Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Lou, who usually wore all black as well as sunglasses to avoid the punishing lights that occasionally flashed over his face, faded into the shadows and was primarily represented by his eerie, disembodied, monochromatic voice intoning the hymnlike lyrics to “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs.” But since it issued from a mélange so new, so strange, so different, so revolutionary, the last thing an observer found himself wondering about was who’s the singer?

  The writer Stephen Koch, who was there, has given the most telling description of the performance’s effects as it mirrored the essence of Reed and Warhol’s artistic marriage. “The effort to create an exploding (more accurately, imploding) environment capable of shattering any conceivable focus on the senses was all too successful. It became virtually impossible to dance, or for that matter do anything else but sit and be bombarded—‘stoned’ as it were … Seeing it made me realize for the first time how deeply the then all-admired theories attacking ‘ego’ as the root of all evil and unhappiness had become for the avant-garde the grounds for a deeply engaged metaphor of sexual sadism, for ‘blowing the mind,’ assaulting the senses; it came home to me how the ‘obliteration’ of the ego was not the act of liberation it was advertised to be, but an act of complete revenge and resentment wholly entangled on the deepest levels with the knots of frustration. Liberation was turning out to be humiliation; peace was revealing itself as rage.”

  “I’d never seen a show like that,” John Cale said. “You just ignored it and played. Lou and I had an almost religious fervor about what we were doing—like trying to figure ways to integrate some of La Monte Young’s and Andy Warhol’s conceptions into rock and roll. It was exciting because what Lou did and what I did worked. What he put into words and what I put into music and what the band put together, the combination of everything and the mentality involved in it, was stunning.”

  ***

  During his first week at the Dom, Andy opened a new show at Leo Castelli’s, which had been conceived as his farewell to art. He wallpapered one room of the gallery with the repeated images of a cow’s head, resembling the friendly Borden ice-cream trademark, Elsie. Another room was filled with free-floating helium-filled silver pillows. At the end of the show, Warhol opened a window and released a giant pillow which floated away as a symbolic end to his fine-art career.

  The Dom was a financial success, earning $18,000 in its first week. “But our actual salary from Paul Morrissey, who handled the business side for Andy, was five dollars a day, for cheese or beer at the Blarney Stone,” chuckled Sterling. “He had a ledger that listed everything, including drug purchases—‘$5 for heroin.’ When the accountant saw it, he said, ‘What the hell is this?’”

  The continuing tensions between Lou and Nico were evident during the shows. “Nico took an age in the dressing room, and then we had to wait while she’d light this candle,” remembered Cale. “It was for her own good luck or something—and she held up the band, held up the gig. Lou had very little time for women and their accoutrements, and this ritual would really irritate him. The comic thing was, she’d do all this to help her performance, and then she’d start off singing on the wrong beat! Where she started in the song was a real focal point of the night! Lou would hiss across the stage, ‘We know what we’re doing, Nico.’ There were always conflicts and presumably there always will be. Lou was the vocalist, front man, and songwriter for the band. I was just taking it easy and generally having fun. Now I look back on it all, I wasn’t particularly enamored of the more garish aspects of, say, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable row, but then that’s exactly what Lou was very into.”

  As much as Lou enjoyed playing at the Dom, not everything was always copacetic. One night on stage Sterling suddenly yelled at him, “Don’t move!” “I take a look,” Lou recalled, “and I’d just put on fresh strings, and one of the long ends had hit the microphone and just burned right up, and it was starting down the neck of the guitar! Well, I didn’t move. They shut everything down, and I just stood there, and there was smoke and that terrible ozone odor in the air. I mean, people get knocked out, killed. It’s incredible. I mean, that kind of jolt cannot be doing good things to your system … I’ve always had a big fear of electric shocks.”

