Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  “He gave me ageda. That’s an Italian term for an upset stomach. I have to say Lou was a strange bird. He would never pump up the band members. Eric Kronfeld told me, we were in L.A. and Entertainment Tonight was interviewing him after a show and they said, ‘Who’s your tremendous drummer?’ and Lou told them to scratch that from the tape.

  “When we played the Beacon Theater in New York on what was Lou’s biggest tour of the time, the Beacon was sold out three or four days. We were given two names each per night on the guest list. So the first night I had Andy [Warhol] and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and when I put the names down, Eric Kronfeld made sure Lou didn’t see Andy’s name down there or I would have been on the shit list.”

  Despite the friction within the band and Lou’s new bid for sobriety, the tour managed some Olympian moments. “‘Am I glad to see you,’ said a lean and clean Lou Reed to last week’s crowd at the Beacon Theater in New York before launching into ‘Waiting for the Man,’” wrote one reviewer. “The feeling was mutual. But the show’s real centerpiece was Reed’s brilliant orange guitar. He couldn’t keep his hands off the instrument, only shifting it to his back to hitchhike his way through ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ soloing seraphically in ‘Legendary Hearts’ and ‘New Sensations,’ and goading Saunders and especially Quine to increasingly dazzling flights. Indeed, Quine’s playing was practically an illegal stimulant, sending the band rushing back into a song after every solo.”

  But other critics felt Lou had lost a lot of his former edge. A reviewer for the Washington Post noted that “Lou Reed has no stage moves and not much of a voice,” while adding that Lou managed to transfix the crowd anyway. Ferrari had also noticed Reed’s awkward stage presence and joked that when he tried to clap his hands, Lou looked like the comedian Jerry Lewis.

  Lou’s long-term obsession with Bob Dylan reached a crucial turning point in November 1984. Lou was in L.A. doing a TV show on the New Sensations tour. The band was poised on stage waiting for the cameras to roll when Lou looked down to see Bob staring up at him. For a split second their gazes locked, and they grunted in mutual acknowledgement. Plunking himself in a seat next to Sylvia, Bob watched intently as Lou launched into “Doing the Things That We Want To.” Halfway through the song Bob turned to Lou’s wife and intoned, “Man, that’s a great song. I wish I had written that song.” After the show, no sooner had Lou been informed of this statement than he grabbed his roadie and charged him to leave the theater immediately and not return until he had acquired every Dylan album available. From that moment on, Lou, who had previously never had a decent word to say about Bob, became a dyed-in-the-wool Dylan fan—a fact he would broadcast almost ten years later when he gave one of the few outstanding performances at Dylan’s fiftieth birthday concert at Madison Square Garden in 1992.

  Ferrari, who went from resenting Lou to feeling that he wanted to give him a hug when he saw him, realized Lou was extremely ambivalent in his feelings about other people, swinging from hot to cold and from kindness to cruelty in a matter of seconds. “It’s interesting that he wrote the bible on hip but personally he was not hip,” the drummer remembered. “He was just intelligent enough to know what was hip. I think that’s what led to his longevity in the music industry.

  “Lou tried not to get close to anyone. He said to me, ‘I already have enough friends, I don’t need any more.’ It was stressful, because the only thing he’d say to me is, he’d turn around and say, ‘Play harder!’ and I was playing harder than you can imagine. I was breaking everything and I broke two snare-drum stands, which is unusual because I’ve never broke them in my life. One time in Germany my roadie comes out and was saving the day by holding the snare drum. His ears in there without earplugs, and the band is playing loud and the snare drum is ear-piercing, so I’m worried about his ears, and Lou knows this fact and Lou turned around and said, ‘Play harder!’ If I wasn’t such a professional, I would have put my sticks down and walked offstage because that was just inhumane. He didn’t respect that roadie who was saving the show that night in Düsseldorf.”

  But Ferrari also remembered times when Lou could relax and enjoy his company: “There were many funny moments onstage when Lou was very honest with the audience. We were playing some college, a music school somewhere, and Lou said, ‘You probably figured it out, I’m playing the same song over and over and changing the lyrics.’ Another funny thing was, Lou would say to me, ‘I couldn’t believe it, I’m singing an older song and I’m making up the lyrics ’cause I can’t remember them, and then the audience is singing the right lyrics and I’m reading their lips.’

