Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  When Warhol returned, Lou got a minor, but symbolic, opportunity for retaliation. The night he got back from Europe, Warhol took Nico to Boston so she could join the VU onstage during a concert at the Boston Tea Party. In typical Warhol fashion, the two arrived late. Surprising both Andy and Nico, Lou refused to let her onstage. Nico blamed Lou’s enlarged ego for the incident. “Everybody wanted to be the star,” she said. “Of course Lou always was. But the newspapers came to me all the time. That’s how I got fired—he couldn’t take that anymore. He fired me.” Reed’s refusal to let Nico come onstage could have been excused by the fact that the band had only two more songs to go and they weren’t songs that she could sing. But Andy did not see it that way and took Lou’s action very badly.

  This incident prompted a meeting between Warhol and Reed to decide what kind of financial and time commitment Warhol wanted to make to the EPI. He had many film plans in the works. He had a number of art shows coming up. Andy told Lou, “Look, you have to make a decision: Do you want to continue presenting your music in art museums and at colleges? Those are the only venues we can present to you. Don’t you think that you should be moving into the Fillmores and the rock theaters of America?”

  As Lou recalled the incident, “I fired him.”

  Billy Name, who attended the meeting, explained, “Andy said to everybody who worked with him: ‘You have to start developing your own career and not just be dependent on what’s going on here.’ He had no problem with it because Andy was an artist. Lou was trying to get into the straight music scene and not be the puppet of an artist. So in a sense it was good. He wanted to have a real manager in the music business. There were no problems about leaving Andy.”

  However, as Lou remembered it, Warhol “was furious. I’d never seen Andy angry, but I did that day. He was really mad. He turned bright red and called me a rat. That was the worst thing he could think of. This was like leaving the nest. In a way it was terrible to be without him. He wasn’t there to take the criticism. And it was always such fun to be with him, it was a nicer environment. I never felt dependent because at that time I didn’t have anything anyway, so I didn’t having anything to lose, and it didn’t matter. Nothing over here, nothing over there—what difference does it make? We worked until the show couldn’t exist anymore because it was just so expensive. No one knew the business. No one could handle the business. No one could talk to the businesspeople. Business people have a place in this world, and especially now you’re getting a lot of businesspeople who are, let’s say, easier to talk to. But the point is, if you’re going to get involved in business, then you should get a business manager.”

  Lou was shaken by Andy’s uncharacteristic display of emotion. The extraordinary thing, and one of the examples of Andy’s generosity, was that he let Lou out of the contract with no argument. Nonetheless, he still presumed that Lou would honor the arrangement that they had made in California, namely, that Andy would receive 25 percent of all earnings from the Velvet Underground’s music created under his management. The record had been produced under his management, and Andy even put up some of his own money to pay for its production and contributed the artwork. He really wanted the Velvet Underground to be successful, so he let them go. Asked to explain this uncharacteristic financial laxity years later, Warhol replied, “I liked them so much it didn’t matter … they just decided to find some other manager.”

  Chapter Eight

  Exit Cale

  1967–68

  The relationship between John and Lou was symbiotic. They loved each other, but they also hated each other.

  Lynne Tillman

  In the summer of 1967, despite all the maneuvering for control, the band was charged with the enthusiasm of a fresh start. Instead of dwelling on the poor response to The Velvet Underground and Nico, and the possibly adverse effects of breaking with Warhol, everyone had great expectations for Steve Sesnick and the new material they were working up for a second album. In turn, Sesnick had his own terrifically high hopes for the group. Maureen thought, “He was honestly convinced that we could be the next Beatles. He always talked up—never down. Of course, even I realized he was in it to get rich. He had such high, high hopes.”

