Through the end of 1973, in between speed binges and his divorce, Lou Reed and the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour continued their assault on cities across America. By this point Lou had stopped playing guitar at all onstage as well as in the studio. Instead, he had become a spindly-thin stand-up lead singer, whose eyes bulged out of his near-shaven bullet head as if they were plugged into an electric socket. His body was a shivering sack of anemic skin and bones clothed in a black T-shirt and jeans.
According to Lester Bangs, “He’d poke his arm so full of invigorating vitamins that he lost all the fat overnight, then cartwheeled onstage in spastic epic[ene]-choleric fits looking like some bizarre crossbreed of Jerry Lewis of idiot-movie fame and a monkey on cantharides. He moved in the short, clipped, violent motions of a speed freak.” According to Cale, “Steady doses of amphetamine changed the muscle structure of Lou’s face so he can’t smile anymore. When he smiles, his face gets limp and sags. It looks like a weird Frankenstein grimace.”
Reed continued to function as an artist, whether he was master of his senses or not. In fact, he used the long hours and increased concentration afforded him by amphetamine use to compose a number of new songs. Working in an idiom where success was measured by commercial acceptance, however, he soon found himself marginalized. His devoted (if maniacal) public wanted, not a hardworking artist, but a freak show. One reviewer described a show in Boston where Lou “clumsily lurch[ed] about the Orpheum stage, violently yanking his frame downward at exactly the wrong times, rhythmically speaking, and crouched froglike to serenade the front row as his band droned on.” It was an uncomfortable spectacle, and one that, for all its appeal to the audience, brought Lou dangerously close to the edge. “They wanted to see me die,” Reed repeated. “I like to think of us as Clearasil on the face of the nation. Jim Morrison would have said that if he was smart, but he’s dead.”
***
Around the end of his tour and the beginning of his speed run, Lou had become acquainted with Dennis Katz’s brother Steve Katz, a star guitarist with Blood, Sweat & Tears. Lou and Steve talked and played guitar together. “Working with him,” recalled Steve, “eased me out of the unhappiness with my own band. When he asked me to produce his next album, I went for it.” Steve appreciated Lou and found it sad that Berlin was “a beautifully crafted album that was bombing … I think it sold maybe twenty thousand copies. I told Lou we’d have to get rid of this old mystique and put out his songs to new people. He had a great band now and he could become a star with a hot live album.” Lou accepted the strategy.
At the end of the U.S. leg of the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour, Reed’s faith in Berlin combined with the burning drive that had produced two of his greatest solo works in a single year paid off on December 21 when he recorded a concert in New York at Howard Stein’s Academy of Music on 14th Street. Wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times: “With Berlin, Reed has proven conclusively that he must be counted as one of the most important figures in contemporary rock. His concert December 21 at the Academy of Music should be an event.”
Guiding a Record Plant mobile unit, Steve Katz watched a capacity crowd explode into frenzy. A lot of fans still think it was one of the most spectacular concerts of their lifetime. Lou later characterized the performance as “manic.” Lou and the Katz brothers realized that the Academy concerts would make the great live albums they had been searching for and set about mixing the tracks to get the record out as quickly as possible—to capture the moment.
According to Reed, who insisted on maintaining the recording principles first used in The Velvet Underground and Nico, “It was a perfect sound. Because I mixed it. The engineer just left. He didn’t know how to record it. I couldn’t stand what they were doing. Cleaning it up! And I went, ‘Oh, no!’ and there was another big fight.”
On Christmas Eve, 1973, Lou was arrested in Riverhead, Long Island, for attempting to obtain drugs from a pharmacy with a forged prescription. Lou believed he had been sold out by another member of the speed scene. “The game never ended,” said Barbara Falk. “I had to scrape up five hundred dollars of my own money to get him out of jail. He was pissed off, but in a humorous kind of way. Almost as if it was part of his image and act. Famous people get busted—that sort of thing. He wasn’t scared or miffed about it, except that he was inconvenienced. He started kvetching a little bit. He was miffed that Dennis didn’t come. He said, ‘You come through for me, he never comes through … blah blah blah.’”
Lou got through the minor scrape with the law, but his drug habits were getting the better of him.
