Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  SOME MONTHS BEFORE THE release of the box set, Reed published a book of his lyrics, titled Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. Rob Bowman was miffed that Reed had used the title of the box set—it’s a line from the Velvet Underground song “Some Kinda Love”—for the book. (Bowman had suggested the box set title to Reed after conferring with another writer and Reed fan, Jeffrey Morgan.) Reed clearly saw the book as part of the same effort as the box set: to shape and define his achievement up to that point. Published by Hyperion in hardcover, the book is handsome and consciously literary. The black-and-white cover photo by Matt Mahurin shows Reed in profile against a black background, out of focus, softly lit, his eyes closed. The cover design by Sylvia and Spencer Drate features elegant gold-and-black type, and the back cover features half a dozen quotes from Reed’s lyrics. It was another effort on Reed’s part to move away from his identity as a rock star and define himself as a writer. “It isn’t a rock star’s compilation,” he said of the book. “There’s no pictures of my house or of the band. I didn’t bring in some Belgian to paint the cover. It was serious.… The songs are like my diary. If I want to know where I was, the book gives me a good idea.”

  In his brief introduction to the book, Reed wrote, “Over the last few years I have done occasional ‘poetry’ readings, always using my lyrics as the basis. I was continually struck by the different voices that emerged when the words were heard without music, and those experiences encouraged me to consider the possibility of publishing them naked.” Along with the selection of lyrics from his Velvet Underground and solo material, Reed included two previously published poems as well as his interviews with Hubert Selby and Václav Havel. Intermittently, Reed offers comments on the origins of his songs, and while sparing, they’re among the most revealing remarks he made since he cleaned up in the early eighties and began refusing to discuss “personal” matters in interviews. The book also reflects Reed’s deepening understanding of himself as a writer, as well as his weary comprehension that “drugs and liquor did not do me any good.” In fact, Reed created much of his greatest work when he was using drugs and alcohol, but the toll those excesses exacted on him finally proved unsustainable and certainly would have killed him. Sobriety was key to his continuing ability to make strong records, to appreciate and nourish his gift. “I know more about writing now than when I was a lunatic,” he said. “I’m very respectful of it now and I try to do everything in my power not to impede the process. I’ve been around a long time, and I know things that do impede it: drugs impede it; getting in a fight with a friend impedes it; tension impedes it.” His sobriety also allowed for a focus and precision that had been a nearly impossible struggle for him to achieve before. “Once you get past the first inspiration, which is always great fun, then comes the real business at hand: how do we make this say exactly what we want it to say—not almost, not close, not sort of, not, well, I can’t explain that, it’s poetry—but how can we put it exactly in the least words possible? I spend the bulk of my time taking things out. I’m always trying to get a visual image you can get really quickly. When you hear the record, it shoots by, so I want you to get the image quick. And if you didn’t, then it’s bad writing.”

  Perhaps the most striking aspect of the book is its dedication: “For Sid, Toby, Bunny / And most of all / For Sylvia.” Including his parents and his sister like this in a book devoted to his most prized vision of himself—that is, as a writer—suggests an ongoing effort on Reed’s part to come to terms with his upbringing and his past. And simply having a book that consists solely of his own words, that defined him as a writer, was incalculably important to him. Bill Bentley, who handled Reed’s publicity at Sire, accompanied him to a book signing for Between Thought and Expression at Book Soup in Los Angeles. “Lou built a real toughness around himself,” Bentley said. “He could be rude—let’s face it. But he wasn’t at all a hard person. At that signing, everybody was telling him their stories. One guy had him sign a banana—that was funny. But one lady said, ‘My sister had cancer, and Magic and Loss really got me through it.’

  “Lou would never show a whole lot. He would be polite, sign everything. But afterwards he went into a private room in the back of the store, and just sat down, fell into Sylvia’s arms, and started to weep. That image has always stuck with me. He’d been so touched by what people said. This wasn’t like a record release party—these were his words. I’ll never forget that. I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘That’s a Lou Reed that very few people have ever seen.’ I would always think of that when another side of him would come out. It made me really appreciate the depth of his feeling for other people. There are people who live by Lou’s lyrics. He’s written things that inspire you, give you hope, fuel your dreams. He’s one of a handful of rockers who did that over and over, forever, as long as they created. That showed me he knew the power of his music. He was no fool.”

  21

  ME BURGER WITH I SAUCE

  IF NEW YORK GOT Reed off on the right foot with his new label, Sire Records, Magic and Loss began the perhaps inevitable fraying of that relationship. With New York, Reed had brought Sire an album that both got strong critical attention and sold well. Its spare production and high-powered playing suggested that Reed was reenergized—exactly the message a new label wants to convey about an iconic artist it has just signed. The album was also ambitious and serious-minded, which made it a worthy addition to the Lou Reed oeuvre—another positive point, as far as Sire was concerned. Many critics thought it was the best work of Reed’s solo career.

