Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  The Palladium set may have been “faceless,” but the 1976 tour soon heated up thanks to a chance encounter at an airport. Reed and the band ran into the trumpet player Don Cherry when they arrived at LAX in Los Angeles; Cherry was about to fly out after a visit. Fonfara recalled Reed recognizing Cherry from an Ornette Coleman album cover and walking up to introduce himself. Bassist Bruce Yaw, who was playing with Reed at the time, recalled that the band’s saxophonist, Marty Fogel, knew Cherry from New York and provided the introduction. Regardless, the two men hit it off immediately. According to Fonfara, Reed said, “‘We’re playing the Anaheim Convention Center tonight. Will you please hang out for an extra day and come and sit in with us? I’d give anything to have you onstage with us.’ Don said ‘Fine,’ canceled his flight, and came down to the hotel. Lou got him a room and we went and did the Convention Center that night.”

  Playing with Cherry was a thrill Reed would refer back to for the rest of his life. One of his many, oft-repeated critiques of punk was its musical primitivism, its lack, in his view, of subtlety or nuance. In the shows the two men played together, Cherry pushed the jazz element in Reed’s sound to the edge, dramatizing Reed’s fondness for the out jazz Cherry had pioneered with Ornette Coleman—the sort of music Reed used to love to play on his radio show in college. The band, too, lifted off with Cherry on board. “Don Cherry is positively spiritual onstage,” Fonfara recalled. “He was like some ghost that was floating above the ground. He’d suddenly come creeping in from between the amplifiers, and all of a sudden he’s here like an apparition, and then he’d hit two or three notes that are outside, take a Sunday stroll, and then [come] back in. But [those notes added] a lot of meaning to what Lou was saying. Lou loved him, and he loved Lou.”

  AMID THE CHAOS THAT was his life in the late seventies, Reed met Sylvia Morales, the woman who would become his second wife. The story of how they met varies with the teller. Michael Fonfara claimed that he introduced Morales to Reed after spotting her in the audience one night. “I looked at this group of girls in front of me, and one of them was waving,” he recalled. “So I pointed to her and told my keyboard roadie, ‘I’d like to have that one backstage.’ So he brought her back, and she ended up coming back to the hotel with me. We were going up in the elevator, and she said, ‘Michael, I’ve got to tell you the truth. I’m really doing this so that I can meet Lou.’ So when we got to my room, I said, ‘Okay, just wait here a minute.’

  “I went to Lou’s room and said, ‘Just give this girl five minutes. She’s a nice girl.’ He said, ‘As long as you come back—and she only gets five minutes.’ They started to talk and I could see their foreheads coming closer together. Then Lou looked up at me, jerked his thumb at the door, and said, ‘Get out.’ The next morning we met for breakfast and he was already talking about Sylvia.”

  However, Reed’s friend Erin Clermont said that Reed first encountered Sylvia at a meeting of the Eulenspiegel Society, the BDSM support group based in Manhattan. For her part, Morales said she was introduced to Reed by Anya Phillips, a downtown New York scenester, cofounder of the New Wave dance emporium the Mudd Club, and, eventually, manager of the No Wave band James Chance and the Contortions. Phillips also worked as a dominatrix and had been friends with Morales since their high school days in Taiwan, where Morales’s father, who was in the military, had been stationed. According to Morales, she and Phillips spotted Reed in a bar on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, Phillips walked over and introduced herself to him, and the three of them got into a conversation. At the time, Morales was in her early twenties and a student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, just north of New York City. She was intimidated by Reed but determined to hold her own in his presence. “Lou’s very, very smart, and I fancied myself to be very, very smart, and Lou made some remark that I was not as bright as he was,” she said. “But I was not gonna let this guy think that he was some rich famous rock star that was impressing me.”

