Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  But when Reed and Cale finished their short set, Reed called Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker to join them onstage. To enthusiastic cheers, they took their places, and edged into “Heroin.” This reunion was not planned, or at least was not a foregone conclusion. Morrison had not even brought a guitar. But the performance was riveting—stunning, really, for the relatively small crowd of a few hundred insiders and notables who witnessed it. Cale’s viola was a mesmerizing drone, and Tucker’s drumming was tribal and intense. Reed and Morrison locked in on guitar, and Reed’s singing was simultaneously impassioned and coolly detached. Reed got lost in the song once or twice and dropped lyrics, but all in all, the performance was everything anyone could have wanted from such an event. This particular VU lineup had not been onstage together in twenty-two years, and they sounded better than they had in their heyday. Their conviction and sense of the historical importance of what they were doing lent their performance a weight it never could have had back when they were desperately struggling for recognition. And for all their maturity and intelligence, they had lost none of their rawness. The audience was ecstatic. “That would be an amazing one for the bootleggers,” Reed joked to a friend backstage, and, of course, it was. At that moment, something that would have seemed unthinkable emerged as a possibility: a genuine Velvet Underground reunion.

  For years, Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker had been circling one another warily. In addition to participating in the Cartier performance, Tucker appeared on Reed’s album New York. Reed, Cale, and Morrison all performed on Tucker’s 1991 solo album, I Spent a Week There the Other Night. That same year, Reed and Morrison joined Cale onstage during a solo gig of his at New York University. That this degree of interaction had not already led to a VU reunion suggests how much distrust still permeated their relations. In 1992, the group did some rehearsals, still unsure if they could successfully perform together. Finally, the group made the decision to proceed.

  Tremendous excitement surrounded the announcement of the band’s European tour, which was set to begin with two shows in Edinburgh at the beginning of June. Morrison wanted Doug Yule to join the band on the road, but Reed and Cale nixed the idea. Cale wanted the band to write new material for the tour; his oft-repeated watchword was that the purpose of the tour was to “remythologize” the band, not “demythologize” it. He was overruled by the other members. According to Cale, Reed believed that he was doing the band an “enormous favor” by participating in the reunion at all. Sylvia, who designed the stage lighting for the tour, also very much wanted the reunion to happen, and Cale suspected that Reed’s agreeing to do it was part of his strategy to negotiate the divorce that seemed to be in his future. Reed and Sylvia were in the process of breaking up, though they were still working together—an untenable situation.

  Still, Reed understood what was at stake. “We’re confronting the myth head-on,” he said while the band was in rehearsals before the tour began. “I’m sure there will be people who will say afterward, ‘Oh, it would have been better if they didn’t play. The memory of it is so much better than the reality of it.’” Morrison, perhaps, had the best attitude about the band’s determination to perform again. “Should we stay in hiding just because a myth is loose in the land?” he asked. The rock press, which had spent the previous quarter century or so praising the band to the skies, remained skeptical, of course. In the Times of London, critic David Sinclair wrote that the Velvets’ “unique godhead status will begin to diminish almost from the moment they start their first number.” The problem was that the Velvets were not competing with actual memories—relatively few people had ever seen the band, and for that matter, the Velvets had never performed outside the United States. Few recordings of their live performances were available at the time, as legitimate releases or even as bootlegs, and few people had heard any of those. Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker were competing with the idea of the Velvet Underground, the symbolic importance that the band had come to assume, and that, understandably, must have been a little bit frightening. It was brave of them to proceed in the face of that challenge.

  As it happens, the band inevitably did not match the exalted expectations generated by its storied past. In part because of Reed’s desire to exert as much control over the reunion as possible, the group often sounded like former members of the Velvet Underground backing Lou Reed in a set of Velvet Underground classics. Reed simply could not relax into allowing the group to explore the musical outer limits of what the band had done in the past—and could still do. That experimental urge was largely Cale’s province, and Reed was not going to yield to him on it. Still, the band performed at a high level, and critics were respectful of both its gifts and its legend. David Sinclair, who had assumed that the reunited group’s first notes would tarnish the Velvets’ standing, concluded that one of the Scotland shows “did not produce a feeling of déjà vu, more an impression that, after twenty-five years, the rest of the world has only just caught up with them.” The sheer excitement of seeing the foursome onstage performing a body of work that ranks among the most significant in the history of rock and roll no doubt affected the reactions of both critics and fans.

