Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  In the photograph, the Lou Reed who had previously worn the black jeans, T-shirt, and rumpled corduroy jacket of a man uninterested in frills and stripped for heavy action, now appeared in the guise of a bisexual glitter rocker. Lou’s face was painted with a mask of deathly white Pan-Cake, and he stared past the camera with haunted eyes underlined by black kohl. Black lipstick delineated his new Cupid’s-bow mouth. His dyed jet-black hair was shaped in a stylish semi-Afro similar to Marc Bolan’s. Dressed from head to foot in a black jumpsuit, he also spotted black nail polish. This powerful image so matched the era it was hijacked by Tim Curry, who put it to use in his starring role in the 1975 cult musical and film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It would shortly lead Reed to the peak of his commercial career.

  ***

  When Dennis Katz and the people at RCA heard Transformer, they celebrated their decision to entrust Reed’s future to David Bowie. Convinced it would be a success and even yield a hit single, they prepared the way for its release and a subsequent tour by the artist. The album, with the seminal cover photo by Mick Rock, came out in November 1972.

  Transformer was an enormous success and opened up a new world for Lou Reed. “Both lyrically and musically, Transformer was less intellectual and more pop than Reed’s work with the Velvet Underground,” wrote Ellen Willis, who originally gave the album a poor review. “At first I thought it was disappointingly conventional, lacking in the Velvets’ subtlety. That judgment turned out to be a joke on me; Transformer is easy to take as medicine that tastes like honey and kicks you in the throat. Take a song like ‘Perfect Day,’ a lovely, soft ode to an idyll in the park … or is it? But the album’s deceptively ordinary surface had commercial appeal, which was no doubt part of the point.”

  To promote their hot new star, RCA came up with a clever label. They dubbed Lou Reed the Phantom of Rock. Ironically, this epithet underlined Lou’s greatest weakness: He had fashioned himself in the image of what his English fans imagined he was—a sexy wolverine, homosexual junkie hustler, and advocate of S&M. However, Andy Warhol, a man with a telling eye for these things, pointed out, “When John Cale and Lou were in the Velvets, they really had style. But when Lou went solo, he got bad and was copying people.” The figure he presented to the public didn’t really exist.

  Bowie had insisted that RCA release “Walk on the Wild Side” as a single—against Lou’s wishes. Reed was sure it would be banned on the radio and didn’t want to repeat the pattern of media neglect he had experienced with the great Velvets albums that were never heard on the radio. Fortunately, Lou relented, and as the record company predicted, the single began to climb the charts, peaking at No. 16 on the U.S. charts in late winter of 1973.

  However, somewhat to Reed’s chagrin, both in the U.K. and the U.S. the Bowie–Ronson influence was given more credit than Lou for the success of the work. “Thanks to their intelligence and taste,” Tim Jurgens wrote in Fusion, “Lou Reed has found the perfect accompaniment to such flights of fancy that he’s been lacking since John Cale went his own way.” And the Village Voice noted that “you can cut the atmosphere surrounding each song with a knife … and the clue to this album’s appeal lies in … a mix that has a chance of startling the listener and touching our common humanity.”

  The album rode the wave of gay liberation and the sexual awakening of the early seventies, so Lou became a mascot of the burgeoning gay community. “What I’ve always thought is that I’m doing rock and roll in drag,” he stated. “If you just listen to the songs cursorily, they come off like rock and roll, but if you really pay attention, then they are in a way the quintessence of the rock-and-roll song, except they’re not rock and roll.”

  Referring to another song, “Make Up,” he commented, “The gay life at the moment is not that great. I wanted to write a song which made it terrific, something that you’d enjoy. But I know if I do that, I’ll be accused of being a fag; but that’s all right, it doesn’t matter. I like those people, and I don’t like what’s going down, and I wanted to make it happy.”

  Not everyone bought this new act quite so unquestioningly. When Transformer was released in the U.S., Lisa Robinson got everybody in her writers’ collective to give it a negative review. “As long as he played ball with Lisa and Richard, everybody supported him,” recalled Henry Edwards. “But if you pull the reviews of Transformer, you have a little story, because she single-handedly turned the press against him. And she got everyone to pan his album, including me. And that’s a good story, I think. No one thought at that moment he had a future. Everyone thought that he was a pop artifact to be manipulated—he was almost a golden oldie in a very short period of time. And he was desperate … I do feel guilty about writing a bad review of his album for the Times. I did what everybody else did—we fucked the album.”

