Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  For the most part, however, Lou entertained himself with inanimate objects over which he had some control. When not composing songs, he spent his time tinkering with his bike, shooting hoops, working out, and trying biofeedback therapy. Meanwhile, fulfilling Lou’s fantasy of living with his college sweetheart, Sylvia enrolled in writing classes at Sarah Lawrence College in a suburb north of New York City. Together they worked on video projects and took kung fu classes.

  Sylvia’s brother was also a help, introducing Lou to Wu-style tai chi chuan, or Chinese boxing, focusing on a powerful Chinese system of exercise organized, refined, and handed down from master to master since the time of the Yellow Emperor (2696–2598 B.C.). It evolved from the Taoists’ search for a way to rejuvenate and heal the body and to increase internal strength and energy.

  According to Master C. K. Chu: “Tai chi enables students to cultivate ‘chi’ [or ‘qi’]—the intrinsic energy or life force of the body. The circulation of the chi revitalizes the internal organs and all the biological systems. As an active meditation, tai chi promotes the integration of body, mind, and emotions. As a result, the student will find he or she is better able to deal with the internal contradictions and external stress.”

  Lou found it to be “a sport where the ritual of combat is as important as the outcome. It’s an aesthetic and physical discipline that I find exquisite. The discipline is in the ability to relax. It’s very beautiful to watch.”

  Spending long weekends out of the city with Sylvia and his dogs, Reed had plenty of time to think for the first time since his Freeport exile. “I really love it,” he enthused. “It smells great. Even if you wanted to do something, there’s nothing here. It’s appalling how much sleep I get.

  “I’m a happy person. And I would hope somebody like me would be. You ought to be happy. I’m happy I’m walking around alive. Which is not to say I’m happy about the state of the world. I’m just happy about my own personal situation. And from there I look out.

  “I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I work in a rock-and-roll format because I really like rock and roll and I really like playing the guitar and wouldn’t it be great if I could combine these three things I really like. I’m just trying to get off like everybody else. And avoid working. If I can do something that I’d be doing anyway—and not have to have a job—well, that to me is really getting through this world pretty well. And if I could have a wife, too … My God, who could ask for anything more?”

  By early February 1980, Lou was back in New York making arrangements for his wedding to Sylvia. The event would herald the beginning of a new life for Lou. Then, just before the big day, the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, awaiting trial for murdering his girlfriend, died of a heroin overdose. Asked by a British journalist if Sid had died for Lou Reed’s sins, the Pistols’ Johnny Rotten replied, “Yes. Too many Lou Reed albums I blame it on. There was that horrible movement from New York to London, and they brought their dirty culture with them. Sid was so impressed by the decadence of it all. God! So dreary.”

  ***

  “If you meet the perfect woman,” Lou said, “you should pick her up in your arms and dash off with her.” On Valentine’s Day, February 14, Lou Reed and Sylvia Morales, whom he described, invoking Poe, as his “child bride,” got married in Reed’s Christopher Street apartment. The vows, written by Lou, were taken from two poems by Delmore Schwartz: “I used, ‘Would you perhaps consent to be my many branched little tree?’ in my wedding ceremony,” he said. “A lot of my ideas come from him. I just really adored him and his writing—that you could call up so much in so few words, in very simple language. It serves you well if you’re trying to put a lyric in a song, where they go by so quick.”

  The formalities were overseen by New York Supreme Court justice Ernest Rosenberger and witnessed by the families of Sylvia and Lou, Lou’s band members, his old Syracuse friend Garland Jeffreys, Sylvia’s friends Roberta Bayley and Susan Springfield, who was a member of the punk band the Erasers, Lou’s new manager-lawyer Eric Kronfeld, and RCA president Bob Summer and his wife.