  Among the people who were most enthusiastic about a Velvets reunion were the executives at Reed’s label, Sire Records. While it was unlikely ever to be a massive commercial success, the Velvets reunion had the potential to generate a great deal of interest in Reed and his solo work. A live album from the tour was the least of it. Very quickly, the possibility of the band making an appearance on MTV Unplugged emerged, an event that would expose Reed and the Velvets to an entire generation of younger fans. An Unplugged album would no doubt follow, and after that, who knew? Perhaps a new Velvet Underground album. Of course, the team at Sire was under no illusions about how sturdy the Velvets’ reunion was. When the tour was announced, Jeff Gold jokingly told Steven Baker, “We’ve got to go to the first show in Edinburgh, because there might not be a second one.” But that did not diminish the thrill of seeing the legendary band perform live. “We went backstage before the show,” Gold recalled. “It was almost an intellectual disconnect for me, this band I loved so much, and here they are in one room and I’m meeting them and they’re about to play. It was really overwhelming, almost beyond belief.” That the shows themselves did not rise to the level of what the Velvets were capable of was almost a secondary consideration. “It seemed like Lou was running things. He was doing all the talking and he was calling the shots onstage,” Gold recalled. “That said, I was really happy I went. It was a bucket list moment, the closest I was going to get. But it wasn’t what it could have been.”

  Everyone’s assumption was that the European shows were a run-up to a U.S. tour. It was inconceivable that the band would reunite for a few weeks in Europe and then not perform in America. But that’s precisely what happened. The reason? As Gold put it, Lou “was really being Lou.” The band insisted that Reed not produce the Velvets’ live album, which ended up being titled Live MCMXCIII—the Roman numerals for 1993 and a nod, playful or not, to the monumental nature of the Velvets reunion. As far as the production went, Reed settled for, in his view, the next best thing to a compromise. He brought in Mike Rathke, who had worked with Reed and Fred Maher on New York. Reed said, “You don’t want me to do it? Okay. I’ll make this happen. Mike is my right-hand man. He will do what I would have done. And he did. He did a brilliant job of it.”

  Because of the tensions that arose—primarily between Reed and Cale, though also between Reed and Morrison—the notion that the band would do some dates in the United States was scuttled. Finally, the MTV Unplugged performance was also abandoned because Reed insisted on producing—and receiving an additional fee for—the album that would result from that appearance. For Reed, the issue was completely straightforward. “The reason the Velvet Underground did not play in the United States—and obviously never will—is twofold. It was a volatile brew; I was happy it made it through Europe in the first place. Two, I wanted
to produce and be paid for the production of any albums we were going to do. The other members of the group, led by John Cale, didn’t want me to.” To anyone who cared about the Velvet Underground, Reed’s decision seemed mind-bogglingly petty.

  “I was in the middle of that whole situation,” said Steven Baker, who had come up with the idea of the Velvets doing MTV Unplugged. “I just recall taking calls, ping-ponging back and forth between John and Lou, and feeling like, ‘This thing is falling apart,’ and it’s ridiculous because that really could have been a moment. It fell apart because nobody from their side could help them rationalize a way to get it done.”

  Once again, the most likely person to perform that key role was Sylvia. During rehearsals for the tour, when an issue about song publishing came up, Reed immediately called Sylvia and insisted that she drop whatever she was doing and come down to deal with Cale. When she arrived, Cale informed her that, while she might manage Lou Reed, she did not manage the Velvet Underground, and he had no interest in discussing the matter with her. “Sylvia couldn’t possibly have brokered the peace between them,” Baker said. “There was nobody who could have brought them together and said, ‘We should look at this as in the best interests of the Velvet Underground,’ and also say to Lou, ‘This is good for you, for whatever you do solo after this, because this just brings more attention to your accomplishments with the Velvet Underground.’