  “What’s the matter with Lou Reed? Transformer is terrible—lame, pseudodecadent lyrics, lame, pseudo-something-or-other-singing, and a just plain lame band,” wrote Ellen Willis in The New Yorker. “Part of Reed’s problem is that he needs a band he can interact with, a band that will give him some direction, as the Velvets did, instead of simply backing him up—in other words, not just a band but a group.”

  Andy Warhol was quick to realize that “Walk on the Wild Side” was the single strongest piece of publicity he could use for his trilogy of films starring various drag queens and Joe Dallesandro—Flesh, Heat, and Trash. “Walk on the Wild Side” would become the No. 1 jukebox hit in America in 1973, and every time it played in a restaurant or bar or came wafting out of an apartment or car, it reminded everybody that Warhol’s movies were playing nearby. Warhol was happy about that, but it reminded him that Lou had now twice tapped into the Factory for material—where was the money Lou owed him from the first album? Thus, while embracing Lou publicly in his democracy of success, Andy harbored a hard-boiled resentment.

  ***

  Lou was traveling too fast to notice. The year 1973 proved a momentous one in Reed’s professional and personal life. As Transformer sales mounted—it would take six months to peak—Dennis Katz and the RCA machine swung into action, sending Lou out on a seemingly endless tour that winter. In January, at his first New York solo show at Alice Tully Hall, wearing black leather jeans and jacket, he was, by all accounts, electrifying.

  In February, to everyone’s surprise, the sexually ambiguous Reed, who thought of himself as a knight, who believed in pretty princesses and sparrows, married the woman another part of him looked upon as a Stepford wife. It was, he would later say, a pessimistic act. David Bowie was married, Mick Jagger was married. Maybe, Lou figured, it was the hip thing to do. “Yes, he’s got the princess; she’s Jewish, she likes making homey things,” noted one skeptical friend. “He needed a companion tucked away to be there when he needed them, but Bettye really didn’t understand him at all. He needed a person he could joust with, and ultimately Bettye really couldn’t play the game. She’d be very boring. That’s why he always ended up hitting her. He would never hit anybody who would smack him back.”

  Katz soon added to Reed’s team his assistant Barbara Falk, who would be Lou’s road manager through the mid-seventies and the indispensable member of his support team. In those days it was unusual for a woman to have such a powerful role, and Barbara suffered from both the macho businessmen who ran the rock-concert scene and Lou’s wife, who was understandably jealous of another woman usurping her role as Lou’s baby-sitter. However, Barbara Falk, who possessed seemingly unlimited energy and a tough sense of humor, found herself enjoying the wild ride that was Lou’s life in those intense, successful years.

  Mickey Ruskin visiting Lou Reed and Barbara Falk prior to Lou’s concert at the Music Inn, Lennox, in the Massachusetts Berkshires where Mickey maintained a country home. Summer, 1973. (Gerard Malanga)

  In 1973, Lou and his band played three to five concerts a week, for fees ranging from $6,000 to $7,000. Dennis Katz took 20 percent off the top. William Morris took 10 percent off the top. Barbara Falk, who col
lected and distributed the money, recalled that she was paying twelve people per diems of $100 per week: “There must have been money owed—rehearsal money to be paid. Guitars. It never seemed to me that there was enough. I used to do these budgets. There were as many expenses as there were receipts, and then some. Rent-a-cars or limos, hotels. In Europe and Asia, sometimes the promoter would pay hotels and cars; in Australia, we would get maybe $5,000 a gig. They paid flights. I never got paid all my salary. Then there was the accountant and the IRS. The accountant dealt with them; we never put money aside for them. And Lou could spend a lot on the road. I was doling it out, very petty cash. He’d come up to me with his hand full of receipts. I used to have Lou sign things like, ‘Before money is paid to Lou, such and such amounts must be paid to Transformer, Inc.’ He read what was written and he could usually quote it back to me. I remember thinking of Lou that it was so sad that here was this guy with records and fans and all this, and he was living in this little sublet of a place with rented furniture … And coffee ice cream.”

