Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Lou was trying to reconcile his confused feelings about sex and love and his relationship with Bettye. In the process he worked out his own view of what being gay was all about: “Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you have to camp around in makeup. That’s just like platform shoes. You just can’t fake being gay. If they claim they’re gay, they’re just going to have to make love in a gay style, and most of these people aren’t capable of making that commitment. You can’t fake being gay, because being gay means you’re going to have to suck cock or get fucked. I think there’s a very basic thing in a guy if he’s straight where he’s just going to say no. ‘I’ll act gay, I’ll do this and I’ll do that, but I can’t do that.’ Just like a gay person if they wanted to act straight and everything, but if you said, ‘Okay, go ahead, go to bed with a girl,’ they’re going to have to get an erection first.”

  Meanwhile, Richard Robinson, who was a staff producer at RCA Records, imagined himself gaining considerable credence from producing successful Lou Reed solo albums. The emergence of David Bowie in the U.K., who had just been signed by an A&R man at RCA in the U.S. named Dennis Katz, opened the door a crack further.

  Like many musicians who spend the majority of their time and energy inside their heads with their music, Lou was, as we have seen in his relationship with Steve Sesnick, more easily led and manipulated than we might imagine given his fiery character and powerful will. No sooner had the poetry audience melted away and the Robinsons encouraged him to perform some of his “new” songs on acoustic guitar than Lou found himself playing what would ultimately end up on his first album (mostly outtakes from Loaded) to an appreciative audience at the Collective’s salon.

  With the support of the Robinsons and their coterie, Reed regained much of the confidence he had missed since his days with the Velvets. Before long he was holding court. Meltzer recalled one such evening when he made the mistake of insulting the new incarnation of Lou Reed: “He took hold of an acoustic guitar and played a good ten to fifteen new compositions—all of them really okay—he’d been fooling around with at home. He completely blew up every time I opened my mouth, couldn’t fucking stand anything I had to say that didn’t capture the essence of his oh-so-unique creative vision. Like I’d tell him, hey, it would be real good with just him and an acoustic playing the clubs, he’d claim I was calling him a goddamn folky—beneath his dignity. I’d tell him one particularly nifty song reminded me of the Monkees; he’d say the Monkees were just plastic shit—he being, on the other hand, a sensitive genius. I’d tell him he was handling a passage the way Ray Davies might; he’d insist he never plagiarized anyone—his every thought being original. Lots of fury in his reaction ’cause, besides, what right did I—a mere writer!—have to question the efforts of a musician?”

  In retrospect, several observers of the Collective Conscience group believed that the Robinsons were too-cool-to-live snobs “who were using Lou for their own ends and thought that he was lucky to be around them.” One friend remembered how they didn’t want Lou, a phoneaholic, to have both their private phone numbers since he had started calling fifteen to twenty times a day. Nonetheless, the Robinsons provided a stage on which Lou could rehearse his comeback and an audience to applaud his sense of humor. Despite his essay on fallen rock stars, he took Jim Morrison’s death that summer as a joke. “I didn’t even feel sorry for Jim Morrison when he died. I remember there was a group of us sitting in this apartment in New York and the telephone rang and someone told us that Jim Morrison had just died in a bathtub in Paris. And the immediate reaction was, ‘How fabulous, in a bathtub, in Paris, how faaaantastic.’ That lack of compassion doesn’t disturb me at all, he asked for it. I had no compassion at all for that silly Los Angeles person. How dumb, he was so dumb.”