  The dissenting opinion about Sesnick came from Cale, who instinctively distrusted the fast-talking, cigar-smoking entrepreneur who managed to manipulate everybody in the group as well as their record company with a smoke screen of promises, laughter, and exaggeration. “Steven just drove a wedge right between Lou and me,” said Cale. “His main concern was to say, ‘Look, Lou’s the star, you’re just the sideman.’ Wrong, Steve.” John found himself constantly arguing with Lou about arrangements for the new songs. Lou was pushing the band to appeal to a wider audience. John was resisting with all his might. “There were pressures building up, and we were all getting very frustrated,” Cale recalled. “After the first record we lost our patience and diligence. We couldn’t even remember what our original precepts were.”

  The Warhol crowd also despised Sesnick. “It was as if your daughter married someone from the wrong family,” sniffed the man who continued to be the band’s strongest supporter and Lou’s staunchest friend, Danny Fields.

  “The person they picked,” Warhol noted icily, “was terrible.”

  Although not yet officially their manager, Sesnick immediately got to work behind the scenes on a number of Velvets projects. He sent a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, with an eye to making a publishing deal with Epstein’s company, Nemperor. The deal, backed by an Epstein-produced European tour, might have elevated the band to international stardom.

  One night that spring Danny Fields found himself at Max’s with the British impresario looking for an opportunity to encourage the deal. “I wanted Brian to manage them or promote them or get them to Europe or something!” Danny recalled. Spotting Lou in the crowded back room, he hurried over and urged him, “Pretend you have to go uptown and I’ll get you a ride with Brian Epstein!” Although in the midst of an intense conversation, Lou complied.

  In the limousine, Brian, who had just returned from Acapulco, leaned over and, fondling Lou’s arm, murmured, “My lover and I spent our whole vacation listening to your record.”

  “Oh?” Lewis replied.

  “Well, I like it very much.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  Reed sniffed dismissively to a friend the following day, “Everybody thinks we homosexuals are wanton perverts, but as a matter of fact we’re all quite straight and selective.” Sesnick continued to pursue a deal with Epstein in the ensuing months, cashing in on his friendship with Epstein’s lawyer Nat Weiss. Tragically, Epstein died of a drug overdose before the end of the year, without having done anything about the VU.

  In July, John helped produce and arrange Nico’s first solo album, Chelsea Girl. It was a magical record and collaboration, containing three songs by Lou (who seemed willing to collaborate with Nico from a distance), as well as tracks by Dylan, Cale, Morrison, and Jackson Browne.

  Browne recalled meeting Lou during the sessions: “Lou, who always had this incredible menacing scowl on his face, wouldn’t say more than one or two syllables because that was how Andy was. But he was a sweetheart underneath. Afterwards he took me for a big Chinese meal and then on to see the Murray the K Show at RKO. There was Wilson Pickett, the Blues Project, the Who, Etta James. What a day.” Impressed by Jackson, Lou took the seventeen-year-old singer/songwriter under his wing. At one point he told Jackson about the recent “be-in” hippie celebration in San Francisco and revealed that he’d been to the simultaneous event in New York: “The way he described it, you realized there was a place for all that inside of him. He loved seeing Central Park full of people all just high and loving each other.”

  Unfortunately, when Nico’s Chelsea Girl was released in October, Lou, John, and Nico were all disappointed by its production. “If they’d just have allowed Cale to arrange it and let me do more stuff on i
t,” exclaimed Reed. “I mean everything on that song ‘Chelsea Girls,’ those strings, that flute, should have defeated it, but the lyrics, Nico’s voice, managed somehow to survive. We still got ‘It Was a Pleasure Then’; they couldn’t stop us. We’d been doing a song like that in our beloved show, it didn’t really have a title. Just all of us following the drone. And there it sits in the middle of that album.” Lou became more determined to make the next Velvet album a success no matter what the cost.

  The Velvet Underground recorded their second album, White Light/White Heat, in September. They had been working up the material since the previous summer and took three days to complete it in the studio. Reed was quite taken with astrology at the time and would enthusiastically explain how a lot of his songs embodied the Virgo–Pisces opposition. Lou and John were Pisces, and Maureen and Sterling were Virgos. (All the songs on the second album were published by their company, Three Prong Music, representing the trident of Neptune—the ruler of Pisces.) “White Light/White Heat” was an obvious drug song showing the Pisces: suffering, self-indulgent, and living on the “road of excess.” Virgo, on the other hand, was about enlightenment, expressions of Christian purity, self-control, living in the “palace of wisdom,” as expressed in songs like “Here She Comes Now” and “I Heard Her Call My Name.”