  “The fact is, New York had great tracks and a strong first single in ‘Dirty Blvd.,’” said Steven Baker, Reed’s product manager at Warner Bros., Sire’s corporate home. “We did right by it and did a good job of promoting it. The song was an alternative radio hit, and even though Lou wasn’t exactly MTV material, the video got a certain amount of play on MTV. We sold more than half a million records. When records go that well, there’s not a lot of friction.” While Sire was excited about Songs for Drella and saw its appeal to serious music fans, the label still regarded it as a niche project. From Sire’s standpoint, Magic and Loss was the true follow-up to New York.

  When Reed delivered Magic and Loss, the label recognized its quality and understood its personal importance for Reed. But there was still a sense of disappointment. “I listened to Magic and Loss and thought, ‘Well, someone is really going to like this record, and that someone is going to be writers,’” said Baker. “When you’re working at a record company, you’re always really focused on, ‘How is this record going to be marketed compared to the one before it, which did quite well? What are our options for singles?’ All that stuff. If someone sent me Magic and Loss now, I could just sit back, enjoy its brilliance, and not worry. But then I was thinking, ‘The first track is good, but it’s not a single.’ And I kept hoping the next track would be the one. Then you get to the last track, and you think, ‘Well, there you go—it’s not going to emerge.’ Magic and Loss was a great record, but nothing on it was as obvious a single as ‘Dirty Blvd.’”

  Reed’s stature ensured that Sire would support Magic and Loss regardless of its commercial potential, but, as with Reed’s experiences at both RCA and Arista, the problem was convincing him to have realistic expectations for both sales and promotion of the album. A key ally in any such effort would typically be the artist’s manager—in Reed’s case, his wife. Managers, of course, advocate for their artists as strongly as possible, but “client control” is also one of their responsibilities. While artists are thought to be in need of constant ego massaging, record company executives assume that they can speak candidly to managers about their sense of what’s possible with a particular project and what the most effective marketing strategies would be. But even under optimal circumstances, Reed would be hard to handle. As usual, his hopes for the album far exceeded what could reasonably be expected to happen. And he was not the sort of artist who would agree to do exte
nsive interviews, for example, or visit radio stations. With record companies as well as fellow musicians, he was not an ideal collaborator.

  “George Clinton used to have this expression: he would talk about somebody being a ‘Me burger with I sauce,’” said Jeff Gold, who was senior vice president of creative services at Warner Bros. “That was my experience with Lou. It was all about Lou. Lou did what Lou wanted to do on Lou’s timetable, and fuck the rest of it. And I have no objection to artists being that way. They just have to put that into the calculus of how successful their record is going to be.”

  Unfortunately, Sylvia was in no position to convey that reality to Reed—though whether anyone else could have is a fair question. Sire came to believe that she was essentially useless in serving as an intermediary between Reed and the company. In a diplomatic understatement, Steven Baker observed that Sylvia “was probably not that well versed in the mechanics of Warner Bros. Records at that point.” Ultimately, he said, “my only impression of Sylvia is that she was nice. She was very easy to deal with. She was looking out for Lou’s interests. I have to say, though, that she wasn’t a seasoned manager, so she was naive about how things get done. There was a big difference between Sylvia Reed and dealing with someone like Cliff Bernstein [who managed Metallica and Def Leppard] or John Silva [who managed Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails], people whom I would respect as a manager. Not that I didn’t respect her, but she wasn’t bringing a lot of creative energy to the table. She was basically supporting her husband and client.”

  “Whenever you would hear something from Sylvia, my expectation was that Lou had said to her, ‘Call Warner Bros. and ask them for this or get them to do that,’” Jeff Gold said. “That’s perfectly fine, and she was a pleasant person. But I don’t think she contributed anything to the marketing of Lou’s records.”

  To be fair, Sylvia was in an impossible position, even if it was one she voluntarily accepted. When she first met Reed in her early twenties, she knew very little about him. Sylvia had come to New York on a scholarship to Pratt Institute, where she studied fine arts and filmmaking. The arts meant everything to her, and as she fell in love with Reed, his work loomed as something like a noble mission—as did relieving the desperate neediness that manifested itself in all his love relationships. “I felt that I had to fill this role,” she said. “There’s a lot of need there, the side of him that’s very fragile, very vulnerable. Here’s Lou the great artist in this misunderstanding world. ‘You understand me. Help me with this.’” Early on, he would bring Sylvia to meetings, sit her in a corner, and not introduce her to anyone. “It was key for him to have me there,” she said. “He’d never speak to me. But later he’d ask, ‘Okay, who said what? Who did this? What did you think? What’s your impression of this person?’” She was eager to impress him and passed all the tests he put her through. When Reed left his manager Eric Kronfield, he put Sylvia in charge as an interim decision that inevitably became permanent. He trusted her implicitly, and her role grew and grew. There was virtually no aspect of Reed’s life in which Sylvia, as a wife and business partner, did not play a significant role.

  “It snuck up on me,” she said. “I cannot believe how much he was having me handle. It ended up where all the requests, all the things that would normally go to a business manager, I’m handling. I’m making sure that the tours and the recording sessions are set up right in every aspect—the musicians, the transportation. I’m also dealing with the huge number of daily requests: ‘Are we allowed to print the lyrics?’ ‘Can we use this song for a benefit?’ ‘Will you make an appearance here?’ Endless, endless. It was a huge amount of work.