  No sooner had the Robinsons decided that Lou’s new songs were a top-notch batch of classic Reed material that simply needed the right production, than they invited Dennis Katz to meet Lou Reed. The major arm of Reed’s talent throughout his career has been in seizing upon the right collaborator at the right time. From Cale through Warhol to, at least for a little while, Sesnick, he has, in his own words, brought out the best in people he worked with. Dennis Katz was to be Reed’s most important single collaborator during the first half of the seventies. Katz had just become vice president of A&R at RCA. “I was musically oriented and had the ability to negotiate and structure deals that would give them an A and R head with both backgrounds,” Katz explained. “An A and R head must be able to do more than evaluate acts and listen to tapes. He must have a feeling for an act’s commercial potential, to know what they’ll be worth.” Everybody was in the right place at the right time. Having just signed the hottest new rock star in the U.K., David Bowie, Katz soon persuaded RCA executives that Lou Reed would be another perfect star for the new rock era. Katz was a bright light in an otherwise lackluster company. RCA had been living off Elvis Presley since the mid-1950s and had done little since then to consolidate their position. Other RCA artists during Lou’s RCA years were John Denver, Harry Nilsson, Hall & Oates, and Alabama. Lou signed a two-album solo contract with the company and immediately set to work with his new mentor.

  Dennis saw an outstanding potential in Lou Reed: “Up to that point he was basically a songwriter. I really liked the Velvet Underground, even if I became familiar with their work only after they disbanded. The original group with John Cale had a much wider effect on other artists, but the later band was much more commercial, in my opinion.” He also found a personal connection to his new artist. “Dennis was straight,” recalled one observer, “but he had a few kinky things about him.” Both appreciated music, poetry, and maintained a strong work ethic. Katz and Reed formed the core of a team that would prepare the way for Reed’s solo career.

  It was taken for granted that Richard Robinson (an in-house producer at RCA), who had become obsessed with reviving Lou’s career, would be Reed’s producer. “To date,” he said, “he has not been recorded in a way that enables him to communicate easily with those who want to listen. And he’s written the best rock-and-roll songs I’ve ever heard.”

  Once Lou got back in touch with Danny Fields and found himself a star in the Robinsons’ coterie, things moved forward rapidly and very positively. In September he met a man who was to play a vital supporting role in his career, David Bowie. Bowie was on the verge of taking off into superstardom. He was already making a big point of how much he thought of Lou. He came to New York with his wife, Angie, guitar player Mick Ronson, and manager Tony DeFries to sign his RCA contract and meet Lou. Tony Zanetta, an American actor who had recently starred as Warhol in Warhol’s play Pork, was the go-between. “To celebrate the signing, Dennis Katz arranged for this party at the Ginger Man,” recalled Tony. “The big thing was the celebration of the signing and for Lou and David to meet. It was like going to a bar mitzvah. There were twelve to fifteen people, Richard and Lisa Robinson, Bob Ring who was A and R at RCA, Dennis, and other record-company people. Lou took Bettye and David had Angie with him. Rono, Tony, and David thought of me as his entrée to Lou and Andy. I didn’t know Lou. I was very intimidated by Reed. That amphetamine cutting humor frightened me so I sat there quietly, smiling. David was also not used to the biting, caustic humor. David was flirtatious and coy. He was in his Lauren Bacall phase with his Veronica Lake hairdo and eye shadow. So he let Lou take the driver’s seat conversationally. Plus Lou was one of David’s idols from the Velvet Underground. David was very shy. Lou was very short haired. I remember him being in jeans and a denim jacket. No colored fingernails or any of that. He didn’t even have long hair. And no one knew how to take Bettye. We all thought she was an airline stewardess. Very vapid. She didn’t have much to say. She wasn’t very hip looking. She was in pantsuits. Lisa Robinson was the social center of all this, she was pivotal in terms of conversation at the dinner. After the dinner, we went down to Max’s so David could meet Iggy Pop. It was in the back room seated at the big booth in the corner on the ri
ght when you went in. Danny Fields was officiating over the introductions.”

  As 1971 drew to a close, Reed looked around for a manager. The first person he approached was his beloved Danny Fields, who declined, explaining, “Lou was making me crazy. So at a party at the Robinsons’ I went over and I told him, “Lou, I love you but this won’t work. I just want to be your friend.” This was best left to professionals who weren’t so emotionally or aesthetically involved, who weren’t so enraptured of him.” Next, Lou turned to Fred Heller, who managed Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose guitarist was Dennis’s brother. Dennis was clearly having a strong influence on Lou, who hired Fred on his advice. The perspicacity of this choice was intimidated by a buoyant, optimistic mood. Heller’s inventive motto was: “Lewis is going to be big in the business.”

