Laurie flipped out in “On Riptide” and she screamed in her dreams. She wished she were dead. On the last song, the title song, Lou delivered his answer to Laurie’s questions on Bright Red’s “Freefall,” insisting that she take him at his word and accept that he had really changed. The old Lou is gone, welcome the new one.
“Set the Twilight Reeling is Lou Reed’s strongest effort since New York, and although it sonically mines a similar vein, it’s not quite as conceptual in nature,” John Metzger reported in The Music Box. “Among the highlights is ‘NYC Man,’ which, replete with literary references, relays the tale of a battered and bruised relationship as only Reed can tell it.”
“The best track on Twilight was ‘Trade In’, on which Lou revealed his feelings for Anderson,” wrote Nick Johnston in Uncut magazine. “‘That’s a great song,’ Lou said. ‘Once in a while, I get a song like that and no one notices it. I love the lyrics to it. I thought it really captured that certain kind of, “Oh you sweet thing.”’”
“Reed has been a changed man on record so many times, it was easy to mistake sincerity for shtick,” wrote David Fricke in Rolling Stone. “But the central image came in the closing, elegiac title track of a soul singer in mid-epiphany—‘But as the drums beat, he finds himself growing hard / In the microphone’s face he sees her face growing large … I accept the newfound man and set the twilight reeling’—has the ring of truth and the distinct kick of autobiography.”
“I had heard dark whisperings that Reed had cut Anderson off from her old life and old friends, ‘brainwashed her’ in a way he is said to have done with several former companions,” wrote Barney Hoskyns. “That was not the impression I was getting here. Lou and Laurie seemed genuinely lovey-dovey together. In fact, he was boyishly proud as he showed her the artwork for the new album.”
Bright Red and Twilight were question-and-answer albums. Both singers were poets; their songs were true. Twilight was dedicated to Laurie and could have been called Songs for Laurie, whereas Bright Red could be called Questions for Lou. They are as intimately related as their composers. Any way you look at them, they provide the perfect place from which to begin this account of Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s dual adventure.
According to Hal Willner, “They were a perfect couple. They shared the same views on life and work, but from very different backgrounds.” The difference between Twilight and Growing Up in Public was that when Lou came across with his big proposal, rather than falling into his arms like Sylvia, Laurie turned him down. This changed the dynamic of their relationship.
***
In 1993 Laurie had introduced Lou to Robert Wilson, the theatrical genius of their times and a member of Lou’s generation who had hung out on the fringes of the Factory at the time Andy Warhol started managing the Velvet Underground. He revolutionized the theater and electrified the avant-garde with an opera, Einstein on the Beach, he put on in collaboration with Philip Glass back in 1976, the same year Lou put out Coney Island Baby. Laurie had written a score for a Wilson production, Alcestis, in 1986.
Wilson recalled that Reed’s soft voice “always made me cry. He was always so uncompromising and his ironic humour was always on an edge.” In 1996 Wilson asked Lou to write the music for the third piece in a trilogy of plays that had included his recent hit The Black Rider, with words by William Burroughs and music by Tom Waits. He wanted Lou to rework H. G. Wells’s Time Machine in words and music. It would be called Time Rocker. Lou was thrilled as he loved to be commissioned to write songs. Writing plays is an obvious step a lyricist can take to move into prose, but writing for Wilson’s ethereal and spellbinding theater tableaux coming out of another factory could not have better suited Lou’s muse and technical assistant. And with the energy of that change, he began to find ways to deepen and broaden his writing.
Time Rocker stretched the transformations of Twilight. The big development here came in “Turning Time Around.” He defined love as time. The act of love is to give your time to the one you love. Yet between them Lou and Laurie were both becoming so engaged in creative times, there was less and less time to extend to each other. For Lou, the big threat lay in Laurie becoming divine. Then we get the brilliant “Talking Book.” Any time Lou opened the book, Laurie told him what to do.
