Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  One of the people who most feared that Berlin might mark the end of Lou Reed’s career was Dennis Katz, his manager. Katz was a lawyer who had worked in the A&R department at RCA before he edged Fred Heller out and took over his role. It was an incestuous affair all around and culminated in a string of costly lawsuits. Heller had been managing Blood, Sweat, and Tears when he took Reed on as a client. Dennis’s brother, Steve Katz, was the guitarist and a founding member of the group. Heller had lined up the unlikely touring band Reed had been performing with since he had begun playing gigs in England at around the time he began working on Transformer: a rough-and-tumble rock-and-roll quartet from Yonkers, New York, known as the Tots. Heller found them through the band’s bass player, Bobby Resigno, who ran errands for the Blood, Sweat, and Tears office in Dobbs Ferry, New York, not far from Yonkers. Resigno, for his part, got that gofer job because his girlfriend babysat for Dave Bargeron, a horn player for Blood, Sweat, and Tears.

  When Reed began looking for a band, Heller took him to Yonkers to hear Resigno’s group, which also included guitarists Vinnie Laporta and Eddie Reynolds and drummer Scottie Clark. Still in their teens or barely out of them, the band members rehearsed in the basement of Resigno’s parents’ home in Yonkers. They were hardly devoted Lou Reed fans. “I had heard of Lou because some of my friends were really into dope pretty early and they were into the Velvet Underground,” Reynolds said. “So I was familiar with him and knew that he was due respect.… Next thing you know, Bobby’s mom answered the door, and she led Lou down to the basement to listen to us.”

  It might seem ridiculous that Reed would attempt to recruit a barely adult band of suburban unknowns for his first major solo shows after the breakup of the Velvet Underground—and perhaps it was. But a youthful band, free of history and emotional baggage, had its attractions for Reed. In 1972 he had turned thirty, a frightening prospect for anyone playing rock and roll at the time. Proud as he was of the body of work that the Velvet Underground had created, he felt burdened by the band’s legend; an anonymous backup group would help wipe the slate clean. Equally important, the band’s youthful eagerness and pliability would only reaffirm his standing as the outfit’s undisputed leader. After his disagreements with John Cale, Reed had no interest in debating strategy and musical direction with a band of experienced, first-rate players.

  Nor, for the most part, was he in any condition to. When he arrived in Yonkers, Reed was hardly in tip-top shape. “As far as I was concerned, he looked like he was stoned on something,” Reynolds recalled. For their audition, the band played some original songs that Reynolds had written. The Allman Brothers’ live album At Fillmore East had come out just the year before, and Laporta and Reynolds modeled much of their playing on the twin-guitar attack of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. That elaborate style of playing might sound preposterous in a band hoping to back Lou Reed, but while critics and fans might have loved the primitivism of the Velvet Underground, Reed did not. The aspirations of this literal basement band would have made perfect sense to him.

  After Reed listened for a while with Heller, Reynolds said, “Lou picked up his guitar and tried a couple of songs with us. We tried to do a lot of that harmony stuff like the Allman Brothers, and that perked Lou’s ears.… I guess they left with good enough feelings for us to think that maybe it went all right. A month later, we went to England.”

  The Tots supported Reed on tour in the UK, Europe, and the United States in 1972 and 1973, including the shows at Alice Tully Hall. Reviews of their playing were mixed. These shows were the first appearances by Reed since the breakup of the Velvet Underground, and anyone who showed up anticipating the Velvets’ cool, boundary-shattering, avant-garde detachment was going to be sorely disappointed. The Tots were young, sloppy, excited, and energetic; as far as they were concerned, Reed was a rock-and-roll star, and their job was to play his music with as much energy as they could muster. Reviewers who understood that, as Ed McCormack did when he wrote about the second Alice Tully Hall show for Rolling Stone, enjoyed and appreciated the band. Others didn’t get it.

  For his part, Reynolds believed that more showmanship improved the performances—the band’s and Reed’s. “I had read stuff about Lou being the American Mick Jagger and all that,” Reynolds said. “There were a couple of shows where he would really get into it and start dancing, and I could feel the energy.”

