Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  The album was not well received by critics, but perhaps Reed himself delivered the most damning review. “Oh, I slept through Sally Can’t Dance—that’s no big secret,” he told Caroline Coon in Melody Maker. “They’d make a suggestion and I’d say, ‘Oh, all right.’ I’d do the vocals in one take, in twenty minutes, and then it was goodbye.” He was more virulently dismissive when he discussed the album with Lenny Kaye. “What a horror. It went Top 10 and it sucks. People who want more Rock n Roll Animal, sorry. I mimic me probably better than anybody, so if everybody else is making money ripping me off, I figured maybe I better get in on it. Why not? I created Lou Reed. I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well. Really well.”

  BY NOW REED’S DRINKING and drug use were affecting every aspect of his life, but what seemed to concern him most was that he had had two successful albums in a row. This became a recurring theme in Reed’s interviews: “The worse the albums were, the more they apparently sold.” The merits of Rock n Roll Animal and Sally Can’t Dance can be debated, of course. But are they really as out of character as Reed insisted? Or did Reed choose to stop the momentum of his career as part of an effort to maintain control over it, to feel the impact of his own agency, even if the results were negative?

  Given the success of Reed’s last two albums, which came out within six months of each other, RCA was eager for him to deliver something new. He went back to Electric Lady in early January of 1975 to begin work on a new album. Steve Katz was supposed to produce again, but he and Reed had completely fallen out by that time, and Katz did not even attend the sessions. Reed stopped recording after less than a week, and fired his manager, Dennis Katz, after a dispute about the direction the album was taking. The inevitable legal battles ensued and would persist for years.

  In March of 1975, the label put out Lou Reed Live from the same concerts that had yielded Rock n Roll Animal, but that was not enough. Reed would honor RCA’s request for another album, and the label would come to regret it. After Sally Can’t Dance and amid all the chaos surrounding him, Reed felt the need to get behind the wheel of his career—and drive it into a wall. And he did exactly that.

  “I kept thinking that somehow it would stop,” he said, referring to what he regarded as the meretricious success of Rock n Roll Animal and Sally Can’t Dance. “But it didn’t. So I decided to put a stop to it. For those who wanted to hear the real thing, and wanted to hear a guitar solo, they got Metal Machine Music. And that put a stop to it! There wasn’t going to be any more records after that.”

  Even allowing for his characteristic exaggeration, you could see why Reed might believe Metal Machine Music would be the last anyone heard from him. A double album released in July of 1975, less than a year after Sally Can’t Dance, the album was exactly what its title described: four vinyl sides of nonstop, reverberating, distortion-laden, clamorous guitar feedback. Each of the sides was listed as running exactly sixteen minutes and one second (with side four designed to keep repeating until the listener physically removed the needle from the groove), but in fact the pieces vary in length by twenty seconds or so.

  Reed has variously described how the album, which was partly subtitled An Electronic Instrumental Composition, was made, but it’s now generally accepted that he recorded it alone in his loft in the garment district of Manhattan, with three guitars, two amplifiers, and a four-track analog tape machine. Guitars wildly feeding back, essentially playing themselves, for a bit over an hour in full metallic glory constitutes the record’s “music.” “My goal at the time,” Reed later wrote, “was to have a keyless album of ever-changing rhythm with no lyric or vocal—pure guitar-driven sound in which to surround and intoxicate yourself. I made it out of love for guitar-driven feedback and the squall of the metal machine.” It’s as if Reed made good on his joking comment to Danny Fields that he might not be “on the record at all next time around.”

  But contrary to his prediction to Fields, Metal Machine Music did not go to number one. From the standpoint of Reed’s record company and his fans, the album was most notable for the absence of his voice, lyrics, and anything that might remotely be called a song. As the New York Times put it, “Warhol once said that his ambition was to become a machine; Lou Reed has gotten there before him.” Reed agreed. Asked about the back cover shot depicting him onstage with a microphone in front of him (an odd choice for an album with no vocals), Reed replied, “It’s just one machine talking to another.”