Reed and Wilson had a lot in common, both being radical, unorthodox geniuses in their fields. Wilson admired Reed enormously for his uncompromising stance. But in Europe, where theater people looked down on rock people, there was some friction in the Hamburg Theater about the sound.
The bottom line was in constructing his plays and operas, Wilson saw the music as one layer, the text as another layer, and the actors’ movements as a third. His theater was constructed on layers of stylized movements and still, almost silent, dreamlike atmosphere. It was the way he put these layers together that created the final piece. In other words, although Lou managed to ensure his band-leader Mike Rathke oversaw direction of the German singers and musicians in the Time Rocker band, he was not in control of the final product. At the time, Lou said diplomatically that he saw the advantage of not being limited by his vocal range.
According to Lou, “The whole thing is that you got to believe the singer. You bleed with Edith Piaf. You hear Maria Callas and you believe it. With certain people like that, you just go ‘Whoa!’ But there are also great actors—make no mistake. In Time Rocker, I was writing for actors and actresses and their voices and not for me, and I found it really interesting. Songwriting is phenomenal. I get a major-league kick out of it. That is the only reason I do it—I just want to have fun. I think you should build a statue to me in Central Park.”
Time Rocker opened at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in late 1996. The dialogue was spoken in German and Lou’s songs were recited by robotic actors with German accents, backed by ambient music. Wilson recalled an incident before the opening: “There was a press conference at 11 a.m. in early June, and it was raining and snowing and sleeting, and someone from the press asked, ‘Mr. Reed, do you like Hamburg?’
“‘Yeah, I like Hamburg.’
“‘Why do you like Hamburg?’
“‘’Cause I like the weather.’”
A year later, Time Rocker opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1997. At the final dress rehearsal Lou’s uncompromising side emerged. Lou asked the sound engineer at BAM, Wurzbach, to make the sound louder. The engineers pushed the faders up. Lou said to push them higher. He listened. Then to their horror, he asked them to go even higher. He finally seemed pleased. But after the performance, he came back and asked—although Wurzbach was not sure if “ask” is an accurate term—to push them up to an unheard-of 11.
Wilson had a great sense of humour, so Lou had fun on Time Rocker. It reminded him of working with Andy Warhol. Wilson and Reed were on the same level and connected well. “I figured it was a great opportunity for me to bust out of the straitjacket of the twelve-song LP,” he said.
Lou mixes with his minions at Allen Ginsberg’s memorial service, St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, New York, 1997. (David Schmidlapp)
The reviews were sympathetic but limited in their praise. To start with, the dialogue was performed in German, and even though the songs were in English, the German-accented delivery limited their effect. Furthermore, whereas Wilson’s recent collaborations with Tom Waits had taken off successfully, Time Rocker remained earthbound but it had planted a seed in Lou. Time Rocker became an obsession with Lou when he recorded all the songs for his next album but could not get a record company to release it. Perhaps it was too soon after Twilight to release another Lou Reed album, or perhaps the poor critical reception and soft sales of the former left his record company hoping for something different.
***
In July 1997, Laurie Anderson curated the Meltdown festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Among other artists, she invited Lou and his super-tight band, which moved the music like a single, well-oiled machine. Lou and his band flew forward thrust into Lon
don. It was a special night because Lou was going to be singing directly to Laurie. “The night of the show when the band and I hit the stage, I was really pumped,” Lou wrote in the booklet of A Perfect Night in London. “Wow! I had an acoustic guitar with the sound of diamonds. I had a sound and I knew it and I was going to be able to share it.”
Among the tracks from Time Rocker recorded for the Perfect Night album were “Turning Time Around,” “Into the Divine,” “On the Run,” and “Talking Book”; these were all “down on your knees, Laurie, please.” “Talking Book” was the original title for Laurie’s autobiography, which had come out as Stories from the Nerve Bible in 1994. Lou’s song is up there with “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” and is rather like “The Gift” (on White Light/White Heat) in reverse. This time Lou wasn’t sending himself in a box to get his brain split in two; he was putting Laurie in a book—like a small box—that he could carry with him wherever he went. Every time he had a problem or a question, all Lou had to do was open the book and Laurie would always tell him what to do.
