Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  ***

  That night the band and Billy Name had dinner together—and the night after that, and the night after that. They even visited the Louvre together. John and Lou were considering playing some Drella concerts in the U.S. and Europe. The band talked of getting together to play in a club in Paris, although nothing came of it. However, the French reunion would not die, and throughout 1990 to 1992 Lou was plagued by the question, “Is there any chance of something like that happening again?”

  He answered emphatically, “It will never happen. If was purely a moment in time. Again, a tribute to Andy. Once in a while these things happen. It was a wonderful, joyous occasion, but no, because I wouldn’t want to give people the impression that there’s any chance ever that the Velvet Underground could exist again. It won’t. Or play again in public, which it won’t, because I won’t be there.”

  Asked, “Why?” he responded, “You must remember, I wrote, what, ninety-seven percent of the material for the Velvet Underground. So these are things I’ve gone through on my way to making Magic and Loss. So I don’t want to—and I don’t, not in real life—look back, you know, dwell over my shoulder. There’s nothing to be gained from it. I believe that. You’re trying to grow and go forward, and the people you were with then are not where you are now. So it’s not a fair matchup.”

  In August 1990, Lou toured Japan with Maureen Tucker’s band as his opening act at several shows. During the tour Lou and John played what may have been the last Drella show in Tokyo.

  By this time, both Songs for Drella and New York had come to represent to the public a reborn Lou Reed—a Lou Reed seemingly unafraid of recognizing the vast influences of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

  The spring of 1992 brought Lou together again with Moe and Sterling. Lou was touring Europe with Magic and Loss at the same time Moe was touring behind her latest album with Sterling on guitar. The three of them ran into each other in Paris; Lou played at one of their shows. Sylvia hung out with Sterling and Moe, threatening to move in with them if Lou screamed at her one more time.

  Sterling got the feeling that Lou might be open to a reunion. He clearly saw that Lou wasn’t enjoying himself onstage anymore because he had become such a control freak. When Lou admitted that he had had fun playing with Moe and Sterling in Paris, Sterling replied, “Well, see, Lou, if you’d only consider …”

  Polygram had started work on a boxed set of VU music. This led to a meeting in New York in December 1992. “It was really a great meeting, because we were all friends again,” Moe Tucker recalled. “We were fooling around, when Lou suggested that we get back together to play Madison Square Garden for a million dollars. It was just a joke, but it was the first time any of us had said anything like that in front of the other three. After a lot of thought, we all decided, ‘Yeah, a Velvets reunion is a really cool idea.’”

  On December 5, Cale played a concert at New York University accompanied by Sterling. Lou joined them onstage for two songs. “The evening’s biggest treat came when Lou Reed strode onstage in suburban casuals, guitar strapped to his chest,” wrote Ann Powers in the New York Times. “Mr. Cale, Mr. Reed, and Mr. Morrison launched into ‘Style It Takes,’ from Songs for Drella. Only the crucial absence of drummer Maureen Tucker kept this from being a Velvet Underground reunion. Mr. Reed’s aggressive playing dominated the proceedings, but the three men did listen to one another, building a fractured reflection of the foundational Velvet sound.”

  After that night, Lou started talking eagerly about a reunion. Sylvia began investigating the possibility of the Velvet Underground doing some shows in Europe in 1993. Shortly thereafter, Cale went on the Tonight show and told Jay Leno that they were planning to get back together (“for the money!”).

  Lou playing at the opening of the Robert Mapplethorpe Room at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1993. (Bob Gruen)

  In February 1993, “we all got back together in New York for a rehearsal,” Tucker recounted. “We played music together for five or six hours. Everybody was feeling a bit nervous at first. We really didn’t know what was going to happen. None of us had any idea how the others would react. But, in the end, we were all extremely happy with the result.”

  They agreed to do a short tour of Europe that summer. In retrospect, though Lou insisted that it was just a whimsical notion based upon having fun, this was a brilliant career move for Reed, engineered by Sylvia.

