Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  “Things were starting to go sour. Lou was having convulsions from the speed. Speed is insidious, and the personality changes are radical. Lou would go from being a nice Jewish boy from Long Island to a paranoid maniac. He would have hallucinations about intricate Machiavellian plots working against him. That’s why he was always suing—when in doubt, litigate. Other occasions merited more violence. He took his reviews very seriously and sometimes wanted to kill the writers, no matter how much they adored him. Fortunately a member of his family was around to help me.” His favorite cousin, Judy, who was traveling in Europe, joined him for a few shows, helping Lou through the ritual of preparing for his nightly performance. “He listened to her because he was going through a difficult time,” said Barbara. “She said he’d listen to a strong woman. I remember shoving Valiums down him. Like all drug freaks, he felt he had complete control over the drug. In my experience, no matter how intelligent or visionary a person might be in other parts of his life, no matter how intimate his knowledge of the drug’s effects, he still thinks he’s stronger. And Lou had a much larger ego than your average speed freak.”

  Barbara had put the fear of God into the band about carrying drugs since they were bound to be strip-searched as they crossed borders daily. But “Europe, of course, is famous for easy prescriptions, so Lou would go to a different speed doctor in every country,” she recalled. “He truly believed in it! He was forever proselytizing, trying to get me to take some. On tour he’d actually go to medical bookstores, he’d literally carry around written justification for amphetamine. Not only that, but he knew how to pronounce it correctly, in every language.”

  Despite his protestations, it was not a healthy life. He often stayed up for days at a time. In Europe that winter, as a result of clinical fatigue, he collapsed in convulsions on several occasions.

  ***

  At the beginning of March 1975, Lou returned to the U.S. in time for the release of Lou Reed Live, a second album culled from the December 1973 shows that produced Rock ’n’ Roll Animal. Lou Reed Live was yet another commercial success, reaching No. 62 on the LP charts, where it hovered for several months. “Satellite of Love,” “Sad Song,” and “Vicious” placed him in the mainstream of rock between Elton John and the Rolling Stones. On the live album, Lou insisted that the producers keep the clear hollow ring of a youth’s voice screaming out from the bleachers, “Lou Reed sucks!” at the very end of the second side.

  The trilogy of Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, Sally Can’t Dance, and Lou Reed Live vaulted Lou from the hesitant commercial start of the early seventies to the rock mountaintop. His distinct following of the most mentally disturbed people in each country gave him a higher profile than he might otherwise have had. Lou Reed fans were loud, nasty, and exhibitionistic. “During the U.S. tour, mutual hostility rose in waves during some shows. The standard audience expression,” according to Janet Macoska in the Cleveland Commuter, “was one of stunned boredom, hands barely holding up nodding heads … And Lou, half the time, had no idea what he was supposed to be singing.” But by the time he reached Detroit, then home turf of Lester Bangs, he had once again managed to focus his rage; Lester thought the show was superb.

  At this midway point in the decade, Lou’s famed interview slugfest with the writer Lester Bangs in Creem magazine reached its climax. “I always thought when Lou was being interviewed by Lester Bangs was the peak of his career,” said the cartoonist John Holmstrom. “Lou hated Lester. They really hated each other. Lester had a love–hate thing. Lou just had the hate.” “Bangs attempted to place rock within a cultural framework, pointing out its similarities to everything from Dada to Jack Kerouac,” wrote critic Kyle Tucker. “For a critic like Bangs, Andy Warhol was as much of an aesthetic signpost as the Beatles; an understanding of Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground founder, was impossible without discussing Brecht’s alienation effect.”

  Ever since the Velvet Underground played San Diego in 1968, Bangs had set himself up as the conscience of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. After celebrating the Velvets during their last two years, he had remained true to them through the first half of the seventies, writing obsessively about their influence and keeping tabs on the activities of Cale, Nico, and Reed. But when he met Reed during the U.S. tour, Bangs wrote, “Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is.”

