Reed played two sets that night at the elegant eleven-hundred-seat theater and told a reporter beforehand, “Did you know that both shows are sold out? That’s why I don’t give a fuck what the critics say. Fuck the critics.” Whether he gave a fuck or not, what the critics thought—and, even more, what the audience thought—mattered. This was Reed’s comeback concert, and the stakes were high. By the time of these shows, Reed had already pared back his wardrobe and his stage presentation. “Those who expected the fey Phantom in pancake that they saw on the album cover and in the posters are somewhat taken aback by the Lou Reed who walks out onto the stage at Alice Tully Hall,” Rolling Stone writer (and Reed buddy) Ed McCormack observed. “More than some campy forebear of glitter rock, he resembles a punk rocker of the early sixties in his skintight stage armor of macho black leather. When he seems to stagger as he fiddles with an amp, one begins to have grim forebodings about the outcome of this concert.”
According to McCormack, the first show was disappointing, and before the second one, Andy Warhol went backstage to encourage Reed. “Andy heard the news from the vultures in the lobby as soon as he walked in: the first show had gone badly; Lou’s timing was off; he seemed listless through the entire set, perhaps even slightly drunk,” McCormack wrote. But in the second set, Reed took the reins. “His presence is cool and benign,” McCormack wrote, “his movements spare. He does not camp it up or cavort daintily like David Bowie. He stands behind his guitar and sings; only at intervals does he break formation to remind us of his pansexuality with a subtle wave of the wrist or a less subtle dipping squat that is Chuck Berry–like but decidedly anal in the middle of his song called ‘Rock and Roll.’”
“For the most part he just steps up to the mic and sings with a Dylan-like dignity,” McCormack continued, “letting the songs create all the auras for him.” In the Village Voice, Richard Nusser was extravagant in his praise. Reed and his band, Nusser reported, played “the kind of rock and roll that stands up to anything being played in the world today, or, for that matter, anything that has gone before.”
Still, the Lincoln Center appearance fell short of the triumphant homecoming it was meant to be; this was hardly Reed’s post-Velvets claim to iconic solo stature. Among other issues, his past continued to haunt him. Regardless of the quality of the performances, the members of the jaded New York crowd that constituted the core of Reed’s following were too conscious of their own status to show too much enthusiasm about his return. McCormack described the postshow party at the stately Sherry-Netherland hotel as “funereal.” Steve Paul, a hip New York club owner, said, “This is the weirdest party I’ve ever seen. Everybody seems afraid to make a move, afraid of acting uncool or something.” Reed, wrote McCormack, was the “somnambulant heart” of the fete, “slumped in a period chair in his black leather S and M suit, sipping Scotch.” At one point, Reed turned to McCormack and, drawing a wry distinction between the reporter covering the event and his friend, said, “Someday in the near future, we’ll get together over a couple of Scotches and laugh about this whole scene.… Off the record, of course.”
ONCE TRANSFORMER CAME OUT, Bettye Kronstad was confident that Reed’s career was fully established, and in early January of 1973, just three weeks before the Lincoln Center shows, Reed and Kronstad married. Fred Heller, Reed’s manager at the time, arranged for a Catholic officiant to perform the ceremony; “In Fred’s mind, that was somewhere between being Presbyterian and Jewish,” Kronstad explained. They held their reception in their studio apartment on East Seventy-Eighth Street between First and York Avenues. In the pictures, she said, “he’s very happy and I’m really puzzled.”
Besides the wedding and the prospect of Reed’s commercial success, little had changed about their relationship. Reed’s drinking and drug use carried on, and Kronstad continued to have to shift through the roles of supportive wife, nursemaid, confidante, party partner, and collaborator. In addition, she was now a publicity tool. A secretary in the office of Reed’s manager assured one writer that “Lou’s a changed man. He’s really settled down since he married Betty [sic]. Like, he’s cut down on his drinking drastically and eats watercress sandwiches now. He’s got a great sense of humor—he tells Polish jokes, and one time I actually saw him tickling his wife. In public.”
In fact, behind that sales pitch, Reed’s dependence on Kronstad continued to be frightening. During an interview with Ed McCormack a week or so before the Lincoln Center shows, Reed drank Scotch and suddenly seemed “to sag. His chin drops down on his chest and his lids half close. Presently, he begins to nod out, and Betty [sic], his bride of two weeks, leads him inside and puts him to bed.” At around that time, an English magazine poll determined Reed to be the second most likely rock star to die prematurely. Keith Richards edged him out.