  But of course she was impressed. Like so many of the people Reed was drawn to, Morales was poised, well-read, and articulate. She talked with him about writers and books, his favorite subjects. He also would have noted her Sarah Lawrence pedigree. That Reed even bothered to make a joke about being smarter than Morales indicates that he was taken with her. Typically, he would assume his intellectual superiority, or, if he truly didn’t care, he would ignore the other person or insult her. His teasing was a mark of his attraction. Even so, when they parted, Morales and Reed did not exchange numbers, so Morales hatched a plan to find out Reed’s address in order to write him a letter—a gesture far more intimate than a phone call. The strategy worked. After he received her letter, Reed contacted Morales, and the two began to see each other.

  Fonfara instantly noted that Morales understood how to behave around Reed, and she honed that understanding as their relationship developed. “She was very smart, and she knew when not to talk,” Fonfara said. “She knew when to give Lou the floor. She’d just sit there and nod. And whenever she disagreed with him, she would make her views known, but not publicly. She’d talk to him on the side.” Before long, Morales moved into the apartment Reed had been sharing with Rachel on Christopher Street, near Sheridan Square. Fonfara, who lived nearby with his wife, said, “Soon Rachel was gone, Sylvia was there, and they kept the dachshunds.”

  As for Rachel’s disappearance, Reed was determined to keep that as mysterious as possible. “I never found out what happened,” Fonfara said. “All I knew was that Rachel dropped off the scene, and I never saw her again. Never. I asked Lou about Rachel a couple of times, and he just said, ‘Never mind. You don’t want to know.’”

  There was talk that Rachel had been taking hormones and was interested in a sex change operation, and that Reed began pulling away from her; whether this was because of a discomfort with that transition or for other reasons is unknown. One of the last people known to have seen her was guitarist Jeffrey Ross, who ran into her near the intersection of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue in the Village, in either the late eighties or early nineties. “I was walking across the street, and on that little triangle in the middle of the street comes Rachel,” he recalled. “‘Oh, my God, Jeffrey, how are you? I can’t believe it!’ I recognized him right away. There had been no further treatments, I guess, or whatever was going on when she was with Lou. She had been on hormones, trying to grow tits, basically. She was very proud of them, too, these little nine-year-old breasts under a T-shirt. I guess all that stopped when she wasn’t with Lou anymore. This is much later—you’ve got to figure this is ten, twelve years of living over in the West Village, doing whatever you do there to earn money when you’re a transsexual—with what I self-diagnosed as an obvious crack problem. She was absolutely rail thin, very unhealthy. AIDS had basically taken over New York and the crack surge had started.” Reed would almost never again speak of Rachel, publicly or privately.

  WHATEVER RACHEL’S FATE, HER breakup with Reed became one of the subthemes of Reed’s next album, Street Hassle, which came out in February of 1978; Rolling Stone referred to Rachel as the album’s “raison d’être.” Street Hassle, which combined live performances of shows in Germany with studio overdubs, marks something like the beginning of Reed’s obsession with technology, although Metal Machine Music might contend for that honor as well. Street Hassle was the first album released using the binaural process created by sound architect and engineer Manfred Schunke; it involved computer-designed models of the average human head. “The detail was as precise as possible down to the size, shape, and bone structure of the ear and ear canal,” wrote music historian Rob Bowman. “Microphones were then designed to fit each ear so, theoretically, what they recorded would be exactly what a human being sitting in the position the head was placed in would actually hear.” Schunke engineered Street Hassle, as well as Reed’s next two albums.