  As the show became successful, the band’s unity broke under the pressure brought on by the unequal attention afforded certain members of the troupe—Malanga and Nico were more prominent than Cale and Reed for example. “John had the balance of the Velvet Underground charisma,” pointed out a mutual friend. “Lou without John, it wouldn’t have the edge. John gave it that romantic … I mean the sound of the Velvet Underground was John. The words and the music were Lou, but it was those weird nails-on-the-blackboard sounds and the holding of the notes and that La Monte Young/Terry Riley preface to the Velvet Underground—that cold, edgy Wales edge, and John just visually was the person I always looked at. I don’t know if John knew that … Lou knew it enough that he was jealous.”

  “They were outrageous times,” Cale recalled. “Every day someone would do something outrageous to someone famous. It was characterized by this terribly camp, very flagrant behavior. I used to just stand there and watch and have a good laugh. And there was always Andy, who was a fantastic game player—so was Lou, but he had street sensibility. That was the big difference between them: Andy was a society person who didn’t have a bad bone in his body, while Lou came with a streetwise outlook and was very close to having a bad bone in his body. It was a case of never the twain.

  “I never felt marginalized. To me, it was just a marvelous collaboration, where everybody had an enormous amount of freedom. Lou felt marginalized, though. He has this thing in his persona about having to struggle alone, not as part of a group. At the time, he clearly felt that he was experiencing a lot of boundaries working with other people. It’s something that was there for the duration of our time with Andy. He never really resolved in his mind the relationship between Andy and the band, and himself and the EPI.

  “In some ways, if you’re a protest writer like Lou is, then you need some spark of injustice to continue—and where one does not exist, then you find one. That makes one awfully close to being a malcontent, you know. I think that’s always been Lou’s problem, he’s always tried to find something which he can work off.”

  At the time of the EPI performances at the Dom, Reed was struck by a small tragedy. “Lou had a Gretch, semihollow body, old, green,” recalled Maureen. “He had taken the frets off of it. And it really had this odd sound. Fantastic sound. Of course you couldn’t use it for many songs, but for what he wanted it was tremendous. And it got stolen while we were playing at the Dom. Along with his record collection. Lou must have been collecting singles since he was twelve. Songs, groups you’d never heard of, for the most part. I loved them, because we both liked the same music, and once in a while we would have sort of a party, and he would say, ‘Listen to this!’ He’d be half-drunk and I’d be half-drunk, and so would everybody, and he would put it on and I’d say, ‘Yaaaaa, who is it?’ and he’d say, ‘The Goofballs,’ or whoever. He must have had two or three hundred records, anyway.

  “We called it the ‘great sneaker robbery,’ because there were actually sneaker prints on his bed. But they came and took his guitar and all of his records. Oh, it was heartbreaking. Some of those records, there isn’t a copy left in the world.”

  The Exploding Plastic Inevitable became a sensation, attracting celebrities like Salvador Dalí and Jackie Kennedy to intellectuals, college kids, druggies, and members of the press. “We played music surrounded by people who were in every respect more glamorous than we were,” commented Sterling. “Andy created multimedia in New York,” said Reed. “Everything was affected by it. The whole complexion of the city changed, probably of the country. Nothing remained the same after that.” The media pundit of the age, Marshall McLuhan, agreed and included a double-page-spread photograph of their performance in his classic book The Medium Is the Massage, with the statement, “‘Tim
e’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village … a simultaneous happening.” Lou responded in a poem, “I’m an electric child / Of McLuhan. (Bullshit) / He’s got no clue / To what’s going on.”

  Some critics, jealous of Warhol’s publicity and angered by his indulgence toward amphetamine and homosexuality, attacked the EPI as nothing more than an untalented evening of noise and insults. Warhol, they charged, was ripping people off at $6 a head just to make them feel uncomfortable. “People would tell us it was violent, it was grotesque, it was perverted,” said Reed, laughing. “We said, ‘What are you talking about? It’s fun, look, all these people are having fun.’ Right around the corner was Timothy Leary and some mixed-media event. He criticized us, saying, ‘Those people are nothing but A-heads, speed freaks.’ So the people talking for Andy Warhol said, ‘Those people take acid. How can you listen to anything those people say?’ It was that insane and ridiculous. We were always astonished in the first place that people were shocked by us. Andy and us were cut from somewhat the same cloth, and we wanted to shake people up a little bit. Just so much fun. When confronted with a—quote—really straight audience, that’s what we went for. We were never playing to make enemies; we were playing to make music.” On more than one occasion members of the group were attacked as they left the building by bottle-wielding malcontents.