  “See, this to me is what rock journalists do, they rip off, make fun of musicians … y’know, and sell to morons,” responded Reed in an interview. “Written by morons for morons … The best way to get anything publicized is to tell Lester, ‘Please don’t print that.’ And he’ll print it. The very best way is to let him overhear something accidently on purpose.” Asked, “Did you read the story Lester Bangs did on you?” Lou replied, “Oh, yeah. We both worked on it very hard. He thinks he won the last time, but that was only because I let him think that. He’s the best PR agent I have. The worse things he writes about me, the better it is. If he ever started writing good things about me … it would be like the kiss of death. I mean, everyone has turned the old Velvet thing into much more than it ever was.”

  From then on, Reed’s American concerts received critical raves. “Both Mr. Reed’s concerts and his records have been up-and-down affairs over the last couple of years, and in that context Saturday night at the Felt Forum must be counted as a success,” wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times on April 28. “His singing was as tuneless as ever, but the phrasing remains gripping, and his backing quartet strikes a nice balance between professionalism and the out-of-tune raunch of his Warhol days. But in a large measure the risk has gone. Mr. Reed has made himself into a rock star—a strange, weird rock star, to be sure, but a rock star nonetheless. Still, in the old days he gave promise of something more daring, if more lonely.”

  As the graph of his record sales rose, however, Lou’s emotional state plummeted. The break with Bettye, the rejection of Berlin, the struggle with the Katz brothers, the riot-torn tour, and the success of Lou Reed Live, another album he professed to loathe, reduced him to a fried geek. Meanwhile, the more he stumbled, the less capable he became of performing, the more audiences goaded him to fall. Pinned by the spotlight to the stage, he began to portray himself as rock’s next sacrificial victim. He claimed that Bowie had told him “that ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’ (on Ziggy Stardust) was written for me.” Asked how it felt to be voted second only to Keith Richards in a Who Will be the Next Rock ’n’ Roll Casualty in a recent magazine poll, Lou exclaimed, “Oh really, that’s fabulous. It’s a real honor to be voted after Keith. He’s a real rock ’n’ roll star.”

  Great rock stars often have the ability to respond to the very worst situation by performing at the top of their game. Lou was one such animal. With everything against him by the time he returned to New York, Reed was delivering a gripping set. “He was such a romantic figure at that point,” said Bob Jones. “He was as good as you could be. He was very much a Rimbaud figure.”

  “By far his greatest work was composed when he was on drugs,” pointed out Glenn O’Brien. “But who is successful using amphetamine over a long period of time?”

  In the spring of 1975, after three years of relentless, amphetamine-fueled touring behind his most commercially successful albums, Reed faced a new contractual demand from his product- and profit-hungry record company, RCA: he had to deliver a new studio album. The “product” Lou came up with this time was way beyond anything any of his fans could have contemplated in their wildest expectations. A screeching cacophony of feedback and electronic noise that lasted for sixty-four minutes, it was called Metal Machine Music.

  “As soon as he came walking into my office, I could see this guy was not too well connected with reality,” recalled an RCA representative to whom the lot fell to steer Reed through this production. “If he was a person walking in off the street with this shit, I woulda threw him out. But I hadda handle him with kid gloves, because he was an artist in w
hom the company had a long-term commitment. He’s not my artist, I couldn’t get his hackles up, I couldn’t tell him it was just a buncha shit.”

  The only thing the RCA executives knew about Lou was that Lou’s last three albums—Sally Can’t Dance, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, and Lou Reed Live—had been moneymakers. The company had high hopes that he would deliver another. Consequently, in a series of meetings about Metal Machine Music, they let Lou walk all over them. After talking the RCA people into presenting this highly unusual product, Lou told friends he had had to run to the men’s room to explode with adolescent laughter. “I told him it was a ‘violent assault on the senses,’” continued the RCA executive. “Jesus Christ, it was fuckin’ torture music! There was a few interesting cadences, but he was ready to read anything into anything I said. I led him to believe it was not too bad a work, because I couldn’t commit myself. I said, ‘I’m gonna put it out on the Red Seal label,’ and then I gave him a lot of classical records in the hope that he’d write better stuff next time.”