  “The Unplugged would have brought the Velvet Underground to the forefront of MTV viewers’ imaginations. Even those kids who may have heard the New York album on alternative radio might not have had a clue what group Lou came from. Look, this record was not going to do what Eric Clapton’s or Nirvana’s Unplugged did. I’m not suggesting that. The simple fact is they could have put an album into their catalog that might have sold better than any previous Velvet Underground record.”

  According to Cale, the final decision about the Unplugged album and the tour was made during a band meeting on Long Island for which Reed arrived in a white limousine. Reed sat by the pool “draped in white towels, looking like an outpatient or an old-age pensioner,” as Cale put it, and insisted that he was the only person who could produce the Velvet Underground. “I saw immediately what that was about—everybody would be taking orders from Lou Reed,” Cale wrote afterward. Cale suggested alternatives: George Martin, Chris Thomas, or “any producer we wanted.” Reed’s response: “I must produce.” Cale’s position: “Absolutely not.”

  Cale was, needless to say, at least as well established a producer as Reed. Along with his own estimable solo work, Cale had produced groundbreaking albums for the Stooges, Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, and Nico. That, of course, was a piece of the problem. Part of Reed’s mission was to demonstrate that he was the most important figure in the Velvet Underground, and Cale was his most significant rival in that regard. The band’s reunion shows took on the character they did for that reason. The two men had shared the production credit for Songs for Drella, but that was a side project. In the same way the other band members were contained onstage for the reunion shows, there was no way Reed would let the production of a VU album, live or not, seem like a communal process—or the result of anyone’s decisions but his. Even the back of the Live MCMXCIII CD booklet reads “ALL SONGS WRITTEN BY LOU REED,” in all caps and in a typeface much larger than the titles of the songs themselves. In infinitely smaller type appears the parenthetical “except where indicated.”

  22

  FOURTEENTH CHANCE

  IN 1992, JOHN ZORN, a saxophonist and charter member of New York’s downtown music scene, curated the Munich Art Projekt, an annual festival devoted to new music. The rubric Zorn chose to explore was what he called radical Jewish culture. Zorn had recently become interested in both his Jewish identity and the role of Jewish musicians in the most adventurous quarters of the New York music scene. He had composed a piece commemorating Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” the attack on the Jewish community in Germany and Austria in 1938 that signaled the beginning of the systematic genocide that would evolve into the Holocaust. It was the first of his pieces to explore this aspect of his history and identity. As part of his curator’s role in the festival, Zorn invited Lou Reed to perform. That’s where Reed met Laurie Anderson, another of the artists Zorn had invited.

  Like Zorn, Anderson had been a fixture on the avant-garde scene in New York, and like him, she moved in circles that occasionally grazed against the world of popular music. Unlike Zorn, however, Anderson had actually enjoyed a hit. Her 1981 song “O Superman (for Massenet)” rose to number two on the UK singles chart and created a sufficient impression in the United States to land her a multialbum deal with Warner Bros. (Jules Massenet was a French opera composer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.) Essentially, then, Reed and Anderson were labelmates. Trained as a classical violinist, Anderson combined an array of styles in her work. As a performance artist, she often treated her voice in a way that blurred or even erased gender. Even Anderson’s looks refused a commitment to gender. Her face was pretty and fine-boned, with expressive eyes, but her cropped hair and inevitable pants made her appear boyish. She was fascinated by electronics and invented several instruments that explore the interface between acoustic and synthetic sound. Musically adventurous, her songs often include vocal parts that are not so much sung as intoned. Her cadences are musical but more like spoken-word recitations than like songs. They are delivered with a studied lack of affect, as if she were an anthropologist describing a realm she had never seen before and to which she had no emotional connection.

  Not only was she not blown over by meeting Lou Reed; she barely knew who he was. That had to have made an impression on him. When Reed invited her to perform with him in Munich, Anderson wondered to herself why he didn’t have an English accent: she had thought the Velvet Underground was from England. Only five years younger than Reed, she was hardly in the position of looking up to him as a more famous and established figure. On the other hand, she was extremely intelligent, and Reed’s gifts and accomplishments—not to mention his charm and wit—would not have been lost on her.

