On November 13, 1985, Bob Dylan attended an exclusive party honoring his achievements at New York’s Whitney Museum. His guest list featured dozens of rock-and-rollers, including Lou Reed, Pete Townshend, Billy Joel, Little Steven, Dave Stewart, Ian Hunter, David Bowie, Roy Orbison, Yoko Ono, Judy Collins, and members of the E Street Band, as well as the writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, the filmmakers Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, and actors Mary Beth Hurt, Robert De Niro, and Griffin Dunne. “There’s no way you can be a pop artist today or do anything in contemporary music without being influenced by Bob Dylan,” said Billy Joel. Dylan was photographed with an uncomfortable-looking Reed on the steps of the museum.
In public Lou was now vocal in his praise of Dylan, and Dylan, whose whole career carried more weight than Lou’s, was vocal back, not only singling out Lou as one of the very few current artists he could listen to, but publicly thanking him on the back of one of his albums. However, in private Lou could still not control his shpilkes. Why was Bob always getting these awards and special editions when he, Lou recalled, received virtually nothing in the way of honors. You could see his point. The Velvet Underground are generally now considered to be the second most influential rock band of the 1960s. Lou had always been an artist on the same level as John Lennon, Keith Richards, and Bob Dylan, but, until the 1990s, without anything like the recognition afforded his peers.
At the beginning of 1986, as if refreshed by the excursions into other worlds, Lou recorded his next solo album, Mistrial. The album, released in April 1986, was designed to follow up on the pop vein originally tapped into by New Sensations. RCA released a promo tape called He’s Got a Rock and Roll Heart based on an MTV interview and a number of remixes and special editions of his songs. In addition to Reed’s customary print interviews, on May 19 he was on the Late Night with David Letterman talk show, along with the basketball player Michael Jordan and the actor Alan Alda, promoting Mistrial and its single, “Video Violence.”
Mistrial, artistically the lowest rung of Lou’s mid-eighties trilogy commencing with Legendary Hearts, received bored reviews and ran into several problems. The video for its second single, “No Money Down,” was cut from the MTV playlist for being too violent. In it, a Lou Reed look-alike robot has its face torn apart, which Lou thought was hysterically funny. “My wife didn’t,” he reported. “My mother felt the same way. She looked at it and said, ‘What can I say, Lou? I’m sure it’s very clever, but I don’t like seeing that happen.’”
After four albums with RCA he once again became dissatisfied with their handling of his work and determined to find another label. Mistrial marked the end of another period in Reed’s career.
What it came down to: “I think the album is a very up album. I think somebody in my situation should be positive. At this stage of the game it would be, possibly, disappointing to other people as well as to myself had it not been a positive album. I mean, after all, I’m getting paid to do something I would want to do anyway. I don’t have to work for a living. I don’t have to go through a whole bunch of things I couldn’t bear. I just think I’m very lucky and that attitude is reflected on the record I think. I want everyone watching to forget everything else and just listen to the music, and to have lots of positive energy and emotional moments. I think this is all any singer can hope for.”
***
In the summer of 1986, Lou made his strongest altruistic commitment when he joined a tour celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Amnesty International, the human rights organization that seeks the release of prisoners of conscience throughout the world.
