Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Parting ways is common among former schoolmates who move on to new jobs and allegiances. The amputations that struck more deeply and perhaps more definitively were made by Lou of the people who had been most influential, the ones who knew too much about him.

  After a period of psychiatric rehabilitation, Lincoln Swados had re-emerged on the New York scene, living in the East Village not far from Lou. For a short time he was making a reputation for himself as a comic-strip illustrator and stand-up comedian. But soon he beat Lou hands down in the lunatic sweepstakes by stepping in front of an oncoming subway train, saying, “I am a very bad person, I am a very bad person …” Moving aside at the last minute, he survived—minus an arm and a leg. Subsequently, he became something of a fixture on the Lower East Side as a crippled street performer. Lincoln’s sister, Elizabeth, who had gone on to a distinguished career as a playwright, was apparently quite upset by the extent to which Lou, rather than opening up to Lincoln after this tragic episode, put even more distance between them. Lincoln, though, apparently had a perceptive understanding of his friend’s motives. “Lou pretends to be like us,” he told his ex-girlfriend, the journalist Gretchen Berg, “but he’s really not, he’s really someone else. He’s really a businessman who has very definite goals and knows exactly what he wants.”

  Interestingly, Delmore Schwartz, who was now in the final year of his life, had drawn a similar conclusion. A Syracuse classmate of Lou’s who ran into Schwartz in Manhattan one day was astonished to discover that “he looked really bad. He had on a black raincoat which looked like it was covered with toothpaste stains. He seemed to have been drinking, maybe he was drunk. And the only thing he was interested in discussing was his dislike for everyone at Syracuse; how Lou Reed and Peter Locke were spies paid by the Rockefellers.” When Lou discovered that Schwartz was living in the dilapidated fleabag Dixie Hotel on West 48th Street, he went there to make contact, but Delmore let him have it with both barrels, screaming, “If you ever come here again, I’ll kill you!” scaring off a shaken Reed, who recalled, “He thought I’d been sent by the CIA to spy on him, and I was scared because he was big and he really would have killed me.”

  The third mind in his life at Syracuse, Shelley Albin, reversed the amputation, cutting Lou out of her life when she married Ronald Corwin, who had been a big wheel on the Syracuse campus from 1963 to 1965 as the head of the local chapter of CORE, and whom Lou subsequently characterized as an “asshole airhead.” The marriage was a blow to Lou in as much as he still considered Shelley to be “his” girlfriend, even though he had neither seen nor apparently made any attempt to contact her since the summer of 1964. Still, he had not carried on a romantic relationship with anyone else. Shelley would remain a thorn in his side at least throughout the end of the 1970s, inspiring some of his most poignant, if vicious, love songs.

  The only people Lou seemed incapable of amputating were his parents, who were vividly remembered by friends as a pair of never seen but constantly present just off stage ogrelike specters threatening at any moment to have Lou committed (despite the fact that he was now twenty-three years old and legally beyond their reach).

  ***

  A month into his collaboration with Cale, one of those chance meetings that have often formed rock groups took place when Lou bumped into his friend from Syracuse, Sterling Morrison, walking in the West Village. Lou invited Sterling to Ludlow Street to play some music. By then Angus MacLise was playing drums around Lou and John. The next time Tony Conrad dropped by, he discovered that the Reed–Cale relationship had blossomed with MacLise and Morrison into what they were beginning to call a group. They had even made a first stab at a name, trying on for several months the Warlocks (which, incidentally, was the name being used at the same time on the West Coast by the proto-Grateful Dead), and were taping rehearsals. The music, heavily influenced by La Monte Young via MacLise and Cale, but equally by the doo-wop and white rock favored by Reed and Morrison, was ethereal and passionate.

  Lou and Angus collaborated on an essay called “Concerning the Rumor That Red China Has Cornered the Methedrine Market and Is Busy Adding Paranoia Drops to Upset the Mental Balance of the United States,” a nutty, stoned credo of the band’s basic precepts. It read, in part, “Western music is based on death, violence and the pursuit of PROGRESS … The root of universal music is sex. Western music is as violent as Western sex … Our band is the Western equivalent to the cosmic dance of Shiva. Playing as Babylon goes up in flames.”

  Their original precepts were to dedicate themselves with an almost religious fervor to their collective calling, to sacrifice being immediately successful, to be different, to hold on to a personality of their own, never to try to please anyone but themselves, and never to play the same song the same way. The group discovered and exploited musical traditions lost to their contemporaries, rejecting outright the popular conventions of the day. “We actually had a rule in the band,” Reed explained. “If anybody played a blues lick, they would be fined. Everyone was going crazy over old blues people, but they forgot about all those groups, like the Spaniels, people like that. Records like ‘Smoke from Your Cigarette,’ and ‘I Need a Sunday Kind of Love,’ the ‘Wind’ by the Chesters, ‘Later for You, Baby’ by the Solitaires. All those really ferocious records that no one seemed to listen to anymore were underneath everything we were playing. No one really knew that.”

