Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  Even in high school, Reed led something of a double life. On the most superficial level, he attended classes, participated in athletics, and got passing grades. “I saw him practically every day in junior high and high school,” said Allan Hyman, who was on the high school’s track team with Reed and would go on to college with him. “He was regarded as kind of a quiet kid. He certainly wasn’t in the so-called in crowd, and neither was I. That wasn’t important to him. He didn’t care.” Along with his friend Richard Sigal, Reed took a summer job cleaning up the trash with a pointy stick at nearby Jones Beach. According to Sigal, Reed did not last long in that position.

  What Reed did think was important was music, writing, and sex. Speaking of his discovery of doo-wop, R & B, and rock and roll on the radio as a teenager in the fifties, Reed rhapsodized about “the dusky, musky, mellifluous, liquid sounds of rock and roll. The sounds of another life. The sounds of freedom. As Alan Freed pounded a telephone book and the honking sax of Big Al Sears seared the airwaves with his theme song, ‘Hand Clappin’,’ I sat staring at an indecipherable book on plane geometry, whose planes and angles would forever escape me. And I wanted to escape it, and the world of SAT tests, the College Boards, and leap immediately and eternally into the world of Shirley and Lee, the Diablos, the Paragons, the Jesters. Lillian Leach and the Mellows’ ‘Smoke from Your Cigarette.’ Alicia and the Rockaways’ ‘Why Can’t I Be Loved,’ a question that certainly occupied my teenage time. The lyrics sat in my head like Shakespearean sonnets with all the power of tragedy. ‘Gloria.’ ‘Why don’t you write me, darling / Send me a letter’—the Jacks. And then there was Dion. That great opening to ‘I Wonder Why’ engraved in my skull forever. Dion, whose voice was unlike any other I had heard before. Dion could do all the turns, stretch those syllables so effortlessly, soar so high he could reach the sky and dance there among the stars forever. What a voice that had absorbed and transmogrified all these influences into his own soul as the wine turns into blood.” His favorite doo-wop songs, Reed later said, “made me believe that I could write a song.”

  REED’S OBSESSION WITH ROCK and roll in high school led him to the guitar. He found a teacher and went for one lesson, during which he demanded to learn only four basic chords that would carry him through most of the songs that he wanted to play. He organized bands for school talent shows, and, along with friends like Richard Sigal, on guitar, and Allan Hyman, on drums, started playing local gigs. Reed drafted Judy Titus to join him, Sigal, and another Freeport High student for a performance at the school’s talent show. “I was looking for an opportunity to be part of the variety show, so it just fell into place,” Judy November said. “We rehearsed, and it went over pretty well. Lou was the orchestrator of our event, but he wasn’t a dictator about it at all.” Reed also performed at the school with a friend named Alan Walters and a singer named Phil Harris, who was one of Reed’s classmates. “We were in many of the same classes together, and quite a few times we went over to his house to hang out,” Harris recalled. “We were both interested in music and most of the ‘in’ bands and groups of the time.” Reed, Walters, and Harris performed a Little Richard act, and Harris, who sang lead, remarked in 2008 that he was “still hoarse to this day.” Reed and Walters sang backup and Reed played guitar. The performance was successful enough that the trio decided to see if they could come up with some material of their own. They got together at Reed’s house and generated two midtempo doo-wop songs: “Leave Her for Me” and “So Blue.” One inspiration for their songwriting was a neighbor who had heard their performance at Freeport High; he mentioned that he had a contact in the music industry and asked if they would mind performing some of their original songs for him. Once he heard the songs, he put Reed and his friends in touch with Bob Shad, who was an A&R man for Mercury Records and was about to launch his own label, called Time.

