Transformer
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The British critic Matt Snow wrote: “Lou’s going on forty-two, and Live in Italy documents how he regards his history as of September 1983, just as Take No Prisoners did in ’79, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live five years before that. And when I say history, I mean that seven out of fifteen tracks are the Velvet Underground’s greatest hits, and two others are ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Satellite of Love.’ Of the rest, only two come from his latest pair of LPs, The Blue Mask and Legendary Hearts, the latter providing the lineup of musicians who play here. Lou and Quine mesh in an empathetic steel-and-glass grid, aluminum sound which spirals into jaggedly lyrical solos, even psychedelic as on a stunning ‘Kill Your Sons’; Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television spring to mind: rhythms are crisp and slightly jazzy.”
By now, the tension Reed created between him and Quine became detrimental to the results. “Unfortunately they didn’t present that band at its best,” recalled Quine. “We were very tense at the first concert, we did not play as well as we could. Only the encore. We had a guitar roadie who would consistently put our guitars out of tune. And the result was almost none of the ballads could be used. We had great arrangements to ‘Sunday Morning,’ ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘Femme Fatale.’
“Another highlight was ‘Heroin’ at the Rome concert. We were teargassed at that one and we were playing Circus Maximus—an outdoor place. Apparently a crowd had gathered outside the fence before the concert, and the police dispersed them using teargas the moment before we came out. When we came onstage, the wind blew the teargas directly on us. So during the first forty-five minutes of the show I could not see a thing. I could not even see the little dots on the neck of my guitar. And there was snot running down my face and they were throwing wine bottles full of piss on the stage. People said we were really brave to stay onstage, but we had to. There would have been a riot. There were God knows how many of them. And it was a pretty emotional performance.”
Reed had not had a collaboration on the level with Quine since working with Cale. Quine and Cale were both high-strung and had an ability to share their own light with others. These qualities made them particularly vulnerable to Lou Reed, whose reptilian mind loved nothing more than to attack such creatures.
An incident on the return flight from Italy to the States illustrated Lou’s hang-up. According to Quine, “We were coming back on the plane from the Live in Italy thing. We were fried, we were wasted, we all got sick from the food we’d had in this horrible hotel we were staying in … I was sitting next to Fred Maher on the plane, and Lou came over and gave me cassettes of the two shows we had had recorded to put on an album. He said, ‘Well, Quine, here’s what I want you to do. Make a list of the songs you did at the Verona show and the Rome show, and then check off the version that’s best.’ I said, ‘You know, you can just use your own judgment really. I think we’ll agree. If you’re really stuck, just call me up.’
“I knew from the beginning that it was probably pretty obvious which version was best, since one version would always be better than the other, but he wouldn’t let up. ‘No, you can do this, can you just …,” and after he insisted about five times, I snapped. I said, ‘Look, why should I humor you by doing this? You’ve done this before and you end up totally ignoring my opinions. There’s no point in this, and I’m not going to insult your intelligence by humoring you. It’s just pointless. It’s a waste of my time and it’s a waste of your time.’ And he turned several colors and he said in a very low, menacing voice, ‘Quine, you’re going to be very sorry you did this.’”
“Quine hated every minute of playing with Lou after Legendary Hearts,” recounted one close friend. “He thought that Lou was losing it. Their falling out had to do with Lou’s megalomania, with stealing credit. Lou would enjoy humiliating Quine. There were real problems in the music. Although he adored Quine and was using Quine, it was obvious he was jealous of him as a guitar player. If Quine would come up with something great, Lou was jealous. I mean; he was a jealous person. The, impression I got was that he was really fucked-up, vindictive, sick …
“Miserable was his favorite word for Lou. Not just once, not just twice, many, many, many times. Lou Reed was the incarnation of misery. For many people misery is an attractive, seductive subject. Teenagers identify with suffering, basically. The thing that’s intriguing about a lot of Lou’s music is that it makes suffering happy. He celebrates it. And the music itself is catchy, it’s dancey, and so it’s embracing the suffering, making it lovable. But in embracing it, you’re not trying to change it, you’re just dressing it up, you’re recognizing it and you’re wallowing in it. Lou wallows in it, and he makes sure everybody else is wallowing in it. Maybe he got stuck in it because it became his subject matter. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s what misery’s about, it’s about obsessiveness. The nature of being a miserable person requires that you obsess about it. And you do this over and over and over, and you absorb things and turn them in on yourself.”