  Using the binaural technique, which pretty much assumed that fans would be listening to the album through headphones, was a characteristically confo
unding gesture on Reed’s part. By 1978, punk had fully enshrined itself as a national movement in the United States. Patti Smith’s Horses was already regarded as a classic, and the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television had emerged as important groups. While all the bands gathered under the punk rubric were different, the very idea of punk rested on rawness and irreverence. The preciousness of recording an album meant to be heard through headphones seemed entirely antithetical to everything punk represented. Reed, of course, completely understood the appeal of punk. When Danny Fields first played him a demo tape of the Ramones, Reed couldn’t have been more excited. “They’re crazy!” he exclaimed. “I mean, it makes everybody else look so fucking wimpy, Patti Smith and me included, man.… They got them an amp, they got them a guitar, and now look—there they are.… It doesn’t take any talent. All they’re doing is banging it, and look at this. That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  But Reed clearly believed that what was good for the Ramones, or for the punk aesthetic generally, did not really apply to him. The notion that it “doesn’t take any talent” to play rock and roll was fine for a laugh about a new band with an old friend. But Reed had premised his entire career on the idea that rock music could bear the weight of great literature. Writing lyrics—or, for that matter, making music—as cartoonish as the Ramones’ was the last thing he wanted to do. He described his song “Banging on My Drum” on Rock and Roll Heart as “what the Ramones should do. Three chords is three chords, but there is a finesse to it.” As for the Sex Pistols, Reed said, “Shakespeare had a phrase for that.…‘Sound and fury signifying nothing.’ I’m so tired of the theory of the noble savage. I’d like to hear punks who weren’t at the mercy of their own rage and who could put together a coherent sentence.” The poet and performance artist Camille O’Grady aptly summed up Reed’s complicated attitude toward punk: “The kid adopted me, so I might as well make the best of it.” But his contrarian nature and fierce artistic independence finally would not allow him to fully exploit the possibilities that the punk revolution offered him. Instead, Street Hassle reflected the most sophisticated recording technology that Reed could find.

  Thematically, however, Street Hassle pushed up against and overwhelmed the aesthetic challenges that punk represented and demonstrated why Reed was a founding father. In a brilliant nod to his multiple personalities and image shifts, Reed opens the album in jagged conversation with himself. He references some career high points as the rugged riff from “Gimmie Some Good Times,” the album’s first song, plays in the background. “Hey, if it ain’t the rock-and-roll animal himself,” he says in an excited voice, as if mimicking a fan running into him on the street. “What are ya doin’, bro?” He answers in his characteristic speech-singing with the opening line of “Sweet Jane”: “Standing on the corner / Suitcase in my hand.” As if enthused by hearing the opening line of a Velvet Underground classic, Reed the fan exclaims, “No shit! What it is!” Reed the artist continues to sing, “Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest.” In a withering tone, Reed the fan responds, “Fucking faggot junkie.”

  At around the time of the release of Coney Island Baby, Reed had told Lenny Kaye, in language predictive of the opening exchange on Street Hassle, that he was done with the stereotypical “Lou Reed” image—“No more bullshit, dyed hair, faggot junkie trip,” he said. It’s hard not to hear those words repeated on Street Hassle as a repudiation of the life he had been living with Rachel. The three-part title track, one of the masterpieces of Reed’s solo career, stands as something of a requiem for Reed and Rachel’s relationship, as well as for the tawdry, dangerous street life out of which Rachel had emerged. Indeed, Reed once described the nearly eleven-minute “Street Hassle” as his answer to the question, “What would happen if Raymond Chandler wrote a rock-and-roll song?”

  The first section of “Street Hassle,” “Waltzing Matilda,” is set to an elegant cello riff and describes in unapologetically romantic terms a woman or transvestite picking up a young male hustler for sex. Rather than quick, furtive, and anonymous, the act is described in lovingly erotic terms: “He made love to her gently / It was like she’d never ever come.” The “sha-la-la-la” interjections in the lyrics recall both innocent children’s rhymes and doo-wop rhapsodies, both helping to sweeten the sexual encounter. In a sense, Reed is revisiting the meet-cute he described in Coney Island Baby’s “Crazy Feeling,” in which a chiming guitar and a lilting melody lend a shimmering quality to an after-hours gay bar pickup. The two songs, then, frame Reed and Rachel’s relationship, the first describing the headiness of falling in love, the second fixing that emotion in an equally romantic but ultimately finite context. “Neither one regretted a thing,” Reed concludes “Waltzing Matilda.” The line lends dignity to the two characters in the song but also makes it clear, with an undercurrent of sadness, that whatever passed between them is now over.

