Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  John’s reflections about the episode were dismissive and bitter. “It was just a flash in the pan,” he reflected on his four-year investment in the Velvet Underground. “It came and it went, and all of it had gone on without anybody really noticing that it had been there.”

  Ironically, at the time Cale left the band, their influence was just beginning to get a foothold on the front ranks of rock. The Rolling Stones, who had lost themselves in psychedelic rock in 1967, made a superb return to form in 1968 with Beggars Banquet. “Lou’s basic influence on songwriting was his use of plagal cadence,” asserted Robert Palmer. “Plagal cadence is a one-chord—four-chord. C to F to C to F. ‘Heroin’ is that. ‘Waiting for the Man’ is basically that. An awful lot of Velvet songs are basically that. Lou really taught everyone to use the plagal cadence with a drone. The other people who really mastered the plagal cadence were Keith and Mick. ‘Street Fighting Man,’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ are all plagal-cadence songs.”

  However, Cale was convinced the experiment had been a failure. “We never really fulfilled our potential. With tracks like ‘Heroin,’ ‘Venus in Furs,’ ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ and ‘Sister Ray,’ we defined a completely new way of working. It was without precedent. Drugs, and the fact that no one gave a damn about us, meant we gave up on it too soon.”

  “I think he’s right in a way,” Lou would admit twenty years later.

  Chapter Nine

  The Deformation of the Velvet Underground

  1968–70

  It became less fun when we had a manager. I think he destroyed the group. He took two or three years, but he destroyed it and made it so it wasn’t any fun.

  Lou Reed

  Playing rock and roll at the level Lou was (in twenty years the Velvet Underground would be judged the second most influential rock band of the 1960s after the Beatles) is dependent on the musician’s confidence. The more confident he is, the stronger his performance. By firing Cale, Lou had, like a lion expelling a competitor from the pride, revealed his most confident self, a self so confident that it labored under the illusion that it could do without John Cale (which is like Mick Jagger thinking in the mid-1980s that he could do without Keith Richards).

  At this moment, Lou Reed was at the peak of his career. He had collaborated with three people who brought out the best in him: Cale, Nico, and Warhol; he had written and recorded two of the most influential albums in the history of rock and roll (the first has often been listed in polls as the single greatest rock album of all time). On top of that he had gained complete control of the band he had worked so hard on, molding it into the crack unit it was and he had in place, as far as he knew, a manager who adored him, agreed with his plans, and was eager to fulfill his every whim. Steve Sesnick was still convinced that with Lou’s prodigious songwriting talents and with the great playing of Maureen and Sterling, the band would become in time as big as the Beatles.

  It is at this stage in the story that Lou betrays one of the weakest links in his character: he is both the best and worst collaborator. Throughout his career Lou has revealed over and over again fantastically good taste in people he needed to help him put himself together. From Shelley Albin to Delmore Schwartz, from John Cale to Andy Warhol, he had chosen terrific people to work with. However, just as much as Lou was screaming out to play with the best of them at the top of the game, he was always finally incapable of staying too long around anybody who was as good as, or heaven forbid, better than, him. Clearly Lou had dismissed John because even though Cale was intimidated by Lou, he still shone too brightly and contributed too much for Lou. Aged twenty-six, four years into his career, Lou, perhaps understandably, was under the impression that he possessed that indefinable “it” that is rock and roll, and that he could do anything he wanted with it. Like so many egocentric maniacs, or young people, he could not see what he was doing. His vision at the crucial turning point may have been further blurred by the dramatic resumption of his love affair with Shelley Albin, which led him to write what many consider his most beautiful, enduring love song, “Pale Blue Eyes.”

  In the fall of 1968, through Steve Sesnick, Lou brought Doug Yule, a young bass player brought up on Long Island but now living in Boston where he played in the Glass Menagerie, into the band. Naturally, Sterling and Moe were concerned that the introduction of a new member could upset the delicate balance of the band’s musical and personal relationships. “I just found it totally acceptable if Lou was being crazy, or being a pain in the ass, to say, ‘Oh, well,’ and forget it, because Lou was special and different,” said Maureen, “whereas Sterling couldn’t do that.” Doug was impressed by Lou: “The best and worst thing about Lou as a person to work with is he has a lot of creative will power and drive. He gets an idea and he does it. He could make you laugh or cry, depending on what he wanted.”

