Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  As always when it came to Reed and women, Kronstad’s resistance to his pursuit only intensified his desire. He kept calling, and finally she called him back. “He said, ‘Look, I want to see you before you leave,’” she said. “He assumed that, out of everybody else I knew, I would want to see him. The arrogance of that guy! Now, from a woman’s point of view, there is a kind of charm to that kind of audacity. It’s almost humorous.” Still, she decided not to see him. But while she was in Paris, she picked up an English-language newspaper that happened to include an article about the Velvet Underground that praised Reed for his groundbreaking writing. “I was thinking, ‘This is that guy I met—that’s Lou,’” she recalled. “I’m trying to put this together with the drunk guy who smacked my ass.” They began dating when she returned to the United States.

  After Reed moved back in with his parents, he spent many weekends with Kronstad at her student apartment near Columbia, but at least one weekend a month she would come out and stay with him and his parents in Freeport, spending time at the private club they belonged to. Reed had equipment set up in his room, and he would work on his songs, often asking Kronstad, who he said had the voice of a “choirboy,” to sing for him. When they were on Long Island, Kronstad fell in easily with his family life, more easily than Reed did himself. “His parents loved me,” she said. “Minimum requirement: I was a girl. I was not a boy. They were a little concerned about that.”

  Kronstad said that Reed “hated working with his father” and that the relationship between the two men was strained. “There was a distance, a kind of formality to it,” she said. “I know Lou felt like he disappointed his father because he wasn’t going to take over his father’s accounting firm. I actually think the conflict was more with Lou than it was with Sid. Sid clearly loved his son.” Reed had told Kronstad about the electric shock treatments, and she gave his parents the benefit of the doubt: “I’m sure they did it because they were told it was the right thing to do, that it was in his best interests. These are not people who in any way whatsoever were trying to hurt him.” Still, she saw that the incident had taken a serious toll on Reed’s relationship with his parents. “It was an awful experience for him, and he was bitter about it. I think Sid knew that, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. And I don’t think Sid actually believed that he was guilty of anything, because he was trying to do the right thing. But Lou never did forgive them for that, and, as far as he was concerned, they owed him something from that point on.”

  Kronstad left Columbia and began to pursue a career as an actress, and she and Reed took a studio apartment together on the Upper East Side. Reed’s drinking continued unabated, and, though Kronstad was unaware of it, his drug use did as well. As often was the case with Reed and the women in his life, his feelings about Kronstad veered between extremes. Part of him idealized her as a beautiful, innocent girl from the country, unsullied by New York cynicism and outrageousness. Another part of him resented her naïveté and wanted to strip that very quality from her—much the way he had nastily shown off the bleach-blonde Shelley Albin to his parents. For Reed, the lure of innocence was always the exquisite possibility of violation. “Lou would tell me how much he loved Bettye and get almost mawkishly sentimental,” Reed’s friend Ed McCormack said. “He’d go on about how he loved her because she wasn’t hip. He’d say, ‘Most of the people I know are like the scum of the earth in a way, and I sometimes think that’s me, too, that that’s what I’m like. But I believe in fairy-tale princesses.’ Then the next time I’d see him, it would all be about ‘that bitch, man. What a bitch she turned out to be. She had some of her square-ass friends over the other night, and she took my gay magazines off the coffee table.’ Meanwhile, the last time, she was an angel, a princess.”

  Like many people, McCormack saw a performative element to Reed’s gay desires. “He was unsure about his sexuality, and to some degree he wanted to get even with his parents for the shock treatments they’d given him,” McCormack said. “There was a deeply conventional part of him that was very real. I think his parents were very disappointing to him. They didn’t turn out right, you know? He longed for them a little bit. He was supposed to be a nice Jewish boy. My feeling was that he had learned from Warhol the art of asexuality. He just didn’t seem that interested in it. He seemed more interested in drugs than anything else—drugs and Scotch. Whatever made him feel better. In some ways, he was one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known. He was not a happy man.”

