Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  Asked if the marriage proposal on Twilight, “Trade In,” produced the rejection on “Modern Dance” on Ecstasy, Lou replied, “It’s hard to believe it isn’t. My work should have a forward thrust to it. After all, there is a universal chord to all of it. He wants her and he wants her in a way she won’t do. ‘Ahh, it’s not a life being a wife, huh? That’s not enough for you? Well, that’s not enough for you? OK! Alright, that’s not for you!’

  “‘Maybe I should go to Amsterdam, okay?’” He careens through the attic of his memory, ranting. “‘You’re not coming? Are you sure you’re not coming? OK, let’s go to Tanganyika!’ Oh my God, I get very difficult and possessed sometimes.’

  “‘I love you, I don’t love you, you do love me, but you don’t love me enough! Or, you love me but you won’t marry me—or vice-versa.’”

  However, by the time he attained the heights on “The White Prism,” Lou had surrendered on all fronts to Laurie. Now he is calling himself her lifelong servant and asking her to cut him loose for his own good and hers. He admits that he cannot do better than this. Then he delivers a classic boy’s fantasy with an image of himself sitting between Laurie’s legs underneath her floor-length dress jerking off and shooting sperm all over its fabric.

  On “Tatters,” Lou reached the morbid conclusion that their love was scattered in tatters on the harsh ground.

  ***

  In June 2000 Lou was headed to London on a summer long tour, which brought this encomium from Ian Fortnam: “Reed’s latest collection Ecstasy is nothing short of a brooding, monovalent menace on a stick and so all would appear to be on target for a cracking show.”

  The tour received the same level of acclaim as the album. Drozdowski was on the money. Commencing with Willner’s fine production values on the album, which had become synonymous with Reed’s collective band, Lou sounded better on the Ecstasy album and subsequent tour than he ever had. You don’t have to know anything about music to appreciate his powerful and graceful group, based on love for the music and the pleasure of playing together as one. “Reed is fully on top of his game,” Fortnam concluded. Gavin Martin wrote in Uncut, “It’s because he is in the flush of a late-flowering Laurie Anderson-inspired romance, or because he is enjoying a living large ethic borne out by Ecstasy’s substantial birth of this whole new Lou, rejuvenated and exulting in his blistering and righteously murderess band. This was an American Master. His art form still potent, the fire still at his fingertips.”

  After Willner completed work with Lou on Ecstasy, he went straight on to produce Laurie’s parallel album, Life on a String. The Lou and Laurie saga as played out across these conversational albums all boiled down to the dynamic of infidelity: The big infidelity now takes center stage on Ecstasy and Laurie’s 2001 album, Life on a String. Laurie outdid herself on String, emphasizing how special Lou was, how much she loved the way his brain worked—but she wondered what had happened to the master of the slow-dance?

  There are three songs in the first half of String in which Laurie turned a radical corner in her telling of the Lou and Laurie saga. First, in “My Compensation,” she introduces Lou as her most precious love. The song ends with her crooning over her love for his brain. Then on “Dark Angel” she brings Lou in as her negative angel who arrived in L.A.’s vicinity by parachute and said he was looking for a Caucasian jester, Laurie. In the lyrics, Laurie has Lou lay a bunch of Mickey Mouse advice on her, which she pointedly ignored. Somebody tripped in that scenario. Let’s get to the center of this: “Broken” is the album’s central charge against Lou. She is badly off because things have not been as wonderful as they might have been, and she is at the end of her tether with all Lou’s song and dance routines in which he persuades her to see things his way. This is a story full of grief and the feeling of being betrayed. She cannot, she concludes, carry on with him anymore. She wanted to tell him so many things, but lost her voice, always an image of impotence for Laurie. But more than no longer being able to talk to each other, she wonders why they’ve stopped dancing together. Whatever. She concludes that their love has been broken into pieces, apparently by Lou’s twisted mind games. Then on “Statue of Liberty” she delivers her big splash knockout crash of a line that explains how she has always avoided attachment by constantly going, concluding that moving forward is her modus operandi.

  Anderson wraps up her diary of love with two scenes. On “One Beautiful Evening” Lou joins her on guitar. Now the dark angel has turned into a snake. This is classic Laurie Anderson land, inhabited by Laurie Anderson people. It’s a big, marvelous song propelled by 1950s soundtrack music amid a shimmering glow of magic. It would have made a happy ending to this tangled affair. However, Laurie had one last note to play. The album’s title track appears to her as a mind affair when in fact it’s the exact opposite. In this song about time travel, inspired by William Burroughs, she references Lou with the subtle suggestion that he was something that is lost in her past. All L.A. is looking for here is a single moment in which she can escape the planet. In other word, she’s a traveler and she’s leaving—that’s what she does—but this time she wants to leave the planet. No mention is made of Lou’s place in Laurie’s travel schedule. This unexpected shift in their relations at the turn of the century was even more disturbing than it was in the mid-nineties.

