Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  The Velvet Underground, though, knew how good they were and maintained a positive outlook despite the reviews. Fortunately, by the end of January, their financial situation had improved significantly. When managed by Warhol, the Velvets had lived on paltry per diem handouts from the Factory. But after Sesnick became their manager, they began to make some money. Lou especially, as the songwriter and lead singer, got enough money to live a reasonable life.

  Most of their money came from touring. In one bright moment of an otherwise terrible relationship with MGM/Verve, Sesnick persuaded the company to take the money that they would have used in publicity and devote it to the expenses of the Velvets’ touring. As a result, they flew first-class, stayed in the best hotels, and ate in nice restaurants. Moreover, they were sure they would sell out and get a great response at several of their regular venues—La Cave in Cleveland, the Tea Party in Boston, the Second Fret in Philadelphia, and a number of other places on the West Coast and Texas.

  “We never did tour Europe, but it vexed us beyond imagining that we never made inroads in the U.S.,” said Sterling. “It was tilting at windmills. We were obsessed by the idea of somehow changing California. We were always sallying forth to the West Coast for months, living well and playing occasionally. The longest we were ever away was two months, and that was hell. If we went out to the Coast, we couldn’t afford to fly back and forth so we’d stay out there and play for six weeks and play up and down the Coast a little bit. Being on the road is mostly real boring. The only real good thing is playing.”

  The band, who received no royalties from their albums, earned $600 one week, $2,500 the next on the road. It was the only way they could make money, and they liked to play, but the pressures of touring did little to assuage the developing tensions.

  Like any rock group spending large amounts of time on the road, they had problems getting along with each other. Whenever they got to a hotel, for example, Sterling would virtually knock everyone over in his attempt to get the best room in the suite. He usually shared a room with John, while Maureen would team up with Lou. Cale and Reed fought about the musical direction. According to Morrison, “One time in Chicago the club had a circular stage. I was playing the solo on ‘Pale Blue Eyes,’ Cale was lurching around on bass and stepped on a distorter, which quadrupled my volume. It was an accident. Everybody staggered back. John shuts it off and kicks the box across the stage. I look over at Lou and Lou’s eyes were saying, ‘What an asshole.’ But for Cale, offense is the best defense, so when confronted, he attacks. I said, ‘John, I wish you wouldn’t come lurching over, blah, blah, blah. Oh, forget it.’ Cale was really getting into it. On one occasion he drank nineteen whiskey sours. They had a big argument in Chicago. They may have thrown a few punches at each other. The first time they did that in California, I was horrified. I wasn’t alarmed by the fighting, I was enraged. Sesnick and I felt like throttling the both of them.”

  Indeed, Cale found himself fighting more than Reed and Sesnick about maintaining the band’s radical sound. Facing the extreme counter-avant-garde while touring the Midwest, he found that an element of compromise crept into their original precepts. “To make audiences feel comfortable,” John explained, “we ended up putting a backbeat on everything, as if to say, ‘We may be crazy, but we’re still rock and roll.’”

  During the early months of 1968, with Steve Sesnick egging him on, Lou Reed chipped away at the Velvets’ democratic foundations. Sesnick and Reed decided where the band should play, setting up a surfeit of gigs at the Boston Tea Party, broken by occasional visits to California, Cleveland, and Canada. They also masterminded a subtle shift in the band’s musical axis, away from the explorations of sound toward an emphasis on lyrics. Lou stepped into the forefront with his poetic investigations of a human spirit burdened by obsession and guilt.

  John recalled it as an unhappy time. “Lou and I couldn’t see eye to eye anymore. We weren’t rehearsing, we weren’t working, we were flying all over the place, and we couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to work. It was a result of touring day in and day out—which can be a detrimental influence. In terms of emotional balance, there was no more room in the band for anyone else—Lou and I did enough fighting for all. We weren’t very compatible writing together, but we did turn out a number of songs.”