  The short, intense sessions lent the music a feeling of spontaneity. Nowhere was this more evident than on “Sister Ray,” which Reed had written on a train coming back to New York from Connecticut. The lyrics echoed scenes from Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, one of Lou’s favorite writers. “‘Sister Ray’ has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything. The situation is a bunch of drag queens taking a bunch of sailors home with them, shooting up on smack and having this orgy when the police appear.”

  In terms of musical arrangement, “Sister Ray” was Cale’s greatest masterpiece with the Velvet Underground. Though Reed and Sesnick were pushing Cale to tone it down, he stood his ground and eventually forced both of them to see things his way. “When we did “Sister Ray,” we turned up to ten flat out, leakage all over the place,” said Reed. “That’s it. They asked us what we were going to do. We said, ‘We’re going to start.’ They said, ‘Who’s playing the bass?’ We said, ‘There is no bass.’ They asked us when it ends. We didn’t know. When it ends, that’s when it ends. It did a lot to the music of the seventies. We were doing the whole heavy-metal trip back then. I mean, if ‘Sister Ray’ is not an example of heavy metal, then nothing is.” Later Lou commented on just how far ahead of their time they were: “No one has ever attempted what we did on the second album, where we used raw electronics.”

  The seventeen-and-a-half-minute song, unrecognized when it was released, has been compared to Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” as well as such rock classics as “Wooly Bully” and “96 Tears.”

  White Light/White Heat was the most manic, abrasive, and powerful album of the Velvet Underground. It reflected the internal tensions of a band ascending into prominence and “at each other’s throats,” as Cale said. The intelligence in the band, however, could not offset the daily antagonism of differing musical ideas. Some observers insisted that Lou, at this point, realized he wanted to make it as a solo performer, regarding a band as a necessary but supportive evil.

  “I Heard Her Call My Name,” which opened side two of the record, played a decisive role in the intensifying Reed–Cale battle. Lou, in an extraordinary move, went into the studio without telling any of the others and remixed the track so that he would appear prominent on it. According to the normally restrained Moe Tucker, the song “was ruined by the mix—the energy. You can’t hear anything but Lou. He was the mixer in there, so he, having a little ego trip at the time, turned himself so far up that there’s no rhythm, there’s no nothing.”

  ***

  In the fall of 1967 the band split up their communal living. Sterling moved in with Martha Dargan and her brother Tom on East 2nd Street. John moved into the Chelsea Hotel with his girlfriend, Betsey Johnson. Moe was living on Fifth Avenue and 9th Street. Lou bounced from place to place, staying mostly on Perry Street, and later in a loft on Seventh Avenue and 31st Street. Lou’s loft was “just me, a bed, and our stuff, five or six huge amplifiers and guitars.” Despite this separation, the band still spent most of their time hanging out together. “We’d come flying in at five in the morning and play ‘Sister Ray’ through them,” Lou continued. “I was the only guy living in the building, except for this big black guy upstairs who had a gun. When it got too loud, he’d start jumping up and down on the floor; you knew when the ceiling started buckling that things were getting serious. Then he’d come down and start pounding on the door. That was it: rehearsal canceled due to gun.”

  The major shift in the group came, however, not from the recording of White Light/White Heat or from the breakup of their living situation, but rather from their having signed a managerial contract with Steve Sesnick. Cale’s predictions were beginning to play themselves out with catastrophic consequences. “Lou was starting to act funny,” said John. “He brought in Sesnick—who I thought was a real snake—to be our manager, and all this intrigue started to take place. Lou was calling us ‘his band’ while Sesnick was trying to get him to go solo. Maybe it was the drugs he was doing at the time. They certainly didn’t help. Basically, Sesnick just became an apologist for Lou. He was just a yes-man, and he came between us. It was maddening, just maddening. Before, it had always been easy to talk to Lou. Now you had to go through Sesnick, who seemed pretty practiced in the art of miscommunication. We should have been able to sort out our own problems. He should never have been brought in. Things had been bad between us for a while, but when Sesnick arrived, they got worse. There was a lot of intrigue, a lot of duplicity, and a lot of talking behind people’s backs, a lot of plotting.”