  Here is my reading of the conflict in the conversation between Ecstasy and Life on a String:

  Lou was in trouble. Sometimes Laurie was as regal as an eagle; sometimes she fell apart and felt lost. Lou feared conflict, feared he’d lost Laurie and would not be able to get her back. Sometimes he thought it was because he was not able to be her. She told him she loved the way his brain worked but often wondered what had happened to the master of the slow dance? How come sex appeared to have fallen by the wayside? According to Lou, she then claimed that he was cheating on her. He swore this wasn’t true.

  Laurie saw Lou in a dark-angel costume jump out of a plane over an abandoned town where she was holed up struggling to write. As soon as he landed and identified her as the whiteface clown, Lou gave Laurie a pep talk full of lame advice. Laurie could not listen to anything he said. She told him she was feeling lost.

  Lou told Laurie that he had had another woman in their bed. Laurie hurled a coffee cup at Lou’s face and screamed that he was scum. He tried with Reedian logic to blame it on her. She screamed at him to grow up.

  Lou took a big step when he admitted that he wasn’t always right. But he could not get over what she said about him. Lou realized that his old-fashioned view of what a wife should be might not be understandable to Laurie. Laurie told him that she had envisioned a really rich emotional life for them. But now, after nine years of fending off Lou’s serial manipulations, she felt that there were just too many things he used to tell her she no longer wanted—or could afford—to take in.

  Lou surrendered to Laurie on all fronts. He admitted that he could not do better than he was. He started calling himself her lifelong servant. He also asked her to cut him loose for his own good and hers. Laurie countered with an offhand remark that went deep into their relationship. She had always distanced herself from people by keeping in motion. That was just the way she was, she explained. In fact, Laurie’s new touring schedules were taking her away from home for longer and longer periods. In his answering shot, Lou imagined himself sitting between Laurie’s legs underneath her floor-length dress jerking off.

  Lou was still annoyed about the cup and the scum. In his 1950s mindset, she should never have mentioned his adultery. According to Lou, their love was lying in pieces on the ground because of Laurie’s bad manners. In a conclusion that could have given Lou a concussion, Laurie told him that what they had was broken and she could not continue being involved with him. Finally, he defended himself by claiming that he had a cavernous hole in his heart the size of a large motor vehicle and added sarcastically that he doubted a one-night stand would have any chance of filling it. Laurie booked a single one-way ticket off the
planet.

  2001 was a weird year for Lou and Laurie. According to both of them, by the end of Ecstasy and Life on a String the Lou and Laurie thing was in dreadful shape, perhaps kaput! It looked as if they were both contemplating the end. Lou was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist but was never inducted. Incorrect reports of Reed’s death were broadcast by numerous U.S. radio stations, caused by a hoax email (purporting to be from Reuters), which said he had died of a drug overdose. Anderson’s awards included the 2001 Tenco Prize for Songwriting in San Remo, Italy, and the 2001 Deutsche Schallplatten prize for Life on a String. She also received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Then came the 9/11 attack on New York, the Towers coming down uncomfortably close to Laurie’s studio. Lou was in New York, while Laurie was performing in Chicago, but she soon came back to New York with the debris and the incinerated bits of people blowing through her streets. As Anderson saw it, “After the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Towers, I saw an amazing amount of tenderness in New York City than I have ever seen. Plus it had been 50 years since New Yorkers had been Americans. So it was very odd that suddenly this little island was part of the country, and I think it was startling to people. New Yorkers are not good victims—it is not our style.”

  Lou sent Laurie a poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe called “Laurie Sadly Listening,” published in the New York Times on October 6. The poem ends with the lines, “Laurie if you’re sadly listening / Love you / Laurie if you’re sadly listening / Love you.”

  Then there was Laurie’s heroic 2001 Live in New York album, a Valentine to the city recorded eleven days after the 9/11 attack. She had originally planned to do a live version of Life on a String, combined with some stories. Then Lou suggested that they included some of her old songs too. The album also includes several of her most intense songs about their relationship, including “Poison and Broken” from Bright Red.

  Everything Lou did was in collaboration with Laurie. At a tribute concert for terpsichorean dance legend Bill T. Jones, Reed and Anderson duetted on the Drifters’ Save the Last Dance for Me. Over the years, Laurie albums flowed over and into Lou albums—and both of them played on each others’ albums.

  Laurie has a wonderful voice. It’s crisp and clear, its harbor is a calm Buddhist center. Laurie rarely emotes like a movie star, rock star, or priest, her humor is subtle and layered, and she uses the depths of experience with such precision. When Laurie commanded that Town Hall stage on September 19 and 20, she offered herself as a medium for the pain and confusion as we discovered policemen were the new heroes. I missed Ginsberg and Burroughs. Laurie stood there as somebody who was not afraid. Before 9/11, Laurie’s albums were unlikely to make you cry, whereas there are many tearjerkers in Lou Reed’s catalog. But then, if you listen to the New York Live album she might as well be a blues singer. She got down that night. It was a piece of magic. This was the work of a courage teacher, and the album is among the best things she has ever made.

  In the fall of 2001, Laurie toured the United States and Europe with a band, performing music from Life on a String. She also presented some solo works, including “Happiness,” which premiered in 2001 and toured internationally through the spring of 2003.