  The wedding marked a break from the past for both Lou and Sylvia. Her best friend, Anya, wasn’t invited. “They had been best friends since they were like eleven—they were military brats together,” observed one friend. “One can see Sylvia’s point of view because Anya would probably have caused a big scene or done something to really get the attention of everything on her. Sylvia really did have this traditional, calm, sedate sort of wedding. But Anya was really bummed out.” Much to his chagrin, Andy Warhol was not invited either. “I don’t understand why I wasn’t invited to the wedding,” he complained in his diary. “They had a big reception and everything.” And to friends he went even further, exclaiming, ‘What is a friend?’ According to Glenn O’Brien, “Andy was totally sentimental about weddings. If Andy wasn’t invited, it was real deliberate on Lou’s part because in a way that’s the only person that he wanted there, and Lou was trying to punish Andy. Maybe he felt he had to get revenge because Andy had forced him to fall in love with a transvestite. Lou had to break away in order to achieve that hetero bond.”

  In wedding photos taken by Roberta Bayley, Lou stood next to Sylvia and their parents wearing a suit and tie, coming across as a younger version of his father. Thirty-eight but looking nineteen, he appeared happy at last. Sylvia, twenty-four, wore her mother’s satin and tulle wedding dress with gardenias in her hair. After the ceremony, everyone toasted the couple, then went off to a nearby restaurant on Barrow Street for wedding cake and champagne. Afterward Lou and Sylvia changed into casual attire and joined their friends. Piling into limos, they sped off to Times Square where they played pinball at the Broadway Arcade, whose proprietor, Steve Epstein, was a friend. “You know you won’t be stabbed in Steve’s place,” commented Lou, who was an avid pinball player. “I got the highest score I’ve heard of on the Rolling Stones game,” he boasted. “Twenty-nine million one hundred eighty thousand eight hundred and eighty. It’s actually a pretty easy game, but I was there two hours getting my twenty-nine million.”

  The only ripple in an otherwise perfect wedding was the failure of Mick Rock, Lou’s longtime friend and photographer, to attend and take pictures. Lou, who knew how to hold a grudge, was so furious he did not speak to Mick for the next ten years.

  To Reed, the wedding marked another definitive attempt to take full control of his life. “I know now that certain things will get taken care of and looked out for on the home front, where you can get hurt a lot,” he said soberly. “It’s nice to have a trustworthy situation at home, a security situation. It’s good to know that you’re covered, and beyond just friendship. I’m a great one for commitment. I like to look at centuries past, when knighthood was in flower—l’m still a great one for that. I think I’ve found my flower, so it makes me feel more like a knight.”

  ***

  In April in the U.S. and May elsewhere, Growing Up in Public was released. The new album once again dealt with Reed’s most personal problems. Despite, or perhaps because of, his difficulty in living with another human being and expressing his emotions, the marriage to Sylvia and the new straight life became the central themes of his work. “In his most recent albums, The Bells and Growing Up in Public, Reed has continued—as if he were picking a scab—to expose his/our need for love and stubborn defenses against it,” wrote Ellen Willis. “He wants to believe in the most sentimental, romantic clichés and can’t quite pull it off. The song that says it best, I think, is ‘All through the Night.’”

  Certainly the specifics chronicled in “Standing on Ceremony,” or in “My Old Man” were not strictly autobiographical, but, as Lou suggested in interviews, the general tone and sentiment of the songs on the album were inspired by Lou Reed. “My mother’s not dead, and my father never beat my mother—you’ve got to take it like I’m a writer. I’m not restricted to me. Whether my mother’s dead or not really doesn’t matter, it’s the attitude I’m interested in. I want to expres
s a view, so I manipulate the events to justify the view.” One of the things old friends noticed on the cover of Growing Up in Public was that Lou looked like his father, a development he would later describe as “the final disappointment.”

  Despite Arista’s ridiculous trailer for the album, “There are seven million stories in the city, Growing Up in Public is all of them,” the album was not well received, and there was little company support for it. “Lou Reed is the smartest person regularly recording rock and roll,” wrote Jeff Nesin in Creem. “But one of the great rock singers of the late sixties simply cannot sing anymore. Though he uses sharp rhythmic phrasing and some expressive dynamics to disguise the problem, he has no tonal pitch or control anymore and a drastically reduced overall range.

  “I have witnessed Lou Reed in many strange incarnations over the years, but I never could have imagined him as a prattling, self-absorbed Central Park West analysand. No song is utterly without redeeming virtue, but all of them could stand considerable work. As a follow-up to The Bells, Reed’s best recorded work since Coney Island Baby, Growing Up in Public is truly depressing, and I wish Lou would get off the couch and back into the streets.”