Reed recorded his next album, New Sensations, December 1983 through February 1984. Quine was fired from the band two days before they were supposed to record New Sensations.
“A couple of days before doing New Sensations,” Quine recalled, “we were checking out the studio, and I was still allegedly going to be on it. I did not want to be on the record because I knew I was going to put all this effort into coming up with parts and getting a good sound and he was just going to mix me off the fucking thing again, and it’s nothing I can ask him point-blank about, and I realized I was just dragging my feet every way I could. A couple of days before the recording I demanded more money from Eric Kronfeld, something that was pointless to do since I was already being paid well. Then I was meeting the producer, John Janson, for the first time, and he, Lou, and I had lunch together. When we went over to the studio, John was very enthusiastic. He said, ‘You know, I think of myself as the fifth member of the band. I’d like to contribute arrangements and be a fifth member of the band,’ and you know that was never going to happen. I had to open my mouth and say, ‘Well, you know, that’s really not necessary. We have enough problems between the four of us on arrangements.’ It was a pointless thing to say; it was stupid. And looking back ten years later, I realize exactly why I was doing it. I did not want to be on that record.
“There was some really strange disagreement that he precipitated, and I said, well, you know, I don’t think this is going to work out. Lou said I should call him back about it later, and I did call him back the next day. Then the next day after that I received a call from his manager saying that Lou planned to do the guitar by himself.” Reed told the press Quine wasn’t available for the sessions because he was recording his own solo album, Basic.
Lou’s inability to continue the fruitful collaboration with Quine had negative results comparable to those following his firing of Cale. In dumping Quine, Lou came across to friends as a cutthroat Machiavelli. “With Quine it was a little too even for Lou,” said one friend. “Bob is a really smart guy, a little bit too equal. So that had to go.” Another friend recalled, “Bob gave Lou a lot of musical credibility and really good musical direction, and then Lou just fucked up the friendship. Lou really couldn’t handle having a friend. Lou doesn’t have any friends, he just wants a guy to sit around and listen to him discussing equipment, guitars, recording, and just go, ‘Really, really, really …’”
***
New Sensations was released in April. The album’s single, “I Love You, Suzanne,” was released with “Vicious” as a B side. “I Love You, Suzanne” captured significant radio airtime and MTV video play. A second video, “My Red Joystick,” boosted sales of Lou Reed albums present and past. Where sales of The Blue Mask and Legendary Hearts were disappointing, the two reaching only 169 and 159 on Billboard’s LP chart respectively, New Sensations peaked at 56, his best showing since Coney Island Baby eight years earlier. New Sensations was also No. 9 in the Village Voice albums-of-the-year poll.
“The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, and New Sensations explored marriage not as happiness ever after, but as a convention that imbues familiar emotions (love and jealousy, optimism and anger) with new intensity,” summed up Bill Flanagan. “What emerged from those albums was a rock-and-roll romanticism with illusion. In “High in the City” (New Sensations) Reed, the quintessential New Yorker, praised the pleasures of Manhattan while warning to arm against attackers. In “My Friend George” (New Sensations) the grown-up street kid ran into an old pal and recognized him for the first time as a dangerous bully. Reed writes of husbands and wives at each other’s side and at each other’s throat.”
Meanwhile, despite the fact that Reed had dropped Quine from the New Sensations album, he brought him back to play for the New Sensations world tour of 1984, restoring the band to the five man lineup that had given the 1979 tours their high pitch. “He called me to go out on tour in early ’84,” recalled Quine, who said he signed for the money. “I thought it was fairly curious to be asked to go out and support this record. And his manager, Eric Kronfeld, was shocked and amused that I accepted.” The keyboardist Peter Wood signed on for the tour along with Fernando Saunders and Fred Maher.