  Shad liked what he heard and signed the group, which had been calling itself the Shades, to his label. It was an all-too-typical arrangement for young bands at that time. “I used to ask Bob Shad how we were going to get paid from record sales,” Harris recalled, “and what I got for an answer was not to worry about the business end of the deal.” As teenagers and high school students, they felt that they were in no position to push matters any further. Shad brought the group into the studio, and arranged for an additional singer to fill out the background vocals with Reed and Walters. Incredibly, Shad also lined up the torrid sax player King Curtis and famed R & B guitarist Mickey Baker to play on the record. The songs are unremarkable by the standards of the radio hits of the time, but not bad at all for kids, and Curtis’s playing is vivid at every moment. As for the songwriting, “Leave Her for Me” was credited to “Lewis Reed,” and “So Blue” to Reed and Harris. In an early reflection of Reed’s style sense, the group would perform in dark sunglasses—hence the Shades. Shad, however, was concerned that both the sunglasses and the name would get them confused with other bands, so, with inadvertent wit, the group renamed itself the Jades. They likely were thinking of the gem, though, as a budding litterateur, Reed might well have been aware of the word’s historical use to describe sexually disreputable women, a usage that comes down to us in the term “jaded.”

  “Leave Her for Me” achieved its moment of glory when it was played on the Swingin’ Soiree, a show hosted by the legendary New York disc jockey Murray Kaufman, universally known as Murray the K, on 1010 WINS, then one of the most important rock stations in the country. To Reed’s immense disappointment, it was not Kaufman, who had taken that night off, but a substitute DJ who played it. (The band later lip-synched the song at a Long Island dance party at which Kaufman made a brief personal appearance.) The two-sided single also appeared in jukeboxes on Long Island. Reed would later claim that he received a royalty check for seventy-eight cents, prompting Phil Harris to joke that Reed owed him a third of that for his songwriting contribution. The Jades also took their show on the road. “We played openings of shopping malls and other events after the release of the ‘So Blue’ record,” Harris said. “We played in bars and other such establishments and anywhere where people would listen. Sometimes they did, and sometimes not. The outfits we wore were classics of the fifties. Shades, peg pants, string ties, and jackets with glitter on them.” After “So Blue,” Shad invited Harris to record some other songs for him. Notably, the other Jades were not included in that invitation. Reed, however, recorded other tracks for Shad in 1962, including the teen-pop confections “Your Love” and “Merry Go Round,” neither of which found much success. Reed’s brush with exposure, however, encouraged him to continue to try to place his songs. “I used to go up to Harlem,” he recalled. “I met this guy, Leroy Kirkland, who was the arranger for the orchestra at the Alan Freed rock-and-roll shows. I’d go with him to get the Harptones or somebody to record one of my little songs. Isn’t that a thing of fantasy?”

  Reed did not limit his performances to the Jades. “We started a garage band dubbed the Valets by Lou,” Richard Sigal said. “I never liked the name, but Lou was the leader.” Along with Sigal, whom Reed taught to play guitar, Allan Hyman played drums and Bobby Futterman, a cousin of Lou’s who lived in a nearby Long Island town, played bass and guitar. Jerry Jackson, an African American football star at Freeport High, also performed with the Valets, as a singer. “Jerry had a good voice, and he would sing lead on some songs,” Sigal recalled. “Lou always said to me, ‘You have the sweet voice,’ so he wanted me to do the slow songs. I sang ‘Castle in the Sky’ by the Bop-Chords. I would do the doo-wop songs, and Lou would do the fast, gravelly ones. He always liked ‘Bony Moronie.’ We played parties, the beach clubs and bars along the strip on the south shore of Long Island. You never knew if you were going to get paid or not with the Valets; sometimes our pay was dinner, a plate of spaghetti. We played private birthday parties at people’s houses, where the neighbors would call the cops, and they’d come and tell us to turn it down. We always played loud.” The Valets followed a standard routine: “T
hree fast songs and one slow song, especially if you wanted to get people out dancing. Sometimes you’d go to a dance where the boys would be on one side of the room and the girls on the other. So we’d start with a slow song and they’d always dance to that. Then you’d lead in with a fast song. That was the format.”