  “It was never the same for me after John left,” Sterling Morrison complained. “He was not easy to replace. Dougie was a good bass player, and I liked him, but we moved more towards unanimity of opinion. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I always thought that what made us good were the tensions and oppositions. Bands that fight together make better music.”

  In fact, Doug was an interesting addition to the band because, being five years younger than Lou and snowed to be suddenly catapulted into such a (in his Boston music circle) prestigious band, he was such putty in Lou’s hands that he would soon come to dress, look, and sound like Lou, although they had virtually nothing in common apart from coming from Long Island. Doug was a more than adequate musician and in fact played well and successfully with the band, going on tour with them in October only a week after joining, but his major role originally was to fulfill Lou’s desire to have somebody onstage and in his studio who would do what he was told and not bother Lou in any way. Doug fit the bill so perfectly that Moe was convinced that outside of work Lou found Doug to be a bore.

  The first fruit of Lou’s new band was their third album, called The Velvet Underground, recorded at TT&G Studios in L.A. that November.

  The writing and recording of the album perfectly summed up both Lou’s personal dilemma and the dilemma of the band. The songs themselves, commencing with “Candy Says,” and ceasing with “Afterhours,” focus on the subject that Lou Reed was most confused about: love.

  The deepest roots of this problem obviously have to come at least in part from his relationship with his parents, the only people, according to his friends, whom Lou genuinely feared, but at the time Lou wrote the album, from the spring through the fall of 1968, his confusion was apparent in his active bisexuality. During and beyond this time Lou was having affairs with two of the most influential people in his life, whose characters pervade the album, Warhol Factory manager Billy Name and Lou’s Syracuse girlfriend Shelley Albin. The basic theme of the album, according to Reed himself, is that all kinds of love are the same as long as they’re love. The album catalogs all kinds of love from adultery to religious love. However, by “Beginning to See the Light,” the album’s protagonist (clearly Lou) claims that he doesn’t know what it feels like to be loved and declines from there into isolation and loneliness, complaining that going through the motions with somebody (Shelley) for the second time is particularly sad. After pausing for a moment to claim that he is set free, and concluding with the words of Billy Name that there’s no difference between wrong and right, he also characterizes “Afterhours” as a “terribly sad song.”

  The recording of the album was no less disturbing than its subject matter. First, according to Sterling Morrison, “Right before we went into the studio all of our electronic gear was stolen in their ammunition boxes at the airport. So we didn’t have fuzzers and expressers and compressors. We were left with amps and guitars, so we made a straightforward record.” To complicate matters, Lou’s voice, never strong under any circumstances, was ragged from constant touring. Furthermore, Morrison got his back up when presented with the soulful “Pale Blue Eyes.” �
��Cale’s departure allowed Lou’s sensitive, meaningful side out,” Sterling sneered. “Why do you think that happened on the third album? ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ is about Lou’s old girlfriend in Syracuse. I said, ‘Lou, if I wrote a song like that, I wouldn’t make you play it.’ He was very vain about his gifts as a lyricist. He didn’t want them swept by the wayside. I didn’t argue hotly about this or that feature on the album. My contribution was as much as ever, probably even more, but I didn’t try and get my own way all the time. Perhaps the Cale business left me all argued out, or perhaps I didn’t feel that strongly about the material one way or the other. I tried to maintain some tension by instigating a tremendous paranoia because I was still hanging around with Cale. But my position on that album was one of acquiescence.”

  Despite these problems and tensions, the making of The Velvet Underground was clearly a seminal victory for Lou. He celebrated his dominance over the band by doing something that would plague the rest of his career. After the album had been recorded and mixed, Lou went back into the studio and remixed it to bring his guitar playing and voice into prominence, destroying all the hard work the others had put into bringing his compositions to fruition. Granted, the album contained two of Reed’s classic VU songs, “Some Kinda Love,” and “Pale Blue Eyes,” but according to the other members of the band, the original mix was superior. Coming on the heels of his brutal betrayal of Cale, this arrogant over-playing of his confidence was to cost Reed dearly throughout the remainder of his career with the VU. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that rather than beginning to see the light, they had all caught a glimpse of the end.