  In 1968, in two recording sessions that served to harvest the seeds of their breakdown, they attempted to cut a single. During the first session they recorded “Ferryboat Bill” and “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” poppy, crowd-pleasing rock-and-roll songs that indicated the direction Lou wanted to take. In the second session they produced “Mr. Rain,” Cale’s recording swansong with the Velvets, a return to the prominent drone and viola. None of the songs were particularly inspired. Whereas they had previously gone into a recording studio and recorded an album in a day or two, they were now hacking around for days getting nowhere just trying to record a single.

  In defending his turf musically, John went to extremes that even Sterling found intolerable. He recalled how John drove them all crazy: “One thing that really rankled was John insisting on building this bass amp of his with band money. Something to do with acoustic suspension speakers producing this great wall of sound. Thousands were spent on these goddamn things—and then they didn’t work. Meanwhile, we were on endorsement to Acoustic Amplifiers, who made this fabulous bass amp, the Acoustic 360. John refused even to accept a free one from the factory. Later on, John found out that if he’d only had a preamp, it would have worked. All this money for what I called the Tower of Babble. There was a general dissatisfaction with his free-spiriting—and free spending. It really did piss everybody off. What the hell was he up to? Ha ha ha! But it was an ugly business, stupid and counterproductive.”

  According to John, “Because there was less and less finesse of anything we were doing onstage, we lost sight of the music. There were a lot of soft songs and I didn’t want that many soft songs. I was into trying to develop these really grand orchestral bass parts. I was trying to get something big and grand and Lou was fighting against that, he wanted pretty songs. I said, ‘Let’s make them grand pretty songs then.’ All of that was just irritating, it was a source of a lot of friction. It was unresolved, it was a constant fight of who was gonna play what. They were creative conflicts. I think egos were getting bruised.”

  Even for Moe, Lou could be hard to deal with, primarily because she could never tell whether he was going to be superfriendly or withdrawn. Just like Lou’s childhood friend Allen Hyman, Moe felt that Lou was overly influenced by his surroundings, too sensitive to anything that happened to him. Whereas this left her simply feeling sorry for Lou, whom she characterized as “a kind of sad person” at this time, Sterling found Lou’s mood swings harder to handle. If Lou was down, Sterling would go down too. This dynamic, combined with the pitched battle between Reed and Cale for control of the music, transformed the Velvet Underground from being a band that had had a lot of fun together to being a band that began suffering together.

  In February, John and Betsey Johnson announced that they planned to be married. Lou, she realized, “was not happy that John was getting married. Period. To me. Period.”

  “When you’re in a band,” Cale explained, “you’re married to the band.”

  In Betsey’s words: “The Velvets were totally insecure all the time anyway. It was an on-the-edge kind of time every day. Now it was like the girl breaking up the group.”

  The wedding was postponed when Cale came down with hepatitis and spent several weeks in the hospital, but John and Betsy finally got married in April. Lou attended the ceremony, but the Reed–Cale relationship was clearly under siege. Watching from the sidelines, Betsey sensed “a real edge with Lou all the time. Ego jealousy. Lou was definitely the star. Any guy who is out there singing is the star. It was hard for John because he was backup star. He had so much charisma.”

  If the Velvet Underground was a family and Lou was the husband, it raises the que
stion of whether Lou had a personal life beyond the band. Mary Woronov, who saw him occasionally through the speed circle that centered around Ondine, recalled that Lou did not date, and other friends had the impression that Lou was no longer interested in sex. However, the truth is that from 1966 on, when Shelley Albin moved to New York City with her husband, Ronald Corwin, Lou had a relationship with her.

  At first Shelley hoped that she could maintain an open, honest friendship with Lou that would include her husband, but when Corwin rejected the notion of having anything to do with Reed because he was a bad influence, she found herself having to reject Lou’s overtures since she could not imagine being dishonest. Consequently, through 1966 and 1967 they rarely met. However, by 1968 she crossed the border and entered into a secret affair with Lou. Despite its occasional moments of satisfaction and inspiration for a number of outstanding songs, the relationship tortured Lou, who felt that she possessed everything he wanted but could not keep. “Are you going to come and spend your life with me,” Lou would ask, “or are you going to stay with that asshole?”