Perhaps because he often saw himself as a persecuted artist, he could sympathize with others who suffered for their convictions. “I had never been a member of a group besides a rock band,” he said. “But I’ve joined Amnesty International. In a country where Reagan is president, it is very easy to be cynical. But I’m really fascinated about why people are arrested and what happens to them in jail. I mean, for the rock-and-roll records I’ve made, I’d be dead ten times over if I was over there.” By the time the Conspiracy of Hope tour kicked off June 4 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in front of thirteen thousand fans, the permanent lineup included Lou Reed, U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Peter Gabriel, Joan Baez, and the Neville Brothers. Guests who popped up along the way included Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Bob Geldof, Dave Stewart, and the comedian Robin Williams. During the tour, Lou would be called a great guitar player by some of the greatest guitar players ever. At the Amnesty concerts, he was introduced as “the legendary Lou Reed.” Lou’s continuing work with the program grew not only in time but also in intensity. Along the way, barnstorming across the country in the tour’s Boeing 707, he composed a song for the Amnesty cause called “Voices of Freedom.” Bonded by the cause, mutual respect, as well as “fun” (a word he used to counteract criticism of his intentions), the musicians developed a strong sense of camaraderie. On the road Lou cemented his friendship with Bono, whom he had met on the Sun City project, urging him to read “a really great short story,” Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” According to U2’s biographer, Eamon Dunphy, “There was a part of Bono that could have lived where Reed had lived, in the drug-induced twilight of New York City. Reed understood what U2’s music was trying to say, the difference between freedom and responsibility.”
When the Amnesty tour arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, they celebrated at the Ramada Renaissance Bar. When the house band finished their set, a number of the Amnesty musicians jumped onstage. “Bono, high on the absurdity of the night, got up to sing. He started Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane’ and sang it to a raunchy young lady posing at the bar,” wrote Dunphy. “They jammed the night away, Baez, Gabriel, Adams, the Neville Brothers, Larry, Adam, and Bono. When they heard about it the next day, Lou Reed and Edge were sorry to have missed it. ‘If you ever do that again, be sure to wake me,’ Reed chastised Bono. ‘Okay, we’ll do it again tonight,’ Bono replied. Only this time it was contrived. The magic was missing on Tuesday night. But not the pleasure. Reed was one of Bono’s heroes. Bono had been no great record collector when he was young, but one of the few good records he had was of the Velvet Underground … Bono called on Lou to play the next night at the Ramada. Reed, after much persuasion, shyly consented, offering rare renditions of ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Vicious.’”
Ironically, despite Lou’s heartfelt involvement, several members of the press were even more cynical about his involvement with this venture than they had been about Farm Aid or Sun City, openly questioning his motives for enlisting. “Lou Reed is a washed-up ex-rocker who couldn’t fill my garage with paying fans,” commented one particularly riled journalist. “Somehow he managed to cash in on a Honda scooter commercial, and now he’s turned up on television and the Amnesty tour with his latest product, Mistrial, in tow.” And another scowled, “The Amnesty lineup consisted of such superstars as Sting, U2, Peter Gabriel, the Neville Brothers, and other has-beens such as Lou Reed, Jackson Browne, and Joan Baez also attempting to rekindle their flagging careers.” Even positive reviews were tinged with similar sentiments, as in the New York Times: “These concerts also helped seasoned, consistently creative artists like Mr. Gabriel and Mr. Reed reach the wider audience their work has long merited.”
On June 15, after two weeks of sold-out touring across the country, the concert’s core performers mustered their combined efforts and enthusiasm for a grand finale. From noon until midnight MTV presented, live from Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the last show in the Conspiracy of Hope tour. Lou, who had done his set earlier, returned to the stage during U2’s set to join Bono and the rest of the band in the antiapartheid song “Sun City.”
At the end of the month, Reed was back on the road, touring behind the Mistrial effort. “The most surprising thing about Lou Reed’s Tuesday night August 19 concert at the Universal Amphitheater was that the hall was only half-filled,” commented one reviewer. �
�Those who attended, however, saw what amounts to Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Survivor Traveling Roadshow—nearly two hours’ worth of two-chord rockers, third-person story-songs, and seven tunes off his latest album, Mistrial.”