  Sterling Morrison rarely spoke to Lou for the remainder of their time together and psychically closed him out of his life. Maureen, who was by far Lou’s best friend in the band, was stalwart, but if one hundred strands of friendship held them together, some strands were definitely broken when Lou remixed the record. Doug Yule was actually the major victor of the crisis for two reasons. First, since they had been playing nightly at the Whiskey in L.A. during the recording sessions, Lou’s voice was ragged and Doug got to sing several of the key songs like “Candy Says,” bringing him into prominence in the band and blowing a lot of hot air into his inflatable ego. Secondly, Sesnick, a shrewd manipulator who wanted above all success, power, and money, began to see in Doug a possible replacement for the tiresome Lou, whose arrogance was only offset by his permanent case of shpilkes.

  The third album offered hints of the path Lou Reed would eventually follow to personal survival. “I’ve gotten to where I like ‘pretty’ stuff better than drive and distortion because you can be more subtle, really say something and sort of soothe, which is what a lot of people seem to need right now,” he explained. “Like I think if you came in after a really hard day at work and played the third album, it might really do you good. A calmative, some people might even call it Muzak, but I think it can function on both that and the intellectual or artistic levels at the same time. Like when I wrote ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘My God, a hymn!’ and ‘Candy Says,’ which is probably the best song I’ve written, which describes a sort of person who’s special, except that I think that all of us have been through that in a way—young, confused, with the feeling that other people, or older people, know something you don’t.”

  Nineteen sixty-nine looked as if it was going to be Lou’s most successful year. The Velvet Underground, released in March, was of course a big surprise for their fans, being nothing at all like the previous two albums. In January, Nico had released her second solo album, The Marble Index, produced by John Cale, who recalled, “When we finished it, I grabbed Lou and said, ‘Listen to this: this is what we could have done!’ He was speechless.”

  At the same time the band was touring through a performing peak. That November, the guitarist Bob Quine, who would work with Lou in the 1980s, met him during the band’s visit to San Francisco. “You could see the relationship during the rehearsals. Lou seemed to be closer with Doug Yule than with Sterling. Sterling seemed to be a little detached from things. When Lou was working on arrangements, he would direct more comments to Doug Yule. Doug Yule did a good job—he didn’t get in the way of songs. Like “Sister Ray,” and sometimes they would whip off a version of ‘Black Angel’s Death Song.’ I don’t think they were pleased to be in San Francisco, and they knew what awaited them,” Quine recalled. “They were regarded as Andy Warhol’s death-rock band. It was still the height of clichéd hippiedom—flowers and everything. I saw them at the Family Dog the first week and they were great. But it was fairly tragic. Hordes of hippies would just go there regardless of who was playing. They had their tambourines and harmonicas and they were all playing along with the band, who they didn’t know of course. At one point Maureen was laughing. Lou said, ‘She’s laughing because the tambourine players can’t keep time.’ He was doing amazing choreography—stuff that would make Chuck Berry look like a cripple—way beyond the duck-walk types of things and amazing guitar solos.

  “Then they did this long thing at the Matrix club. They were there two or three weeks and I saw them every night. The most inspiring thing for me was that Lou was writing a lot of songs like ‘Sweet Jane,’ ‘Sweet Bonnie Brown,’ and ‘New Age,’ some of which would show up on Loaded. And they would change from night to night. He would improvise lyrics on ‘Sweet Jane’ and they were very different each night. Sometimes they would be funny and sometimes very, very scary. One night they did a version of ‘Waiting for the Man,’ and instead of that up-tempo thing, it was very slow and bluesy. Instead of taking any guitar solos he’d whistle. He was making up whole new verses: ‘Standing on the corner waiting for the sun to rise, Miss Gina and Miss Ann said that they had a surprise. It’s no mystery, it’s no mistake, I guess that I’ll just have to wait. I’m waiting for my man.’ He would go on and on and on. Two or three ‘Sister Rays’ where he would really cut loose on guitar.”