  For the most part, the mainstream press maintained a hostile stance when commenting on the show. The New York Times mentioned the event, but placed it on the Women’s page. “The first story about the Velvet Underground was on the Women’s page of the Times and it was all about Nico,” recalled Paul Morrissey. “You can imagine how well that went down with Lou Reed.” In fact, the Times review was one of the more kind reactions to the performance. “We were attacked constantly,” said Reed. “No one ever wrote anything nice about us, or even looked at it very seriously, which was fine. You got tired of being called obscene. It just seemed to go on and on and on and on and on. Anyone who writes for a newspaper or something has to be sick. People who criticize other people. There must be a reason for it. They must have something else to do. Why don’t they go and do something with themselves. They think it’s so easy. Our favorite quote was, ‘The flowers of evil are in bloom. Someone has to stamp them out before they spread.’”

  These were heady days for Lou. In four months he had gone from obscurity to being, as part of the Velvets, the center of a media blitz. They had every reason to believe that they were on their way to being as big as the Rolling Stones. The Lou Reed who created intelligent rock poetry of drugs, deviant sex, violence, and suicide now fully emerged. “That’s when he was at his peak,” remarked the writer Glenn O’Brien. “When Lou was the most good-looking, dressed in the best of taste, and did the most powerful work. He didn’t show any signs of age or ravage, he was still undamaged and young.”

  As Reed’s image grew, he developed a coterie of staunch supporters. For those who didn’t know him, however, he presented an often contradictory and confusing image. “A bunch of us would leave the Dom really late and go to the after-hours clubs around the Village—Lou knew them all,” recalled Warhol. “At the Tenth of Always [named after the Johnny Mathis song ‘The Twelfth of Never’] there’d always been one same little blond boy every night who’d get drunk and turn to Lou and demand, “Well, are you a homosexual or not? I am and I’m proud of it.” Then he’d smash his glass on the floor and get asked to leave.”

  Richard Mishkin, who had kept in touch with Lou and who had occasionally sat in on bass at the Dom, was under the impression that Lou was making progress in his drive to become a success. “Anybody who could tolerate what he was tolerating in terms of lifestyle would have to be driven,” he said. “I remember playing at the Dom in front of strobe lights, and I had never been exposed to strobe lights, and thinking, this is really hard, this is not playing music. Lou was doing what he had to do. He knew that he wasn’t Paul McCartney or Elvis Presley. He was Lou Reed, and if he was going to do what he wanted to do and become a rock-and-roll star, he had to do it the Lou Reed way. That’s what he was doing, he was creating his place in history, so to speak, by being so different.” (The irreverent teenager still lurked beneath the sleek surface, however. On one occasion when Lou and Ritchie were rehearsing at Lou’s Grand Street loft, Mishkin’s mother showed up in a fur coat and high heels to drag her recalcitrant son away from the den of iniquity, and Lou was so hysterical with laughter he almost fell on the floor.) Another man who sat in on several shows when Cale got sick, the avant-garde violinist Henry Flynt, recalled, “Reed taught me their whole repertoire in about five minutes, because basically he just wanted me to be in the right key. At one point I got in a fight with him onstage because I was playing a very hillbilly-influenced style on the violin and that upset him very much. He wanted a very sophisticated sound, he didn’t want rural references in what was supposed to be this very decadent S-and-M image that they were projecting.”

  Reed had found a vitality in performing at the Dom. “Young people know where everything is at,” he told a reporter backstage. “Let ’em sing about going steady on the radio. Let ’em run their hootenannies. But it’s in holes like this that the real stuff is being born. The universities and the radio kill everything, but around here, it’s alive. The kids know that.”