AMONG HIS OTHER EXTRACURRICULAR activities, Reed was a devoted patient of Dr. Robert Freymann, more casually known as “Dr. Feelgood,” a medical doctor on the Upper East Side whose amphetamine-laced vitamin B12 shots attracted an extraordinary clientele of celebrities (allegedly including Jackie Kennedy). Freymann was immortalized in the Beatles song “Doctor Robert” (“If you’re down he’ll pick you up”) on their 1966 album Revolver.
While Reed concealed much of his drug use, particularly anything that involved needles, from Kronstad, he eagerly turned her on to Freymann, perhaps because the setting of a standard medical practice in the posh environs of Park Avenue and Seventy-Eighth Street somehow made the doctor seem more respectable. Indeed, while Reed was sophisticated and obsessive enough about drugs to know exactly what he was getting from Freymann, he may well have believed that the hormones, vitamins, and other additives that the doctor used in his concoctions somehow made them “healthy.” It’s common for serious users to study their preferred drugs intently and, ironically, to use their knowledge to rationalize what any objective observer would perceive as obviously destructive behavior. Often a holistic context is created in which other “healthy” behaviors cancel out or even transform the negative effects of the drug use—along the lines of John Lennon using heroin and smoking relentlessly but adhering at times to a strict macrobiotic diet. Baited about shooting speed by Lester Bangs during one of their notoriously combative interviews, Reed, who was roaring drunk, responded, “I still do shoot it… My doctor gives it to me… Well, no, actually, they’re just shots of meth mixed with vitamins… Well, no, actually, they’re just vitamin C… injections.”
Regardless, Reed was a convert, and eventually Kronstad was, too.
“It was like going to see God,” she recalled, laughing. “You’d go through, like, four waiting rooms and finally you were in God’s office. Lou told me it was a vitamin shot, and I believed him. But… the doctor, who had a German accent, said to me the first time, ‘I vill make you feel like no man has ever made you feel.’ And he was right. Holy cow! So we went to get those shots, I think it was every Friday. It would be, like, eight o’clock in the morning and we’d take a cab over and be sitting on his doorstep, waiting for the office to open so that we could get that shot.
“After a while it occurred to me that there must be something in there other than vitamins. But they served their purpose. The kind of schedule that we were on—I think there were three tours around that time—there’s no human way that anybody could perform at that level, and you can’t just go to sleep. And there was one time when Lou was really ill; he was so sick he couldn’t perform. And those shots fixed it. They brought him back to health.”
Ever the enthusiast determined to share his excitement with others, Reed also dragged his writer friend Ed McCormack to Freymann’s office for what turned out to be, of all things, a legitimate medical visit. Looking like “death warmed over,” according to McCormack, Reed banged on his friend’s apartment door early one morning while it was still dark outside. McCormack hadn’t been feeling well but wouldn’t see a doctor, so Reed took matters into his own hands. “Let’s go… Get dressed,” Reed insisted. “I’ve got a
cab waiting downstairs, and I’m taking you to see my doctor.” When McCormack protested that it was too early, Reed shut him down: “Don’t worry about it. This guy gets in early. And he can cure anything—including cirrhosis—as long as you’re honest with him about your habits.” Rather than pump McCormack full of speed, however, Freymann took an X-ray, analyzed it, and discussed it with him. His conclusion, according to McCormack: “‘Your liver looks okay, but your bowel is slightly distended,’ he informed me in his guttural German accent. ‘You better go a little easy on the drinking.’” When McCormack attempted to pay, Freymann informed him that “Lou had already taken care of it.”
BECAUSE OF THE SUCCESS of Transformer, RCA was eager for a follow-up, and Reed felt the pressure. Speaking about “Walk on the Wild Side,” Reed had declared at one point, “That’s my masterpiece. That’s the one that will make them forget ‘Heroin,’” and yet he felt characteristically ambivalent about the prominence the song had brought him. How can you be an underground icon and have hits? How can you define the edge when you’ve been absorbed by the mainstream? “In the end,” Kronstad said, “he kind of resented the song. He resented the very song that made him popular, that pushed him over the edge.” Attempting to re-create “Walk on the Wild Side” was the last thing he wanted to do.
