Hammer wrote Lou, telling him that “I was what he needed” and was astonished when Lou responded with a call. Just as Doug Yule had done when asked to audition for the Velvets, Hammer dropped everything and excitedly rushed to New York. “I asked [Lou], ‘Does anyone in your band know who you are?’ ‘Not really,’ he replied. I said, ‘I do, you’re a genius. Berlin is a masterpiece, and I know the music.’”
Rehearsals were held at the old Star Sound studios where the band would work up material through the end of the year, convening daily for long, regimented practices. It turned out that Hammer was the antithesis of Reed: drug, alcohol, and even caffeine free, he was unprepared for the mind games he would face as a member of the band. The first track Hammer auditioned was “Sad Song.” He had spent eighteen hours learning Bob Ezrin’s string arrangement, and as he played it, Lou, with his collar up, silently glared at the young musician. Afterward, Hammer remembered, “Lou said softly, ‘You’re everything you said you were.’”
At the beginning of 1979 Lou recorded The Bells in Germany, working for the last time with the binaural process at Manfred Schunke’s Delta Studios on a farm in Wilster, about sixty miles outside of Hamburg. Lou was ambivalent about recording in Germany: “I wasn’t crazy about going to Germany in the first place. And the real reason was that I liked the binaural technique, but I didn’t like the board. I don’t like any of the sounds they got, across the board. Because they don’t have good boards.”
Don Cherry attended the sessions for their first studio collaboration. Though Cherry could play R&B riffs to order, his presence automatically tipped the balance toward avant-garde jazz, allowing Reed to make The Bells as much an exploration in sound as an exercise in lyrical composition.
“The Bells” itself is a perfect example of Lou’s method of spontaneous composition. The song was inspired in equal parts by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells” and by Ornette Coleman. After listening to Cherry quote a musical line from Coleman’s masterpiece “Lonely Woman,” Lou stepped up to the microphone and recited the whole “Bells” lyric in one take, pouring the words into the wash of music. To this day he still wonders at their meaning, but the experience was so sublime that “The Bells” remained one of Lou’s favorite tracks.
Unfortunately, there were few fans of the album at Arista. Clive Davis went so far as to write a lengthy critique, concluding that the record was only half-finished. Even the loyal Fonfara was never enamored of the work, agreeing that it needed more time. Naturally, this sort of response only made Lou more determined to release it the way he wanted.
With Lou in control, the record was released in April. And no sooner had it come out than he was up on his soapbox proclaiming that it surpassed Take No Prisoners, that it was the best record that he had ever made, that if he died tomorrow, etc. One can only imagine the bile he spewed forth on reading in Lisa Robinson’s column how disappointed Arista’s executives were with the new Lou Reed record. “I guess that’s what happens,” he snapped to the press, “when you don’t respond to the suggestions of the president.”
Though the album stalled at No. 130 on the Billboard charts, the critics were unusually kind to the flawed work. It was hailed as “powerfully cogent and authoritative, trenchantly universal,” in the Washington Post. Christgau “hadn’t found him so likable since the Velvet Underground.” Rockwell noted “a new intensity.” Bangs outdid himself, pronouncing it “the only true jazz-rock fusion anybody’s come up with since Miles Davis’s On the Corner period.”
In the wake of The Bells, Lou undertook one last, lengthy, booze-soaked tour that would take him to Britain, the West Coast of the U.S., back across America, and finally to Europe. The tour would be characterized by the conflict and violence that had greeted him on the Rock-’n’-Roll Animal tour of 1974. The three-month jaunt kicked off in the spring of 1979 with the British and West Coast legs of the tour.
Sterling Morrison, who hung out with Lou between shows in Texas, was saddened by the insularity that characterized Lou’s progress: “The worship surrounding Lou was just awful. I love Lou. That’s why it upset me that Lou is making rudeness and obnoxiousness part of his daily life. When he came to Austin, the only person he spoke to in the city was me. I said, ‘Lou, what is the fun of going outside of your apartment if you’re not going to talk to anybody? If you never meet a different person?’ So we had all kinds of secret rendezvous all over the city, where I wasn’t able to bring anybody. It was strange seeing him with a pickup band. Things were so different—a total sycophantic relationship with the band. Lou is the employer. It’s not like an organic unity, it’s like these touring mercenaries. People falling over backwards for him.”
