During January 1972 Reed had lived inside a bubble—waited on hand and foot in a luxurious hotel at the center of a circle whose sole reason to be there was he—doing what he liked best: writing, singing, and recording. As soon as he returned to New York on January 30, however, the bubble burst.
Dennis Katz was appalled by how bad the album was. “The production did not come out the way I’d anticipated it,” Katz explained. “It was much too sparse.” Everybody in Reed’s New York management organization agreed with Katz. “What are we doing wasting our time!” the salespeople at RCA screamed at Katz. “They made it clear that they were disappointed in Lou,” he recalled. “They rejected the direction—and specifically the production—of the first album.”
Listening to the album now, one can understand their concern. Whereas the record, titled simply Lou Reed, contained a number of fine songs such as “Lisa Says” and “Ocean,” the performance and the production paled considerably in relation to anything Lou had previously released. Part of the problem was purely technical. Years later, when Reed remastered several tracks from Lou Reed for the 1992 boxed set Between Thought and Expression, he discovered the album had not been recorded in Dolby, but Dolby decoded, which robbed it of its high frequencies.
Technological mistakes aside, the album’s artistic weakness arose from the fact that most of the songs were outtakes from VU albums that had sounded a lot better when Lou played them with the VU. The outstanding example is an outtake from Loaded, “Ocean,” on which John Cale had played backup in 1970 at Steve Sesnick’s invitation. The Loaded version, with Cale on organ and Lou in full command of an eerie and vibrant voice, was magisterial. The version on Lou Reed was dead by comparison. It was like comparing Janis Joplin singing “Bobby McGee” to Kris Kristofferson. Lou was very influenced by whomever he played with, and his inability to collaborate with people who were as good as or better than he had produced painfully obvious results on the album. In essence, the taut sound of Lou’s songs on Loaded was obscured by the wrong musicians and poor production on Lou Reed.
Lou Reed almost destroyed Lou Reed’s solo career before he got off the ground. The rock world was changing rapidly, and a lot of money was at stake for record companies, who were forced to make fast and merciless judgments. RCA’s executives were so dismayed by the poor quality of Lou Reed they considered canceling his second album. Matters were made even worse by the fact that, for the cover, Lou insisted they use an illustration of a bird next to a jeweled egg by the artist who did the covers of Raymond Chandler books.
Back in New York, Lou found himself in a confusing place with nobody he could really talk to. Money was tight. Lou and Bettye squeezed into a cubiclelike studio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on 78th Street, popularly known as the airline-stewardess ghetto. Lou was trying on different disguises. “His life with Bettye and his apartment seemed to provide a kind of domestic security that Lou needed to sustain him in his transition from cult-group figure to solo artist,” reported his friend Ed McCormack, who edited Fusion, a magazine that had recently published a number of Reed’s poems. Ed remembered Lou, accompanied by a nervous, battered-looking Bettye, sitting in his apartment at midnight wearing a pair of sunglasses, keeping his fears at bay by bolting down copious quantities of booze.
“He had the most horrible apartment,” recalled Glenn O’Brien, another writer Lou socialized with. “With shag carpeting going up the walls and really bad furniture. And Lou was boozing really heavy. He was a little bit more together, he didn’t seem so pathetic, but he must have been doing a lot of booze and pills. He was the first person I ever saw who was really shaky like that, having double Bloody Marys at noon. The first time I met Bettye she had a black eye. She was cute, but I remember her always having a black eye.”
The album was to be released in May, by which time it was Lou’s job to put together a band and tour the U.S. Lou faced the near impossible question: What musicians do you hire to play with when you’ve played in one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of all time? Lou’s answer was to choose an unknown and unacclaimed band whose name, the Tots, said everything you needed to know about them. Not only were they pedestrian musicians, they were ugly and asexual. But the Tots provided Lou with exactly what he wanted—an unshared spotlight. No member of the band would question orders or arrangements, Lou would have total control. He also figured that teaching them his repertoire would be simple since the majority of his songs were repetitions and variations and stemmed off three, basic chords. Lou introduced the Tots as a great young and unknown band.