  As soon as word of the agreement was out, the businesspeople—spearheaded by Sylvia, who would also become the VU’s road manager—set up the dates and worked out the contracts for a three-week tour, followed by a live album and video to be recorded in Paris. It was left to the band to carry out a series of rigorous rehearsals not unlike the rehearsals of 1965 that had bolted the musicians to their sound. They were conducted, fittingly, in a former factory on West 26th Street in Manhattan.

  Although glad to get back together, they were not without apprehensions. It was not possible to simply erase the years of bitterness between the rest of the band and Reed. Even now, he held the whip over them because he owned the publishing rights to the vast majority of the VU’s material. According to the proprietor of the Mudd Club, Steve Mass, who had many conversations with Cale in the early 1980s, “John would say to me—he would crow—that he wanted to extract the Velvet Underground, the history, the culture, from Lou Reed. Reed wanted to kill the Velvet Underground and Cale was the carrier of the virus. The way Cale would express it to me was in terms of the financial elements, the lawyers and the accountants, and Lou Reed just controlled it. He had the legal power and had it all tied up.”

  At first Cale emerged as their spokesman, telling Richard Williams, in a piece for the Independent on Sunday magazine, “Nothing would have gotten done without Lou thinking it was a good idea. There was nothing happening for him this year, so he decided to try it. We had two days of playing to see if it was fun, and it turned out to be fantastic. All the original enthusiasm was there.

  “It’s good that Lou has about twenty thousand guitars, or he’d be spending hours retuning between every number. That’s what we used to do, and it drove people crazy. But Lou is being Lou Reed again—he’s turning up his guitar and wailing. Which is how most of those songs work anyway: turn it up and crank it out.”

  In another interview with Allan Jones for Melody Maker earlier that year in Paris, Cale had reflected upon their motives for performing: “As far as I’m concerned, this is an opportunity to take care of some unfinished business. The business we started when we first put the VU together. We never saw it through.”

  He seemed hopeful about the possibilities of doing new work: “I’ve got three pieces I’ve almost finished that I’ve already talked to Lou about, and he wants to do them. I don’t really think he’s interested in doing something that’ll come out as just another Lou Reed solo album. From what he’s said, he sees this very definitely as a group thing.”

  When Jones remarked “that sounds uncommonly democratic of him,” Cale snapped, “Lou, democratic? Let’s not go too far. Let’s put it this way: if he thinks I’m going to turn up to play ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ he’s going to be very disappointed.”

  Once they had found their groove and felt as comfortable with each other as they ever would, the band agreed to receive a series of European journalists whose publications were willing to treat their re-formation as a cover story. Matt Snow from Q came away with a sharply etched image of the four veterans: “The first is small, late forties, dressed in black with a paradoxically mumsy face. The second wears jeans, T-shirt, and a pair of hexagonal glasses, giving him the aspect of an intimidatingly intelligent monkey. The third sports a Gothic profile, gray-edged chestnut Eton crop. The fourth, like the previous two an alarmingly well-preserved fiftyish, has the ranginess, acne-scarred complexion, and graying, slightly receding Prince Valiant haircut of a perpetual student. They are Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker, Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison, the names as hallowed to the alternative-rock
fan as John, Paul, George, and Ringo are to everyone else.”

  Every journalist who interviewed the band emerged with some colorful images. Despite his repeated insistence that they were there primarily to have “fun,” Lou Reed’s uncomfortable presence dominated the sessions. Max Bell, writing in Vox, described Lou as alternately staring at Sterling “like one of the Gorgons” and speaking “in a voice that creaks like the cellar door at Frankenstein’s castle.” Bell thought that the band and everyone involved in the project were living in “Lou’s world.”