A reporter from Rolling Stone who saw several of the shows found Lou in a sedate albeit self-deprecating mood in his hotel room one night. Watching videos of the previous night’s performance of “Street Hassle,” he expressed a kind of healthy identity crisis:
“‘Look at that guy,’ says Lou, pointing at himself on the screen. ‘He sure is shameless about occupying his own life. Every time I’m doing that song, when it gets to that awful last line, I never know just how it’s going to come across. “So the first thing they see that allows them to be, they follow it / You know what it’s called?” And here comes that line and it should punch like a bullet: “Bad Luck.” The point of view of the guy saying that is so awful. But it’s so true. I only realize sometime afterwards what Lou Reed’s talking about. I just try and stay out of the way.’”
Things moved from bad to worse as the tour progressed into its second leg, returning to Europe in the spring of 1979. A climax came in Germany where Take No Prisoners had just been released and audiences expected a crazed, ranting Lou Reed. One night when the band was playing a concert at a 2,500-seat gymnasium, a particularly rowdy audience of American soldiers and German kids started a riot.
Lou, who played best when he felt in control of his audience, walked offstage three times but he could not get them to calm down. Finally a girl leaped onstage and lunged toward him. Reflexively, Lou grabbed her and dragged her to the edge of the stage as security men and roadies fought to separate them. In the midst of the melee Lou, his adrenaline going full blast, grabbed his large Swedish roadie with one hand and lifted him off the ground. Screaming, “You’re full of shit!” at the audience, he ordered the whole band offstage.
Pandemonium erupted in the hall. Meanwhile backstage, the police, who had been told Reed had attacked a female fan, came into the dressing room and arrested him.
According to Lou, “Some girl came up onstage and I didn’t know who she was, some irate roadie or something, I hardly saw her, man, and there were all these drunk GIs too. They took me to jail alone. How would you like to get into a van with twelve goose-steppers saying they’re going to test your blood? They took me to jail after the show. I slept in the cell overnight. I was tired. Then the next day they came to get me and I thought, oh, they’re letting me out. But they came in and said, ‘We want your blood.’ The guy was sort of nervous because on the way he asked me for a light and his hands were shaking, but, you know, my German’s good enough. I couldn’t believe it, it was like I said to the guy, ‘You must be an Americcan or else all your life you wanted to be an American so you could have a great line like that. And now you said it.’ They drove me to Frankfurt to have a blood test and urinology, to see if I had any drugs in my system, as they suspected I had. Of course … there was nothing.”
No charges were pressed and Lou would later deny responsibility for the violence, claiming, “The problem was a bunch of American soldiers. They wanted to have a riot, and they had one.”
A Swedish fan, Stellan Holm, who had seen Lou every time he had played in Stockholm, remembered the 1979 show as the most emotional. “He was crying on ‘Men of Good Fortune’ and saying, ‘Look at the fortune, the fucking fortune.’ And he was ranting. And he was really good. Most people hated it because it didn’t sound like his songs. But for once he had charisma as
a performer.” After the show, Stellan and his best friend, Don, went to the bar of the Sheraton Hotel and got a table next to Lou, who was drinking with his bass player, the Moose. Stellan got a close-up glimpse of the noble savage:
“He just looked like some guy from Queens. He had big curly hair, jeans and maybe a leather vest. One of us was brave enough to walk over. So he invited us to come and sit with him, which we did. And he bought us drinks. I told him I had met Andy and he suddenly became very defensive. As if he had to live up to the role of Lou Reed. He was very, very obnoxious. He was rude. You’d say something and he’d say something bad back. Then the other guys got up for some reason and we were alone with him. Just me, Don, and Lou. And then he looked at us and said, ‘I’m crazy, that’s my problem.’ Sort of like excusing his own behavior for being an asshole. But it was such a cheap way of trying to be interesting. He knew we really admired him enormously anyway. And he knew by talking to us that we were well informed and we knew the records. He wasn’t some old guy and he wasn’t crazed on drugs. He was drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. He was very together. He was just an extremely uptight and insecure person.”