  Predictably, Metal Machine Music immediately incited controversy. No rock artist on a major label had ever released anything like it. When stunned RCA executives heard the album, they considered releasing it on their Red Seal classical label, a suggestion that actually made sense but would immediately have identified it as a niche recording, which, of course, it was. Reed opposed that strategy, regarding it as “pretentious.” Instead, the album was released on RCA, giving it the same commercial positioning as his previous albums.

  Reed had said that he wanted the album’s cover to include a disclaimer that read, “Has no songs, no vocals,” a clearly unrealistic expectation. How much Reed approved—or was in any condition to approve—the artwork and visual presentation of Metal Machine Music is open to question. Part of him loved the sounds he had created for the album, but he was also motivated by revenge on a company that seemed to be trying to squeeze as much profit out of him as it possibly could. Metal Machine Music would be his seventh album release on RCA in three years, and Reed had decided that enough was enough.

  Reed had a sizable audience by this time. Particularly for younger fans who had come to him since Rock n Roll Animal, a new album from him was a very big deal—and these were not the sort of fans to be dissuaded by the Electronic Instrumental Composition subtitle, which, in any event, was not printed in especially large type. Far more compelling to them would have been the striking image of a meth-thin Lou on the cover in his full black-leather-and-studs Rock n Roll Animal regalia. For the heavy metal fans of Rock n Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live, that cover and a title like Metal Machine Music suggested a muscular return to form after the relatively somnolent Sally Can’t Dance.

  Like the product-hungry suits of RCA, those fans seemed to be a target of Reed’s nihilistic gesture. When Reed said that those who “wanted to hear a guitar solo… got Metal Machine Music,” that’s whom he was talking about: the heavy metal kids who loved the twin-guitar pyrotechnics of Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter even as Reed believed those arrangements betrayed some of his own best songs. He was talking about the fans who called out for Wagner and Hunter when Reed hit the road with his new, more R & B–inflected band after Sally Can’t Dance came out.

  Compared to Metal Machine Music, Berlin was, as Rolling Stone had insanely predicted, the Sgt. Pepper of the seventies. Fans returned the album in such numbers that RCA felt compelled to issue an apology to retailers. That appalled Reed, but the label had little choice. It’s said that the album sold a hundred thousand copies, which seems inflated, even at this juncture, given the extremeness of the music. But if one considers the young, enthusiastic audience waiting for a new Lou Reed album and the fact that none of them would have heard the music before seeing that enticing cover, that number is not inconceivable. The real question is how many of those copies came back to the stores. RCA ended up pulling the album after three months.

  In strictly artistic terms, what can be made of Metal Machine Music? Most obviously, it’s a punk gesture on a scale that remains unrivaled, a screeching fuck you not only to Reed’s record company but to his fans. Musically, it can be heard as the furthest extension of sounds that had been part of Reed’s creative life for many years, from the squalling free jazz he had loved as a college student to the barrier-shattering drones of La Monte Young that John Cale had introduced him to. Bob Ludwig, who engineered the album, insisted that nothing about it shocked him. As a graduate of the prestigious Eastman School of Music, Ludwig was familiar with the avant-garde compositions of Kar
lheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and Elliott Carter, and he heard what Reed was doing in that aesthetic context.

  Reed claimed a more prosaic lineage. “I did tons of shows with the Velvet Underground where we would leave our guitars against the amps and walk away,” he explained. “The guitars would feed back forever, like they were alive. Metal Machine Music was just me doing that—lots of it.” As relentless and monochromatic as the album can sound to—and this hardly seems the correct term—a casual listener, critic David Fricke pointed out that as you engage it, “you start to hear a certain oblique cohesion, patterns and effects that surge in and out of the chaos: shrill pipe organ–like chords, trebly shivers of demented surf guitar. And there are moments when the stereo halves of the mix suddenly erupt into a combined burst of feedback sunshine. It is a clarity that hurts; it leaves you blinded and shaken.”