  “Lou was starting to become enthusiastic about music,” Allan Hyman said of his high school friend, “and he started taking it a lot more seriously than I did at the time.” Sigal recalled Hyman missing Reed’s cue to end a song one night. “Allan was banging away on his drums and he’s looking up at the ceiling and he’s got his eyes closed. Lou reached over and rapped Allan on the head with his knuckles hard enough for me to hear. Allan looked startled and Lou just gave him a glower and we wrapped up the song. I guess that’s sort of indicative of how Lou dealt with a lot of people in his bands over the years.”

  IN ROCK AND ROLL, Reed discovered a yearning and lyricism that complemented the rawer truths he was encountering in the literature he was reading. Sex, of course, suffused both of those aesthetic pursuits. As Reed and his high school buddies began to explore their sexuality, as all adolescents do, he followed his own path. “As we got older in high school, we started to become interested in girls,” Hyman recalled. “His view was always different from the view that most of us took toward girls. Completely different. I’m not aware that he ever dated anyone seriously in high school.”

  While it was typical for Hyman and the other boys in Reed’s crowd to find girls to go steady with, Reed took another approach. “We all had long-term girlfriends. Like, for months on end, or a year, we would be going steady,” Richard Sigal said. “Lou never did. All of a sudden he would show up with these girls. They were all sluts. I had no idea where he found them. He didn’t do traditional things, like take them to the movies and then to the ice-cream parlor. Lou once told me, ‘I like girls with black hearts.’ I think that’s telling.” Sigal recalled Reed recounting a visit from one such black-hearted girl. “Once I was over in the den at his house, and he was on the phone with some girl,” Sigal said. “I guess his parents had gone away and he had had this girl over the night before. He started speaking angrily to her about the fact that she had given him a blow job and when he came in her mouth she ran into the kitchen and spit it into the sink. He said, ‘You spit that all over my dishes!’ That’s classic Lou. I don’t know if it was mock anger and he was trying to impress me. I was just shaking my head.”

  Allan Hyman had a sense of where Reed found some of his girls. “There was a radio station in Freeport called WGBB, and you could call in and make dedications,” he said. “There were so many people trying to call that the line was always busy. But between busy signals you could actually have a conversation with the other people waiting. There may have been dozens of people waiting to get through, but you could speak to a girl and get her phone number. Lou met a girl in Merrick that way. This was before we could drive, so she eventually took a bus or train to Freeport, and Lou took her to the Grove Theater on Merrick Road for an afternoon matinee. They sat in the balcony and Lou was making out with her with his hand under her sweater. I couldn’t imagine anything more outrageous! But they had matrons with flashlights in theaters in those days, and one of them saw what was going on, and told them to knock it off. Lou told the matron to go fuck herself, and she called the manager, who escorted them out of the theater.”

  When Reed grew tired of his friend from Merrick, he passed her along to Hyman, an early manifestation of his fluid sexual boundaries. She was the first person who ever offered Hyman marijuana, which was still very much a forbidden drug in the fifties. (“Are you addicted to those?” he asked her when she fired up a joint. “She started laughing.”) “I literally learned about sex from this girl, and Lou was the one who found her first,” Hyman said. Hyman’s prom date was another of Reed’s finds from Merrick. In Hyman’s senior yearbook, Reed wrote, “Let me know how you do with Gots,” using a nickname they had come up with for the girl. On prom night, Hyman was driving and his date was in the front seat, while Reed was energetically making out with his date, a girl from East Meadow, in the back seat. When Gots expressed outrage at Reed’s shenanigans with his date and refused Hyman’s overtures, Hyman grew angry. They drove to the Rockville Center Oasis Diner after the prom. Afterward, Hyman drove away with Reed and his date, leaving Gots at the diner. Reed, perhaps recalling his own escapades with Gots, halted his activities in the back seat to urge Hyman to reconsider. “You’ve got to go back and pick her up,” Reed told him. “You can’t leave her there.” At three or four in the morning, Gots agreed to have sex with Hyman. “Finally,” Reed remarked from the back seat. A Freeport policeman on patrol interrupted their tryst, however, so Hyman’s plans were foiled. “Lou was in the back seat, hysterical,” Hyman recalled.