The denouement of what had deteriorated into a two-month international binge came after the last show in London when Lou and his entourage, featuring the giant, bodyguard-like Moose, dined with David Bowie, whose own career was going through a shaky period.
What began as an ebullient celebration soon disintegrated into an ugly exposure of the mad tension that had always existed between the two temperamental stars. Ever since Bowie had produced Transformer, he and Lou had flirted with the idea of collaborating again. That night, however, when Lou proposed that David produce his next album, Bowie demurred, commenting that Lou needed to do a lot of work on his songs and himself. Lou slapped David hard in the face. Both startled but quickly recovering, they made up, embracing across the table. Minutes later, Lou exploded again, screaming, “I told you to never say that to me!” as he belted Bowie a second time.
Before the two men could create superstar pandemonium, they were separated by the Moose, who, flinging one massive arm around his shoulder, led Lou out of the restaurant. Bowie cursed loudly as, one by one, he smashed the potted plants that lined the stairs from the restaurant to the street. When David showed up at Lou’s hotel later that night looking for a rematch, Lou pretended to be asleep.
“Yes, I hit him,” he admitted, “more than once. It was a private dispute. It had nothing to do with sex, politics, or rock and roll. I have a New York code of ethics. Speak unto others as you would have them speak unto you. In other words, watch your mouth.”
The following morning Lou flew back to New York. Angie Bowie, who had dinner with Lou shortly thereafter, witnessed ominous mood swings: “I watched with growing concern as he swung through his changes and then went thataway: from real pleasure to see me, to a venomous but more or less rational attack on David, to a state of bugged-out, all-inclusive paranoia which struck me as truly insane. He was stoned, so his mood was affected by however his pharmaceutical cycles of choice were intersecting during that particular hour or two, but even so … You might get a better sense of Lou if I tell you something he told me during dinner. ‘You have to get stoned in the city,’ he said in absolute seriousness. ‘It’s a necessity. The atmosphere is so polluted that you have to put chemicals in your body to counteract it.’”
“He had a potbelly after touring,” said Bob Jones. “I think that was because he quit speed. The speed scene ran out. There was no speed. Everyone got busted. Marty got busted. Turtle was sent away for five years. Lister … when I was arrested, they wanted Lister … they knew I was dealing with Lister and they wanted me to turn him in and I wouldn’t.”
“I met up with Lou again in 1979,” recalled deejay Terry Noel, who had known Lou at Max’s during the 1960s, “when he was blown up. Fat and waddling around the Village. That’s when we started going down to Uncle Paul’s, right off Christopher and Greenwich. He used to go in there to play the pinball machines. He seemed a lot more sedate and polite and receptive.”
“I believe in all things in moderation—including moderation,” Lou attested. “I did more than abuse my body in the past. I very often wounded it. I enjoy age. I was miserable when I was younger.”
One night in June, he was playing a brief stint at the Bottom Line. Before the first show he was to have cocktails at the apartment of his longtime hero, the writer William Burroughs, whom he had never met. On his way to the party, he stopped in at the Bottom Line for a 5 p.m. sound check. There he discovered that his bosom buddy and bass player, the Moose, was nowhere to be found. Lou became increasingly upset as it emerged that no one had seen the big man since leaving him on a street corner at 2 a.m. the previous night. Soon Lou was convinced that the Moose had suffered grievous bodily harm and began blaming himself. At the same time he worried about the bass’s absence from the upcoming show. Without a bass, there was no way the band could deliver. He decided that if the Moose could not be located by 7 p.m., the shows would have to be cancelled and the money returned.
William Burroughs and Lou Reed at Burroughs Bunker, New York, 1976. (Victor Bockris)
Meanwhile, the time for Reed’s meeting with Burroughs had come and gone. Then the door of the club flew open and the Moose came thundering in, guitar case in one meaty palm, eyes bugging out of his head like electric eightballs. He had overslept.