Not that it would have been possible. Given the credit that David Bowie was garnering in some quarters for Transformer—and the heat that Reed was taking for mimicking him—working with him again was out of the question. Not that Bowie would have been interested. The two men actually had a public brawl at a London club when Bowie said that Reed would have to clean up if Reed wanted to work with him again. It was time for a departure.
Reed and Dennis Katz, who took over managing Reed from Fred Heller, decided that Bob Ezrin was the man for the job. Explaining why Reed was moving on from Bowie, Katz declared, “Lou is out of the glitter thing. He really renounces it. He’s not interested in glam rock or glitter rock. Lou Reed is a rock and roller.” A twenty-three-year-old from Canada, Ezrin had risen to prominence when, barely in his twenties, he had coproduced Alice Cooper’s third album, Love It to Death, which included “I’m Eighteen,” the song that put Cooper on the commercial map. Ezrin had produced three other Cooper albums: Killer; School’s Out, which rose to number two on the album charts, with the title track a Top 10 single; and Billion Dollar Babies, a number one album in 1973.
While both Reed and Bowie viewed Alice Cooper as a shallow shock monger, a joke version of their own subversive personas, from a record company standpoint his producer was an ideal choice to work with Reed. From the industry perspective, the aesthetic differences among Bowie, Reed, and Cooper were meaningless. Broadly speaking, they were all working the same side of the street—bending gender categories and stunning conventional sensibilities with their cross-dressing, uproarious stage shows, and pushing-the-envelope lyrics. That Ezrin was a talented, ambitious producer was, if anybody even noticed, just icing on the cake. The idea was to transform Reed, like Alice Cooper, into a commercial juggernaut, and no one was better cut out for that task than wunderkind Bob Ezrin.
As far as Reed was concerned, Ezrin’s most significant credit might well have been producing the band Detroit, which was fronted by the powerhouse white R & B singer Mitch Ryder; the band’s eponymous 1971 album included a muscular version of the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll,” which had caught Reed’s ear in a positive way. In fact, when Ezrin dropped in on Reed’s sessions for Transformer at Trident Studios, Reed told him “it was his favorite version that had ever been done on one of his songs,” Ezrin remembered.
Much as he liked the texture and intelligence that Bowie and Ronson had brought to Transformer, Reed believed that the Velvets albums and his solo work lacked punch. Ezrin’s albums, in contrast, hit with real sonic power—Detroit’s “Rock and Roll” is crushing—and that’s what Reed wanted. For his part, Ezrin “fell in love” with Reed when he saw him perform at Massey Hall in Toronto. Not long afterward, Reed was sitting on the floor at Ezrin’s house, playing him some new songs on acoustic guitar. “I just found him blazingly smart and challenging and inspiring,” Ezrin said. “There was no question in my mind after spending fifteen minutes talking to him that I wanted to work with him.”
For the album, Ezrin drafted a crew of stellar musicians, including keyboardist Steve Winwood, bassist Jack Bruce of Cream, drummers Aynsley Dunbar and Procol Harum’s B. J. Wilson, and guitarists Steve Hunter (who played in Detroit) and Dick Wagner, both of whom had done sessions for Alice Cooper. Bassists Tony Levin and Eugene Martynec overdubbed parts later in New York. Ezrin played keyboards as well, and Reed played acoustic guitar. The impeccable pedigree of those players was a mark of Ezrin’s ambitions for Berlin.
But in many ways, Ezrin and Reed met each other while headed in opposite directions—or, perhaps more accurately, they saw opposite sets of possibilities in each other. If Reed viewed Ezrin as the man who could get him the sound he wanted and, as Rolling Stone put it, “do justice to his sledgehammer images,” Ezrin saw Reed as the vehicle through which he could realize his own literary and artistic ambitions. Ezrin had “always wanted to be a writer,” Rolling Stone observed, and he viewed Reed primarily through that lens. “Lou is the best living American writer at this point,” Ezrin declared. “He’s better than Dylan in many, many ways.” Perhaps infected by Ezrin’s enthusiasm, the author of that Rolling Stone piece, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, insisted, “It’s not an overstatement to say that Berlin will be the Sgt. Pepper of the seventies.”
