Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  “One realized what was missing only at the very end of the two-hour, fifteen-minute affair, when Mr. Reed deigned finally to pick up his guitar,” John Rockwell noted in the New York Times. “The sound of a twanging electric guitar at long last lent the music—played previously by saxophone, keyboards, bass, and drums—a true rock aura.”

  Unfortunately, in December 1976 the tour ended in trauma when Rachel, who was suffering from an infected lung, was mugged in L.A. “He got kicked in the balls and had some internal bleeding,” Reed explained. “That really had me strung out.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Master of Psychopathic Insolence

  1977–78

  His credentials are unshakable.

  John Rockwell, New York Times, March 13, 1978

  “Lou Reed’s angry reaction to his glitter years serves as the perfect dividing point between the early 1970s and the late part of the decade,” Mark Edwards wrote in the London Sunday Times. “Annoyed at the travesty of his original self that he had become, he released Metal Machine Music. It’s an hour of white noise. There is no music on it. Just distortion. Coming out in 1975, it neatly signaled the end of glam as a whole, while the emphasis of the record on nasty, angry, unmusical noise heralded the punk explosion that was to erupt the following year,” Edwards concluded.

  1975 was indeed a pivotal year in rock. The glitter scene died. Punk was born. Springsteen arrived. Dylan was reborn. Lou Reed was super-aware of the change. In fact, no single band and no single performer benefited from punk as much as the Velvet Underground and, in particular, Lou Reed.

  When punk rock’s New York headquarters, CBGB on the Bowery, opened its doors at the end of 1973, the NY rock scene was mostly populated by touring superstars. The only remnants of the rock underground were the dying New York Dolls and the Berlin-era Lou Reed. Reed’s raw reports from the underbelly of the city were an inspiration that helped open the way for punk rock. Fragments of, among others, the Ramones, Blondie, Television, and Talking Heads began to coalesce as early as 1974. According to M. C. Kostek in the VU Handbook, “Brian Eno’s quip about how not many people bought the Velvet Underground and Nico album but of those who did, everyone went out and formed a band, carried much truth. Many of the most creative people in rock music from the seventies—the Stooges, New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Television, Pere Ubu, Ramones, Richard Hell, Jonathan Richman, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Buzzcocks, Talking Heads, Wire, Cabaret Voltaire, and Eno himself strongly reflect and validate the Velvets’ massive musical influence.”

  By the final months of 1975, however, while Lou was recording Coney Island Baby, two powerful streams of rock were surging forward, threatening to leave him in their wake. In the mainstream, Bob Dylan was going through a resurrection, touring with his Rolling Thunder Review and recording his next album, Desire, which would go to No. 1 around the world. David Bowie had, in collaboration with John Lennon, his first No. 1 American single, “Fame.” The new boy, Bruce Springsteen, was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek. In left field, all the leading punk bands were poised to make the enormous impact they would soon have. Coney Island Baby and Rock and Roll Heart offered little competition to Springsteen’s Born to Run, Patti Smith’s Horses, or the Ramones’ The Ramones. Where was Lou’s place in all of this?

  It wasn’t until John Holmstrom’s Punk magazine came along in New York in January 1976, pulling the disparate music of the punk groups together, showcasing them as if they were major stars, that punk could be looked upon as a movement. Holmstrom put Lou on the cover of Punk’s first issue. It was Holmstrom’s view that Reed’s independent spirit, enthusiasm, and dedication to passion made him the ultimate punk rocker. “If you were going to do a rock-and-roll time line, Lou’s there for every decade,” he pointed out. “From doo-wop to garage rock to psychedelic to glitter to disco to punk rock and beyond it later to alternative rock and to sober-rock.” His cover portrait captured Lou’s chemical-insect persona as perfectly as the cover of Coney Island Baby, released the same month, put across his chameleonlike MC role.

  Everybody, it suddenly appeared, owed something to Lou Reed. Consequently, in the second half of the seventies when his career could well have taken the nosedive it was in the midst of, Lou was picked and held up by, in particular, Bangs, Meltzer, Holmstrom, Rockwell, Jon Savage, Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, etc.