Reed went ballistic. Ordering everybody but the band out of the dressing room, he attacked the trembling giant in a tirade that could be heard out on the street. Then, storming out of the club with a final threat that if anything like this ever happened again, the Moose would instantly be fired, Lou, a bottle of Scotch in hand, accompanied by two band members, leapt into a limousine and motored over to Burroughs’s apartment on the nearby Bowery.
He arrived forty-five minutes late at the home of the great writer, a punctilious gentleman of the old school who had cocktails at six and dinner at eight. Rather than apologizing for his tardy arrival, Lou cast a withering glance around the room, and abruptly asked if there was a chair or whether he was expected to sit on the floor. Provided a seat, he proceeded to take apart each of Burroughs’s guests with deft one-liners that pinned their weakest points. Then, turning to Burroughs, he asked him if it was true that he had to have sex with publishers in order to get his books published. A few seconds later he asked the writer whether it was true that he had cut off his toe to get out of the draft. A lesser man than Burroughs might have got his back up against the wall at such an onslaught. However, as it turned out, the author was charmed by what turned into a hilarious exchange between the Martin and Lewis of the kingdom of junk about, among other things, how to shoot heroin with a safety pin.
After a whirlwind visit, Lou gathered up his entourage, left everybody in the room, except Burroughs, feeling as if they had been mentally raped, and swept back to the club where he was shortly due to perform. In the dressing room before the show he was so drunk he was regressing to a state of infantilism. Meanwhile, dripping with sweat, he looked like a punk version of the late-sixties belicose Jack Kerouac. However, when he hit the stage, he delivered a stunning set.
Lou Reed with Diana Ross and Clive Davis, 1976. (Bob Gruen)
Beginning the revamped “Heroin,” he greeted the audience’s applause by calling out, “How do you think it feels when I hear you calling for a pop song called ‘Heroin’? The evil of that drug—you don’t know. When I say it’s my wife and it’s my life, do you think I’m kidding?” Reed’s anger and frustration about his career was reaching a climax. Raging around in front of his audience, Reed smashed microphones against each other. When he spotted Clive Davis in the audience, Lou paused to give him the finger. “Here, this is for you, Clive,” he said through the microphone. “Where’s the money, Clive? How come I don’t hear my album on the radio?” Reed kept his fans waiting twenty minutes for an encore. He received a standing ovation.
Later that week, Lou issued a
press release through Arista: “I’ve always loved Clive,” he said, “and he happens to be one of my best friends. l just felt like having a business discussion from the stage. Sometimes, out of frustration, you yell at those you love the most. I have a mouth that never sleeps, and I suppose that’s why I make rock-and-roll records. Trying to read anything deeper into all this is pointless.”
“Reed spent most of the seventies refining, amending, denying, and playing off his image,” wrote Bill Flanagan. “He could be romantic (‘Coney Island Baby’), funny (‘The Power of Positive Drinking’), nasty (Take No Prisoners), almost incomprehensible (Metal Machine Music), and frightening (‘Street Hassle’). But that is the mark of a good writer. That convention inclines the audience to believe that the singer/songwriter’s work is autobiographical only added to Reed’s power. His image was of a man outside society’s conventions, a rebel.”
“My attitude often gets to be, ‘Screw you, and I’ll screw your girlfriends just for spite,’” Reed told one interviewer. “Which is a terrible way to do things because it’s not like I would enjoy it. Of course they would, it goes without saying.
“‘I Wanna Be Black’ … it was transmogrified—that’s a big word meaning Catholicism,” he continued. “You want to know the real Lou Reed? Turn around. Now bend over.”
In the same interview in which he had compared himself to Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, Lou had, for the first time, come out of the closet publicly, insisting that he wanted his audience to know that when they looked at him they were looking at a gay man from head to foot. Clearly, a person as complex and multifaceted as Lou Reed cannot be confined to such statements, nor to a singular way of being. Since he went to college, he had been a practicing bisexual. However, friends who knew him well during the late seventies and early eighties, probably the most vulnerable period of his career vis-à-vis the public, were of the opinion that he was basically gay, but since he came from the 1950s world in which people despised queers, Lou also despised queers and hated being queer. Consequently, on and off over the decades he paid numerous psychiatrists to tell him that he wasn’t.
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