***
In early 1974, Lou moved in with a new girlfriend named Barbara Hodes, at 45 Fifth Avenue, and immersed himself in the New York scene. He prided himself on knowing more hot-dog places than anyone else: “In New York I can pick up a phone and have anything I want delivered to the door. I can step a foot outside the door and get into a fight immediately. All the energy, people going crazy, guys with no legs on roller skates. It’s very intense, the energy level is incredible. It’s nice at five in the morning to be stoned on THC and go down to Hong Fows, have some watercress soup, then you take a taxi uptown with some maniac and say, ‘Go ahead, drive fast, wise guy,’ and you just zip around. When you go up to Park Avenue, there’s a very funny turn and it’s always fun to wonder if they’ll make it.”
In the wake of the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour publicity, Warhol seemed to take a renewed interest in Reed. Warhol was doing a series of videotape interviews for a projected TV show in which he’d usually sit silently staring into space or hiding behind a newspaper while the hapless interview victim was subjected to a series of banal questions by one of Warhol’s minions. Reed had agreed to be videotaped on the stipulation that the interview be conducted solely by Warhol. Andy sat with his overcoat on, making it obvious that he couldn’t think of anything to ask, while Lou, heavily made-up and looking as sick as one could without being locked up, made phone calls trying to find drugs in between trying to get a rise out of Andy. The artist merely responded with an occasional mirthless laugh that meant he was bored and thought you were corny. The experience was excruciatingly uncomfortable. “It was very sad,” Lou recalled, “because he said while we were doing it, ‘You know, it can never happen again.’ And he was right.”
In January 1974, Reed and Andy Warhol discussed the possibility of making Berlin into a Broadway musical. Reed, Warhol, and Bob Colacello went to dinner at Reno Sweeney’s, a cabaret-style restaurant in Greenwich Village that had just opened. Reed was characteristically obnoxious and paranoid. “Lou’s opener was, ‘l want you, Andy, your ideas—not Paul or Brigid’s,’” Colacello recalled. “It was a very difficult dinner, with Lou hesitant to tell too much about his ideas, afraid Andy would steal them. He did explain the psychology of the lead character a bit: he only shows emotion when he’s out of speed, Lou said, and when his drug dealer makes it with his girlfriend but not him. When his girlfriend commits suicide, he can only describe and feels nothing.”
When the new live album, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, was released just five months after Berlin in the U.S. at the end of February, it won universal acclaim. The young Chrissie Hynde reviewing the album in the New Musical Express wrote, “He looks like a monkey on a chain, court geek—listen to him scramble to a corner, damaged and grotesque, huddled in rodent terror. Animal Lou. Lashing out in a way that could easily make the current S&M trend freeze in its shallow tracks. And the audience cheers after each song, we’re with you, yeah, we always loved all those songs, ha-ha-ha. Well, he hates you.” But, according to Timothy Ferris in Rolling Stone that March, he had finally become “a rocker and not a chanteuse.” Ferris noted:
“Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, an album of Reed’s standards, opens with ‘Sweet Jane’ and a jam by the band before Reed takes the stage, which establishes that, unlike some of his past backup groups, this one is first-rate. The rest of the side is devoted to a towering, unsettling version of ‘Heroin.’ It is sinister and
stunning, rooted in a treacherous organ and strung tautly on a set of vaulting guitar riffs. The piece has the atmosphere of a cathedral at Black Mass, where heroin is God. Rock ’n’ Roll Animal is much less claustrophobic and oppressive than Berlin, but many people will probably loathe it anyway. Faggots, junkies, and sadists are not very pleasant, but theirs are the sensibilities Reed draws upon. His songs offer little hope. Nothing changes, nothing gets better.”
The reviews of Rock ’n’ Roll Animal were, however, among the best ever. For the first time in his solo career Reed was being praised for his Velvet Underground as well as his independent material. “At its best, Reed’s live album brought the Velvets into the arena in a clean redefinition of heavy metal, thrilling without threatening to stupefy,” wrote Robert Christgau. “‘Lady Day,’ the slow one here, would pass for up-tempo at many concerts, the made-in-Detroit guitars of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner mesh naturally with the unnatural rhythms, and Reed shouts with no sacrifice of wit. This is a live album with a reason for living.”
