Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  But even when Reed finally did complete writing the album’s ten songs, things didn’t get easier. “I remember the morning I woke up and found Lewis in the living room next to a mostly consumed bottle of Johnnie Walker Red,” she wrote. “It was eight thirty in the morning and I became upset. His drinking didn’t usually begin until at least the afternoon.” Reed explained that he had completed writing the album. He handed her his notebook with the lyrics in it, picked up a guitar, and sang the songs he had written.

  The songs on Berlin trace the disintegration of a couple, Caroline and Jim, through infidelity, violence, and suicide. Caroline is portrayed as unfaithful and promiscuous; Jim swings from yearning for her to icy contempt and malevolence. He beats her and, in the song “The Bed,” describes her cutting her wrists and her subsequent death with a truly eerie detachment. The album is tough going for even the most aesthetically objective listener. For Kronstad, listening to it was a devastating experience. Scenes from her marriage and other details of her personal life are woven into the songs. Even when treated as composites or fictionalized in other ways, they were clearly identifiable to her and hit with intense force. It’s hard to imagine why Reed would have chosen to play her those songs without any explanation, and even harder to fathom how he expected her to respond.

  Kronstad’s mother, who had been living in Queens, had recently died. At five years old, Kronstad had been taken from the woman, who had left Kronstad’s father when the girl was three. Reed adapted that story and wildly elaborated on it for his Berlin song “The Kids.” Kronstad had attempted to reconcile with her mother at various points over the years, never completely successfully, so hearing a character based on her mother essentially described as a bisexual whore and drug addict in a song written by her husband was quite a blow.

  “The other thing,” she added, “is that he was actually writing a lot about what was happening in our relationship. That’s what writers do. But who wants their marriage as it’s falling apart to be put on an album for the entire world to hear? Or who wants the couple of times that he fucking socked me—who wants that? But there it was.”

  Kronstad understood, of course, that Berlin was not exclusively about her marriage. Talking about the character of Caroline, she noted, “I think Nico is in there. Lou did know her and she was German.… Someone once said that the woman in Berlin is a combination of all the women in Lou’s life, and I think to a certain extent that’s true.” Despite being hurt, Kronstad remained determined to see her husband through the recording of the album, which was primarily done at Morgan Studios in London.

  At the time he wrote the title song and even when he started work on the album, Reed had never been to Berlin. “I love the idea of a divided city,” he later explained, joking that the album could just as easily have been titled Brooklyn, tellingly the place of his birth. “It was purely metaphorical.” Kronstad’s memory of her conversations with Reed support that view. The wall, he told her, represented “what’s going on in this relationship between these two people.” Berlin, of course, loomed large historically and culturally during the Cold War years of Reed’s youth. In the late forties, it was one of the confrontational flash points between the Soviet Union and the West, and in 1963 the city was the site of the dramatic “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech by President John F. Kennedy, one of Reed’s heroes. The city’s divided soul and the absence of a clear identity lent it a morally ambiguous air, a place where black markets, international intrigue, drug trade, and underground activities of all kinds could thrive. The present was tense, the past a horror show, and the future unknowable and potentially frightening. Berlin provided Reed with a different but equally compelling imaginative urban landscape, one with little of the knowing swagger of New York, and one that was more European and weighed down by history. All this made for an album that lacked the note of stoic cheer and upbeat determination that can be heard in even his grimmest New York stories.

  Reed’s approach to his lyrics and melody writing on the album was strong and spare. “Berlin needed a lyrical approach that was direct,” Reed explained. “There could be no mistaking it, no head games. You didn’t have to be high to figure out what was happening, or be super hip or anything. It was to the point, whereas some of my other albums and songs had puns or double entendres. In other words, the difference would be, in ‘Heroin’ I wrote, ‘It makes me feel like Jesus’s son.’ Now, if the Berlin guy had said that, he’d say, ‘I take heroin.’ That’s the difference.… He’s consistently saying very short, straight, to-the-point, unmissable things.”

  Ezrin described Reed’s lyrics on Berlin as “just magnificent, visceral, elemental writing.… That’s Lou. Unadorned but romantic to his core. He found a way to take the reality of the street and make it beautiful.” But despite his passion for the material, for Ezrin the album was “a nightmare to make,” not least because the self-described “simple Canadian boy” found himself completely out of his element in Reed’s decadent scene.

  “Keep in mind,” said Ezrin, “that with Alice Cooper, I was dealing with a bunch of regular guys who happened to wear makeup when they went onstage. Essentially their lifestyle was very all-American. They were really just hamburger and TV guys, so I understood them.… Lou, on the other hand, was an artist with a capital A. His milieu included some of the most cutting-edge and eclectic artists of the time, and their whole approach to everything—from their art to their living—was foreign to me and somewhat scary. That made it tough, and then, when you add to that the fact that many of us were experimenting with drugs… it was disorienting, challenging, and ultimately frightening.”

  Ezrin was even more direct in another interview. “It drove me literally crazy,” he said of making Berlin. “I was put away for a little time because I couldn’t control myself. I got home and started breaking things, and I’ve never done something like that before in my life! That album just had me so taut inside.”