  Cale later claimed that it was at this point, after the recording of White Light/White Heat in the fall of 1967, that he first thought of leaving the band. He realized that they weren’t going to progress any further on the path that he and Lou had embarked on in early 1965. Lou was beginning to introduce to the group a light, much more pop style of playing. The songs he was writing that fall signaled a clear backing away from the material typified by “Sister Ray,” and an increasing emphasis on his lyrics.

  Cale’s original idea—to create an orchestral chaos in which Lou could spontaneously create lyrics—was being lost, because Lou wasn’t looking for an orchestral chaos anymore. He was looking for a group that would follow his directions to create pop songs. Sesnick was also playing a large role in this, because Sesnick was supporting Lou’s approach toward what he imagined to be a more popular and commercial form.

  Making matters worse for John was that Lou, who demanded 100 percent allegiance and attention from his collaborators, resented John’s close relationship with Betsey Johnson. Betsey had a great belief in John and encouraged him to step out of Lou’s shadow and make his own music, write his own songs, and sing them himself. A fashion designer of international fame who had recently been written up in Time magazine, Johnson had a shop called Paraphernalia, which was said to be the hippest clothes shop in America. John was very photogenic, and Betsey enhanced this greatly by designing clothes for him. She also designed clothes for the rest of the band, but John’s tastes and style became increasingly flamboyant. In one instance, he wanted her to make special gloves for him so that his hands looked as if they were on fire when he was playing. Sometimes he wore dramatic masks onstage. Sterling recalled that after being dressed by Betsey Johnson, John became astonishing to look at and even more charismatic onstage next to the diminutive, uncomfortable Lou.

  John’s outshining Lou onstage was counterbalanced by the fortuitous appearance of Andy Warhol’s Index Book, by Andy Warhol, published in December, which helped pave Lou’s way as a solo star. Less a study than a celebration of the Factory, the book contained interv
iews with Andy and his clique and was packaged with a number of Warholesque objects and a flexidisc. The record was decorated with a photo of Lou Reed, clad in the Factory-standard impenetrable shades. The recording consisted of an interview with Nico, with the Velvets’ music playing in the background. The book, which made an enormous media splash when it hit the stores, raised Lou’s profile.

  ***

  With the rock field expanding rapidly, the stage was set for a successful debut of White Light/White Heat on January 30, 1968. But, to everyone’s dismay, it too was banned on the radio. Lou, however, was still confident that they would succeed and, if anything, took this rejection as a sign that he was right to move further into the mainstream.

  White Light/White Heat turned out to be another severe commercial disappointment, receiving an even harsher response than the first album. Because of the lyrics, there was almost a complete blackout on the radio. Moreover, the lack of association with Warhol limited their channels of publicity. With no Warhol or Nico publicity boosting it, the record had to rely on the standard conduits for rock music, where White Light/White Heat was largely ignored. Even Rolling Stone magazine refused to review the album. “Most of our singles were never distributed,” noted Morrison. “However, where they appeared on jukeboxes, people have really liked them. ‘White Light/White Heat’ as a single is nice. That single was banned everyplace. When it was banned in San Francisco, we said, the hell with it. That’s as far as it ever got.” Aside from neglect, the album faced competition from an enormous pop market that was being flooded with all sorts of flash-in-the-pan products, soaking up the teen market’s dollars. As the rock-and-roll industry came into its own, alternative groups like the Velvets found it increasingly difficult to break in. Making matters worse was the fact that the band was still being put down for being Warhol acolytes—drug-taking, homosexual, S&M devotees—without the advantage of Warhol’s umbrella protection and buoyant encouragement.