  Reed was undoubtedly calling the shots. It was he, for example, who made their much debated decision to open for U2 on several dates in Europe following their own tour. And it was he, not Cale, who conducted the rehearsals. Despite his often dour mien, Lou attempted to present their position in as light a vein as possible. He repeated over and over again like a mantra, “The only raison d’être for this is fun. Fun. To play for fun. This is not about money. I like playing with them; we had fun in France; we had fun sitting in with one another. And so long as money doesn’t get in the way of anything and you can afford to do it just for fun and not lose any money and it doesn’t become a career—that is, it’s in essence pure, driven only by the instinct to make something nice—that’s a nice, pure thing to do.”

  Ever since they had started meeting in late 1992, Sterling and Lou had appeared to old friends to have fallen in love, giving each other messages of appreciation as strong as valentines. Consequently, Sterling was shocked and hurt when Lou started screaming at him one Friday during rehearsals. Morrison told friends that if he had had a day like that at the beginning of the rehearsals, he could have saved everyone the trouble of going through with them. But then, much to everyone’s surprise, at the end of the day Lou actually called up Sterling and apologized. Lou’s handlers put the tantrum down to his nervousness about the fast-approaching shows, pointing out that he was as nervous now about performing as he had been when he was fifteen.

  Reed, Cale, and Morrison all suffered from paranoia, taking a conspiratorial view of the world. The difference between 1968 and 1993 was that Sterling and John were able to see Lou with enough detachment to feel sorry for him. With a little help from their handlers, they were able to see that Lou was trapped inside this paranoia like a mastodon in an arctic ice cap, that he was not to be condemned for his brattish mouth, but rather pitied for the pain his every waking minute contained.

  By then, though, they were all suffering from some of the anxiety that goes hand in hand with any international rock tour in the 1990s. The sheer financial logistics were terrifying, as was their vulnerability before the rock press. Veteran rock writers were warning that the Velvets had more to lose than any other band in rock history if they blew even one gig on the three-week tour. The consensus of opinion was that agreeing to open for U2 had already put their reputation in jeopardy. “Wouldn’t that be like Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees?” queried one fan in a letter to Rolling Stone. Meanwhile, despite another letter published in the magazine that stated simply, “The Velvet Underground are back. There is a God,” other fans voiced their opinions that they should never have threatened the VU myth in the first place. To make matters more uncomfortable, the band was criticized for the outrageously high ticket prices—as much as $75 in London and Amsterdam.

  For the most part, the positive chemistry of the foursome overcame their collective fear, and Sterling and Moe worked as a buffer between Lou and John. In fact, the reunion might have been a great success, and perhaps even a long-lasting one, if it hadn’t been for the added pressure of Sylvia, whose ego had ballooned out of proportion to her job. According to several people involved with the shows, Sylvia made no secret of her contempt for the other members of the outfit, particularly John, whom she called stupid and untalented. John was convinced that she had learned everything she knew in this department from Lou, but others were not so sure. After lasting through twelve hard, embattled years with Lou, Sylvia had developed a tough shell and an instinct for self-preservation that led her to lash out at others. Sylvia seemed more intent than ever on shoring up Lou’s image and, by extension, her own.

  She virtually showered contempt on Cale, going so far at one point as to make the curious remark that as he had grown older John had become exceedingly ugly while Lou had grown more and more handsome. Sterling and Moe were also subjected to foulmouthed put-downs. Sylvia seemed to think that the “lesser” band members should feel grateful to Lou for stooping to their level to help them.

  Being tough and highly self-confident themselves, the band members could have shrugged off Sylvia’s cutting remarks, had she not been their road manager. Worse still, Lou put Sylvia between himself and the band. Despite living with Lou for over a decade, Sylvia did not appear to understand the chemistry of collaboration in creative rock music. She had no conception of how important Cale was to Reed. In the long run, observers noted that it was Sylvia’s separation of Lou from the band that would do the most damage.