  For all that, Metal Machine Music is—in its conception, motivations, execution, and consequences—a hymn to speed. (Reed even included the chemical symbol of the Benzedrine drug group as part of the album art, and one wag referred to the album as Methedrine Machine Music.) Reed’s extensive liner notes, including a completely made-up list of sonic and equipment “specifications” (“All the specs were a lie,” he later declared), are little more than a deranged amphetamine rant. “This record is not for parties/dancing/background/romance,” Reed wrote, stating the obvious. “This is what I meant by ‘real’ rock, about ‘real’ things. No one I know has listened to it all the way through, including myself. It is not meant to be.” Those quotation marks around “real” say just about all that needs to be said about Reed’s frame of mind. He chides his fans: “Most of you won’t like this, and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you.… This is not meant for the market.” He concludes with a strangely adolescent insult—“My week beats your year”—which he described as “a try at a Warholian soundbyte.”

  Typically, Reed exulted in the negative reactions the album garnered, often referring specifically to a Billboard review that concluded, “Recommended cuts: None.” And yet, as so often was the case with Reed’s output, critics tended to accord the album far greater consideration than he acknowledged, even when the reviews were negative. It’s as if Reed believed that his fuck you gesture to the music industry could be meaningful only if it had no support at all. While there was a certain amount of the adolescent sneering so common in rock criticism, for the most part, major journalists wrote at length about the album in prominent venues and struggled to come to grips with it. In the New York Times, John Rockwell, who had praised Berlin, wrote with genuine appreciation, as well as concern for the impact the album might have on Reed’s career. Citing what he described as Reed’s “onstage image of off-the-wall instability” and pointing out that the album’s grinding roar was “hardly unprecedented in the world of the classical avant-garde,” he speculated that Metal Machine Music might “convince many of his admirers that he has finally tripped over the line between outrageousness and sheer self-destructive indulgence.” Rockwell did not shy away from the complex issue of Reed’s anger, noting that Reed was “clearly full of hostility about the whole problem of balancing his rock star career with his need to experiment.” Rockwell concluded, “One would like to see rock stars take the risk to stretch their art in ways that might jeopardize the affection of their fans. But one can’t help fearing that, in this instance, Mr. Reed may have gone further than his audience will willingly follow.”

  Writing in Rolling Stone, James Wolcott, too, expressed concern about the self-destructiveness evident in Metal Machine Music. “What’s most distressing is the possibility that Metal Machine Music isn’t so much a knife slash at his detractors as perhaps a blade turned inward,” Wolcott wrote. “At its very worst, this album suggests masochism. He may be, to shift weaponry images, moving to the center of fire so that we critics-as-assassins can make a clean kill. Fine, Lou, go ahead. Just stand there. Don’t move. But damned if I’ll squeeze the trigger.”

  As shaky as Reed’s emotional state was at the time, and as much as Metal Machine Music was both a symptom and an expression of that precarious state of mind, Reed seemed somehow to understand both the musical and the symbolic importance that would eventually accrue to the album. “In time,” he said, “it will prove itself.” Years later, he would say, “I run into different musicians in my travels, and it’s odd how many of them tell me that Metal Machine Music is a seminal thing.… [O]nce you hear Metal Machine Music, it frees you up. It’s been done—now you can do anything.”

  And the album did go on to “prove itself.” It would become a foundational document for the genre of industrial music, and, incredibly, it would be transcribed and performed live. About a year after the album’s release, Lenny Kaye asked Reed if he thought that Metal Machine Music had established him “as an underground artist again.” That was a smart question, and as a member of the Patti Smith Group, Kaye was the perfect person to ask it. As the punk movement was gearing up in New York and London, Reed had to be aware that for the first time in his career, it was possible that he could be outflanked on his left. The burgeoning movement owed Reed and the Velvet Underground an essential debt, needless to say. He would soon be dubbed the “Godfather of Punk.” But Reed had no interest in becoming a father figure of any kind. This was still an era in which anyone over thirty who was still playing rock and roll was suspect. The media had already felt the need, for example, to anoint a dozen-odd so-called new Dylans despite the fact that the old Dylan had not yet reached thirty-five. So, after two commercially successful albums that carried him into the mainstream, did Lou Reed need to be established “as an underground artist again”? Absolutely. And with Metal Machine Music, he outgunned the punks before their movement had even managed to get off the ground.