  “That’s the importance it had for him. Every single thing that came in, all of it had to be vetted by someone he trusted and presented to him for a final yes or no. And then the worm turns. ‘How do I know your point of view is right on this? You’re the only one telling me this.’ He’d want to pull away and get on with his own creative process, but then he would feel, ‘No, I need to be in control.’ He became sober, and as with many people who clean up and get dry, there’s that underlying alcoholic thing about control. And that was difficult, a very difficult time. He was an absolute control freak, and I don’t think it would have bothered him to be called that at all. I think he would think of it as a point of pride.… But I will say this. I don’t believe, even at the end, that he ever let go of trusting me.”

  Finally, both Sire and Sylvia were up against what may well have been an immovable force: Lou Reed himself. Said Jeff Gold: “You can do all this stuff around the release of an album: take out provocative advertising, make the most of whatever video the artist is willing to do, create special packages—a lot of hoopla. But ultimately, nothing can compete with the artist getting in there and doing something himself. A writer doing an article about what Warner Bros. is doing to support a Lou Reed album is not nearly as exciting as the writer talking to Lou Reed. There’s nothing you can do for the key buyer of a retail chain that can compete with bringing Lou Reed in and having him meet the guy. Same with radio programmers. Lou had negative interest in doing any of that.”

  Reed developed strategies for dealing with the various people at his record company, though the degree to which he was in control of his behavior is unclear. For the most part, he felt fully justified expressing his dissatisfaction directly—and personally. Information that would typically come from a manager often came straight from Reed himself. Jeff Gold came to Warner Bros. at around the time of Magic and Loss, and as a fan of Reed and the Velvet Underground, he found himself in a complicated position. “I think Lou had pissed off enough people in the sales department, the publicity department, the advertising and marketing departments that a phone call from Lou Reed wasn’t good news,” Gold said. “It would be like, ‘Uh-oh, what’s wrong? What’s he going to yell at me about? Jesus Christ, I don’t want to talk to this guy.’ And he didn’t have a real manager who could help you. So I was kind of fresh meat—like, ‘Wow, a call from Lou Reed? Great, put him on.’ You figure, ‘I can talk to this guy. How bad can he be?’”

  Gold would eventually learn the answer to that question. At around the time of Magic and Loss, he also discovered one of Reed’s strategies for avoiding personal conversations and discussions about the meaning of his songs: his retreat into the subject of sound technology. “I remember going to meet Lou at his house with Steven Baker,” Gold recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, what a trip—going to Lou Reed’s house!’ Lou had a bunch of instruments set up, maybe some drums and guitars, and he had a guitar that was rectangular and he was going on and on about the sonics of it. I remember thinking, ‘It seems like he’s more obsessed with the sound he can get from his guitar than the songs.’… This is the guy who’s the visionary behind the Velvet Underground, who was so far ahead of the pack, and all he wants to talk about is some new amp he’s found. He was obsessed with it. That was my takeaway from going to Lou Reed’s house. It was so mind-bogglingly uninteresting. It’s like you’re going to the Messiah to get the answer and all he wants to talk about is the lunch menu.”

  Without question, Reed’s obsession with sonic niceties was a way of avoiding the personal questions that his style of songwriting, self-presentation, and lurid history inevitably generated. But in his defense, he had clearly come to believe that sound was the primary means of how songs communicated. For someone as obsessed with lyrics as Reed was, that’s saying something. Fans and many critics hear music solely in emotional terms, but for Reed, that emotional effect can come only when sound has been properly deployed. Critic Simon Reynolds called it Reed’s “science of magic.” Reed told him, “I know how much the magic disappears when the technical stuff is wrong.”

  With Baker, Reed conveyed his disappointed expectations in a different way. “He never screamed at me,” Baker said. “He would make me feel guilty. He would call and say, ‘I was in a record store in’—pick your city—‘and there weren’t any posters up in the store.’ I would be thin
king, ‘There’s no way Lou went to that record store. Maybe one of his roadies did.’ But I’d get this call at eight in the morning. That’s what I remember—you’d get this call and Lou’s upset. He’s not yelling. He’s telling you what he’s seen, and he’s disappointed. The way I would react to that is to feel incredibly guilty, that we weren’t coming through for Lou. He understood that that was a great way of pressing my buttons. I never remember a barrage of anger, that kind of energy coming from Lou. More like a constant sense of disappointment.”

  AS REED’S SOLO CAREER proceeded, interest in the Velvet Underground seemed only to gain momentum. From June 14 to September 9, 1990, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art presented an exhibition devoted to Andy Warhol, titled Andy Warhol System: Pub-Pop-Rock, in Jouy-en-Josas, about sixteen miles outside Paris. All four original members of the Velvet Underground were invited to and attended the opening, which took place on a gorgeous summer day, and Reed and Cale agreed to perform five selections from Songs for Drella on a simple outdoor stage arranged in a woodland setting. Some people, of course, were hoping the Velvets would play together, but word of bickering at their table during lunch spread through the crowd, and those hopes diminished.