  ***

  As soon as he realized the group was taking off, Andy started producing The Velvet Underground and Nico album, which would become a rock classic. Warhol put up some of the revenue from the Dom engagement, and they found some other investors. “This shoe salesman, Norman Dolph, put up the money,” recalled John Cale, “and he got a deal at Cameo-Parkway Studios, on Broadway. We went in there, and the floorboards were torn up, the walls were out, there were four mikes working. We set up the drums where there was enough floor, turned it all up, and went from there.” The recording studio was rented for $2,500 for three nights, enough time to cut the whole album.

  In order to claim royalties on a song, it first had to be published. A lead sheet of musical notation had to be written for each song, then the tax forms had to be registered. If this was not done, the writer could not earn any money from the song. One of Danny Field’s closet friends, a musician by the name of Hope Ruff, who worked in this capacity for many songwriters including Bob Dylan and Sam the Sham, made it her responsibility to work up the lead sheets for Lou’s songs “because nobody else was doing it,” she said. “John was certainly capable of it, but I think he was really strung out a lot. I don’t think Lou could do it. It’s a real pain in the ass for most people. But it was nothing to me. I would write it as fast as they’d play it. I think Lou was concerned about it. He was not as crazy as he pretended to be. And I always said that. Danny would say, ‘Oh, Lou, he did this, he did that,’ and I always said to him, ‘He is just a kid from Long Island.’ He calls his mother up to make sure she fed the dog. And that’s how I always thought of him. He’d say, ‘I have to go make a phone call,’ and I’d say, ‘Who are you calling?’ He’d say, ‘I have to call my mother to find out how my dog is.’ When you’re really crazy, you don’t worry about that kind of stuff. But everybody saw what they wanted to see. But he was not a nut case. I liked him. I thought he was a nice person. And Danny would look at me like … That was a big insult in the sixties. You don’t say that about someone: ‘He was a nice guy.’ But he was. And I had great respect for him. He had a reputation for being mean to women, but he was always very nice to me. He was wild to Nico. He was never mean to me. I remember Lou talking to Nico like she was a pile of trash. I can’t remember any specifics but I remember him yelling at her—she really couldn’t sing and she couldn’t play. At the Balloon Farm or in the back room at Max’s—l’d always be there—and she’d say something stupid. He’d jump on her because he’s very smart and he hated stupid. Put it this way, he was caustic with anybody who was weaker than he was. I don’t think you just had to be a female. I mean, there were dumb guys around too—dumb rock
stars. Lou had a sharp mouth as far as they were concerned because he wasn’t mainstream famous and he was very talented and way smarter and that’s the way it goes. So I think if he sensed that someone was weak, as a lot of us did in those days, he would sweep in for the kill because it was funny.”

  The Reed–Cale collaboration reached a peak during the recording. Because of his experience of making records since he was fifteen and his time in the studio at Pickwick, Lou seized the opportunity to act as engineer and producer. John Cale, who had a limited knowledge of the workings of a recording studio, also contributed significantly to the album’s sound. His music training and love of experimentation perfectly complemented Reed’s songs. “Basically, Lou would write these poppy little songs and my job was to slow them down, make them ‘slow ’n’ sexy,’” explained Cale. “Everything was deeper too. A song written in E would be played in D. Maureen used cymbals. I had a viola and Lou had his big drone guitar we called an ‘ostrich’ guitar. It made a horrendous noise, and that’s the sound on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ for instance. In addition, Lou and Nico both had deep voices. All of this made the record entirely unique.”

  The usual conflicts, however, quickly erupted. Lou didn’t want Nico on the album, and she felt she didn’t have enough material to sing. Then Nico kept insisting on singing “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in what Sterling described as a “Götterdämmerung voice.” There was near constant bickering between Lou and the Velvets and Nico and Warhol and Morrissey. “Everyone was nervous about it,” Cale recalled. “Lou was paranoid and eventually he made everybody paranoid.” “The whole time the album was being made,” Warhol wrote, “nobody seemed happy with it.”