  If there was any key juncture at which they could have broken out into the mainstream, this was it. However, the music business was changing so fast it could make your head spin faster than Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. As it would turn out, the band was now nearing the end of its relationship with MGM/Verve. “They knew they were up against it,” recalled Quine. “Mike Curb was at MGM. He was bubblegum mentality at best and they knew they had to get out. I had overheard a conversation in the spring of ’69 where Lou was saying they were enthusiastic and were making a fourth album. Then I asked them about it in November, and he just canned it: no comment. Lou would occasionally give them little talks, like, ‘If we just stick together, I know we’ll make it.’ It’s hard for people to imagine how totally ignored they were. Then they had this image—despite songs on the third album that anybody should have been able to like, like ‘Pale Blue Eyes,’ ‘Candy Says’—the image worked against them.”

  Consequently, they were getting little support from the company whose president, Curb, would win praise from then President Nixon later that year for his resolute stand against “drug music,” and one of whose employees would describe Reed as “the most spaced-out person I have ever met in my life. I think he was on speed all the time they were here. And on top of that, he had the nerve to tell me what a fucked-up company MGM is, and how much he hates the way we’re handling them.” The bottom line was that the album lacked adequate distribution. The Velvets would pack a club in the Midwest or Texas, then on the following day discover that none of their albums were available anywhere in town. Some store owners even complained of not being able to get them when ordered.

  It says a lot for Reed’s self-confidence that, despite these disheartening developments, he soldiered on through the summer working hard and apparently enjoying his life. Billy Name recalled going out with Lou regularly to gay bars, often stopping by the Factory for quick, casual sex after a night spent enjoying the new freedoms engendered by the gay liberation movement, which had sprung to life that year along with its sister, the women’s liberation movement. “
We would go to a gay dance bar and gravitate towards getting our rocks off,” recalled Name. “He would stay with somebody from the after-hours bars or we would walk down 8th Street and I would say, ‘Well, come over to the Factory.’ The more intimate relationship happened only because of the after-hours bars. We wouldn’t have had a relationship if we hadn’t gone out to that type of place and got blasted and there was a place at the Factory for us to go back to. It was strictly a result of the cultural theme going on. We weren’t lovers or anything. And we weren’t necessarily intimate. We were making out and we were closely bonded.

  “My favorite remembrance of Lou was at the second Factory. Lou came and everything and was getting ready to go and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t come.’ So I made him sit on my face and he said grudgingly, “Okay,” so I could get off. So it was a playful type of relationship. But he could turn it off. I would never turn it off. He had that little streak of his own mentality operating where he’ll just say no where I would never say no. It really pissed me off one time. I said, ‘Come over to the Factory,’ he said, ‘No.’ He could do that after being very close and very friendly. He was a brat. Other than that, the relationship was purely bonding, real friends, love and respectful, really into art and esoteric literature and very young type things. I think that whole mean streak was in there though.”

  On the other hand, as Lou pointed out, “Billy also told me I was a lesbian, so you have to take these things with a grain of salt.”

  “Another important person to Lou was Mary Woronov,” Billy recalled of one of the former EPI dancers. Billy, Mary, and Lou formed a vigorous threesome. “Lou used to like queers, and I used to hang out with queers, so we went to gay bars,” Mary recounted. “He liked sleazy drag queens. We were crazy about drag queens like Jackie and Holly and Candy. We knew them as very funny people. Lou had a loyalty towards me not as a girlfriend or as a fuckable person, but in the same way as he had a loyalty to a person like Maureen. I was a girl he liked. In other words, he never made a pass at me. Once I brought him home to my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn Heights. My parents were freaked out because he looked so strange. He looked horrible. He was kind of strong about his health. He could take major drug-abuse and not be bothered at all. But he looked skinny and he always slouched. And his hair was always that wiry conk stuff. He wasn’t a good-looking guy. He never dated. No one would touch him with a ten-foot pole.”