  11

  A SPEED-ADDLED, LEATHER-CLAD VIRGIL

  THE SEVENTIES WAS A decade defined by sexual excess, and Reed distinguished himself in that regard as well. He became a regular at the gay bars that lined the docks along the Hudson, the west-of-everything boundary of Greenwich Village where the sex shows—and the sexual encounters available to patrons—established the outer limits of deviance, perversion, and fetishism. Whatever else he did, Reed took a voyeuristic delight in those environments, often photographing and interviewing the hustlers, transvestite hookers, and other erotic adventurers he met there. (That urge to document the extreme from a cool distance was another attribute he shared with his mentor, Andy Warhol.)

  Reed liked to test people—sometimes gently, sometimes not so much—and one of his ways of doing that was to escort carefully chosen friends through the wilds of the sex bars, like a speed-addled, leather-clad Virgil guiding a series of aspiring Dantes through the underworld. To be asked to accompany Reed on one of these jaunts was, in a sense, to be accepted by him. He would invite only people he already trusted. But it was an intriguing impulse nonetheless. For Reed it was a gesture of friendship, an invitation to get to know him better. Welcome to my world.

  Music mogul Clive Davis was one of the friends Reed took on a night journey through his favorite clubs. Reed and Davis, who had run Columbia Records and then founded his own label, Arista, in 1974, seemed an unlikely pair. A graduate of Harvard Law School, married, and a father, Davis was ten years older than Reed and maintained a formal bearing; a suit and a matching tie and pocket handkerchief were his standard uniform. And, of course, he was the epitome of a record executive, a music industry powerhouse, and, to that extent, the sort of figure Reed would typically hold in contempt. But they shared a number of key attributes. Both were Jewish and had been born in Brooklyn and attended public schools. New Yorkers to the bone, they still shared an outer-borough, rough-around-the-edges defensiveness. For all his high style, Davis prized his Brooklyn roots as well as his ability to get along with anyone, regardless of station. Now in his eighties, he is an innately curious person and values his ability to move in any world with poise and confidence.

  Reed, f
or all his rebellious attitudes, could not help but be impressed by highly educated people. That Davis, unlike the vast majority of record company executives, had graduated from Harvard Law and was highly articulate was not lost on Reed. Davis often noted how smart and funny Reed was, how entertaining as a conversationalist. As a perennial music business outsider, Reed would have enjoyed the irony of his highly visible friendship with Davis, the quintessential insider. And for Davis, befriending the notorious Lou Reed provided the ultimate street cred. Years later, Davis would identify himself as bisexual, and his primary relationships would eventually be with men. Those impulses, however latent at the time, may well have also played a role in the closeness between the two men.

  Davis was a regular at Studio 54 in those heady days (as was Warhol), and Reed, who shunned venues as mainstream and self-consciously exclusive as that club, would ask him about it. According to Davis, Reed wanted to know “what made it special? Was I attracted to explore the nightlife?” The answer was yes; both men relished New York after hours, and Davis was game for a tour of Reed’s favorite late-night haunts. “There was never any lecturing or acting like a guide,” Davis noted. “It was just visual. His demeanor was very straightforward and matter-of-fact—not fun or conversational or looking to see my reaction. I was his friend Clive joining him for a walk through his nightlife. None of it was designed to shock or impress—it seemed more intended to expose: ‘This is my everyday life.’ And I got it, that he was this fascinating, complex mixture, drawn to the wild side. Maybe he was curious to see how I would handle myself, if I would act and dress the same way I always did—which I did. I think it was to show me more than he could articulate or verbally express, that I would learn more and be more in sync with who he really was.”