The ensemble made a nervous debut at the Millard Fillmore Room of the University of Buffalo. Lou’s performance was uptight, rigid, and tentative, according to Billy Altman, the student who arranged the show. Togged out in black leather trousers and jacket, Lou’s halo of ringlets hovered around a face covered by a layer of clown-white Pan-Cake makeup, lipstick and eye shadow. Having abandoned his guitar, Lou found himself thrust into the spotlight without the stage moves that are a crucial part of the lead singer’s repertoire. Lou seemed trapped between personalities. At one moment he seemed to be copying Mick Jagger, then suddenly he looked like Jerry Lewis. When Altman, who had published a glowing review of the concert in the local paper, visited him the following day, Lou was curt, the five minutes they spent together excruciating. Despite proclaiming that he would never commit suicide because he was “in control,” Lou was impressed by the suicide that month of the British actor George Sanders, who left a note explaining, “I’m so bored.”
In May, when the album Lou Reed and two singles, “Goin’ Down”/“I Can’t Stand It” and “Walk and Talk It”/“Wild Child,” were released, Dennis Katz’s worst fears were realized. Initially Lou Reed sold around seven thousand copies, an embarrassing result in an industry where fifty thousand to one hundred thousand was considered reasonable.
It was a telling moment for the Robinsons and their collective. Lou was the mascot of the New York underground, whose inhabitants would have benefited from his success. Loyal critics like Donald Lyons gushed in Interview magazine that Lou was “a classic romantic—the smell of his work is the smell of Baudelaire’s Paris—grappling, tempted, and sometimes happy, always human. It’s a wonderful album.” Robert Christgau gave it a B+ in the Village Voice, but added that it was “hard to know what to make of this. Certainly it’s less committed—less rhythmically monolithic and staunchly weird—than the Velvets. Not that Reed is shying away from rock and roll or the demimonde. But when I’m feeling contrary he sounds, not just ‘decadent,’ but jaded, fagged out.” “Edith Piaf he ain’t,” admitted the disappointed Lester Bangs.
Most reviewers lambasted the work. “The comeback album—the resurrection of [record company’s label] ‘The Phantom Rock’ itself—was one of the more disappointing releases of 1972,” wrote the leading British rock critic Nick Kent, in the New Musical Express. “Reed’s songwriting style has deteriorated—his dalliance with whimsical little love ballads are at best mildly amusing, at worst quite embarrassing, and always out of context.”
Lou expressed a desire to kill Kent, but his defense of the album was lukewarm. “There’s just too many things wrong with it,” he lamented. “I was in dandy form and so was everybody else. I’m just aware of all the things that are missing and all the things that shouldn’t have been there.” Nobody was willing to die for it and nobody claimed to be more upset than Sterling Morrison. “I really felt sad,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh, man, you have blown it!’ He used to be one of the great rock vocalists, but either his voice had seriously deteriorated or he can’t or won’t sing anymore.” John Cale explained that the lyric about hiring a vet Lou sang at the end of “Berlin” was deadly serious. He noted that Lou would often get passionate about something everybody else found funny, then be highly offended by their laughter. But, particularly in light of the bad production of Velvets’ leftovers, he found the album lame.
To make matters worse, no sooner had Lou c
ome rushing out of the gate with his first individual effort than he was unhorsed by the same hurdle the Beatles had come up against when they went solo—the specter of previous work. In Reed’s case the invidious comparison between his earlier and current work was made painfully obvious when his last night with the Velvet Underground at Max’s was released the same month. Live at Max’s Kansas City enjoyed better reviews and sales than Lou Reed.
***
At this awful juncture, Lou put into play one of the elements that would always set him apart from the pack. When in trouble, he had an ability to charm and attract powerful people who believed in and were willing to go to bat for him. Dennis Katz, Lou’s lawyer during the first half of 1972, was now leaving RCA and began to make overtures to become Lou’s manager. Katz’s offer coincided with increasingly tumultuous relations between Reed and Fred Heller, with whom Reed had an explosive personality conflict. Bettye also complained about Fred pushing her around at Lou’s shows. When Lou told Fred he was going to be replaced by Dennis, a lawsuit ensued, from which Lou extricated himself at considerable financial cost.