  It was during a visit to CBGB to see the Ramones just before Thanksgiving in November 1975 that Reed had the pivotal encounter that launched him onto the cover of Punk. Only twenty or thirty people were in attendance that night, but the rank, dark little room crackled with the exhilaration of rock in the making.

  Sitting at a candlelit table with, of all people, Richard Robinson, Lou was approached by two raw, loony-looking Connecticut teenagers, Holmstrom and the magazine’s resident punk, Legs McNeil, who would shortly become the Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon of the punk scene. “Hey, you!” they accosted him. “You’re going to do an interview with us!” Lou, who was on one of this three-day cruises through the underbelly of the city, watching the parade of geeks and freaks pass before him, fell right into his part, giving one of his best interviews without thinking about it. Lou enjoyed talking to interviewers because they gave him a gloss on what was going on in the rock scene, but later claimed to have no recollection of this particular incident. Holmstrom commented, “He wasn’t getting too many people to talk to him who liked Metal Machine. Danny Fields was there and Legs met Danny, and everybody went nuts because Lou Reed was there that night.” To Legs McNeil, the Ramones’ performance was the most moving thing he had ever seen in his life: “The Ramones came out in these black leather jackets. They looked so stunning. They counted off, then each one started playing a different song. Their self-hatred was just amazing, they were so pissed off.” After taking in the Ramones’ fifteen-minute set, Lou spent the next two hours sparring vigorously with the two punk kids and Punk’s British correspondent Mary Harron.

  Lou apparently enjoyed the show.

  PUNK: Do you like the Ramones?

  LOU REED: Oh, they’re fantastic!

  PUNK: Have you seen anyone else that you like?

  REED: Television. I like Television. I think Tom Verlaine’s really nice.

  PUNK: Do you like Patti Smith?

  REED: Oh, yeah, yeah.

  PUNK: How about Bruce Springsteen?

  REED: Oh, I love him.

  PUNK: You do?

  REED: He’s one of us.

  PUNK: Thank you.

  REED: He’s a shit—what are you talking about, what kind of stupid question is that?

  PUNK: O.K.

  REED: I mean, do I ask you what you like? Why does anyone give a fuck what I like?

  PUNK: Well, you’re a rock star!

  REED: Oh … I keep forgetting. Why, do you like Springsteen?

  PUNK: No, I think he’s a piece of shit.

  REED: He’s great at what he does … It’s not to my taste, y’know, he’s from New Jersey … I’m very, y’know, partial to New York groups, y’know … Springsteen’s already finished, isn’t he? I mean, isn’t he a has-been?

  PUNK: I feel he’s a has-been.

  REED: Isn’t Springsteen already over-the-hill? I mean—isn’t everybody saying that they constructed him because they needed a rock star? … I mean … Already, like, groups are coming out and they’re saying they’re the new Bruce Springsteen, which is really … He was only popular for a week.

  Holmstrom couldn’t believe Lou was talking like this on tape. Legs, however, was not so easily won over. During a long discussion of Metal Machine Music and the record business, he started squirming in his seat like an impatient child. “I thought Lou was boring as hell,” he remarked. “I was an eighteen-year-old guy, I didn’t want to talk about art and the record company. I wanted to talk about cheeseburgers, that’s all we had in common. I knew he was like so cool, and I was kind of like, we are not worthy, Lou. But, you knew whatever you did this guy was going to
think you were an asshole. He was just too cool.

  “Lou has this vibe of not being anyone. The guy just seems completely threatened by everything. But he’s so good, you know, it’s funny, because the punk way to appreciate people is to make fun of them. Like Tish and Snooky used to have a song and it was sung to the tune of ‘Sweet Jane.’ The refrain was ‘Lou Reed’ instead of ‘Sweet Jane.’ ‘Lou Reed’ … then they had all these funny lyrics. So I was paying tribute to him, but I didn’t think Lou appreciated it.”

  Halfway through the interview Legs jumped in.

  LEGS: Did you ever hear the Dictators’ lyrics—what they said about you?