  At other times, the Tots found themselves having to compensate for Reed’s lack of energy—and for the condition in which he frequently went onstage. “There would be a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red,” Reynolds recalled, “and if we didn’t watch Lou, he would sit there and get bombed before a show.” The Tots learned to recognize the “vacant stare he had sometimes,” taking it as a cue to help their leader onstage. Reynolds remembered a night when Lou’s playing was so off that “one of the roadies had to take his cords out from the bottom of the amp so that he would be deleted from the sound system.” After a 1973 show in Detroit, Reed, “looking even more wasted” than usual, chided a group of journalists hanging out at his hotel. “I know why you’re all here,” he said. “[You] just want to get a headline story—‘Lou Reed OD’s in Holiday Inn’—don’t you?” He walked away laughing.

  Some of Reed’s other character traits, both negative and positive, were evident to the band as well. Reed could be sweet with his younger bandmates, taking the role of intellectual mentor that he would enjoy playing at various times in his life. But he could also be rude, especially when he’d been drinking, and he had a tendency to lash out unexpectedly. Reynolds remembered the night at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in April of 1973 when he broke a D string during the concert’s opening number, “Sweet Jane.” When the band got backstage after the show, Lou was furious. “He ripped me a new one.… Iggy Pop was standing there watching the whole thing. I felt so bad because it was in front of Iggy.”

  By the time Reed finished recording Berlin and was preparing to tour again, he and Bob Ezrin had a new vision for his music, and the Tots weren’t part of it. Reed handled the situation gracefully in Reynolds’s opinion, personally sitting down with the band in Dennis Katz’s Manhattan office. “I think it did bother him,” Reynolds recalled. “He said that we should go on as a band, and that we’d be great. Just by him saying that actually made me feel good about getting fired. He knew how young we were and how much it could possibly hurt us.”

  WITH THEIR ENTHUSIASM, THE Tots had helped restore Reed’s confidence and got him back out on the road. He now believed he could front a band that was older and more experienced and still maintain control. Ezrin was encouraging in that regard. For Reed’s touring band, he drafted guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, along with keyboardist Ray Colcord and Toronto musicians Prakash John on bass and Pentti Glan on drums. Reed rehearsed the band in the Berkshires at the end of August of 1973. On September 1, Reed and the group played their first gig at the Music Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Then it was off to Europe for dates that ran into early October.

  By the time the North American tour launched at the end of November at Toronto’s Massey Hall, Reed was clearly enjoying the muscularity of his new band. Hunter and Wagner, like the Tots but with far more majesty and discipline, employed the sort of twin-guitar attack that had been established by the Allman Brothers and that would become one of the signature sounds of the seventies for bands like the Eagles. For “Sweet Jane,” the song that opened the band’s sets, the two guitarists had orchestrated—Hunter actually received a writing credit for it—a grand three-minute-plus introduction that was classical in its aspirations. The instrumental section continues for another thirty seconds once the classic “Sweet Jane” riff kicks in, and then Reed enters. Whatever its relationship to the original song, it was a dramatic buildup to Reed’s arrival onstage. Reed’s charming portrait of a young couple celebrating their love and their kinks with everyday naturalness got transformed into a massive sonic statement.

  R
eed didn’t play guitar onstage; the stylized grandeur of Hunter and Wagner’s playing did not at all suit his rawer, less technically proficient style, and he did not feel as if he could play with them. Instead, he poured all his energies into the role of front man and lead singer, which gave him a chance to emphasize his lyrics. “I don’t think I’m a singer, with or without a guitar,” he said. “I give dramatic readings that are almost my tunes.” He changed his look as well. His Jewfro was gone, replaced by a close-cropped near crew cut that mimicked the crisp, cleaned-up look that was becoming fashionable in gay hotbeds like Christopher Street and the West Village docks. (Not long afterward, Reed would dye Iron Crosses into his hair.) He lost weight, looked wiry and spindle thin, and sported a black muscle shirt, black leather pants, a dog collar, and studded black leather cuffs. His movements onstage were jagged and theatrical, and the entire presentation, from its S and M allusions to its guitar pyrotechnics, went over extremely well with audiences. (In a charmingly sentimental move, Reed handpicked the Persuasions, a gospel a cappella group from Brooklyn, to serve as the opening act on most of his UK dates.) By the time the tour got to the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street in New York, a decision had been made to record the two shows for release as a live album. This would be the antidote to Berlin.