  When Lou flew to Detroit in May, a reporter from Creem was struck by a “new” Lou, or at least the twentieth new Lou: “Happily married to Sylvia Morales, Reed was healthy-looking, patient, pleased with his record company, and above all, cooperative. Lou’s first words were, “Where can you play pinball around here?” Upon being told where, he anxiously queried, “Is it in a crummy part of town? Can you bring a lady there?”

  Defending the characters on the record, he said, “I don’t see anything pitiful there. I think of the whole thing as being on a very up note. Like he’s going ahead, like he’s found the perfect lady with the incredible grace. I’ve had more of a chance to make an asshole out of myself than most people, and I realize that. But then not everybody gets to live out their nightmares for the vicarious pleasures of the public. But I’m certainly not restricted by me.”

  Meanwhile, praise for the Velvets was increasing. In the New York Times, Robert Palmer compared Reed’s work with the Velvets to the beat writers of the fifties and sixties. Turning to Reed’s latest work, Palmer was more guarded. “Lou Reed’s latest album, Growing Up in Public, is reminiscent of some of Jack Kerouac’s later books … and he runs the risk of veering too close to sentimentality.”

  “For the last few years,” Reed said in defense of his music, “I was working with musicians who were into jazz and funk. I wasn’t playing guitar on my records because I really couldn’t play with those guys, being a simple rock-and-roll player. I thought it would be interesting to explore that direction, but there was a gap between me and them. You can hear it on the records. So I said, ‘You’ve carried this experiment far enough. It’s not working. The ideas are there and then they disappear, the music isn’t consistent, you seem isolated, there’s a certain confidence that’s not there because you’re not really in control.’

  “I intend to keep playing for a while. I mean, I’m a long-term person, I prefer doing this to anything else. Period. I love making records and I love being in a band, performing.”

  June 1980 saw the kickoff of a brief European tour. Now, Lou’s long-term strategy of slowly building a large European following was finally paying off when Lou found himself playing sixty-thousand-seat stadiums instead of theaters. For the first time, he made a lot of money touring Europe.

  Drugs were off-limits on the tour, and though Lou continued to drink, he was toning it down. His moderate sobriety, however, had no positive effect on his collaborative skills. Relations between Lou and the band seemed to decline in direct proportion to the growth of his bond with Sylvia. Not only did Lou maintain tyrannical control of the band, continually criticizing their performance, but he refused to share with them the highly lucrative profits. When they got back to the U.S., they played some shows in California, but Lou was getting increasingly uncomfortable with them.

  Reed’s bandmates found him almost impossible to deal with, while he was incapable of acknowledging their gripes. Lou got particularly incensed when they began suggesting therapy programs. “I’ve had a decent relationship with them and thought they were intelligent—the next thing you know they’re saying ‘Lou’ and finally confiding in you. They said, ‘Lou, you know something, I’ve got something you’d really like,’” Reed remembered being told. “And you always gotta be suspicious when somebody says that. I used to wear sunglasses to avoid that sort of thing—and they’re always good if you want to go to sleep too. So, I’m starting to get wary now, and I say, ‘Wha?’ He says, ‘Ya ever heart of est?’ Now he was the third person within a week to tell me that.”

  Reed repeatedly expressed the desire to produce records by other people, perhaps to demonstrate that he was better at it than Cale, but something always went wrong. He had been negotiating with Jim Carroll to produce his second album, after the success of Carroll’s Catholic Boy. The deal fell through when Lou started rewriting all of Carroll’s lyrics, telling him that he didn’t know what he was doing, tried to persuade Carroll’s manager to make a record with him and forget Jim Carroll, and then insisted that the whole thing be recorded in Berlin. As Carroll’s manager, Earl McGrath, observed, “Lou is a lovely person, and one of the most charming people in the world—as long as you don’t have to do business with him.”