Lou now seized upon Dennis as a father figure, even though the two were roughly the same age. Poised, literate, happily married, and devoted to his career, Dennis represented a guiding strength. Lou would often visit him at his home in Chappaqua. Everyone around the two recalled with awe a friendship in which Lou initially never contradicted or challenged Dennis.
“I think Dennis liked the fact that Lou needed him and depended on him,” said Katz’s assistant Barbara Falk. “He really thought that Lou was fantastic. David [Bowie] was just starting to take off at RCA right after Dennis left. Now Dennis swung totally to Lou. I remember Dennis’s wife saying that Lou was so much better than David Bowie, he wasn’t all the frills and glitter and he was stark and black, he was the street poet. Being of the literary bent, one of the things that attracted Dennis to rock artists were their lyrics.
“Dennis started getting more interested in Lou, and when David Bowie expressed an interest in producing Lou, Dennis got even more involved. Dennis got more protective and there was more contact and a relationship developed. Lou’s father came up to the office and wanted an accounting or reporting—because Lou had had problems with the guy who came before. He was a quiet, nondescript, businesslike fellow. He came on his own and he and Dennis went to lunch across the street. Mr. Reed was concerned and Dennis was trying to assure him that Lou was finally in good hands.”
Considering that Dennis was so different from Lou, the strength of their bond was surprising. Falk described Katz as a bookish homebody: “He was very home-oriented and private, he didn’t like to go out at night, he wasn’t your typical rock-and-roller. He collected autographs and first editions. And he was very, very literary in his interests. That part of Lou interested Dennis, the fact that he had been published in the Paris Review, and the fact that they both read, which very few people in the rock world did. So they developed this strange relationship where they were both fascinated by each other’s lifestyle and they kidded each other about them and joked and put each other down.”
Lou loved the fact that Dennis was eccentric. He found that it was cool. He said, “He’s not like all the other guys, he’s got something in here.” And there was this strange symbiosis between them. They got along really well, but then I could never picture Lou staying overnight in Chappaqua—with his hours … But he used to stay over in this really nice house. And Dennis got up at seven, he fell asleep at eleven o’clock. I can also remember going out with the two of them to some gay bar and Dennis refused to go to the men’s room. He was fastidious. When they got along, they were a funny pair. And Dennis was always a placater and a builder-upper. He was articulate and he could speak to Lou. He would get frustrated with Lou, but, let’s face it, everybody would get frustrated with Lou. But Dennis always tried to make sure that Lou was aware of everything going on financially.”
During the time that Lou was befriending Katz, Andy Warhol also approached him with a job offer. Thriving in a dramatic period of his comeback from the 1968 attempted assassination, the artist asked Reed to write some songs for a Broadway musical to be produced by Warhol and Yves Saint Laurent. Lou recalled, “Andy said, ‘Why don’t you write a song called “Vicious”?’ I said, ‘Well, Andy, what kind of vicious?’ ‘Oh, you know, like I hit you with a flower.’ And I wrote it down, literally. Because I kept a notebook in those days. I used it for poetry and things people said.” Lou also wrote two other songs that along with “Vicious” would appear on his second solo album, Transformer: “New York Telephone Conversation” and “Make Up.”
Despite the support of these two men, Lou might have limped along indefinitely had it not been for the emergence of a new rock movement that swept him up in its vitality and high drama. Nineteen seventy-two had marked the entrance of glitter rock, which released sexual forces as potent as those let loose by the British pop explosion of 1964. In glam or glitter rock, male stars smashed open gender barriers by copying costumes and styles of camp 1930s film and stage icons. The results strained Lupe Velez and Mae West through a pastiche of drag queens and characters from the Warhol films Flesh, Trash, and Heat. Riding high on a creative wave brought on by the new gay liberation movement, glitter rockers—whether straight or gay—wore jewelry, makeup, high-heeled platform shoes, and sequined outfits. Yet, despite the feminine trappings, these rockers acted just as macho and adolescent as performers like the Rolling Stones, strutting and preening like little red roosters. Exemplified in England by David Bowie with his 1971 album Hunky Dory and hit single “Changes,” and in the U.S. by Alice Cooper, who had just released his album Killer, glitter rock changed rock’s look and sound, blowing open the doors for a number of new groups and movements.