  REED: I hope it’s nothing bad.

  PUNK: Yeah—“I think Lou Reed is a creep.”

  REED: That’s funny—because when I ran into one of them, he was slobbering all over me saying, “Hey—I hope you don’t mind what we say about you.” And I just pat him on the head—y’know, nice doggie, nice doggie.

  Mary Harron, mouth agape, sat through the sparring match with Holmstrom and McNeil. What impressed her most about the hysterically whacked-out interview is the extent to which Lou really looked down on them and how stupid he made them all feel. Out in the street after the interview, she recalled, “John was jumping up and down yelling, ‘We got our cover! We got our cover!’ But Legs flipped out, screaming, ‘Who does fucking Lou Reed think he fucking is?’” Legs felt as if his soul had been taken: “I felt that meeting with Lou, somehow we had been corrupted forever. You felt it in some emotional, stark way. I mean Lou always seemed like he wanted to go darker than sex, murder, mutilation, further. And you always got the feeling that you were definitely an idiot around him. I didn’t want to sit at his feet that night. I didn’t like him. He didn’t seem like a nice guy. I mean, I wouldn’t want to hang out with him.”

  Holmstrom, on the other hand, was in a trance, totally persuaded that putting Reed on the cover of their first issue was the most exciting choice possible. “I saw Metal Machine Music as the beginning of the punk-rock movement,” he said. “It was the ultimate punk-rock album. It was the greatest punk statement ever made. It was fuck you to the record company and everyone who bought it. It was, ‘This is what I want to do the way I want to do it.’ How can you get more punk than that? It was more punk than the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, everything that came out afterward. I think he meant it that way, and we treated it that way.”

  Punk #1, containing the interview and a glowing review of Metal Machine Music, was published in January 1976, the same month Coney Island Baby came out. It had a terrific impact. Danny Fields praised Holmstrom in the SoHo Weekly News for “inventing a new interview form.” “Instead of a photo, the cover was a wickedly accurate cartoon of Reed as metal man: the feature inside was not typeset but told in fumetti,” wrote the British rock historian Jon Savage. “The surrounding artwork is as important as Reed’s insults: when the interviewers follow Reed down the block, there they are in cartoons. The effect was both immediate and distanced, a formal innovation on a par with Mad magazine or the Ramones’ own manipulations.”

  According to John Holmstrom, Lou was impressed. “He said, ‘I barely remember doing the interview and there I am on the cover of this thing.’ He thought it had the whole image thing perfect. I was just knocked out because I was this twenty-year-old kid. And here was this guy who I’d pay seven fifty to see live gushing over my magazine when he hated everything in the world. It just blew me away.” In retrospect, Holmstrom reflected, “Metal Machine Music almost ended his career. He could have become another forgotten Elton John kind of person if we hadn’t put him on the cover. Instead, he became the godfather of punk and it resurrected his career.”

  “People who think I got something out of Metal Machine, monetarily or otherwise, should have another think coming,” countered Reed. “All it accomplished was negative. It’ll be that much harder for Coney Island Baby to prove itself. A lot of people got turned off, and I am so happy to lose the people who got turned off. You have no idea. It just clears the air. That’s the end of it. If anybody wanted Coney Island Baby, it was going to be my way.”

  Rock-star ranks had swelled by the mid-seventies to such unmanageable proportions that it was hard to know how to distinguish one from another. The cover of Punk picked Lou Reed out of the international swamp and placed him squarely in the vanguard, as a heroic figurehead. The new magazine brought Lou into the forefront of the punk world. Soon Lou was pouring advice into the ears of Tom Verlaine of Television and David Byrne of Talking Heads—mostly about getting a lawyer. But it was Lou’s presence more than anything else that turned everybody on. He went to CBGB in his uniform shades and black leather jacket with Rachel. They sat at a table and listened to the music like everybody else. Lou didn’t grandstand and was obviously enjoying himself. When he saw Patti Smith playing “Real Good Time Together” at CBGB, he was genuinely thrilled, clapping with glee and telling everybody at his table that he had written the song. Johnny Ramone remembered how many of them really began to feel something was happening when Lou started coming to the club.