  “Our music evolved collectively,” Sterling reported. “Lou would walk in with some sort of scratchy verse and we would all develop the music. It almost always worked like that. We’d all thrash it out into something very strong. John was trying to be a serious young composer; he had no background in rock music, which was terrific, he knew no clichés. You listen to his bass lines, he didn’t know any of the usual riffs, it was totally eccentric. ‘Waiting for the Man’ was very weird. John was always exciting to work with.”

  Their first complete success in terms of arrangements was “Venus in Furs.” When Cale initially added viola, grinding it against Reed’s “ostrich” guitar, illogically and without trepidation, a tingle of anticipation shot up his spine. They had, he knew, found their sound, and it was strong. Cale, who applied the mania to the sound, recalled, “It wasn’t until then that I thought we had discovered a really original, nasty style.” With the words of this song, wrote the British critic Richard Williams, “Lou Reed was to change the agenda of pop music once and for all. But it wasn’t just the words either. ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’ were given music that fitted their themes, and that didn’t sound like anything anybody had played before. Out went the blues tonality and the Afro-American rhythms, the basic components of all previous rock and roll. The prevailing sound was the grinding screech of Cale’s electric viola and Reed’s guitar feedback, while the tempo speeded up and slowed down according to the momentary requirements of the lyric.”

  The chemistry of their personalities was more fragile. On one occasion, Lou played a new song he had written and John immediately started adding an improvised viola part. Sterling muttered something about its being a good viola part. Lou looked up and snapped, “Yeah, I know. I wrote the song just for that viola part. Every single note of it I knew in advance.” Although unable to outdo Lou verbally, John stuck to his guns through music. Several observers of the scene believed that John did more than that—he actually brought Lou Reed out of himself, completed him as it were. Some believe that without John Cale, the Lou Reed who became a legend would not have been born.

  “It’s a fascinating relationship,” commented one friend. “That John worked with Cage and La Monte Young would be interesting enough if his career ended there, but that he met Lou and saw something in Lou despite the fact that Lou did not have the same kind of training that he had. I think he recognized that and must have done much in his way to nurture it and allowed it also to change the course of his life.”

  Sterling Morrison hid this nervousness under a cloud of silence when anything went wrong. His personality often mad
e him a useful buffer between Reed and Cale, but it could also cause problems when, without informing anybody that he was upset, he would simply clam up. Insecure about his playing, and in need of constant encouragement, Sterling stood in the background and tentatively muttered the choruses he was supposed to sing. One friend recalled that “it was typical of Sterling to play a wonderful solo and pretend he didn’t care, but then after an hour sidle up and ask, ‘How was the solo?’”

  The joker in the deck was Angus MacLise. Not only did the band get the majority of their electricity from his apartment, but Angus was, by all accounts, a lovely, whimsical, gnomelike man, inspired, inspirational, and a serious methedrine addict. As a drummer, he was intuitive and complex, pounding out an amazing variety of textures and licks culled from cultures around the world. He was influenced a lot by his travels, by the dervishes of the Middle East and people he had met in India and Nepal. A visionary poet and mystic who also belonged to La Monte Young’s coterie, MacLise believed in listening to the essence of sound and relating it to one’s inner being. “Angus had dreamy notions of art—I mean real dreamy,” commented Sterling. “So did we, otherwise we could have made a whole lot more money. We were never in it for the money, we felt very strongly about the material, and we wanted to be able to play it. We said screw the marketing.”

  Both Cale and MacLise continued to play with the Theater of Eternal Music through 1965 in between rehearsing with the Warlocks, although this contravened Lou’s need for total allegiance and commitment. This made La Monte Young almost a third mind in the construction of the band’s basic precepts. It was characteristic of that period and place—specifically the East Village—that certain figures, such as La Monte Young, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ginsberg, were ensconced with an adoring, disciplelike entourage of followers and fellow workers. It is significant that despite his two bandmates’ close connections with one of the most charismatic figures of the period, Lou Reed never met La Monte Young during his entire career with the Velvet Underground. Reed understood that people who really wanted to make it on their own—to be stars—had to keep their distance from the vortex of such strong groups.

  In fact, the central paradox of Lou’s career—particularly in the 1960s—was that by entering the highly competitive, fast-paced world of rock and roll, he was by definition entering the one art form that relied completely and uniquely on intense, rapid, often nerve-racking collaboration—the thing he had the most trouble with. Soon his new bandmates would discover what the Eldorados had collided with at Syracuse—that Lou could be the sweetest, most charming companion socially, but he was virtually always a motherfucker to work with. His biggest problem, apart from demanding complete control and having a Himalayan ego, was the matter of credit. Just as the Rolling Stones had done when creating their music, the Velvet Underground worked up almost all of their songs collectively. Reed, who composed the simple, inspirational chord structures or sketchy lyrics, was under the impression, however, that he had single-handedly crafted masterpieces like “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Black Angel’s Death Song,” etc. In truth, although Reed undoubtedly supplied the brilliant lyrics and chord structures, the various and greater parts of the music—Cale’s viola; Morrison’s guitar; MacLise’s drumming—were invented by each individually. In short, Reed should have shared the majority of his writing credits with other members of the band. At first, of course, before the question of signing any contract came up, everything was copacetic—since there was nothing to argue about. The group was also under the impression, due to the nature of the material, that no one would ever record or cover their music. In time, however, this vital subject of artistic collaboration, credit, and, most importantly, of publishing rights (which is where the most money is made in rock and roll in the long run) would become the deepest wound in the band’s history of battles.