  “Then we went to Australia. We were in Perth; Perth is lovely, it was warm. And Lou just looked at me one day while we were at the beach and said, “They really have it down, here.” There was always moments like that when he was really with you.

  “Lou and I went out and had a bite to eat a few times. It was very amicable—Sylvia was there. And as usual, Lou [just like his father] would divide the check up, he would never pick the check up. I used to say, ‘Give me the check, I’ll take it.’ Lou wanted to hang out with us, but we didn’t want to hang out with him. Peter Wood had his wife, so now it’s the honeymoon tour, Peter and his wife and Lou and Sylvia. They were always doing things together to the point that we were a little ill about it. And they wanted us to go to the zoo with them, to a petting farm, as a band, to pet the koala bears or something. I just couldn’t bring myself to suffer that much. We passed it up. But when they came back, they were sure to tell us about it.

  “It was a passionate, intellectual group of people. The music was simple, but the personalities were complex. Nobody was mean to each other, but it was the underlying thing with Robert Quine and Lou, we knew that was there. They were headed for a big breakup, and it was that tour that did it. Quine and Reed were like the odd couple. It was a love—hate relationship. Mostly the love was coming from Lou. And Quine hated to go on tour. He’s a funny guy, he’s a sleeper and he acts like he’s not on top of things completely. The thing that held Lou and Bob together was Quine’s infatuation with Jim Burton. He was Quine’s favorite guitarist and ended up becoming Lou’s favorite guitarist, and whenever we would have a tour bus to take us to the hotel from the airport or something, it was all that was played on the bus. I felt like Lou was into it to brownnose Quine. Lou really wanted to get tight with Quine, but Quine wasn’t letting it happen. No matter what. Still, to this day I’ll run into Quine and he’ll have something not nice to say about Reed. I don’t even want to tell you what Quine was saying.

  “Lou was starting to get off on playing the guitar solos a bit more. Quine was a master of the obscure notes, and Lou was catching the groove and at times it was very good. When it was good, I would let him know. And then Lou would tell Quine, ‘I’m gonna take this solo in this song again.’ And then he was torturing Quine to the point where Quine said, ‘Well, what do you want from an ex-junkie homo?’ [Quine denies saying this.] The way Quine delivers a line, he’s so cold-faced and so intellectually witty that you start to pee your pants because he’s so funny.

  “A big fight in Australia [in December 1984] ended it. That’s when Quine was coming off the stage getting really upset because Lou was stepping on Quine’s turf. Lou was taking all the solos. And then Lou canceled Japan.”

  “There was a definitive break right at the end of the tour,” Quine confirmed. “He has his version and I have mine, but it was a major falling-out. Allegedly over musical problems. It’s nothing that didn’t happen with other members of the band, but I wouldn’t stand for it. I will not take shit from anyone. Whether he had his reasons for being annoyed with me—I’m hardly a saint, but I did deliver the goods. By the second concert in Australia I called my wife and said I’m certainly never playing with him again, ever. I like to think I stoically endured it, but he was not a moron, he probably saw my attitude. Some stupid little incidents happened. The last thing we did was a concert in New Zealand. We were doing ‘Sunday Morning.’ It
was pretty much just the two of us—the bass and drums and keyboards were just so subdued. Arid I was looking out into the crowd thinking, ‘This is a total drag. I’m never going to play this song with him ever again.’”

  Everybody scattered at the end of the New Sensations tour. Quine explained, “We were in Auckland, New Zealand, after our last concert, and I think Lou and Sylvia were going to take a little vacation in Hawaii. I’ll never forget it. This tour was a long tour—seven months—and everybody was in the lobby. A lot of people were drinking [not Lou]. It was a celebration; I had to be there. I just remember sitting there, and I went up to Lou and shook his hand and told him to have a nice trip. And that’s the end of the story.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Commercial, Political Lou

  1984–86

  I think he would do a situation comedy at this point if they paid him enough money. Doesn’t Lou Reed think he’s Delmore Schwartz? Absolutely!