  Reed was taken by her performance in Munich and suggested that they get together again when they were both back in New York. “Yes! Absolutely!” she said. “I’m on tour, but when I get back—let’s see, about four months from now—let’s definitely get together.” That she was in no hurry to cement her connection with Reed would not have slipped by him. It would have tugged at his insecurities, for one thing, but also circumvented his paranoia regarding the agenda, expectations, and intentions of anyone who tried to get close to him. According to Anderson, they solidified their relationship while attending the Audio Engineering Society convention. “The AES convention is the greatest and biggest place to geek out on new equipment, and we spent a happy afternoon looking at amps and cables and shop-talking electronics,” Anderson later wrote. She claimed that she had no idea they were on a date, but when Reed suggested a movie and dinner afterward, it became clear where they were headed. Their true relationship began on that day.

  AS HIS MARRIAGE TO Sylvia was falling apart, Reed had begun to seek out other prospects. Before he set his sights on Laurie Anderson, this made for some awkward times, given that Sylvia still managed him and they still socialized. Suzanne Vega recalled Sylvia calling her up and inviting her to dinner with her and Lou; the singer-songwriter Victoria Williams would also be there. Vega had asked if she could bring along the producer Mitchell Froom, whom she had begun to date and would later marry. When Froom left the table for a few minutes, Reed moved into his chair. “Lou grabbed my hand and started stroking it, saying, ‘You and I really need to get together and have lunch,’” Vega recalled. “I started laughing because Sylvia’s sitting right there. I’m thinking, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ And he keeps on: ‘We really need to get together.’ So I say, ‘Sure, call me up. We’ll have lunch. Whatever.’ So Mitchell comes back to the table, and Lou’s holding
my hand and stroking my arm. I’m still laughing, and Mitchell is like, ‘What’s going on here?’ I’m like, ‘Nothing. Lou’s being mischievous. He’s being flirtatious.’ Obviously, this was a piece of theater. I’d been procured by Sylvia to come to this dinner, so I didn’t take it that seriously. And Lou never called.” The next time she saw Reed was in early 1994, when they were both performing at a songwriters’ evening at the Bottom Line. Vega was pregnant with Froom’s child, Sylvia was backstage with Reed, and Laurie Anderson was in the audience.

  Also during this period, Reed’s friend Erin Clermont thought that something deeper might be developing between her and Reed. “We had been getting very close,” she said. “Sylvia had left him, and there was a new element in the relationship. He was being so nice and caring. I didn’t know where it was going, but it was fun. And then he called me and said he had gotten involved with someone. I said, ‘Oh, who?’ He said, ‘Laurie Anderson.’ My jaw dropped. I had no idea. I felt that he treated me quite shabbily.”

  Reed and Sylvia divorced in 1994, at which point Sylvia no longer managed him. The stresses of their personal and business relationships, as well as Reed’s refusal to have children, which Sylvia very much wanted, eventually took a fatal toll. In the divorce, Sylvia got the couple’s home in Blairstown, New Jersey, which on The Blue Mask and elsewhere had seemed such a symbol of the life they had created together.

  Characteristically, Reed dove headfirst into his new relationship. Apart from their affection for each other, Reed and Anderson brought valuable qualities to each other’s lives. By the midnineties, Reed was past fifty and was in danger of becoming a rock-and-roll elder statesman. He was creating strong work, but, as had happened with punk fifteen years earlier, his own successors seemed to push him from the edge into the mainstream. The so-called grunge movement had brought a corrosive version of punk back into prominence, and even to the top of the charts. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Screaming Trees owed a considerable debt to Reed and the Velvet Underground, but the fans of those bands had little idea of that lineage. Gangsta rap, too, had introduced elements of violence, sexual provocation, linguistic shock value, and abrasive noise into popular music that made Reed at his most extreme seem quaint—all while selling millions of records. Though Anderson was no help in that regard, her impeccable avant-garde credentials sharpened the edge of Reed’s stature. He was now not merely an aging rocker but someone with direct ties to the still-roiling New York underground scene. Her aesthetic credibility and the seriousness with which her work was regarded functioned for Reed as something like the literary standing that he so ardently sought. If Reed wanted to distance himself somewhat from rock and roll in order to be perceived as a Serious Artist, his involvement with Anderson advanced that cause.