  Everybody at the company was horrified by Lou’s new weirdness. One marketing executive, Frank O’Donnell, recalled, “About twenty of us were seated around a vast mahogany conference table for a monthly new-release album meeting. The A-and-R representative at the meeting put on the tape and the room was filled with this bizarre noise. Everyone was looking at everyone else; people were saying, ‘What the hell is that?’ Somebody voiced that question and the answer came back, ‘That’s Lou Reed’s new album, Metal Machine Music. His contract says we’ve got to put it out.’

  “One day a middle-aged, very conservatively dressed and coiffed executive secretary asked me what I knew about ‘this recording artist Lou Reed.’ I told her, ‘Well, I know he was involved with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. One of his songs is called “Heroin,” so I believe he has a pretty big following in the drug culture. He’s kind of in the David Bowie groove—you know, eye makeup and lipstick and all that, so the homosexuals like him. His brand of rock and roll is pretty wild … why do you ask?’ The lady looked side to side, warily. Then, sotto voce, she said, ‘He’s my nephew. But if you don’t tell, I won’t tell.’”

  The company had wanted to issue Metal Machine Music on the Red Seal classical label, but Lou demurred, arguing that the venue was pretentious. Instead, they disguised the platter within a record sleeve showing Lou looking extracool onstage, clearly suggesting that this was his Blonde on Blonde. Included on the jacket was a list of the equipment putatively utilized in the recording, along with a bunch of supposed scientific symbols that Lou had copied out of a stereo magazine. “I made up the equipment on the back of the album,” he later said, laughing hysterically. “It’s all bullshit.” After much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair on the part of RCA’s top brass, the album was released in July 1975. Those not prepared for what lurked beneath the cover of Metal Machine Music were in for a big surprise. According to Lou, “They were supposed to put out a disclaimer—“Warning: no vocals. Best cut: none. Sounds like: static on a car radio’”—but did not. The double album, subtitled “An Electronic Instrumental Composition,” was mixed so that each side was exactly 16:01 in length—except that side four was pressed so the final groove would stick, repeating grating static screeches over and over until the needle was rapidly removed from the record by the hapless client.

  Reed presented the album as a grand artistic statement, claiming that he had spent six years composing it, weaving classical and poetic themes into the noise. If one listened attentively, he promised, one could hear a number of classical themes making their way in and out of the feedback fury. “That record was the closest I’ve ever come to perfection,” he stated. “It’s the only record I know that attacks the listener. Even when it gets to the end of the last side, it still won’t stop. You have to get up and remove it yourself. It’s impossible to even think when the thing is on. It destroys you. You can’t complete a thought. You can’t even comprehend what it’s doing to you. You’re literally driven to take the miserable thing off. You can’t control that record.”

  “I could take Hendrix,” he told Lester Bangs. “Hendrix was one of the greatest guitar players, but I was better. If people don’t realize how much fun it is listening to Metal Machine Music, let ’em go smoke their fucking marijuana, which is just bad acid anyway, and we’ve already been through that and forgotten it. I don’t make records for fucking flower children.”

  Asked Lester, “Speaking of fucking, Lou—do you ever fuck to Metal Machine Music?” “I never fuck,” Lou shot back. “I haven’t had it up in so long I can’t remember when the last time was.” On another occasion when a fellow musician offered Lou access to his girlfriend, Reed claimed, “I’m a musician, man. I haven’t gotten it up in seventeen years.”

  For the most part, the press’s and the public’s reaction to Metal Machine Music was a combination of outrage and contempt. Rolling Stone voted it the worst album of the year. Even John Rockwell, who had been a champion of Reed’s since Berlin, delicately questioned its release. “One would like to see rock stars take the risk to stretch their art in ways that might jeopardize the affection of their fans,” he wrote. “But one can’t help fearing that in this instance, Mr. Reed may have gone farther than his audience will willingly follow.” Lou, for his part, was of the opinion that Metal Machine Music would be the perfect sound track for the cult horror flick The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And he may well have been right.