In the autumn of 1986, Lou was recruited into RAD, a series of MTV Rock Against Drugs public-service announcements, joining the ranks of ex-drug-addict rock stars behind slogans such as “drugs suck.” Although eager to participate, Reed was concerned about being hypocritical: “I had a lot of problems with that spot. When all these rock people make these announcements—‘I did it, you shouldn’t’—my attitude when I was out on the street was, now he’s had his fucking fun, and he’s going to turn around and say, ‘Don’t have any fun because I tell you it’s not worth it.’ Who the fuck are you to tell me anything? I was prefacing it, saying, ‘I don’t want to tell you what to do, but speaking for myself, da, da, da …’ And the director said, ‘Lou, no offense, but this is aimed at eight-year-olds. You do that and they’ll go to sleep.’ So I thought about it, and that’s when I came up with what I said: ‘I did drugs … Don’t you.’”
***
As 1986 drew to a close, the sporadic Mistrial publicity was on hiatus, as were the Amnesty tours. To keep his schedule full, Lou concentrated on more collaborations. Tipping his hat to an early influence, he joined his friend the bass player Rob Wasserman on a version of Frank Sinatra’s “One for My Baby,” which wound up on Wasserman’s Duets album. Lou also worked through early 1987 with Ruben Blades on the latter’s first English-language record, Nothing but the Truth. “Lou and I finished a draft for a song about a son coming back to a painful reunion with his parents,” Blades recounted. While Blades sat in the library of Reed’s New Jersey home, in the music room above, Lou played the melody to the song on his guitar. The tune prompted Blades to write some lyrics, and from this partnership came “The Calm Before the Storm.” “We were both emotionally exhausted,” Blades recalled. “I almost had an anxiety attack that night.”
On December 22, in Japan at the close of a two-day U.N. International Year of Peace Conference, Lou joined rockers from the Soviet Union, the United States, Europe, Africa, and Japan at the Japanese Jingu Baseball Stadium before some thirty-two thousand listeners in a benefit concert the performers called Hurricane Irene after the name of a Greek peace goddess. Hurricane Irene’s aim was to raise public awareness as well as money to establish a computer-based information network at the University for Peace in Costa Rica.
At the beginning of 1987 Reed flew to London to play the yearly Amnesty International benefit, the Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, with Peter Gabriel, Duran Duran, Mark Knopfler, Jackson Browne, and many others at the London Palladium.
By May, Lou was back on the road in the U.S., promoting Mistrial again. That summer his tour met up with U2 in Europe. This was the first time Lou had ever worked as a support act at a commercial concert.
In October, as a mark of his new, positive image, Rolling Stone magazine’s twentieth anniversary issue came out carrying long interviews with Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and, among twenty other major rock stars of the sixties through the eighties, Lou Reed. The same month a local Syracuse paper published an interview with a Scottish punk rocker who had visited the city and demanded to know where there was “a monument to Lou Reed at Syracuse University.” One of Lou’s favorite teachers, the poet Phillip Booth, recalled earlier that year discovering a tribute in the English-department men’s room where some wiseass had scrawled “LOU REED SHAT HERE” above the toilet.
In December, Reed played a benefit concert for homeless children in New York. The event, held at Madison Square Garden, was organized by Paul Simon. The first of a number of celebrity surprise appearances came when Debbie Harry and Grace Jones introduced Lou Reed and sang backup on “Tell It to Your Heart,” “New Sensations,” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed, in turn, introduced Dion, who sang “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue.” Then, Dion was joined onstage by Reed, Paul Simon, Ruben Blades, James Taylor, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen, calling themselves—after Dion’s legendary group—the Belmonts. As they sang Dion’s “Lonely Teenager,” the crowd leapt to its feet. “These guys all loved being Belmonts,” marveled Dion, adding, “Lou Reed, it was like, he knew the part.”
***
In Lou’s tragic, majestic world there was a feeling that an end of something was being reached. Another beginning was necessary. Lou and Sylvia had recently clashed over his refusal to have children. When things were going well with Lou, Sylvia did not communicate with her old friends Susan Springfield, Roberta Bayley, and Risé (John Cale’s wife!), but when things started going badly with Lou, she got back in touch.