John Cale was still not impressed: “I’m amazed at just how different Lou and I were in our ideas now that I’ve heard everything he’s done since that time. It all sounds just like weak representations of tunes and nothing more. I mean, some of his songs in the Velvets really made a point. Now he just appears to be going round in circles, singing about transvestites and the like. The only thing I’ve heard him do since where he put up a good performance was on ‘Sweet Jane.’”
From February to March 1974, Lou hit the publicity trail doing interviews and photo sessions. He even made a TV ad for the new album in which, emulating a Warhol screen test, he stared blankly at the camera for fifteen seconds before blinking and making the startled viewers realize they were not looking at a photograph. Ironically, for a man who was famous for wanting to kill his critics, Lou befriended a number of rock writers, including Nick Kent, with whom he had a love–hate relationship. One day he would call him the Judy Garland of rock writers, the next he’d threatened to kill him.
Even when Lou was his most charming, he could not help but exude an eerie Poe-like quality. One scribe, who wishes to remain anonymous, recalled that talking with Reed was the weirdest interviewing experience he ever had:
Lou resembled the young Frank Sinatra slightly. When I pointed this out to him, he seemed surprisingly pleased, joking, “Don’t say that to Frank.”
Q: Are you interested in Frank Sinatra, Lou?
R: Sinatra’s fantastic. If somebody really gave him a really good song, with real lyrics, coming from him, and at this point he certainly could do it, you know, I mean, what the hell, come on, Frank.
Q: Would you like to work with him?
R: I’d like to write for him. I would love to get to know him, then put lyrics in his mouth, then all he’d have to do would be sing them, wouldn’t matter if he understood them. Can you imagine if Sinatra laid down ‘Heroin’ in Vegas at the Sands with Nelson Riddle conducting?
As he spoke, the mask of the young Sinatra superimposed itself on his face like a ghost image, and for a split second Lou looked exactly like Frank! The transformation was so abrupt it made me nauseous. I ran up to the bathroom to be sick. I recovered enough to conclude the interview. Before leaving, Lou invited me over to his apartment the following day so he could teach me what I evidently didn’t know about rock and roll.
Barbara Hodes’s apartment, where he was staying, was an elegant one-bedroom, tastefully furnished in fashion designer chic. Lou seemed comfortable there, joking with the Jamaican maid, who was dusting the European issues of Vogue. When she left, Lou proceeded to take me through the history of rock, playing singles, explaining their significance, meanwhile exulting in the music, punching the air with a clenched fist, grinning from ear to ear at certain notes. He was an intensely alive person who certainly knew what he was talking about. He delivered the whole lecture with a great deal of passion. However, I thought even then when Lou was at his most serious, he could not help but stir up humor in his interlocutors to such an extent that it was hard to get people to take him seriously. In many ways, at least on the surface, Lou was an extremely funny man. Like his mentor Andy Warhol, he was constantly laughing and exulting in life.
As I got to know him, he turned at times into a fascinating bunch of guys. Once I was talking to him backstage at the Bottom Line when, in much the same fashion he had turned into Frank Sinatra, he suddenly metamorphosed into Jerry Lewis. However, on this occasion he was not so pleased when I commented on the resemblance. “Enough with the cheap shots!” he snapped, turning abruptly back into Lou Reed. As we headed out the door, he launched into a story about fucking a groupie who kept asking him, “How come when you’re inside me I can really feel it, but whenever Mick Jagger’s inside me, I can’t feel anything?” To which a bug-eyed Lou said he complained, “Why are you telling me this?”
The overall question that cast a pall over Lou’s progress through the 1970s was whether he had lost it after 1970. “Everything has been a question of lack of confidence,” confided an observer. “Lou thinks that whatever ‘it’ is, he lost it.”
To the press, Lou spouted the kind of contradictory reactions to the live album that were his trademark, telling one journalist, “It was like a walking time warp to me … but I had to get popular.” The live album, according to Reed, was payback for the deal he had made with RCA in order to get Berlin released. Now, he said, he was paying his dues.