  Glenn Branca

  After their Hawaiian vacation, Lou and Sylvia returned to New York and entered a period of their “great adventure” defined more by commercials than music. In early 1985, Sylvia launched a new campaign for increased media exposure and revenue. Lou signed an advertising contract with Honda motor scooters. With “Walk on the Wild Side” playing in the background, the quick-cut heavy TV ad, directed by Steve Horn, showed a leather-clad Lou wearing shades perched on a scooter in a variety of Manhattan locations. The official line, “Take a walk on the wild side,” came from a Mr. Neil Leventhal, Honda’s motor-scooter manager, who proclaimed, “Reed is an innovator—one of the pioneers of new music. His music is unique and experimental—much like scooters.”

  In May 1985, Lou signed a contract with American Express to advertise credit cards. Appearing beneath the tag line “How to buy a jacket” in print ads aimed at the college audience he had been cultivating with his MTV appearances, Reed posed casually in trademark leather jacket and shades.

  When they appeared in June, the Honda commercials were widely reviewed and became one of the most acclaimed ads filmed in New York. “Rock singer Lou Reed flings off his sunglasses, unbuttons his jacket, and with a cool stare declares, ‘Don’t settle for walking!’” read one. “Posed astride a red, two-passenger scooter in front of New York City music club the Bottom Line, Reed is the latest in a string of unusual celebrities [like Miles Davis and Devo] Honda has chosen to advertise its scooters.” In addition to the TV spots, Honda ran in several prominent magazines a full-page color ad of Lou astride the bike by Manhattan’s Hudson River docks. Honda reported the commercials helped sell as many as sixty thousand scooters. This kind of exposure was a surer sign of commercial success in the United States than anything Reed had done before.

  In the mid-1980s, Lou also accepted assignments to write songs for other projects that had little in common with his own work. Lou claimed to enjoy the work, declaring, “I really love it if someone wants me to contribute a performance or a song and they give me a subject.” Taking a line from a 1975 book that had particularly influenced him, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he added, “And it’s even better if they tell me what kind of attitude they want. I can divorce myself from it completely.” During the mid-1980s, apart from commercials, Sylvia booked Lou into a string of interviews, TV spots, films, public appearances, celebrity concert tours, and assorted publicity outings, culminating in hundreds of mentions of Lou and his work in every media venue available. The campaign helped sell Reed’s latest product and renewed interest in his large back catalog.

  In 1980 Lou had played a small role as a record executive in a movie written by and starring Paul Simon called One-Trick Pony. Despite claiming that he had not enjoyed the experience at all, in the mid-eighties Lou did a slew of film work. In 1983, Lou contributed “Little Sister” to the film Get Crazy and made a playful comment about aging rock stars by appearing in his first scene covered in cobwebs in the famous Bob Dylan pose on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Despite the film’s failure the song was well received, particularly by his little sister, who was proud to be the final and only member of his family to receive good press in a Lou Reed song. Late in the year, Lou contributed a song to a rock cartoon, Rock and Rule. The soundtrack also included songs from Debbie Harry, lggy Pop, and other punk performers. In 1985 he wrote a zany, three-chord dance track reminiscent of his 1964 Pickwick compositions, “Hot Hips,” for the film Perfect, starring John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. The same year he came up with a disco number, “My Love Is Chemical,” for the film White Nights, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov. “When they’re alone in the dance studio, you expect him to put on Mozart and instead he puts on Lou Reed,” noted director Taylor Hackford, who felt Reed’s song gave depth to Baryshnikov’s character. In 1988 Lou contributed “Something Happened” to the film Permanent Record.

  Lou’s most famous quote about rock and politics had been made from the stage at the Bottom Line in 1977 when he’d snapped, “Give me an issue, I’ll give you a tissue, wipe my ass with it.” And on another occasion he had been quoted saying, “Nixon was beautiful, if he had bombed Montana and gotten away with it, I would have loved him. I have no fear … of anything.” He had not been recruited into any political party in the 1970s, being, if anything, a political liability. He made a tentative entry into the political arena in 1984, singing backup vocals on Carly Simon’s theme song for the disastrous Democratic National Convention that summer, “Turn the Tide,” alongside Shirley MacLaine, Mia Farrow, Dick Cavett, Mary Travers, and Phoebe Snow. When Bob Dylan invited Reed to play his Farm Aid benefit on September 22, 1985, he jumped at the opportunity.