  Shelley felt ambivalent. Part of her was so relieved to be with an intelligent and real person with whom she could have a conversation, but another overriding part was scared off by Lou’s lifestyle and all it entailed. “You’re more interested in security than love,” Lou would often chide her, and Shelley had to admit he was right.

  What kept the relationship alive for Lou as much as the magic effect her presence had on him was the challenge. “Leave Ron,” Lou would urge her. “What are you doing with him? Why don’t you just come out the door and stay out the door?” Shelley, who still knew him better than anybody else, was quite sure that if she had agreed to move in with him, Lou would have made her life a living hell as he had done at Syracuse and pushed her out again. That was the curse of being Lou. He was, she was convinced, miserable throughout the sixties and obsessive about his misery to boot, rooting around in it like a pig in shit.

  One striking difference Shelley found in Lou was that wherever he was with her, walking down the street, sitting at a lunchroom counter, he appeared to be constantly composing music in his head. Suddenly out of the blue he’d bark out: “You beat on the Coke glass, boop boop de boop. You sing, doo wah doo.” In other words, either help me write this song or shut up. Actually, Shelley reflected, nothing had really changed. The bottom line was, if you were with Lou, you had to resign yourself to being an instrument.

  Months would pass in which they would not see each other. Then they would get together in the simplest way, meeting for a Coke or a walk in the Central Park Zoo. In order to protect herself from being seduced against her will, Shelley had stopped listening to the radio altogether for fear that Lou’s music would have the effect upon her that the sirens had on anyone who heard their song.

  That summer the band toured the West Coast. Lou had hardly recovered from John’s wedding when one morning in Los Angeles, riding down to breakfast in the elevator with Sesnick at the exclusive Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he glanced at a stack of newspapers piled on the floor to see a glaring headline announcing that on the previous day, June 3, Andy Warhol had been shot at the Factory and had less than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. Badly shaken, Lou found his jumbled emotions difficult to sort out. Part of him wanted to rush to the phone and call New York to find out what the prognosis was, while another part of him was frightened of being rejected by his former mentor.

  Shortly after Warhol was shot, Lou, back in New York, met Shelley at Max’s and told her he was hiding out because Warhol’s would-be assassin, a radical-feminist writer named Valerie Solanas, who had penned the manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM), was after him.

  Before the end of the month, Lou mustered the courage to call Warhol in the hospital. “I was scared to call him,” he remembered, “and in the end I did and he asked me, ‘Lou, Lou, why didn’t you come?’” Reed felt terrible, but after a few minutes Andy started to gossip, and Lou realized Andy would be all right. Already tinged with guilt, Reed’s relationship with his former mentor grew even more complex after the attempted assassination. Father figures weren’t meant to be mortal, so Reed distanced himself from the wounded Warhol by avoiding him. “I really love him,” Lou confessed on many occasions, and the emotion was always reciprocated by Andy. But there was also an inhibition on both sides, an awareness that some boundary of behavior had been breached.

  Reed was among the most outspoken of Warhol’s disciples about the shooting. In his song about the assassination attempt on Songs for Drella, written twenty years later, he concluded that he wanted to execute Valerie Solanas. In an extensive interview with the British writer John Wilcock, who compiled a book of interviews with Warhol’s friends in the wake of the tragedy, Lou spoke about his feelings for the man who was—after Cale—perhaps the most important influence on his life. “Andy’s gone through the most incredible suffering. They let her [Solanas] off with three years. You get more for stealing a car. It’s just unbelievable. But the point is the hatred directed at him by society was really reflected.” Lou also revealed his own fears about the relationship between success and persecution. “I had to learn certain things the hard way. But one of those things I learned was work is the whole story. Work is literally everything. Most very big people seem to have enemies, and seem to be getting shot, which is something a lot of people should keep in mind. There is a lot to be said for not being in the limelight.”