  Still, in early 1965, Angus became a devoted, if crazy, friend to Lou, in the tradition of Lincoln Swados. Angus turned Lou on to the easily available pharmaceutical, methamphetamine hydrochloride, which was the drug of choice of a particularly intense group of visionary seekers centered around Jack Smith, and later, Andy Warhol. Methamphetamine hydrochloride—speed—is a key to understanding what set Reed and Cale’s sound aside from the mainstream of American pop in the second half of the 1960s, which was based more on soft and hallucinogenic drugs.

  The tension between these four disparate personalities became the emotional engine of their music. Twenty years later, Reed would vigorously deny that the friction, particularly between him and Cale, was constructive. But this was simply one of his many attempts to write or control his own history. Morrison remembered, “I love Lou, but he has what must be a fragmented personality, so you’re never too sure under any conditions what you’re going to have to deal with. He’ll be boyishly charming, naive—Lou is very charming when he wants to be. Or he will be vicious—and if he is, you have to figure out what’s stoking the fire. What drug is he on, or what mad diet? He had all sorts of strange dietary theories. He’d eat nothing, live on wheat husks. He was always trying to move mentally and spiritually to some place where no one had ever gone before. He was often very antisocial and difficult to work with, but he was interesting, and people were interested in the conflict and some of the good things that came out of it.”

  Some of the good things that came out of it were the songs that began to soar out over the gritty, dangerous drug supermarkets next to Ludlow Street from Eldridge to the Bowery. Lou, Sterling, Angus, and John hammered away at songs day in and day out, honing down the ones that would appear on the first Velvet Underground album two years later. According to Cale, “We actually worked very hard on the arrangements for the first album. We used to meet once a week for about a year, just to work on arrangements. I felt when we were doing those first arrangements back in Ludlow Street, ’65, that we had something that was going to last. What we did was unique, it was powerful. We spent our entire weekends going over and over and over the songs. We had no big problem with the work ethic; in fact, we were hanging on to the work ethic for dear life.”

  By the spring of 1965, the music began to soar. John Cale remembered these earliest days of playing as their best. Cale contributed his unique electric viola, Morrison his hauntingly beautiful electric guitar, MacLise his ethereal Far Eastern drumming, and Reed his raw lyrics and hard delivery of them. Often the band improvised a riff and Reed simply made up the lyrics as he went along. “He was amazing,” Cale said. “One minute he’d be a southern preacher, then he’d change character completely and be someone totally different.”

  “In my head it would be great if I could sing like AI Green,” Reed said. “But that’s in my head. It wasn’t true. I had to work out ways of dealing with my voice and its limitations. I wrote for a certain phrase and then bent the lyric to fit the melody. Figured out a way to make it fit.” In 1965 he was remarkably creative, carving a dark, macabre, Poe-like beauty out of Cale’s orchestration of the band’s musical chaos. “We heard our screams turn into songs,” Reed later wrote, “and back into screams again.”

  Meanwhile, Cale, traveling back and forth between London and New York on his classical-scholarship funds, was bringing back the latest singles of the most exciting new British groups—the Who, and the Kinks, with whom they felt some affinity. It was an intensely creative, highly energized moment in rock history, and the band gorged themselves on everything they liked. In fact, Reed, who admired a wide range of musicians from Burt Bacharach to the Beach Boys, insisted that the best popular music should be as artistically recognized as poetry. “How can they give Robert Lowell a poetry prize?” he complained in another essay written the following year for Aspen magazine. “Richard Wilbur. It’s a joke. What about the Excellents, Martha and the Vandellas (Holland, Dozier, Jeff Barry, Elle Greenwich, Bacharach and David, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, the best songwriting teams in America). Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wils
on did with the CHORDS. Phil Spector being made out to be some kind of aberration when he put out the best record ever made, ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.’”

  Drugs were both a catalyst and inhibitor for the music. “There were no heavy addictions or anything, but enough to get in our way, hepatitis and so on,” Sterling recalled. “I would take pills, amphetamines, not psychedelics, we were never into that. Drugs didn’t inspire us for songs or anything like that. We took them for old-fashioned reasons—it made you feel good, braced you for criticism. It wasn’t just drugs, there were vitamins, ginseng, experimental diets. Lou once went on a diet so radical there was no fat showing on his central-nerve chart … his spinal column was raw!

  “We took a lot of downers—that’s what I used to do. We did all sorts of junk. There was just so much going on, you had to keep up with it, that was all. I never got really A-headed out. But if you had two members of the band heavily sedated and the other on uppers, it is gonna affect your sensibilities. They wanted to do slow dirges and I wanted to do up-tempo songs!”

  That summer two parallel events catapulted the Warlocks, who also occasionally used the in-your-face drug-innuendo name the Falling Spikes, out of the obscurity of Ludlow Street toward the limelight that would soon illuminate them.