  Coproduced by Reed and Steve Katz of Blood, Sweat, and Tears and released in February of 1974, the album was titled Rock n Roll Animal, and as it was intended to do, it instantly reversed whatever PR damage Berlin had done. The cover showed a close-up shot of Reed midperformance, his lips and eyes blackened with makeup and his hands above his head as if he were bound. The promotional campaign for the album featured a black-and-white photo of Reed crouching onstage, with text that read, “After you buy the album, open the jacket and make sure there’s a record inside. The ‘Rock n Roll Animal’ is a bitch to contain.” The gender tease caught the tenor of the times in a playful way that even the most mainstream music fan could get a kick out of: Reed, somehow, was both a threatening, butch “rock n roll animal” and a bitch.

  The stylized S and M titillation of Rock n Roll Animal’s presentation was much easier for fans—and, interestingly enough, most critics—to take than the far more emotionally charged provocations of Berlin. Writing in Zoo World, critic Wayne Robins opened his review of Rock n Roll Animal by arguing, “It’s just like Lou Reed to follow the worst album by a major artist in 1973 (Berlin) with what might be his best album since the watershed Loaded.” Robert Christgau awarded the album an A minus and declared, “Reed’s live music brings the Velvets into the arena in a clean redefinition of heavy, thrilling without threatening to stupefy.… This is a live album with a reason for living.” Writing about the Academy of Music concerts that the album documented, critic Paul Nelson lavished praise on Reed’s new backing band, comparing the “mediocre pickup band at Lincoln Center some months earlier” (the Tots) to the new group’s “spectacular, even majestic, rock and roll,” and calling guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter “awesome enough so that if Reed were merely competent, the concert would be a success.”

  The references to the Velvet Underground and specifically to Loaded in those reviews were not coincidental. Rock n Roll Animal consisted of five songs, four of which were Velvet Underground classics (“Sweet Jane,” “Heroin,” “White Light/White Heat,” “Rock and Roll”), and two of which (“Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll”) had appeared on Loaded. That was a conscious strategy. As the blockbuster age of the music industry was starting to take shape in the seventies, the Velvet Underground, a cult band if there ever was one, was beginning to disappear from view, and Reed did not want that to happen.

  Still, reshaping Velvets classics with his new band was a controversial move. Not everyone was as enamored of the new versions as some critics were. The thirteen-minute version of “Heroin” and the ten-minute version of “Rock and Roll,” filled with long guitar excursions and elaborate arrangements, overwhelmed the originals and perhaps erased their meaning as well. Eddie Reynolds of the Tots had plenty of reasons to find fault with Reed’s new band, but his simple critique is on the money: “I think they got in the way of Lou too much.” Reynolds added that his musician friends, who typically had no use for Reed or the Velvet Underground, made an exception for Rock n Roll Animal because of the technical prowess of the players. Was that really how Reed wanted those songs to be remembered?

  On the other hand, the musical quality, singled out for praise by Paul Nelson and others, meant something important as rock and roll began to be professionalized in the seventies. Despite, or perhaps because of, its length, the elaborate rendition of “Sweet Jane” on Rock n Roll Animal became a staple of the then-burgeoning FM radio format. That song and “Rock and Roll” had provided the Velvets with their greatest radio exposure when Loaded came out in 1970. Now Reed could enjoy the increased visibility that radio play would provide, and also reach an audience of mainstream rock fans that extended well beyond Velvets stalwarts—something he very much longed for, despite his protests to the contrary. Having tried to distance himself from the Velvet Underground in order to establish his solo career, Reed was now in a position where it was both savvy and necessary to do the opposite. Berlin faded from view and, for his audience, Rock n Roll Animal became the follow-up to Transformer that should have been. It adhered to the classic pop formula for success, sounding at once familiar and fresh. The album made such an impact that six additional tracks from the Academy of Music shows were gathered together and released a year later as Lou Reed Live, once again to a positive reception.