  BOTH REED AND MCCORMACK, to varying degrees, were part of a social scene centered on the Upper West Side apartment of Richard and Lisa Robinson. Record companies, radio stations, and publishing companies were all striving to keep up with the dramatic changes that had reshaped popular music since the midsixties. As often is true in times of change, the people running things were older and, for the most part, out of it. The more discerning ones could see that something important was going on and that they needed people closer to the action to help them address the transformations taking place. For smart, alert, and ambitious young people like the Robinsons, opportunities abounded. Richard wrote about music, hosted a radio show on one of New York’s premier rock stations, and worked at a record label. Lisa, who started out doing office work for him, soon followed his path, becoming, in the process, one of the best-known and most in-the-know music writers in the country, a status she retains to this day. The couple married not long after they met, and they surrounded themselves with like-minded friends who were also avid music fans eager to make an impact on the media that surrounded the music.

  As something like the poet laureate of the New York underground music scene, Reed was a frequent guest at the Robinsons’ soirees. They dubbed their informal group Collective Conscience, and according to Lenny Kaye, “there was some thought about going to corporations and advising them, trying to hip ’em up.” Kaye lived with the Robinsons for three months and worked with them on their various projects. Their apartment was on Eighty-Second Street, between Columbus and Central Park West, “in an old Upper West Side building,” said Kaye, “and it was one of those apartments that you could actually have more than five people in at a time. It had bedrooms, a small room they used as an office, a dining room. Richard was a mover and shaker—he had his hands in about six different media things. Conflict of interest was rife, but we really liked cheerleading for the groups that we supported. Lou felt like he was not only a part of it, but very much respected by it. I think he felt that the people there cared about him and what he did. When he had gone home to Long Island, I’m not sure he realized how much people did care.”

  “When Lou would come into the city, Lisa would have us over for that salon she had,” Kronstad remembered. “Like everybody else, I would be sitting in an adoring circle around Lou, except I lived with him. Lou would be drinking, and everyone just adored whatever pearls of wisdom came out of his mouth. Lisa adored Lou—anything for him.” Unfortunately, the crowd at the Robinsons’ gatherings did not hold Kronstad in the same high regard. Generally speaking, they saw themselves as a kind of cultural vanguard, cool insiders with hip tastes and an eye-rolling attitude toward more conventional types. Kronstad did not share either their cultural acumen or their pretensions, but her relationship with Reed granted her a status that would otherwise never have been available to her, had she even wanted it. That she was young and conventionally beautiful can’t possibly have helped. Consequently, the Robinson crew’s attitude toward her typically ranged from barely polite tolerance to outright condescension. “We made fun of her,” said Danny Fields. “We were merciless. We called her ‘the cocktail waitress.’ It was like, ‘How did you get stuck with this person?’” Reed himself would privately reassure her, but at times he shared their contempt.

  THE MOST SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT that emerged from the Collective Conscience meetings was that Richard Robinson, who had become a staff producer for RCA, helped arrange for Reed to sign to the label, the genuine launch of his solo c
areer. As dramatic as Reed’s departure was from the Velvet Underground, only fifteen months passed between the last gig he played with the band and the announcement of the RCA deal in November of 1971. Reed had a stack of unrecorded songs from his VU days, and he had continued to write new material. Robinson, who would produce the new album, worked closely with Reed in getting the songs in shape for recording. Even though the Velvets had never broken through commercially, they had steadily gathered enough attention to make Reed a cult figure of some renown. Indeed, the Velvets’ own cult status was such that Reed and everyone around him thought it best to keep expectations for the album in check. “It’s just making a rock-and-roll album,” Reed said at the time, continuing his strategy since the Velvets’ third album of downplaying his avant-garde ambitions and signaling a turn to the mainstream. Reed and Robinson decided to record the album in London, probably another effort to minimize comparisons to the Velvets and avoid whatever media buildup the scuttlebutt about Lou Reed being back in the studio might have engendered.