That was not so much an overstatement as an absurdity, but it was typical of the inflated expectations and artificially charged energy that had been generated around Berlin. Industry cheerleader Billboard joined in on the hype, declaring Berlin “a top-notch set from one of the most creative artists on the pop music scene today.… A number of potential singles plus the Lou Reed style make this his most comprehensive LP yet.”
Though Reed would never credit the notion, this was the time when the concept album was coming into its full glory—that reference to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the inspiration for so many grandiose experiments to follow, was neither irrelevant nor accidental. Heavy metal and progressive rock were both in full flower (Ezrin, not coincidentally, would go on to coproduce Pink Floyd’s The Wall), and bands in both genres were drawn, in however adolescent a fashion, to grand metaphysical statements. FM radio, with its album-oriented format, was providing an outlet for more extended, exploratory tracks. Singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and Jackson Browne were writing albums of thematically unified songs that emulated short-story collections. Perhaps most important, Reed believed that, having made an actual hit record, he was finally in a position to do something truly ambitious.
With the expansive context of the concept album in mind, Reed and Ezrin began discussing what Reed might do beyond create another record of individual songs. Ezrin was drawn to the quiet drama of the song “Berlin” on Reed’s debut solo album.
IT SEEMS STRANGE THAT, of all Reed’s songs, he and Ezrin would have identified the dramatic possibilities inherent in “Berlin.” On the Lou Reed album the song plays like a sketch, filled with suggestive details but never really culminating in any satisfactory way. But perhaps it was the song’s unfinished quality that appealed to them, leaving space for them to fill with their fantasies of what it might become.
The two men decided that Reed should write a suite of musically and thematically connected songs based on the disintegrating marriage of the two characters in “Berlin.” That Reed’s own marriage to Bettye Kronstad was falling apart would only lend the project additional force. It would be something like a film in song form, a “film for the ear,” as RCA’s movie-style promotional posters for the album described it, or a “movie without pictures,” in Ezrin’s terms. Those literary and cinematic strategies also served to distance Reed from the visceral power of the material he was d
rawing on. “Berlin was real close to home,” he would say later. “People would say, ‘Lou, is that autobiographical?’… Jesus. Autobiographical? If only they knew!”
The working notion was for Berlin to be a double album, complete with an elaborate booklet filled with lyrics, accompanying text, and photographs illustrating the record’s grim story. Setting aside the darkness of Berlin’s narrative, record companies shiver whenever the notions of double albums and elaborate booklets are mentioned. They are expensive to produce, and therefore the album needs to be priced higher, which tends to diminish sales. Reed had only just established himself as a commercial artist, so this expansive concept for Berlin was by no means an easy sell to his label.
Besides that, according to Kronstad, conceiving what the album should be turned out to be much easier than writing it. “Lou had become abusive on our last U.S. tour, when I got him onto the stage as clean as I could.… He gave me a black eye the second time he hit me,” Kronstad wrote. “Then I gave him a black eye, too, and that stopped him from using his fists. Everybody knew he was abusive—abusive with his drinking, his drugs, his emotions—with me. He was incredibly self-destructive then.” The problem Reed had finishing the songs for the album, she sarcastically explained, “might have had something to do with all the fucking drugs and drinking he was doing. With Lou, people that he loves become part of him, so I got to be part of that incredible self-destructiveness.”
Things had gotten so bad that Kronstad flew to Santo Domingo to get a twenty-four-hour divorce from Reed. The legal standing of such a divorce is complicated, but Kronstad’s action is more significant as an indication of how desperate she had become in her marriage. She was frightened and she wanted out. Kronstad remained in their apartment, on which she held the lease, and Reed moved out. “I don’t know where,” she said. Then, one night, Reed called her from a local restaurant that had been one of their favorites, the Duck Joint, on First Avenue between Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth Streets. “He was, like, ‘Can you meet me here?’” Kronstad said. “I was in a pretty good mood because I’d basically gotten my name back and I was no longer legally attached to him. So I went. He was there with two other people; I don’t remember who they were. They were having a wonderful time, and he was so positive.… He said, ‘I’ve stopped. I’ve quit it. I won’t do that stuff. I’ll play it straight. We can do this. I need you. Can I just come over and talk about it?’” Kronstad let herself believe him. “I had invested a great deal of my life in him, so I guess there was a part of me that wanted to be convinced.”
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