  On the country-musician-heavy bill next to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, and lined up for performance between George Jones and Loretta Lynn, Lou’s presence sparked humorous speculation as to whether he and John Denver might team up for a duet on “Rocky Mountain High.” However, Lou told David Fricke of Rolling Stone that he had overcome his city-dweller attitude and could appreciate the problems the farmers were having. “I’d show up out there in Blairstown and go, ‘What the fuck is going on? It’s raining here. What is this, another weekend with rain?’ Finally they sat me down to tell me the facts of life, such as there are farmers out there and they’re getting killed by the drought. I became aware of what weather means, besides New Yorkers going away for the weekend.” Lou delivered a blistering set, but there were more than a few cynics who questioned his use of a charity event to gain publicity. “How do people in New York perceive Farm Aid?” asked one cynical journalist who appeared surprised to see Lou in Champaign, Illinois. “I don’t know how the people in New York perceive anything,” Lou riposted. “We’re like snowflakes, we’re all different.” On the two occasions that Lou played a show at Bob’s request—Farm Aid and Dylan’s fiftieth birthday—he made sure he gave an outstanding performance. The reviews of his Farm Aid show were unanimous in describing Reed’s set as a blistering rock ’n’ roll show. And Lou’s shit-eating grin at both events indicated his own satisfaction. Backstage, however, he had a different experience. Lou’s bodyguard, Big John Miller, was accompanying Lou and Sylvia across a field backstage at Farm Aid when they spotted Bob some two hundred feet away. On seeing them Dylan lit up like a Christmas tree and started running toward them, his arms spread wide open. Lou stopped in his tracks, returning the gesture with a big smile of his own. But the euphoria of recognition was to be short-lived when Dylan hurtled past Reed to throw himself into the arms of Big John, leaving Lou staring at his feet as he turned eighty-five different shades of red. Farm Aid eventually generated $50 million to help save 2.3 million American farmers from over $212 billion of debts.

  Once Lou got going in a new direction, he was, like his mentor Warhol, relentless. No sooner had he done Farm Aid than he volunteered to take part in the Artists United Against Apartheid Sun City project. The Panamanian superstar Ruben Blades, whose lyrics were on a par with Reed’s, had suggested that Lou take part in the effort. “I couldn’t not
be vocal about apartheid,” Lou explained. He sang one line on the record “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City,” a multiracial effort headed by “Little” Steven Van Zandt, who had left Springsteen’s E Street Band the previous year. The Sun City gang comprised artists from a variety of musical disciplines and included Dylan, Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Bono of U2, Jimmy Cliff, Kurtis Blow, Run-D.M.C., and Afrika Bambaataa. The organization got more than they bargained for when Lou came to the studio and started advising them on how to produce the record. The Los Angeles Times called the song “a refreshing attack on the practice of isolating musicians by category.” Lou appeared in the video of the song and was also in several scenes of the documentary The Making of Sun City. Besides the record and the video, the Sun City project released a book and eventually undertook a concert campaign to force the release of the South African nationalist leader Nelson Mandela.

  Lou benefited from the exposure all these do-good benefits gave him. But he found the experiences less than satisfying personally, largely because he could not handle it when so many lesser mortals than he appeared more prominently in the spotlight. One character who Lou particularly despised was “Little” Steven Van Zant, who organized the Sun City benefit.

  To help put Lou’s segue from commercial songwriting into political songwriting into perspective, in the early summer of 1985 he joined another star-studded project, including Sting, Tom Waits, and Marianne Faithfull, recording Kurt Weill’s “September Song” for a tribute to the German composer most famously associated with Bertolt Brecht. It was a project he felt particularly close to. “I want to be a rock-and-roll Kurt Weill,” said Lou. “My interest—all the way back with the Velvets—has been one really simple guiding-light idea: take rock and roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With subject matter written for adults so adults, like myself, could listen to it.” The 1985 release of his recording of the Kurt Weill song on the album Lost in the Stars coincided with another strong resurgence of interest in the VU, largely perhaps because culturally the first half of the eighties was a rerun of the first half of the sixties.