  By contemporary standards, such adventures seem relatively innocent—and they were. “We didn’t get a lot of sex in the fifties,” Hyman explained. “It was a different time. Most of the people I knew were fairly conservative in that regard.” But Reed moved well beyond the adolescent boy-girl dramas that preoccupied his friends. “Lou’s view started becoming increasingly bizarre,” Hyman said. “It became more bizarre in his poetry, and his writing generally took on what would be described today as a gay tone, if you will. He started talking about having relationships with men, which I found amazingly rebellious at the time. That’s the only way I could describe it. It wasn’t that I viewed it as being bad. It just seemed so foreign.”

  Hyman noted that a number of boys in their school were overtly “effeminate”; they appeared gay—or “queer,” in the nomenclature of that time (and, ironically, of our time as well)—and it eventually turned out that they were. Reed, however, was not one of them. “He was always interested in girls—always,” Hyman said. “So when he started showing me the poetry and the writings, I found it confusing. And they were always bizarre stories. Like he would write about meeting a guy in a men’s room and having sex with him in one of the stalls, describing it in great detail. Now, maybe he was doing that and just never talked about it, but this was in high school. I viewed it as Lou being outrageous, being provocative. Maybe he was taking it from books.” Indeed, the men’s room scene Hyman described was something of a trope in the literature Reed was likely reading, not to mention in some people’s real lives. Walter Jenkins, a trusted aide of President Lyndon Johnson, and, in England, Brian Epstein, before he managed the Beatles, were just two of the prominent men who were arrested for sexual activity in public men’s rooms in that era. In Greenwich Village, the men’s room at, of all places, the Howard Johnson’s at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was a noted cruising site, largely due to the diner’s proximity to Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue, both gay hot spots. When Hyman asked Reed about such scenes in his writing, Reed responded, “Haven’t you ever had thoughts that were different? Didn’t you ever think about stuff like this? What about fantasies?” When Hyman said that in fact he hadn’t indulged in such fantasies, Reed just shrugged. “This is life,” he said. “This is what people think about.”

  But Reed may well have been doing more than reading about such activities. “We all knew everything about one another,” said Richard Sigal about the group of male friends that he and Reed were part of, “but Lou had a secret life that I still don’t know a lot about. One part of that was, he was buying weed somewhere. Where? I hadn’t a clue. In those days, I wouldn’t have known where to begin to find dope.” Another part of that secret life took place at the Hay Loft, a gay bar in Baldwin, Long Island, not far from Freeport. The Hay Loft catered to a young gay and lesbian crowd. Hofstra College, for one thing, was not far away. (One habitué of the Hay Loft was James Slattery, a resident of Massapequa Park who would later transform into the Warhol film star Candy Darling and earn a prominent mention in “Walk on the Wild Side.”) The bar featured music, and Reed would occasionally perform there. Richard Sigal remembered Reed describing the Hay Loft s
cene to him: “Lou said that sometimes the patrons there would grab his ass or his crotch. I asked him what he did when that happened, thinking that he would probably deck somebody. He said he just laughed. I was pretty naive at the time and it never occurred to me that he might have enjoyed or encouraged it.”

  Eventually, Reed started bringing his straight friends there, as he would do in later years with the after-hours clubs he frequented in downtown Manhattan. Allan Hyman was one such visitor. “It was very shocking,” Hyman recalled. “I didn’t really get it. The crowd was very young, just a little older than us. You only had to be eighteen to drink in those days, but you could get phony proof when you were fifteen and get served almost anywhere. Lou obviously knew some of the people there.” Reed also brought Hyman to a gay bar he frequented in Oceanside.

  Reed eventually began, in Hyman’s terms, to “display an effeminate attitude. Instead of being an average teenage kid. It was almost as if he was putting it on, like it was just for shock value, but I don’t think he acted that way around people he wasn’t comfortable with. One of the things about my relationship with him is that he liked to shock me. He liked to say really provocative things and see what my reaction would be.” Richard Sigal remarked, “Lou was an experimenter. He experimented with his sex life. He experimented with drugs and alcohol. He experimented with his music. There was a unique fabric that enveloped all those areas of his life, that tied him together, and made him a unique person.”