Quine got a pretty good view of his role in the new band during rehearsals: “We would be working on arrangements to songs we hadn’t done yet and Lou would say, ‘Well, I wonder how many times we should do the bridge here,’ or ‘How long should the solo be? What do you think, Fred? Well, Fernando, what do you think?’ as if I wasn’t there. I mean, not too subtle, and it wasn’t meant to be. Finally, because of that attitude, after the little brief tour in July and before the long tour I actually called up in a calmer moment and, you know, tried gently to say I might be better off leaving the group. He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m really not contributing anything.’ We ended up having one of those long, better conversations where I approached it, you know, not on a confrontational level saying that I really felt like there was no place for me, and he convinced me that I was important. The next day he bought me a very expensive amplifier with the premium speakers, the premium road case, the whole thing.”
After the July tour, Fred Maher, who had another booking, was replaced on drums by Lenny Ferrari. Ferrari gave an amusing account of his first meeting with Lou: “I go to the session and I walk in and it’s the first day and there’s Robert Quine, Fernando Saunders, Lou, and myself. The first thing Lou says to me is, ‘The last thing I want to do is audition a drummer.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘But you called me!’
“We didn’t know each other yet. I could see he was annoyed he had to audition somebody. So after I get to meet everybody he says, ‘Okay—I usually like to start out with “Sweet Jane.”’ I said, ‘Excuse my ignorance here, but “Sweet Jane,” what’s that?’ Robert Quine sort of held his hand over his mouth, and Fernando Saunders sort of knew what I was saying because he’s an R-and-B player too. Lou looked startled that I had said this—like it was the Bible or something, and I later found out it was. So I said, ‘Hey, Lou, never mind, just hum a few bars and I’ll fake it.’ Robert Quine falls over laughing and Fernando said, ‘I can’t believe you just said this to Lou.”
“So Lou counted it off and I sort of figured it out that this was my first song with him and they’re gonna try and mess me up and see if I’m gonna hold the beat, which, as a drummer, is your main job. So I just locked into the beat and they tried to pull the rhythm against me and I felt it but I just held strong. After he does this, Lou stopped and said, ‘Gee, we were trying to mess you up and you didn’t move, so I was wondering if you’d like to do a world tour with us starting in two weeks?’ It was sort of serious and hilarious at the same time. We did eight days of rehearsal.”
“I saw Quine shortly before he went on the tour,” recounted a close friend. “He was anxietized. He agreed to go on the tour, but had made a lot of demands on Lou. Quine was a passionate person, deeply and profoundly emotional. He loved Lou’s music. He gave him back himself. He was very bitter about the fact that Lou did not give him credit for that and in fact went in the other direction to put him down. The only good thing about the trip was the playing part. The before and after he hated. Lou was a sick person. A mean person. I had a sense that he derived great pleasure out of hurting people. Not just any old people, though, people who threatened something in his own sense of self. For example, if Quine had too much integrity, he would make Lou face his own lack of it. Quine would be a reminder to him of certain things about himself that he couldn’t face, so he would lash out at Quine and try to hurt him. And because Quine was such a lovely person, such a polite person, he was an easy target.”
“We did America in the first two months,” recalled Lenny Ferrari. “Lou was moody and it was a crucial point in his life. At the beginning of the tour he pissed Quine off by saying, ‘No sunglasses on this tour.’”
“The basic thing behind that was the new, positive Lou Reed,” recounted Quine. “Lou had T-shirts made up with a big smiling Lou Reed on them. When we were rehearsing for the seven-month tour, Lou interrupted ‘Waves of Fear’ saying, ‘Look, you know, when I wrote this song, I was in a completely different head. I don’t feel this way anymore. I want to do a happy arrangement.’”
Quine was dumbfounded. “I said, ‘Well, Lou, you know that the name of the song is called “Waves of Fear” … He said, ‘Yeah, but can’t we play it a little happier?’ I said, ‘The happier we play it it’s gonna come out even more grotesque.’ I tried to accommodate the no sunglasses. I really couldn’t do it. Everyone had been enthusiastic about the video for ‘Women’ on The Blue Mask, but more than one executive came up to me and said, ‘Yes, great album. We hope the next one will be more upbeat.’ You can see that was happening on Legendary Hearts to an extent. By New Sensations, it was the new, positive Lou.”