By the end of March 1974, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal had reached No. 45 in the U.S., remaining in the Hot 100 for twenty-seven weeks. Steve Katz was ecstatic with the success of his first production efforts.
The success of Rock ’n’ Roll Animal redeemed Lou and gave him added confidence enough to joust once again with his rival Bowie. One night in February while Bowie was in town for his Diamond Dogs tour, the two got together. Lou was wired, they were both very stoned, and the competition between them soon reached a fever pitch. Lou threw a drink on a table and there was a big fight between them. According to Barbara Falk, Reed was jealous of Bowie’s success. “He was jealous,” she recalled, “but he also said he was the cool, underground, credible one. David stomped out screaming.”
To a friend Lou confided that he was having a good time by taking the road of least resistance and going with things that annoyed him rather than fighting them: “Berlin being a failure and Rock ’n’ Roll Animal being a smash hit had been hard to take. What he really liked was Berlin. Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, what a degrading thing that was.”
On March 2, 1974, the writer Jeff Goldberg presented a birthday cake for Mr. Reed’s thirty-second birthday. He recalled that Reed raised his knife high and slammed it into the cake in mock-Peckinpah style. But, careful about his diet, he didn’t eat a piece. “He is very thin now, and he pops his knuckles a lot and rubs his fingers nervously,” Goldberg wrote. “Maybe he is always itching to play the guitar. He sometimes seems distracted, as if listening to music, and often breaks out with a dum-di-dum movement, as if playing the drums in midair. Why are people so afraid of him?”
“He has no respect really for anyone, which is interesting,” said Glenn O’Brien. “He’s like Stalin in that he loves the people, he’s filled with generosity for the human race, but not for any one person in particular. That’s what he’s all about to me. He loves being kind, but he hates your fucking guts.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Nervous Years
ELECTRICITY AND THE CELL STRUCTURE: 1974–76
Life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous.
Lou Reed
Lou was terrific at putting together a collaborative relationship, but as soon as it succeeded, he had to subvert it. This need to demolish collaboration, his Achilles’ heel, would soon find its way into his relationships with Steve and Dennis Katz. The Katz brothers had been responsible for maneuvering him onto the international rock charts. Now Lou would pay them back.
As a Jewish man of the fifties, Lou knew that the
best way to upset Dennis Katz would be to taunt him for his interest in Nazi memorabilia, and that the best way to taunt him was to flaunt Nazi paraphernalia himself. To accomplish this new affront, Lou had his hairdresser shave off his locks and on the left and right sides of his skull chisel, into his new military crew cut, Iron Crosses that bore an unmistakable likeness to Nazi swastikas.
“Dennis and Lou did have a fall-out when Lewis appeared with those Nazi crosses in his hair,” recalled Barbara Falk, who made Lou wear a hat whenever they went out. “We were worried when we first saw him like that, but what can you do? Lewis is such an extremist.” At times, Lou’s bizarre behavior and street-creep image broadened to such infantile and comic-strip proportions that people laughed at him, whether he wanted them to or not.
Lester Bangs had a friend working as a busboy at Max’s Kansas City: “The guy called me up one day. ‘Your boy was in again last night … Jesus, he looks like an insect … or like something that belongs in an intensive-care ward … almost no flesh on the bones, all the flesh that’s there’s sort of dead and sallow and hanging, his eyes are always darting all over the place, his skull is shaved and you can see the pallor under the bristles, it looks like he’s got iron plates implanted in his head.’”
One reason for Lou’s extreme acting out was his frustration about having to fulfill his promise to RCA to deliver the two promised commercial albums—Rock ’n’ Roll Animal and Sally Can’t Dance. With Steve Katz once again to produce, RCA was sure they’d have a winning product. Yet in their plans and profit–loss calculations, they failed to factor in Lou’s seething ire. In spring 1974, as soon as Lou started work on Sally Can’t Dance, his resentment spilled out.
“I slept through Sally Can’t Dance,” Reed boasted. “I did the vocals in one take, in twenty minutes, and then it was good-bye. They’d make a suggestion and I’d say, ‘Oh, all right.’ I just can’t write songs you can dance to. I sound terrible, but I was singing about the worst shit in the world.”
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