  Characteristically, Reed disowned Rock n Roll Animal as soon as it accomplished what he set out for it to do. “It was the only thing to do at the time,” he said, nearly apologizing for the album in an interview with Lenny Kaye. “I wanted to get the Velvets stuff known. That’s what I was doing.” As for the blustering, extended version of “Heroin,” Reed said, “It’s just desecrated. It’s so blasphemous that it’s horrifying.… I understand why people like ‘Heroin’ on Rock n Roll Animal, but it almost killed me. It was so awful.” Of course, thirty years later, he would casually remark of Rock n Roll Animal, “A lot of people, myself included, consider it one of the greatest live albums ever. Other than James Brown Live at the Apollo, nothing’s even close.”

  Hunter, naturally, had his own views about what he termed “that macabre… ah, majestic” treatment of “Heroin,” which he arranged, and about working with Reed in general. “He wanted to do it the old way originally,” he said of Reed’s feeling about “Heroin,” adding, “See, Lou is another one with a problem. He’d start shooting up and just get… uh, illogical, I guess.” As for why he and Wagner chose to work with Reed, Hunter just shrugged and said, “It’s a living.”

  REED AND KATZ’S STRATEGY of getting the Velvets’ stuff known worked. With Reed reestablished as a commercial force and “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll” on the FM airwaves, the Velvets’ legacy came to the cultural foreground once again. Both John Cale and Nico (with Cale producing her albums) had launched solo careers that, while far from commercial triumphs, were distinguished by important, well-received work, and this also helped keep the Velvets’ music and reputation alive. Reed understood this and was generous to his former colleagues at around that time. The albums that Cale produced for Nico were, Reed said, “so incredible, the most incredible albums ever made.” He noted that “people think that me and Nico and John don’t get along, that we fight all the time. Of course we fight. Like cats and dogs. But it’s one thing if we fight, and another if somebody said something bad about John or Nico. I’d kill ’em. I’m the only one allowed to say something bad about John or Nico, and vice versa.”

  Riding the momentum of Rock n Roll Animal’s success, in September of 1974 Mercury Records released a double LP titled 1969: The Velvet Underground Live. It included virtually all the Velvets’ best-known songs, culled from performances at a club in Dallas called the End of Cole Avenue on October 19, 1969, and at the
Matrix in San Francisco on November 26 and 27 of that same year—a period when the Velvets had been road-hardened and were in top form.

  The album was compiled by Paul Nelson, a prominent rock critic, most notably for Rolling Stone, who at the time worked in the A&R department at Mercury. As a music writer—and, pointedly, unlike the vast majority of record executives—Nelson understood the Velvets completely and made smart song choices. Not that getting Mercury to put out 1969 was by any means a foregone conclusion. In a piece that was not published until after his 2006 death, Nelson described making the case for a Velvet Underground double album to the Mercury brass this way: “When I made my pitch at an A&R meeting, I got almost nothing back but glazed incomprehension. Suddenly, it dawned on me that practically none of these people knew who the Velvet Underground were. When I mentioned Lou Reed, a slight light went on in a few more pairs of eyes. I talked and talked and talked and finally won the day. We got a double album… for twenty thousand dollars.” Nelson’s description perfectly captures the state of awareness and appreciation of the Velvet Underground and even Lou Reed in the mainstream music industry at that time. Even after 1969 came out, Mercury’s president would routinely confuse the Velvet Underground with Deep Purple.

  1969 did not sell well, but it served as a superb document of the group’s power onstage for listeners who had never had the opportunity to see them. The album opens with Reed, who is clearly in an affable mood, teasing the Dallas audience before the start of the band’s Sunday night set. “Do you people have a curfew or anything like that?” he asked, since many colleges did at the time. Having determined after chatting with the crowd that the band would do one long set rather than two shorter ones, Reed encouraged the audience to “settle back. Pull up your cushions—or whatever else you have with you”—studied pause—“that makes life bearable in Texas.” The audience groaned good-naturedly—why would you be at a Velvet Underground show if you didn’t expect some attitude?—and Reed laughed. Then, a master showman, Reed combined his unlikely love of football with his stage sense to smooth the edges of his New York condescension. “We saw your Cowboys today and they never let Philadelphia even have the ball for a minute,” he said, clearly having watched the Dallas Cowboys crush the Philadelphia Eagles that afternoon by a score of 49–14. “It was ridiculous. You should give other people just a little chance”—another perfectly timed pause—“in football, anyway.”