  (NB: As an aficionado of movies, Lou listed as one of his favorite films of all time The Ruling Class, starring Peter O’Toole as a man who thinks he is Jesus Christ. Any serious fan of Reed’s should make a point of seeing this film as an excellent example of Reed’s self-image.)

  Lou anticipated a strong reaction from his fans. He insisted, “I put out Metal Machine Music precisely to put a stop to all of it. It was a giant fuck-you. I wanted to clear the air and get rid of all those fucking assholes who show up at the show and yell ‘Vicious’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ It wasn’t ill-advised at all. It did what it was supposed to do. I really believed in it also. That could be ill-advised, I suppose, but I just think it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever done by anybody, anywhere. In time, it will prove itself.”

  To anyone who would listen he said, “Metal Machine Music is probably one of the best things I ever did, and I’ve been thinking about doing it ever since I’ve been listening to La Monte Young” (whose name Lou misspelled on the back of the album). “That album should have sold for $79.99,” he snapped to another astonished scribe. “If they think it’s a rip-off, yeah, and I’ll rip them off some more. I’m not gonna apologize to anybody! They should be grateful I put that fucking thing out, and if they don’t like it, they can go eat rat shit. I make records for me.”

  The record, which would soon come to be seen as the ultimate conceptual punk album and the progenitor of New York punk rock, harkened back to the work of La Monte Young and the Velvet Underground’s experimental track “Loop” (1966). “The key word was “control,”” Lou concluded in Metal Machine Music’s liner notes.

  In a conscious effort to present Metal Machine Music as a composition, Reed not only left the individual sides untitled, but offered a parody of classical liner notes. His first piece of published prose since his essay “No One Waved Goodbye,” the Metal Machine Music “Notation” was a combination of arrogance, bluster, and inadvertent confessional. The writing was punk. Its subject shifted from Reed’s complaints about the tedium of most heavy metal, through the symmetrical genius of his creation, to puns on his album titles, to insights about the gap between drug “professionals” and “those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush.” It noted, “No one I know has listened to it all the way through including myself … I love and adore it. I’m sorry, but not especially, if it turns you off … Most of you won’t like this, and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you.”

  In the end, almost one hundred thousand co
pies sold. “The classical reviews were fabulous,” Lou reported.

  In August, leaving his critics and fans with an unpleasant ringing in their ears, Reed went on another grueling tour of Japan and Australia. Every tour has a theme. This one was called the Get Down with Your Bad Self Tour. “In Japan, they greeted me by blaring the fucking thing [Metal Machine Music] at top volume in the airport,” he claimed or hallucinated. Nobody in his entourage had any memory of this incident.

  What they do remember is a press conference at the airport immediately following the grueling thirty-hour flight from New York to Sydney at which Lou rivaled the mid-sixties Dylan in repartee:

  PRESS: It says in this press release that you lie to the press. Is that true?

  LOU: No.

  PRESS: Would you describe yourself as a decadent person?

  LOU: No.

  PRESS: Well then, what?

  LOU: Average.

  PRESS: Is your antisocial posture part of your show-business attitude?

  LOU: Antisocial?

  PRESS: Well, you seem very withdrawn. Do you like meeting people?

  LOU: Some.

  PRESS: Do you like talking to us?

  LOU: I don’t know you.

  PRESS: Would it be correct to call your music gutter rock?

  LOU: Oh, yeah.

  Joining the tour on bass was Doug Yule, back with Lou since the Sally Can’t Dance sessions. “When we traveled as the VU, we traveled as a group,” Doug recalled. “But here he and Rachel traveled together—they were like the VIPs—and everybody else traveled behind. It was nice, it was fun. He was a little more mercurial.”

  In fact, much distance had come between Reed and the rest of his entourage, including the ever-present Barbara Falk. Unfortunately, this was not an altogether healthy change, resulting in one of the few times Lou was incapable of overcoming his drug-induced exhaustion to make it to a show. “I once saw him consume fifteen straight tequilas—doubles!—in a drinking contest with a drummer in New Zealand,” recalled Barbara. “And then he walked away.”