  In the opinion of one observer, Lou was simply reverting to the adolescent pattern he had never grown out of. “Mother is going to take care of this for Lou,” she said. “I mean, there are people who don’t grow up. I think as an adolescent Lou probably went through the same thing that all kids do, which would tell you something about his intelligence. He isn’t smart. Sometimes very simple propositions take an incredible amount of time to explain to him. I mean, he doesn’t understand simple things about deal-making, like if you want to get a higher royalty rate, you’d better have something to trade off for it. A simple rule of life. If you give me something, I’m going to have to give you something. Most people have a sense of this. Lou doesn’t. Lou thinks the way you’re going to get a higher royalty rate is just go and ask for it. Which I suppose is like an eight-year-old.”

  Even though Lou managed to place a certain amount of distance between himself and the band, it wasn’t long before the rivalry surfaced between Lou and John, just as it had twenty-five years earlier. The dispute that emerged centered around who was going to produce the live recordings of their reunion tour. Each man thought he was the only one capable of pulling it off. Soon, they were both preparing for a pitched battle. Lou told everybody when the tour started, “Catch it while you can, it’s probably not going to last that long.”

  “Somebody said Lou Reed wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been for John Cale,” commented one friend. “Lou recognized that and that was one of his biggest problems. The sad thing about it was that John didn’t recognize this. John represented everything that Lou wanted to be. In terms of the musical reputation and the other intellectual things. John is probably the most highly trained musician ever to play rock and roll. Cale was very insecure about what he wrote, but he was not stuck in the sense that Reed was—stuck in adolescence.”

  ***

  With Lou predicting its early demise, the tour kicked off in Edinburgh on June 1. The first show did not live up to the expectations of an audience geared up for an exciting set composed at least in part of the VU’s new material. After waiting for the five-minute standing ovation to quiet down, Lou yelled, “One-two-three …,” and the band launched into “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together.” Much of the ensuing material, however, failed to make good on the band’s promise to premiere new songs and improvise on the classics, leading one attention-seeking Caledonian to shout, “This is the most boring load of shit I’ve ever seen.” Chris Whent heard other things being shouted that night that were highly positive. “I thought it was like a lovefest. I have never felt such a warmth of emotion. And the sound was different than anything I’d ever heard before. The entire evening sounded utterly and remarkably like the Velvet Underground.”

  By other accounts the band was tense on the first night. “The first thing you notice as the Velvet Underground stutter and stumble through their first few numbers is the inappropriate rude health of Lou Reed,” wrote Pat Kane in the Guardian. “He bulges out of his black
T-shirt and blue denims like a cross between Bryan Adams and Nosferatu; the pebble glasses make him look more like a pop professor than real pop professors do.”

  “‘I Can’t Stand It’ ends the set,” wrote one critic. “But everyone knows they’ll be back, and the cheers are just turning to impatient boos when Lou leads them back out for two encores: a tense, neurotic, and inevitable ‘Waiting for the Man,’ and a spellbinding trip through ‘Heroin.’ At the end they line up like chorus girls or the cast of The Mousetrap. Cale puts his arm around Lou. Lou jumps. You get the feeling that the last time Cale touched him, his fists were probably clenched. There’s still a lot of history between these two. Lou smiles, puts his arm around Maureen. Sterling taps her on the head.”

  The following night’s show was far superior. “The revelation on Thursday, though, was the diminutive Ms. Tucker’s drumming,” wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times. “Standing at her kit and whacking away, she makes a tom-toms of doom sound that inspired straight-ahead punk drumming for a generation. The effect is not quirky or amateurish; it is rock like in the granitic sense of that word, the foundation on which the band could build a creative future to match its potently nostalgic past.”

  From Edinburgh they traveled down to London for two shows on June 5 and 6. The first was at a 1,200-capacity club, the Forum. David Fricke wrote in Rolling Stone: “You could definitely feel the invisible lightning flashing between Reed and Cale as they faced off during the extended guitar–viola jousting in ‘Mr. Rain.’ Reed lancing Cale’s agitated Arabic droning with paint-peeling feedback.”

  From England they went to Holland for shows in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Back in 1988 a poll of Dutch journalists had voted the first VU album the best record of all time. Since then Lou had received the Dutch equivalent of a Grammy—the Edison Award—for the New York album. The tour was turning into a triumphal procession.