  The care taken to pry Reed free from his Velvets history makes his sudden decision to do a one-off concert with Nico and John Cale in Paris, just as his solo album was being showcased to the media, seem even more bizarre. Media being as limited as it was at the time, it was unlikely that a concert in Paris would come to the attention of rock fans in New York, or even in London. Still, it inevitably raised the prospect of a Velvets reunion for anyone who heard about it. For an event as momentous as it seems from a contemporary vantage, the show, at the Bataclan theater on January 29, 1972, came together quite casually. Cale was working in London on a project of his own, and Reed simply invited him and Nico to perform with him. At that point, the interactions among the three of them, both in rehearsal and onstage, were, while not cuddly, cordial, even friendly. Clearly, no one wanted to rock the boat. As for the performance, it was riveting, something like a Velvet Underground Unplugged, decades before such a notion would have any currency. Listening to the performance, you can feel the intensity of the sold-out crowd of about a thousand people, and, imperfect though they were, the acoustic performances (Reed on guitar; Cale on viola, piano, and guitar; Nico on harmonium) capture both the delicacy and conceptual force of the Velvets. The three musicians share the spotlight as the set moves through Velvet Underground favorites (“I’m Waiting for the Man,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror”) and solo work. Reed performed two songs (“Berlin,” “Wild Child”) that would appear on his forthcoming solo debut. Everyone seemed happy with the performances, and more joint appearances were rumored, though none actually took place. The Bataclan show was Reed’s last performance with Nico.

  REED’S FIRST SOLO ALBUM, simply titled Lou Reed, as if to reintroduce him to a waiting world, was released in May of 1972. Recorded with a crew of top English musicians, including, most peculiarly, guitarist Steve Howe and keyboardist Rick Wakeman of Yes, the album primarily consisted of songs Reed had previously recorded or played live with the Velvet Underground, including “I Can’t Stand It,” “Ocean,” and “Lisa Says.” The new versions are not bad, but they seem hesitant and a bit haunted, as if Reed himself couldn’t escape the legacy of his former band. The players are fine, but they have no instinctive feel for the material. Their parts are executed, not organic. As a singer, Reed had not yet discovered his post-Velvets voice. Amazingly for him, he sounds indistinctive. That’s true of the production and arrangements as well. Moments like the signature guitar part of “Walk and Talk It,” which blatantly lifts the indelible riff from the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” are typical—and uncharacteristic of anything else Reed had ever done or would do. Overall, the album sounds strangely anonymous.

  Reed went through the motions of trying to sell the album while also trying to manage people’s expectations. “This is the closest realization to what I hear in my head that I’ve ever done,” he said. “It’s a real rock-and-roll album, and my direction has always been rock and roll. I see it as a life force. I don’t think anybody who has been following my stuff is going to be surprised by what I’ve done with this new album, and I think the general audience will find it more accessible.” Meanwhile, in their reporting and reviews, you could feel Reed’s coterie of rock critic supporters struggling to make the album what they wished it had been. New York–based rock writer Lillian Roxon heard the album at a London listening party hosted by Richard Robinson, and wrote, “Back in London, the consensus is that the album is beautiful. It’s not a Velvets album, of course, but it is Lou Reed. You can dance to it and fall in love to it, and you will certainly buy it for someone you are crazy about. So what Lou Reed has done, if you want to know, is to make being fourteen beautiful again, even for twenty-seven-year-olds. Is that a crime?” In his review for Phonograph Record, Greg Shaw said what others were probably thinking: “How successful is an album that keeps you imagining what it would sound like with the rest of the guy’s former group? I think that’s what it all boils down to.”

  Defining a pattern he would follow throughout his solo career, Reed soon pivoted from describing the album as the best he’d ever done to effectively disowning it. “There’s just too many things wrong with it,” he told Mick Rock in Rolling Stone before the end of the year. “I was in dandy form, and so was everyone else. I’m just aware of all the things that are missing and all the things that shouldn’t have been there.” Unfortunately, the “general audience” that Reed had hoped to court agreed. Lou Reed barely edged into the Billboard Top 200, and then disappeared.

