for a mental institution, ‘Metal Machine Music’ left Reed ahead of the game, the master of media manipulation - free to pursue his real career aims, as a rival to William Shakespeare.

TWO

"My expectations are very high… to be the greatest writer that ever lived on God’s earth. In other words I’m talking about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky. I want to do that rock and roll thing that’s on the level of The Brothers Karamazov… starting to build up a body of work. I’m on the right track. I think I haven’t done badly. But I think I haven’t really scratched the surface. I think I’m just starting." (Lou Reed to Paul Morley, 1979)

"I always wanted to be a writer and I went to college to prepare myself for it. See, that’s where I’m coming from. If you have my interests and my kind of academic background, then what I’m doing is not really an unlikely thing to do." (Lou Reed, 1982)

LOU REED CHOSE TO WRITE IN THE rock tradition, which at the moment when he began his career with The Velvet Underground, in 1965, was teetering on the verge of broadening its horizons to take in some of the concerns and imagery of literature, art and film.

The popular song traditionally takes the form of an unsent letter - an outpouring of the heart too revealing and romantic to be exposed in everyday conversation, serving the same function as the message inside a greetings-card. On that level, maturity is measured by the wittiness of the song lyrics, with the faintly cynical tricks and turns of a Cole Porter attracting the greatest kudos. Rock and roll, as an artform aimed at working-class teenagers, reduced these conventions to their lowest common denominator: teen ballads stripped Porter’s arch asides down to a basic I love you/do you love me too, while the quintessential rock and roll song was Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’, a litany of jive talk topped by an exuberant wail of awopbopoloobopawopbamboom. Words were reduced to their ancient role as pure expressions of feeling: Little Richard’s cry meant nothing on the page, and everything in performance.

The exception, and it’s an all too familiar road for rock historians, was Chuck Berry