  The question underlying the venture, of course, was whether, when Lou emerged from his exile and hibernation, he still possessed, or indeed might have further harnessed, that elusive spirit, that “it” of rock and roll that he had possessed even through the final days of the VU. In short, did he have the confidence to get up onstage in front of an audience and make rock and roll not as a member of an—within their coterie—established and cherished group, but as a solo star in a new time when rock stars were beginning to look very different?

  Chapter Eleven

  The Transformation from Freeport Lou to Frankenstein

  1971–73

  My direction had always been rock and roll—I saw it as a life force. My goal is to play Vegas … be a lounge act … be like Eddie Fisher … get divorced … have a scandal … go bankrupt … end up in Moscow, marry Connie Stevens, and read about myself in the National Enquirer.

  Lou Reed

  Chubby, shaggy-haired, twenty-nine-year-old Lou presented himself to British customs officers at Heathrow Airport as a musician on December 28, 1971. He did not look anything like a rock star, let alone the glitter rocker who would soon be the world-famous standard-bearer of a new movement. For a man whose image at the Factory had been pencil-thin behind sunglasses and black leather, being fat was the most blatant sign of an ambivalence to the task at hand.

  Reed and his entourage checked into what was London’s most popular hotel for top-of-the-line rock stars, the Inn on the Park. An ultramodern American-style hotel, it was located on the same block as the London Hilton, overlooking Hyde Park. Throughout January, Lou and Bettye and Richard and Lisa lived in a world of their own focused on the making of the solo album and little else. Lou would walk around with Richard on one arm and Bettye on the other, introducing them to people as “my boyfriend and my girlfriend.” The threesome might have made a brilliant collaboration, but as it turned out, Bettye did not have the mind or strength to be Lou’s partner, and Richard was no John Cale.

  Lou had often used the image of a chess game to describe his career. One of his daring moves on the board now was to record in London instead of New York. The decision made sense: In London he could avoid the prying eyes of RCA executives and get out from under the union pressure to use RCA’s New York studios. Yet, for a man who was proud of being a control freak he was taking an enormous risk in choosing to work in a scenario he knew nothing about and therefore could not easily manipulate.

  Reed’s strategy of starting his campaign in London was smart in other ways as well. It would have been a mistake to launch his return in America, where his association with Warhol and the Velvet Underground was the kiss of death. He was also better known in Britain than in the United States. His work was highly appreciated in Britain, and the new generation of rock stars, spearheaded by Bowie, welcomed him like a hero. In London, where the atmosphere was tolerant, Lou was free to explore his sexual identity. England had a history of fondness for eccentrics and cross-dressers, who often played starring roles in music halls and pantomime. Lou would feel free to stretch the boundaries of convention in his music. Apart from refreshing himself by changing the backdrop, Lou chose to record in London because it was the most receptive city for rock experimentors. London studios were on the cutting edge and British producers and engineers appeared more willing to translate musicians’ ideas in a collaborative way. Given the many factors pointing to success, Lou’s arrival in London was as well placed, and played, as his entrance into the Factory six years earlier.

  These factors did not, however, work in Lou’s favor. Despite five years of experience and a fifteen-month furlough to get ready for this step, Lou was ill prepared for his first solo recording sessions. Instead of showing up with a powerful collection of new works with which to stake his claim on the 1970s, Lou brought in unreleased VU tracks and castoffs from other projects. Surrounded by yes-men, Lou got no word of protest. The people working with him were more like enablers than collaborators.

  His musicians, for one, were a lackluster group chosen for him by RCA. When Lou arrived in the studio, unpacked his guitar, and turned toward the microphone, he was astonished to discover, peering at him from behind their instruments, a (by Velvet Underground standards) B-list band: Rick Wakeman and Tony Kaye, two keyboard players from the progressive band Yes; Caleb Quaye from Elton John’s band; as well as Steve Howe and Paul Keough on guitars, Les Hurdle and Brian Odgers on bass, and Clem Cattini on drums. These men were orthodox professionals who knew how to play their instruments, but, as session musicians, they brought little spirit to the music. Lou found it difficult to work up a rapport with them. As a result, Reed, once described by John Cale as “a wild man on the guitar,” did not play a single note on his first solo album. Throughout the Velvets’ reign, his guitar had been an extension of himself. Now, that third arm was amputated.