  Berlin was released in July of 1973, just eight months after Transformer. A week before the final version of the album was due to be turned in (Reed was on vacation in Portugal at the time), RCA told Ezrin that it would not accept a double album. The album was nearly an hour long, and at the time, artists were encouraged to keep each side of a vinyl LP at eighteen to twenty minutes in order to ensure sound quality. To preserve the conceptual integrity of Berlin, Ezrin did not want to remove any of the album’s songs. Consequently, he explained, “I dropped fourteen minutes of endings, solos, interstitial material, digressions inside songs.” The process nearly killed him. Rolling Stone described him as looking “wasted” as he attempted to complete work on the album, the result of “having put in fourteen to twenty hours a day for the last few months.” As Ezrin completed a mix of “Men of Good Fortune,” he screamed, “Awright, wrap up this turkey before I puke.”

  Along with the A-list players he had recruited, Ezrin ladled horns and strings onto the album, plus mellotron and a choir, touches that, once again, were unusual for a Lou Reed project and meant to suggest the seriousness of the record’s intent. (Interestingly, Ezrin would later use some of those identical parts on seminal Pink Floyd tracks he produced: the strings on “Sad Song” for Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and a woodwind part from “Caroline Says I” for The Wall.) On “The Kids,” the song about Caroline’s children being taken from her, Ezrin recorded the wails of his own children to scarifying effect. To get his kids to participate, Ezrin told his seven-year-old son, David, that he was doing a play in the studio and he needed some kids’ voices to sound scared because their mom was being taken away. The first few attempts didn’t sound terrifying enough, but on the third, unprompted, his two-year-old joined in and started screaming. The two children screamed so loud that they distorted the tape. Ezrin further compressed it in the studio. He found that “the more compressed it got, the more anguished it seemed. Most people can’t listen to it.”

  Still, the album was nearly fifty minutes long, but Ezrin was not available to oversee th
e final mastering of Berlin. He was in the hospital. “It was a heroin rebound,” he admitted. “I would rather have had a nervous breakdown. I didn’t know what heroin was till I went to England on this gig.… We were all seriously ill. It took me a long time to get on my feet. I paid a heavy price. It put me out of commission for quite a while.”

  Berlin took its toll on Reed as well. “Lou doesn’t want to talk about it much,” Ezrin said about the album not long after it came out. “He didn’t even want to listen to the album. Every time he listens to the album it gets to him. I mean, I can see tears coming into his eyes and everything.” Reed himself said, “I think I’ve gone as deep as I want to go for my own mental health. If I got any deeper I’d wind up disappearing.”

  For all that, reviews of Berlin were mixed at best. In his Village Voice column Consumer Guide, Robert Christgau blithely dismissed as “horseshit” the argument that, while depressing and unlikable, Berlin was an “artistic accomplishment.” Invited to “review” the album in a conversation in Phonograph Record, David Johansen, then the lead singer for the New York Dolls, said, “I know why he called it Berlin. Because if you called it Seattle, or New York, or Cleveland, you couldn’t write a story about it, because everybody would know what you were talking about, and you couldn’t convince them you were talking about something when in actuality you weren’t talking about anything. But if you give an American kid a flash like ‘Berlin,’ that’s something very exotic to him, and you can say anything to him because he’s never been to Berlin, and he won’t know you’re bullshitting him.”

  In later years, after the album was acknowledged as a classic, Reed loved to revel in the negative reviews it had received—and, admittedly, some of them were not only harsh but gratuitously personal. Even some of the positive assessments of Berlin seemed indistinguishable from attacks. Writing in New Musical Express, inveterate Reed watcher Nick Kent declared, “Just when you think your ex-idol has slumped into a pitiful display of gross terminal self-parody, Lou Reed comes back and hits you with something like Berlin. It’s a creation which leaves you so aesthetically bamboozled you just have to step down and allow him a brand-new artistic credibility for pulling off such a coup in the first place.” Perhaps the most scathing negative review appeared in Rolling Stone, written by Stephen Davis, who, ironically, would go on to chronicle the salacious on-the-road depredations of Led Zeppelin in his gleefully unauthorized 1985 biography of the band, Hammer of the Gods. “Lou Reed’s Berlin,” Davis’s review began, “is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence, and suicide. There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them.” He concluded that Berlin was Reed’s “last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou.”

  A review like that would sour anyone on critics—not that Reed needed any convincing in that regard. “It’s one of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen of anything,” Reed said. “I got one paragraph saying I should be physically punished for putting out the album.” Characteristically, Reed chose to overlook reviews such as John Rockwell’s in the Sunday New York Times, which began, “Strikingly and unexpectedly, Lou Reed’s Berlin is one of the strongest, most original rock records in years.” In an informed, authoritative manner, Rockwell covered what would become Reed’s own talking points about Berlin in subsequent decades. He cited Brecht and Weill, called Reed “a poetic artist who creates unified statements through the medium of the rock record,” and described Berlin as both “cinematic and operatic.” With Berlin, Rockwell concluded, Reed “has proven conclusively that he must be counted as one of the most important figures in contemporary rock.”