  James Walcott, writing in the Village Voice, had a particularly astute view of Lou’s presence at CBGB:

  “Where Lou Reed used to stare death down (particularly in the black-blooded Berlin), he now christens random violence. Small wonder, then, that his conversation ripples with offhand brutality: though he probably couldn’t open a package of Twinkies without his hands trembling, he enjoys babbling threats of violence. One night, when a girl at CBGB clapped loudly (and out of beat) to a Television song, Reed threatened to knock “the cunt’s head off”; she blithely ignored him, and he finally got up and left. No one takes his bluster seriously; I even know women who find his steely bitterness sexy.

  “This walking crystallization of cankerous cynicism possesses such legendary anticharisma that there’s something princely about him, something perversely impressive.”

  Cale scoffed at the comparisons between the punk bands and the VU: “Everybody’s talking about this band the Velvet Underground influencing this and that. They’re even saying Talking Heads are reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, which has absolutely nothing to do with what we sounded like. And many of these people making these assessments and writing these reviews never saw us live. All they’ve got to go by are live reissues by Lou Reed, that kind of narcissistic nepotism. He just regenerates the same material over and over again, in different form. Lou has his whole life sorted out now. He’s become the Jewish businessman we always knew he was.”

  The parallels between Reed’s and Cale’s careers through the seventies reveal just how important image is in rock. As a body of work, John’s solo albums are arguably superior to Lou’s. As Lester Bangs pointed out, “‘Fear’ and ‘Gun’ on John Cale’s Fear are the kind of cuts Lou Reed could be writing now if his imagination had not short-circuited. Unlike much of Reed’s recent work, the music of John Cale is never thin nor euphemized nor needlessly lurid. It is the kind of music that does the Velvet Underground tradition proud, and that’s something to live up to.” Cale’s influence on punk—he produced among other notable works Patti Smith’s first and greatest album, Horses—was arguably stronger than Reed’s. Yet once they went solo, Lou’s image was always stronger than John’s.

  But the direct influence of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground on the punk-rock movement was exemplified by their prominent positions in record charts compiled in fanzines in Britain. Though these charts did not reflect the tastes of mainstream rock-and-roll audiences, they established Reed’s and the Velvet Underground’s popularity with the punk-rock audience. For example, the second issue of Ripped and Torn (January 1977), one of the most widely circulated British punk fanzines, gave “Foggy Notion” by the Velvet Underground the No. 5 position on its singles chart. The same fanzine’s album chart listed six entries (including the No. 1 position) for Lou Reed and/or the Velvet Underground and included every Velvet Underground record.

  ***
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br />   One and a half years later, in the autumn of 1977, Lou prepared to record his godfather-of-punk album. Lou, who in his solo career had made an intense study of recording techniques and become something of an authority on the subject, had discovered a binaural recording process created in Germany by one Manfred Schunke. Schunke used computer-designed models of the average human head. The detail was as precise as possible down to the size, shape, and bone structure of the ear canal. Microphones fit in each ear so theoretically what they recorded would be exactly what a human being sitting in the position the head was placed in would actually hear.

  “I had written these songs on the spot in Germany,” Lou said. “I tried to teach them to the band really quick. The audience didn’t understand a word of English—like most of my audience. They’re fucked-up assholes, what difference does it make? Can they count from one to ten?”

  Street Hassle was originally recorded at live shows in Munich, Wiesbaden, and Ludwigshafen, Germany. Lou brought the live tapes back to New York for overdubbing and mixing. In what looked like an extremely perverse move, he chose Richard Robinson as his producer. Several of the songs were dated. “Dirt” and “Leave Me Alone” came from the 1975 Coney Island Baby sessions. “Real Good Time Together” hailed from the Velvets’ final years. The title piece, one of the most riveting songs of Lou’s solo career, was written in three parts, “Waltzing Matilda,” “Street Hassle,” and “Slip Away.”

  Richard Robinson and Lisa Robinson with Lou Reed, New York, 1976. (Bob Gruen)