  To begin with, she genuinely adored Lou, who had a great sense of humor. He joked a lot. With a gift for mimicry, he would make fun of politicians, audiences, promoters, record-company people, and deejays. All were targets. She also quickly learned to get along with and respect Bettye, who was so obviously devoted to Lou. Transformer kept them pinned to the road for the next four months. By March 1973, Lou had reached a peak of success with his barnstorming tours turning into chaotic rock events. Although he had never possessed the charisma of Bowie or Jagger, Reed played a great rock-and-roll show. Above all, despite the chaos, the pressures, and the tight budgets, they all managed for the most part to have fun.

  During one performance at Buffalo on March 24, Reed was bitten on the bum by a fan screaming, “Leather!” “America seems to breed real animals,” Lou said afterward, laughing.

  “The glitter people know where I’m at, the gay people know where I’m at,” he explained. “I make songs up for them; I was doing things like that in ’66 except people were a lot more uptight then.” Barbara’s favorite memory of the Transformer tour was Lou’s being arrested onstage in Miami for singing “sucking on my ding-dong” while tapping the helmets of the policemen guarding the front of the stage with his microphone. As Lou was led away by a big cop with a serious expression intoning, “This man is going to jail,” Lou could barely control his hysterical laughter.

  The zenith of Lou’s commercial success came between April and June of 1973 when Transformer and its single “Walk on the Wild Side” peaked, first in the U.S., then on the U.K. charts. Lou Reed was finally a pop star, but as the initial excitement of success waned, Reed considered the cost of stardom. Ever since Transformer, Lou’s audiences had come to expect the “son of Andy Warhol,” a manufactured cartoon character Reed had never been comfortable with, but had nonetheless used to resurrect his flagging career. He was trapped in the Bowie-inspired Phantom persona, and much of his celebrity was tempered by comparisons between the two.

  “It did what it was supposed to,” stated the Phantom of Rock. “Like I say, I wanted to get popular so I could be the biggest schlock around, and I turned out really big schlock, because my shit’s better than other people’s diamonds. But it’s really boring being the best show in town. I took it as far as I could possibly go and then o-u-t.”

  Chapter Twelve

  No Surface, No Depth

  FROM BERLIN TO ROCK ’N’ ROLL ANIMAL: 1973–74

  God isn’t a Christian or a Muslim. He’s the victim of cult followings. He’s a bit like Lou Reed.

  Karl Wallinger, World Party

  By the spring of ’73, Reed knew the glitter-rock scene was fading. And by now, his marriage to Bettye was collapsing.

  The pressure of pioneering rock madness plunged Lou’s marriage to the abyss. By Reed’s impossibly high standards, his wife had failed him miserably. She did not understand him and she could not keep up with him. She simply was not of his caliber, and he grew bored with her: “For a while,” one friend thought, “the nuptial plan had seemed like self- preservation, but Lou had come to see it as a dreadful trap. The girl was trying to housebreak him!” Cornered in a relationship he wanted to slough off, Lou took to slapping her around in a fifties style. Lou’s surly, uncomfortable, distinctly uptight manner was a creation of the times—the changing American male—that he shared, for example, with Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan. He even flaunted his misogyny, despite the fact that hitting women was not endorsed by Andy Warhol. “My old lady was a real asshole,” he rasped to one astonished interviewer. “But I needed a female asshole around to bolster me up; I needed a sycophant who I could bounce around, and she fitted the bill … But she called it ‘love,’ ha!”

  Years later, when Bettye was contentedly married with children, she confessed that she could not understand how she got so deeply involved with someone like Lou. But at the time, she was too young to have a secure sense of herself in relation to her increasingly wild husband. She grew confused and despondent. Lou, who wore her tortured life like a badge of courage, bragged, “She tried to commit suicide in a bathtub in the hotel. It was someone standing there holding a razor blade. She looks like she might kill you, but instead she starts cutting away at her wrists and there’s blood everywhere …

  “She lived,” he complained, “but we had to have a roadie there with her from then on.”