  Rockwell wasn’t alone. Circus called Berlin “the most affecting rock effort in recent memory.” Even Rolling Stone, in a review of Reed’s next album four months later, found occasion to counterpoint Stephen Davis’s negative review of Berlin. Critic Timothy Ferris quoted the lines in Davis’s review about Reed chronicling a “degenerate demimonde,” and agreed with them. “But I fail to see how that makes it a bad record,” he continued. “Berlin is bitter, uncompromising, and one of the most fully realized concept albums. Prettiness has nothing to do with art, nor does good taste, good manners, or good morals. Reed is one of the handful of serious artists working in popular music today, and you’d think by now people would stop preaching at him.”

  Speaking about Berlin, Reed would articulate a rationale for his brand of songwriting, and, indeed, for all art that defies accepted pieties. In fact, his argument goes well beyond that. It constitutes a lesson in how to engage art—and how not to. “I don’t think anybody is anybody else’s moral compass,” he said. “Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life. Or maybe it is. I’m writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn’t pay any attention at all.… But a guide to doing things that are wrong and right? I mean, Othello murders Desdemona. Is that a guide to what you can do? The guy in Berlin beats up his girlfriend. Is that a guide to what you can do? Is that what you walk away with? I don’t think so. Maybe they should sticker my albums and say, ‘Stay away if you have no moral compass.’”

  It’s hard to imagine a more cogent justification not just of Berlin, but of Reed’s songwriting as a whole. Rolling Stone would eventually list Berlin among the five hundred greatest albums of all time.

  9

  ROCK N ROLL ANIMAL

  THAT WAS THE BAD move,” Lou Reed said jokingly decades later about following Transformer with Berlin. “That’s one of those career-ending moments. They said, ‘You want to do what?’”

  Whether or not it was a “bad move,” following a successful album with a dramatic, experimental left turn would be the rhythm that Reed would ride throughout the seventies. He then followed each left turn with an effort to restore the faith of the marketplace and his more mainstream fans with more accessible music. Often, Reed would then pivot again, disowning or disparaging the success such efforts had brought him, as he did with Transformer and “Walk on the Wild Side,” and ardently defending the more extreme work he had labored so hard to distance himself from.

  Part of that pattern could simply be attributed to Reed’s contrarianism, his refusal, for complicated and at times contradictory reasons, to be entrapped by what he viewed as the opinions, desires, and expectations of others. Nor is he the only artist among his peers to move in such cycles. Bob Dylan and Neil Young, to cite just two examples, immediately come to mind. Reed’s audience had by no means fully solidified in 1973, and even at its height, his following would never reach the sheer numbers of either Dylan’s or Young’s. In the seventies, his movement in and out of the mainstream seemed driven as much by a fear of success and acceptance as by any aesthetic motivation.

  It’s tempting—and perhaps accurate—to read that reluctance as, in part, a reaction to his father’s wishes for his son’s conventional success. For Reed, anything that resembled social acceptance and approval was tainted by that parental association and needed to be cast off. Not that success had lost any of its allure for Reed. His ambivalent feelings did nothing to diminish his desire for stardom and recognition, the result, perhaps, of his mother’s bottomless adoration for him. The war between those two competing drives—to reject success and to court it—would rage within him for years, and fuel the addictions that would nearly kill him. He would seesaw precariously between them until he had attained a personalized version of success that allowed him simultaneously to be revered and to be perceived as representing the very epitome of rebellion. That tension within him never fully dissipated, but it would eventually ease enough that he would not need to put his life at risk in order to numb it.

  DESPITE REED’S PERCEPTION OF the album as a “career-ending” moment, Berlin was no such thing. But it also did not live up to the commercial expecta
tions that Transformer had created. Though it was a Top 10 album in the UK, it barely grazed the Top 100 in the United States, peaking at ninety-eight. That was not exactly what RCA had in mind, particularly with hit maker Bob Ezrin handling production. Ezrin, for his part, was philosophical about Berlin’s fate. “The expectation was that I was going to do something very commercial with him,” he said. “Sort of Alice Cooper–ish, real mainstream. In reality, I had become mesmerized by the poetry and by the art of Lou. Maybe I lost sight of my mandate. Honestly, I can look back and say I probably didn’t do what I was hired to do.”

  Finally, Berlin “didn’t have a radio-friendly single,” Ezrin noted, “so it never got the exposure that it should have had.… The truth is, we might have had to sacrifice on the artistic side to get that exposure in a way that maybe we would’ve regretted later on. It’s very hard to go back and say what one would’ve done, or what one should’ve done, but I’m entirely satisfied with that album. I think it’s one of the best and most complete pieces of work I’ve ever been involved with.” Reed, of course, dismissed the controversy over the album as the result of critical philistinism. The attacks, he said, were “not for good reasons”; they came only because it was a rock-and-roll record. “I’ve said this over and over again,” he emphasized, “but if it was a novel, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.”