  7

  TRANSFORMER

  WHILE THE LOU REED album failed to break Reed commercially in the way he would have desired—or as his fans expected—it nonetheless established him as an active solo artist and brought him back into the public consciousness. Indeed, he had come up from underground and taken his place in the present once again. The challenge now was to transform himself, to come up with the next incarnation of Lou Reed.

  The Velvet Underground may have been a commercial failure, but the band’s cultural role could not have been more profound. “I’ve not been particularly good at having my note be what the world’s note was at the time,” Reed said. “With the Velvets the world’s note was ‘flower power,’ and mine was the opposite.” That oppositional role, however, was essential to the band’s appeal and credibility. Not only was the music revolutionary, but supporters could bathe in the coolness that their regard for the band conferred on them.

  That was far less true of Lou Reed, and not just because of issues with the album’s production or Reed’s reliance on older material. While he carried a legacy with him, Reed needed to create a new definition of himself that was suited to a new musical era. The straight-ahead rock and roll that for the most part characterized the Lou Reed album had gone woefully out of fashion. Harder, noisier rock styles had emerged—Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, even a band like the Stooges, which would have literally been inconceivable without the Velvet Underground. On a quieter front, singer-songwriters, taking their cues from the softer side of Bob Dylan, had begun exploring more personal, autobiographical subjects. (Jackson Browne, who had been Nico’s lover and accompanist for a time, would soon emerge as a defining figure on that scene.) Progressive rock bands were pursuing the sonic and thematic possibilities the Beatles had opened up with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and later abandoned.

  At first glance, Reed would seem to have little in common with the singer-songwriters, but he himself had started out, as John Cale put it, as something of a folkie. The candor of the singer-songwriters about their complicated love lives and drug and emotional problems was not far out of keeping with Reed’s characterizations of the denizens of the demimonde as he had described them in his songs with the Velvet Underground. James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” after all, was a song about a girl who had been in a mental institution and killed herself. “I been in and out of mental institutions, strung out on drugs, and living with friends for the past five years,” Taylor told the New York Times
in 1971.

  But more important, from the perspective of Lou Reed: it suddenly seemed possible that the oppositional stance the Velvet Underground had taken might no longer be necessary. The edge, it turned out, had moved into the mainstream. The Velvets may have shattered, but their long-term impact was just beginning to be felt, particularly in England, where Reed had been spending so much time, and where the Warhol world of drag queens, ingenues, ironic superstars, and clever conceptual art was far more congenial to the British sensibility than to mainstream Americans. The release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars a couple of months after the Lou Reed album had made David Bowie a vanguard figure in the rock world, and of course he viewed the Velvet Underground as an essential influence, as determinative to him as Chuck Berry had been to the Rolling Stones.

  Beyond Bowie’s individual success, his rise indicated that a critical tonal shift had taken place in rock and roll, a shift that proved aesthetically welcoming to Reed. However much gender-bending had taken place in sixties rock, the music still rested squarely on the assumption of heterosexuality. Even Mick Jagger, who pushed homoerotic posturing as far as it could possibly go with a hugely commercial band, was perceived as a seducer and a womanizer, fronting a band whose swagger and music found its sources in such hypermasculine blues figures as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. (In contrast, the Velvets “had a rule: no blues licks.… I wasn’t trying to be a blues guitar player and play funky licks,” Reed once said.) But the sexual revolution that had begun in the sixties took on real momentum as that decade ended and the seventies rolled in. Me Decade indulgence stripped sex of ideology and made it just about doing whatever felt good. Suddenly, it wasn’t just hippies, college students, and cultural provocateurs who were overthrowing traditional sexual values, but secretaries, accountants, and schoolteachers as well.