Consequently, the only record we have of Time Rocker is the three songs on Perfect Night and two others on Ecstasy. A Perfect Night in London was released in 1998. Then, with exquisite timing, at the 41st Grammy Awards Lou won his only Grammy—Best Long Form Music Video for American Masters: Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary chronicling his career to that point. The awards ceremony took place on February 24, 1999, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
FAST FORWARD
VAL KILMER’S RANCH, THE PECOS, NEW MEXICO, 2005
Roderick Romero is an artist with two particular crafts. He is the leader and singer of the trance band Sky Cries Mary. He is also a world-class architect of tree houses. He built a number of his most famous ones for movie and rock stars. Roderick reminisces about meeting Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in the summer of 2005.
Lou came out to Val Kilmer’s ranch with Laurie to get away and take off to Mexico. At that time I had finished working on Val’s big tree-house project and I’d come up with this idea for building a stone house off of this cliff that looked out over a river. So I started working on that, but then Val was like, “This is awesome but I’m running out of money.” I said, “That’s cool.” So I went back to New York to hang out with my daughter Petra. That’s when he called me and said, “You’re not going to believe who’s here!” I’m like, “Who?” He said, “Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson are having dinner in your tree house tonight!” I go, “Well, do they like it?” He said, “They love it! You gotta get back out here.” So I got on a plane the next day and shot back to Albuquerque and drove out to Val’s ranch on the Pecos.
Every night for the next seventeen nights we had dinner in the ranch house: Lou and I always sat opposite each other. It would be like Laurie and Val and Val’s assistant and Lou and me. We sat around and bounced ideas about everything in our brains. Most of it was fun. We talked about Andy Warhol, we talked about the New York scene, about sound quality. We just went through it all. There were many super-fun moments, but during these dinners we had three huge arguments. And those nights were like, ahhh!
It started when I said something about a guy who had almost killed Laurie. Lou was like, “I hate that motherfucker.” He would get so mad because this person dragged Laurie out on a very intense trip across the Himalayas. She got super-ill because she couldn’t take the oxygen level, but he kept pushing her. This guy’s a very good friend of mine so I was trying to defend him. I’m like, “He’s not such a bad person.” Lou was like, “Fuck you! He almost killed the love of my life!”
The next time we got into an argument it was about Kenneth Anger. I thought Anger was a really great, revolutionary filmmaker, but it turned out that Lou hated him, and he got really pissed at me. Laurie would always try to cool things out or make light of it, rolling her eyes and laughing quietly.
The third one began when I didn’t know what a big fan he was of James Dean, and I brought up the fact that there was a lot of information that James Dean was gay. When he died in his ’53 Porsche, they found little burn marks all over his chest. Back in those days in gay bars, people would be like, “Hey, put out a cigarette on my chest.”
Lou got so mad: “James Dean? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He said, “Roderick, I asked Laurie how old you are and she said you’re 14.” He loved James Dean and was really pissed. I don’t think it was because he was gay, I think I was saying something he just didn’t believe. I guess there were certain triggers. He’s like, “Fucking Roderick!” And then I always backed down because it’s Lou Reed staring at me across the table. [If you want to know where Lou sat with Dean, check out “Walk on the Wild Side (Bertallot Radio Mix)”, track 18, on that essential Reed-curated compilation, NYC Man.]
Before we left, Lou was like, “Roderick, you’re going to call me when you get back to New York, right? I got to get out of here.” I’m like, “Yeah, sure I’ll call you.” But after they left, I started thinking it was like a summer romance. He was nice to me at the dinner table, but I mean, come on, this was Lou Reed. So a month went by and then he called me one night. He said, “Roderick, what the fuck is going on?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ecstasy
1999–2001
He was the Johnny Cash of New York rock.