  Lou responded to the disintegration and chaos with great material. In 1973, “Walk on the Wild Side” placed Reed among the top-selling artists on the lucrative rock-music scene, competing with “Frankenstein” (the Edgar Winter Group), “Midnight Train to Georgia” (Gladys Knight), “Angie” (the Rolling Stones), and “Love Train” (the O’Jays) as the most popular single of the year. Lou knew that after a hit single his best move would have been to, as he put it, hand them down a boogie album. Common business sense would have told Lou to solidify his foothold in the rock field by making another record that sounded like Transformer and continuing to tour. Lou, however, chose to duck back inside the studio and record a depressing album about Bettye that would destroy his commercial credibility.

  In ten songs, Berlin dramatized the breakdown of his marriage with Bettye by telling the story of two American drug addicts living in Berlin. Each song tore away another bandage from the mummy of Lou Reed. He challenged his audience to wonder how it felt to stay awake for five days on speed and booze, lonely, cold, miserable, but terrified of going to sleep because you could not stand to encounter yourself in the world of your dreams. The song sequence that eventually became Berlin revealed a darker, more introspective side of Lou than had his first two solo albums. “It was an adult album meant for adults—by adults for adults,” Reed explained later. “I had to do Berlin,” he insisted. “If I hadn’t done it, I’d have gone crazy.” Lou’s management team and friends were against taking this direction. Lou’s writing had never been better. He was taking, Lou explained, “the approach you would use in poetry. Instead of making a division between pop songs and a real story or a real poem, merging them so the separation didn’t exist anymore. The fun I had in trying to write a really good short story or poem wasn’t separate from writing a song. I put the two together and then I had the whole thing going on at once.”

  Much to the consternation of the RCA executives Reed also cut David Bowie, along with his glitter-rock overtones, out of the equation. Reed and Bowie had put much distance between each other by the fall of 1972. As the media continued to compare them even after Lou’s North American tour, Reed started to criticize and even insult Bowie by way of escaping the stigma of dependency. Each star hinted in the press that the other was exploiting the relationship. Bowie, for example, insinuated that Lou was borrowing too much of his identity. “I’m a ball of confusion, mentally, physically. Everything about me is confused, and Lou is very much the same way.” Lou retaliated, calling David in Circus magazine “a very nasty person, actually.”

  To gain artistic control of the pr
oject, once again Reed entered into a Faustian agreement with RCA that would undermine the first half of the seventies for him. “Convincing the record company to finance the project was not easy,” Reed recalled. “There was this big fight with RCA. I talked them into the veracity of the whole thing, of how astute it would be to follow up “Walk on the Wild Side” with not just another hit single, but with a magnificent whatever. So I shoved it through.” In exchange for being allowed to make this tortured and poetic album exactly as he wanted it, Reed promised to deliver two commercial products to RCA—one live and one studio album in the style of Transformer.

  Fortunately, since Lou was at his commercial peak, all the doors in the rock world were open to him, particularly those of the new generation. After Bowie, Reed, and lggy Pop, the most striking player on the scene was Alice Cooper. His comic-book translations of Reed’s themes, combined with inventive management, had turned him into the biggest- selling rock star of the early seventies. Lou hated Alice and attacked him with the same vituperative humor he had directed at Zappa. This did not, however, stop him from hiring Alice’s whiz kid twenty-four-year-old producer, Bob Ezrin, responsible for Cooper’s classic hit albums Love It to Death, Killer, School’s Out, and Billion Dollar Babies.

  In April, Reed and Ezrin flew to London. The city was crackling with rock energy, and Lou, who had received more votes than Mick Jagger in a recent British music fans’ popularity poll, had the rock world at his feet. But, rather than continuing with Phantom of Rock posturing and ego trips, Reed committed himself solely to getting his artistic self-portrait down on vinyl. According to Reed, Ezrin suggested Lou weave the songs into “a film for the ear” (as the album was eventually marketed), building them around movie images. Having their pick of musicians, Reed and Ezrin put together Lou’s best recording band since the early Velvets. On bass, Jack Bruce of Manfred Mann and Cream; on keyboards, Steve Winwood of the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic; on guitars, two top- flight Detroit players who had worked with Ezrin on Cooper’s records, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner; B. J. Wilson, of the psychedelic band Procol Harum, played drums on two tracks before being replaced by the blues-based Aynsley Dunbar.