  ***

  After the Warhol shooting, Lou decided to take extreme measures to get rid of Cale. The question of who was really in command of the Velvet Underground had to be definitely settled. John felt strongly that they’d worked constructively to capture something rare on the first two albums, but that the motivating spirit was gone. By the summer, Reed and Cale were blocking each other’s progress. Cale felt the problem could be solved; the more aggressive, business-minded Reed did not.

  Once again their conflict centered on Sesnick’s role. Reed, of course, wanted Sesnick in, whereas Cale continued to find his presence unbearable. “Whenever a new song came around, it was like picking at sores. It was very badly handled and exacerbated constantly by Steve Sesnick. Sesnick built up a barrier between Lou and the rest of the band. Lou and I were very close and running the band, and gradually Sesnick came along and said, ‘Lou’s the songwriter, he’s the star.’” After a year with Sesnick at the helm, Cale admitted, “I felt like a sideman, more or less. It was a mishandling of the situation.” However, although Cale felt demoralized, he did not think things were irreconcilable. He wanted to go on.

  The Reed–Cale conflict was as common in the rock world as the clap. Most partners resolved it in some manner that allowed them to continue. Undoubtedly the VU’s commercial failure exacerbated the tension. Whatever, in September, Lou called a meeting of the band at the Riviera Cafe on Sheridan Square in the middle of Greenwich Village. When Sterling arrived, he found Maureen and Lou waiting, but no John. “Lou announced that John was out of the band,” Morrison recalled. “I said, ‘You mean out for today, or for this week?’” and Lou said, ‘No, he’s out.’ I said that we were a band and it was graven on the tablets. A long and agonizing argument ensued, with much banging on tables, and finally Lou said, ‘You don’t go for it? All right; the band is dissolved.’”

  For a blind second Sterling and Maureen were shocked by the finality of Lou’s decision. In retrospect they both admitted they saw the split coming and had been paralyzed to do anything about it. It was a black moment in the band’s history; Morrison and Tucker yearned for the lost sound of Cale’s viola and organ. Yet both admitted that their desire to keep the band going was more powerful than their loyalty to Cale.

  What upset John most was the way Lou handled the situation. It fell to Sterling to deliver the news. “We were supposed to be going to Cleveland for a gig,” Cale remembered. “Sterling showed up at my apartment and effectively told me that I was no longer in the band. Lou always got other people to do
his dirty work for him. Lou never confronted me, saying, ‘I don’t want you around anymore.’ It was all done by sleight of hand. As for resentment, I dunno. Things had been pushed pretty far between us and I can’t say I was entirely blameless, but I felt that was treason.”

  Disgusted with Lou, and creatively frustrated, John stormed off, claiming, “I left because the music was getting redundant, we weren’t really working on the music anymore—and I decided I was going to find another career.”

  “It was really John’s music and then Lou’s music,” concluded Betsey Johnson. “It seemed like they went as far as they could go in a way being the Velvet Underground. There was no kind of growth for them. Now they’re heroes for what they did, but then, to keep a group together for what—a record contract, social acknowledgment, acceptance? Not people like that.”

  In retrospect, Reed laid the blame for the split on management problems. At the time, however, he felt triumphant enough to say, “I only hope that one day John will be recognized as … the Beethoven of his day. He knows so much about music, he’s such a great musician. He’s completely mad—but that’s because he’s Welsh.”

  As a result of the brutal betrayal of the man who had offered him his home and introduced him into a world he had only benefited from, Lou gained complete control of the Velvet Underground, but at the same time was eternally alienated from Sterling Morrison, which would turn out to be perhaps the biggest mistake he made. When he would need Sterling’s support in the years to come, Sterl would not be there.