Mick Jagger
In the fall of 1999, Lou started working on his next album, Ecstasy, with a new producer, Hal Willner. They were both seeking the same grail, the perfection of recorded sound through new developments in digital recording techniques. From then until the end of Lou’s life, Willner, as Lou called him, would become his faithful companion on sonic adventures, his producer and advisor who accompanied him everywhere. They shared much in common in terms of musical taste and having fun, instantly feeling as if they had known each other from college. Lou finally had a mensch in the studio. If Laurie was his first guardian angel, Robert Wilson was his second, and Willner his third. According to Roderick Romero, sound was always on his mind. Over the years Lou spent obscene amounts of money trying to make his records sound the way he heard them in his head. “We mostly talked about sound,” said Romero. “We talked about sound quality. We were both really passionate about how we felt that it was great to have all this new technology and how invigorated we were by it. At the same time we felt the sound quality was being lost, like the bandwidth and what you were being exposed to. We both loved vinyl a lot. So we would listen to different albums—like here it is on vinyl, here it is on CD, here it is as a download. And what if you were playing it in your car, what kind of sound are you getting? Lou was passionate about everything to do with sound. He was so passionate about specifics, down to his graphics or the tone of the guitar—or even a string. Everything was diagnosed and he was impeccable about it. He would never let go. He would keep pushing. And he would tell you right out like you know, ‘This is crap and that’s not.’”
“The best thing to do with Lou was to listen to music,” said Willner. “He was someone who would tear up and just cry when he heard something beautiful and get the goose-bumps. And if he had them, he’d show you. There was just nothing like listening to music with Lou.”
***
“Ecstasy is Reed’s finest album since New York,” raved Ted Drozdowski in the Boston Phoenix. “In fact, it rocks harder. The guitars crackle and whistle like a wood fire, displaying a superheated crunch in their rhythm tracks. It seems like the ideal sound Reed’s searched for as he’s experimented with different instrument and amplifier combinations over the years. Some of Ecstasy’s lyrics probe what it means to be human as thoroughly as ‘Some Kinda Love’ or ‘I’m Set Free’ from The Velvet Underground. Yet they’re tempered with a poignancy acquired from decades of self-examination and perhaps a newfound tenderness that’s a benefit of the love Reed’s found with performance artist/musician Laurie Anderson.”
According to this writer’s interpretation of Ecstasy song by song, Lou ope
ned the album with the title song, bemoaning that he had lost his ecstasy (Laurie) and fearing he will not be able to get her back. In its third song, “Paranoia Key of E,” Laurie caught him cheating on her again. At first, he swore this wasn’t true. He blamed a friend of hers for stirring up trouble. He suggested they make up their own language so nobody could intrude upon their private discourse. Then he grew tired of posturing and admitted that he had had another woman in their bed. On “Mad” he tried to cool her out by comparing them to other couples. His attitude was the roles are shifting but let’s dance. He tried to blame it on her for telling him she would be out of town. He couldn’t believe she had found a hairpin. It was all so mundane. Laurie got really mad! She screamed that he was scum and she screamed at him to grow up. She torpedoed a coffee cup at his metal head. First he took umbrage, but then he turned around and threw a moody. He admitted that he wasn’t always right; still, he was upset by what she said. After all, he had been exhausted and she had told him she was going to be out of town! How could he even imagine that she would reverse her plans? Talk about perversion! Talk about a hairpin! Back-peddling as fast as his little legs would go, he puffed on “Modern Dance” that on reflection he was willing to admit that his 1950s concept of a wife’s role might not suit Laurie so well in 2000.
In an extraordinary profile of Reed called “Oh My God I get very difficult and depressed sometimes” by the British writer Nick Johnstone in the May 2000 edition of Uncut, Lou acted out the drama. “It was kind of like in the song ‘Mad,’” he said, raising his voice to act out the role of comic hero. “‘I listened to you. You said you weren’t coming back! You said you weren’t going to be home! Now you are home! Who knew! Look at this!’” He points at the double bed, referring to the section in “Mad” where he gets caught with his pecker in the wind. “‘This is your fault,’” he barks, chuckling. “Now that kind of logic can’t be beat.”
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