  The second section of “Street Hassle,” itself titled “Street Hassle,” takes its inspiration from the 1975 death of Eric Emerson, a musician, dancer, actor, and Factory regular, as well as the man who caused the Verve recall of The Velvet Underground and Nico when he threatened to sue the label because a photograph of him appeared on the album’s back cover without his permission. Emerson’s body was found near the docks by the West Side Highway, and his death was attributed to a hit-and-run accident. It was widely rumored, however, that he had died in another location from a heroin overdose and that his body had been left in the street to create the impression of an accident in order to avoid a police investigation. Reed used that incident and the speculation surrounding it as the basis for “Street Hassle,” a riveting, streetwise, morally compromised dramatic monologue delivered by a man in whose apartment a young woman dies of an overdose. In a delivery bristling with nervous, suppressed urgency, the singer tells the man who brought the girl with him that he has to get her body out of the apartment, and “by morning she’s just another hit-and-run.” In one of the record’s most chilling moments, the singer takes the “slip away” line that is the heart of the song’s romance—“Why don’t we slip away?” the hustler is asked in “Waltzing Matilda,” and that notion becomes the title and main theme of the song’s heartbreaking third movement—and transforms it into a suggestion to get rid of the girl’s body. “Sha-la-la-la, man,” the singer recites with a kind of weary contempt. “Why don’t you just slip her away?” Reed said he wasn’t sure why he changed the gender of the drug overdose victim in the song from male, as in the case of Eric Emerson, to female, but doing so adds to the sexual blurring that characterized Reed’s relationship with Rachel, as well as his decision to move on from Rachel to Sylvia Morales.

  Dramatically, “Slipaway,” the third and final section of “Street Hassle,” begins with a recitation by Bruce Springsteen. By this point, Reed recognized that, like himself, Springsteen was writing about a community of outsiders who rarely received recognition in works of art. To end the “Street Hassle” section of the song, Reed had observed of the lost souls he was singing about that “some people got no choice / And they can never find a voice / To talk with that they can even call their own / So the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be / Why, they follow it / You know, it’s called bad luck.” Those lyrics could easily find a place in any number of Springsteen songs, and as it happened, Springsteen was working on Darkness on the Edge of Town, his bleakest and most unsparing album, at the time. Springsteen’s voice then, a mumbled drawl that sounds world-weary and defeated, seems entirely at home in Reed’s portrayal of a Dantean urban inferno. Reed said that if he had recited those lines, they would have “come out funny. And when he did it, it sounded real.” Springsteen’s spoken part ends with a sly reference to perhaps the most famous line that he has ever written: “You know, tramps like us, we were born to pay.”

  Springsteen’s speech introduces what may well be the most poignant passage in any of Reed’s songs. A bass guitar continues the musical theme the cello establish
ed, and a mournful, droning organ contributes to an atmosphere of irretrievable loss. “Love has gone away,” Reed sings, “And there’s no one here now / And there’s nothing left to say / But, oh, how I miss him, baby.” Such speculation is always problematic, but, in the simplicity and sheer heartache of those lyrics, it very much sounds as if Reed is singing in his own voice, not that of a character. In any event, the breakup of Reed and Rachel’s relationship lurks in the background. While Reed had explored gay relationships in songs before, it had always been with an element of theatricality and self-conscious provocation. But that “oh, how I miss him, baby,” delivered in a quavering voice on the verge of breaking down, hits with extraordinary power. “Slipaway” tells the story of two human beings whose bond has disintegrated, leaving emotional devastation in its wake. Writing with that kind of vulnerability about a love affair between two men in a rock song was revolutionary at the time and has lost little of its impact.