Reed would have been hard-pressed to compete had he too not donned an attention-getting image. But he didn’t want to lose his hard edge or stoop to offering crass entertainment in the style of Alice Cooper. Lou hated Cooper’s glitzy outfits and goofy stage histrionics, which included wrapping a snake around his neck and spattering himself with blood. David Bowie’s smarter cooler demeanor appealed more to Lou. With his paler-than-pale skin, sensitive eyes, and floppy hair, Bowie looked appropriately androgynous. In Bowie, Reed would find a collaborator as important as Warhol—only much more commercial. And though at times losing sight of the thin line separating person from persona, Reed, like Bowie, would become a master of the seventies pageant.
In the summer of 1972, when Bowie returned to London from his triumphant American tour, bathed in the success of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (which had come out in June), he proposed to RCA that he produce Reed’s second album.
“David was very smart,” noted his wife, Angie. “He’d been evaluating the market for his work, calculating his moves, and monitoring his competition. And the only really serious competition in his market niche, he’d concluded, consisted of Lou Reed and—maybe—lggy Pop. So what did David do? He co-opted them. He brought them into his circle. He talked them up in interviews, spreading their legend in Britain.” David (who had included a musical tribute to the Velvets on Hunky Dory) saw Lou as “the most important writer in rock and roll in the world.”
According to Dennis Katz, RCA was receptive. “They had a lot of faith in Bowie because he co-produced both Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust with Ken Scott. So they were then willing to take another shot at a Reed album—assuming David was working with Lou.”
Tony Zanetta attended “another bar-mitzvah dinner” for David Bowie and Lou in New York at which they started talking about doing Transformer. Plans were made fast. David was still touring and planning on coming back to New York in September. They decided to record in July and August. “They wanted to work with Lou because they didn’t like the first album and didn’t think that it was what he should be doing,” said Tony Zanetta. “But it was a sensitive issue because of Richard Robinson.”
Lou’s decision to have Bowie produce his next album
was a shock to Robinson, who had been the only member of Lou’s entourage to question Bowie’s motives in January. Richard had taken it for granted that he would be producing Lou’s second album, especially since Lou had told one interviewer, “Richard had the same goals I had. We knew we wanted the album to come out this way. We had it all plotted out before we even went to London.” But once Lou became aware that Richard’s involvement threatened to doom him to oblivion, he agreed to cut him from the team. “The Robinsons were rather possessive of Lou,” Glenn O’Brien recalled. “They had a big problem because they thought he should have been eternally grateful to Richard for giving him his big break.”
The Robinsons felt that they had brought Lou out of retirement and saw the move as the ultimate betrayal. When Richard was informed over the phone from Katz’s office that his services would no longer be required, he screamed that Lou was an “aging queen.”
“I can understand it,” said Barbara Falk. “Richard thought, ‘I brought him in, and it was my thing, and nobody wanted him, and part of my deal was that I would continue on …” He thought he had an understanding. Lisa actually didn’t speak to the Bowies for some time because of that—it was a big rift. Lou looked on her as the high priestess of the current rock scene. After the breach when they weren’t speaking, he’d say, ‘They’re little pop people,’ but he probably still read her religiously.”
Lou suddenly found himself closed out of Lisa’s collective. “I still love Richard,” Lou groaned to Ed McCormack, “but I’m not so sure he loves me anymore. But then, I wouldn’t really know what people think of me. I hardly see anyone anymore. There are dear friends who I no longer see, not because I don’t love them, but because I can no longer be a part of that whole hip scene. These nights I hardly go out at all, except down to the liquor store to buy another fifth.
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