His least interesting albums are arguably New Sensations and Mistrial. He was beginning to lose fans who had been with him since the Velvet days. And one man who was in Lou’s AA group became fairly disenchanted with his work and him in the middle of the 1980s. When a member of their group who had been a close friend of Lou’s for twenty years went nuts and Lou was called upon to help him out, he expressed total indifference to his “friend’s” plight, exclaiming, “Who gives a fuck about him!” He really did not give a shit, and maybe that, acquaintances increasingly thought, was what really made him tick. “He doesn’t care for anyone except himself,” opined one.
“Maybe he has concerns for the masses. I mean maybe that’s what Stalin was like, maybe he had no friends but really loved people! I always liked Sylvia. I used to hear a lot of dirt. I think they had some bad moments.”
In rock, the decades ruthlessly winnowed out the losers. As the eighties entered their second half and the clarion call of the century’s final decade could be heard in the distance, more voices from the sixties and seventies fell silent; Dylan was still being heard. Neil Young was still out there.
“How long do you try to do it [make that grand comeback]?” challenged avant-garde guitarist-composer Glenn Branca. “At some point you have to actually start doing it. He hasn’t been trying to start doing anything as far as I can see.”
Chapter Nineteen
Imitation of Andy
THE BATTLE OF THE LOU REEDS: 1987–89
Even today he looks unhappy, like a walking disaster. What’s wrong with him? He married a man, he married a woman …
Paul Morrissey
Then on February 22, 1987, shocking the world and in particular those like Lou whose lives had been so irrevocably tied up with his, Andy Warhol died in New York Hospital following a routine gallbladder operation. Warhol’s sudden exit forced Reed to confront not only his sense of grief, but the sense of himself he had gained through his association with the pop artist and his entourage at the Factory. “Andy had a great effect on my formative years. His way of looking at things I miss. I owe him that. His whole aesthetic. I still wonder, if I look at something new and interesting, oh, I wonder how Andy’d think about that.” Andy had thought of Lou as a friend and was hurt. He suspected it had something to do with Lou’s marriage, suggesting that maybe Lou “didn’t want to see peculiar people.” Still hurting from Reed’s refusal to hand over the money due him from their early collaboration, and envious of Reed’s newfound commercial success, Warhol had stepped up his critical remarks and cold-shouldering of his former protégé. According to a Factory acolyte, “Lou totally idolized Andy and Andy rejected Lou very deliberately so that Lou was aware of it. And so Lou always had to be the kind of prodigal son, who was trying to prove himself to Andy. If Andy liked you, he rejected you in that way. And then he would go and put everybody down to everybody else, so he would say, ‘What’s wrong with Lou, he’s so talented, it’s such a waste.’ I don’t think Lou ever outgrew Andy.” People in Warhol’s entourage recalled Andy treating Lou “very, very badly” on several occasions when Reed had visited the Factory in the 1970s, which, considering how mean Andy could be when he put his mind to it, is a chilling image.
According to Lou, the final break came in 1981 when he and Sylvia were riding in a
car with Warhol. “It was snowing out and the driver was speeding. I asked him to slow down. Andy turned to me and in a fey, arch, whiny voice said, ‘You wouldn’t have said that a few years ago.’ He was being so evil I never spoke to him again. He stirred me up and he did it on purpose. He got me very mad that he did it. You see, Andy had to be the leader.
“The Factory was a really strange place. People came and went, got used up, then moved on. One particular person became dominant there for a while and I just didn’t like what was happening there and stopped going. Andy would moan at me, but I really couldn’t face it. Things build up between people, but basically—and this is going to sound strange—he just wanted me to call him. On the phone. I’d see him around, but I wouldn’t call him.
“We had a very major falling out. I was in touch, but not close. I didn’t want the things I said regurgitated into the diaries I knew he was going to put together. I wanted to have a normal personal conversation with Andy and that wasn’t possible. He used to tape-record everything, every conversation he ever had, and I didn’t want our talk to end up in some publication, which is what would have happened. He would only talk to me on his terms. Everything always had to be on Andy’s terms.”
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