“Every day he was a different person,” Ferrari continued. “He was being Mr. Clean. We weren’t allowed to do anything, we couldn’t have a drink, actually we couldn’t have any fun, so we renamed it the No Sensations tour. The whole band was not having a good time together. Quine also called it the No Sensations tour. Lou didn’t want the temptation back in his life. Nobody was drinking. Except the manager was sneaking it, and the bodyguards. And the crew members were having fun. We had about sixty dates around the world. There were sixty parties scheduled, but he canceled fifty-eight of them so we only had a party in New York and L.A. We were not allowed to have any fun so it was a business thing, which was okay with me.”
“It would be a drag sometimes because we would be so isolated, there would be nowhere to go and nothing to do,” said Quine. “We’d be in the airport Hilton in Rome with no car. I’d be looking out the window at Rome—I hadn’t seen it in thirty years.”
“We’d get back to the hotel and talk about the show,” recalled Ferrari. “It was business. There wasn’t any passion. Lou’s a square. A week before I got the call from Lou I had decided to quit smoking grass, which was about the extent of my drug taking, and maybe a glass of wine. But after four months, five months, man, we were crying—you’re crying for some fun.”
Aside from being forbidden drugs, alcohol, and after-concert partying, the band members felt Lou’s nervousness in other ways. To prepare for a show Lou would hang out with Sylvia in the dressing room, smoke a few cigarettes, and do some tai chi to calm down. But onstage, he would often lash out at various band members, leaving them humiliated and angry. For the first part of the tour he took out his frustration on the new kid, Ferrari. “He acted like a dick so many times onstage,” Ferrzi recalled. “He felt he was under pressure and he released it on me, the new kid.”
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bsp; Lou had a conflict with each of his musicians primarily, it would seem, as a way of keeping the hate that fueled his music. Ferrari, for example, had been excellent in rehearsal, but when they got out on the road, he frequently could not hold the beat. Lou would often turn to him in the midst of a song and scream at the top of his lungs, “Asshole!”
Then he switched to Wood and Saunders and, finally, Quine, who recalled:
“Another one of his major power plays: Every night, week by week, whoever he was picking on, just to make clear to everyone who that person was, at the end of the show he would say, for example, if it was me, as it got near the end of the show, he would say, ‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce the members of the band. On bass we have the magnificent, incredible, the virtuosic and dedicated Fernando Saunders. Please give him a hand. On keyboards we have the blah, blah, blah.’ He would go on and on. And then, ‘On guitar, Robert Quine,’ mumbling the name; not too subtle.
“Another example of his contempt of me as this negative person: Coming into the New Sensations tour, I couldn’t say anything; even the most sensitive suggestion ended up setting him off. We were having a sound check in Paris once, and it was horrendous—one of those echoey places, like a gym, where there’s this endless Grand Canyon echo, and he said, ‘Well, what do you think of the sound check; think we have pretty good sound?’ Well, I lied and said, ‘Yes, it’s pretty good. I just hope that once the audience is here, there’ll be a little less of that echo.’ He just snorted, he turned another color, and he stalked off because of this, you know, terribly negative thing that I had said.”
But such incidents were more than offset by the good pay and per diem expenses for his band members. Moreover, the group was housed in the finest hotels, fed in the finest restaurants, and transported by limousines.
Still, Lou’s mania for maintaining complete control over his environment got on their nerves. “Everything was Lou’s way,” said Ferrari. “I knew Sylvia from the TV party days before she met Lou. And she liked the way I dressed and would be saying, ‘Lou, look at that suit he’s got on.’ And Lou would start getting a little uptight, ’cause he was like in a leather jacket and it looked like I was in a different band, and I didn’t want that to be the case. So I was trying to dress down. I would wear just a cravat instead of a tie. But I just didn’t want to wear blue jeans. I wore blue jeans in Vietnam, I didn’t want to wear blue jeans in civilian life.