  Lou didn’t seem to care. As long as he could bark orders to a quiescent band, he was satisfied: “Making a really good record is very, very difficult and it’s a matter of control. If you don’t have the right musicians and you don’t have the right engineer, it’s very hard. But you have to start someplace. The situation is not always one where you can call the shots or even half the shots. I didn’t particularly know any musicians so it didn’t matter who you got. If they played what I told them to play, then it might be okay, and if they didn’t, then it wouldn’t.”

  While Lou was sleepwalking through the recording sessions, Robinson was floundering at the control panel. Having scant experience as a producer, Robinson was confused by some of the more sophisticated British technology. Giving the impression that everything was under control, he assured Katz’s assistant, Barbara Falk, in a letter that month, “We are into technical cutting stages. As far as I can tell it is the best album I’ve done to date. Lou is in ecstasy.” Gerard Malanga, who visited Lou at his hotel near the end of the session, found him quiet and content in the encouraging presence of Lisa Robinson, who played the Warhol role in the collaboration, flattering Lou and assuring him that everything was “Great!” Lou, though, must have noticed that everything was not as cool as the Robinsons thought because he kept telling Richard, “This isn’t the way the record is supposed to sound, the album is not defined enough.” The truth, one observer noted, was that “he had not quite settled on a voice.”

  “A lot of what I do is intuitive,” Reed said about making the album. “I just go where it takes me and I don’t question it.” This admission about his lack of direction, combined with the weak, raw material of the album, cried out for a strong collaborator. However, Lou avowed, “I’m not consulting anybody this time, it’s a solo effort with my producer, Richard Robinson.” He felt confident that “this was the closest realization to what I heard in my head that I ever did. It was a real rock-and-roll album.”

  Just how ambivalent Reed felt about his solo career was emphasized near the end of the month when John Cale came to London and invited Lou to join him and Nico in Paris to perform at the Bataclan Club on January 29. Lou, who hated rehearsing, not only agreed to play with them, but spent two days going over the material with John in London. Richard Robinson videotaped Lou and John rehearsing, making music that ranked among
their best collaborations. As one critic, James Walcott, described it: “Reed’s monochromatic voice, and Cale’s mournful viola, mixed with the dirgeful lyrics and the colorless bleakness of the video image turned a casual rehearsal into a drama of luminous melancholia. What was blurry before became indelibly vivid, and the Reed/Cale harlequinade melted away so that one could truly feel their power as prodigies of transfiguration. Listening to the Velvets, you may have been alone but you were never stranded.”

  Lou also rehearsed for a whole day with Nico in Paris. The nightclub show, filmed for French television, was one of his happier experiences. Performing in a small, smoke-filled venue with his former soul mates, Lou took off on a few solo flights in the tradition of the nightclub greats. He noted later, “I always wanted to do a song like on the album Berlin that’s like a Barbra Streisand kind of thing. A real nightclub torch thing. Like, if you were Frank Sinatra [whom Lou greatly admired], you’d loosen your tie and light a cigarette. And when I was in Paris, that’s how I performed it. I didn’t play at all. I had John play the piano and I sat on a stool with my legs crossed. And during the instrumental break I lit a cigarette and I puffed it and said, ‘It was paradise. It was heaven. It was really bliss.’ I was just doing that Billie Holiday trip. Her phrasing, I mean that’s singing. I think [he said in one of the more perceptive comments of his career] I’m acting.”

  Lou was so moved by the experience with Cale and Nico that he suggested the three of them get back together, but they turned him down. At the time, Nico had already released three solo albums with great critical success, and Cale had made real headway as a producer and solo artist on among others The Stooges’ first album in 1969. At the time, they both appeared to be in a stronger position than Lewis.