  The next candidate for the Lou Reed treatment was his acolyte Chuck Hammer, who had eagerly accepted Lou’s offer to produce his first solo album. At first the arrangement seemed fine, and Arista was happy with it. Lou and Chuck began meeting daily at Lou’s apartment after Sylvia had gone to school. Every morning as they walked his dogs, Lou would tear apart a member of the Everyman Band, whom he had been with for four years. Lou’s serious case of shpilkes came to the fore. One by one he fired every musician Hammer wanted to play with on Chuck’s solo album. When Hammer remonstrated that these were people who had been with him for years, Lou said that he had no choice now but to tell the record company that Chuck was too difficult to work with. The project was abandoned, but there was a Reedian denouement. When they bumped into each other in the street several months later and shared a cab uptown, Lou forced Chuck to admit that he should have done everything Lou told him. According to a close friend, “Head games were Lou’s true life’s passion. He had an ability to manipulate other people that is unmatched, at least in my experience. He could not take the responsibility for his life and his mistakes, so he spent a lot of time making them the responsibility of other people. He needed a psychiatrist, but there isn’t one in this world that’s a match for him.”

  ***

  The end of 1980 brought the release by Arista of Rock and Roll Diary, a retrospective album that traced Reed’s development from the Velvet Underground to the present. The album presented “the full span of impact of a seminal career,” summed up Time magazine, listing Reed with the Clash, the Ramones, Smokey Robinson, and Bruce Springsteen among the best rockers of 1980.

  Since the album was released by his old record company, which had the rights to the songs, and its cover was a series of Polaroids of him with Rachel, a relationship he was now denying (he would rip photographs of himself with Rachel out of magazines or books), Lou had little to do with the album’s creation and chose to ignore its appearance. Then, after a Christmas, 1980, show at the Bottom Line in New York, he temporarily stopped performing.

  Growing Up in Public sold poorly, and it is likely that on some level Reed blamed drugs for this. For years, along with Keith Richards, Lou Reed had been on everybody’s list as “rock star most likely to die.” Certainly the drugs and alcohol were now having a deleterious effect on Reed’s appearance. Furthermore, in addition to erratic behavior on and off stage, he was experiencing problems with his writing and in retaining his ideas. “It’s very difficult to retain things, to learn things and keep track of everything if it starts to get out of control, which it was,” he said. “Then it g
ot very out of control. So it was just obvious it had to stop. To really get a grip on my career and be true to the talent and everything, I have to have control.”

  At the beginning of 1981, Lou joined both Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. “The last thing in the world I would be interested in is blowing it, on a personal-health level. I think drugs are the single most terrible thing, and if I thought there was anything I could do which I thought might be effective in stopping people dealing in drugs and taking them, I would do it. I just think it’s the worst conceivable thing in the world. Before, I didn’t care. Speaking for myself, I could not continue that way. When drugs and liquor turn on you, it becomes debilitating rather than energizing or making you more focused. Then it’s just a terrible jumble. So I had to set about starting at square one again.”

  To accomplish his radical transformation, Lou needed a period of retreat. For this, his Blairstown estate was ideal. The home—replete with comforts and hobbies that gave Lou boyish delight—was the perfect substitute for his parents’ house, just as Sylvia was an ideal replacement for Toby Reed.

  For a while; struggling to remain sober and married was all he could concentrate on. “The Last Shot” and “Bottoming Out,” two songs composed during his Blairstown retreat, described a Lou Reed desperate for a drink and reeling from emotional instability. The AA recruit’s desire for alcohol represented the classic conflict between what Lou knew was good for him and what he craved for release and catharsis. And his resolve was undermined by the reckless, drug-dependent image his audience demanded. In light of this struggle, he now revealed a remarkable ability to open himself up in front of a different kind of audience: hundreds of other alcoholics and drug addicts. In AA meetings, recruits are expected to get up in front of the group to tell the story of how they became alcoholic, and what led them to stop drinking. Lou’s speech was honest and unadorned. He admitted that while recently riding his motorbike he had spotted a bag of white powder on the side of the road and pulled over in the wild hope that it might be speed. On closer inspection he discovered that it was talcum powder, but ruefully admitted that had it been amphetamine, he would have been hard-pressed to leave it there. The anecdote received appreciative laughter and applause for its candor.