  The New York Live concerts released in 2002 were a big step in Laurie’s transformation from performance artist to hero. Live in New York was one factor in NASA’s decision to ask Laurie to be their first artist in residence for 2003. This was of course a fascinating story and was a sensational exclamation mark in her career. She was the Amelia Earhart of our times, a single young adventurous woman who would go to the end of the earth … a sort of Superwoman.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe

  2001–04

  “There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of precipice, thus meditates a plunge.”

  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”

  In late 1999, Robert Wilson approached Lou Reed, asking him to write the libretto and score for his latest stage production, POEtry, based on the poems and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. “He asked if I wanted to work on his play about Poe, and I was thrilled. He said, ‘You should write this.’ I said, ‘I’ve never written anything like this before.” He said, ‘You were made for this.’”

  Reed had much in common with Poe: Poe always dressed in black; he was always angry, particularly with journalists; he drank to excess and got high on opium; he wrote a lot; and he attracted certain types of women. They were both legends in their own lifetimes. As Lou recalled, “To my mind, Poe is father to William Burroughs and Hubert Selby,” writing that “I am forever fitting their blood to my melodies.”

  Wilson explained his own role in the work. As a student of architecture, in the theater he made mega-structures. “Let’s say an architect designs a building and each tenant can design his or her apartment however they want. They will have different aesthetics, but there will be cohesion among them because of this mega-structure. So in a sense, what I do in collaborations with other people is that I make a form and a structure that allows other people to fill it in.”

  “Bob is the director,” Lou insisted. “He has the overall vision and knows what he is looking for, so no one knows better than Bob where he wants to go or take it or take some of us with him.”

  So began a new regimen. Lou asked Laurie to work with him on how to tackle this monumental task. “It was a wonderful chance to do something really different,” Lou said. “So I sat down to rewrite various things from Edgar Allan Poe that appealed to me. I figured Bob really knows what he’s doing and if he says I can do it, I can do it.” Once they had an outline and some characters, Lou’s writing process began to flow. This journey into Poe’s language was to have a strong influence on Reed.

  In the process, he stumbled upon the Poe short story “The Imp of the Perverse.” When Lou read Poe’s claim that “perversion is a radical, primitive, and elementary impulse,” he saw in a flash how everything he had done wrong made sense.

  “I have wrestled with the question why am I drawn to do what I should not innumerable times,” Reed wrote. “Why do we love what we cannot have? Why do we have a passion for exactly the wrong thing?”

  In the short story, Poe explained: “Through its promptings, we act for the very reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.” Embracing Poe’s concept, Lou now accepted that he was one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse. This was another step in his transformation.

  After Hal Willner and Laurie had helped him work out how to do it, Lou started writing the music for POEtry. Lou loved working with actors. If he was commissioned to do so, he could reel off one monologue after another. Working in the theater gave him a different way to see his songs emerge. One month after the release of Ecstasy, POEtry premiered in Berlin in the middle of April 2000.

  ***

  Lou loved Wilson and the opportunities afforded him by the theater experience, but he could only get full satisfaction when he recorded his songs with his band or made an avant-garde work closer to Laurie’s palette than his own. Thus the production of POEtry in 2000 led in 2002 to the recording of Lou Reed’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven.

  According to Gavin Martin, “Lou considered The Raven his magnum opus, as the culmination of everything he’s striven to attain in a career that’s spanned five decades of rock & roll outrage.”

  Laurie Anderson appeared in the part of Rowena on the album’s most infectious song, “Call On Me.” It is the most poignant recording Lou and Laurie ever made. Lou locates Laurie in the wild being whose spirit rejects control. She constantly travels in pursuit of her soul. They find each other in the prolonged hesitant call-out of the title: why didn’t she, why didn’
t he, call on each other …?

  The album received mixed reviews, ranging from “You will need inordinate patience” to “Surprisingly compelling.” Although it reached 122 in the UK charts it did not chart in the States. The track that drew most positive criticism was his reaction to 9/11, “Fire Music.” Jason Anderson wrote in the British rock magazine Uncut, “‘Fire Music’ is an abrasive squall of electronic noise that may borrow its title from Archie Shepp but is pure Metal Machine Music by nature. It represents a more satisfying communication between Reed and the dark energy that fills the work of his literary forebear than any of The Raven’s wordier passages. It also would have terrified Poe, which may be the highest compliment of all.”

  A few months after the release of The Raven in January 2003, NYC Man (The Ultimate Collection 1967–2003) was put out, which featured career-spanning tracks that had been selected, remastered and sequenced under Reed’s supervision. For this, Lou’s great labor of love, he got together the original tapes of all the songs he wanted to archive and improve. He said at the time: “When you’re putting out a compilation, the last person they talk to is the artist. They usually hope he’s dead …” Except in this case, the BMG people counted on him to be involved. Lou and Willner had a wonderful experience listening to different takes on the original tapes. In every case, as Reed described the process, the listener was rewarded. On the first song they resurrected John Cale’s previously hidden piano track on “I’m Waiting for My Man.” On the last song, the Bertallot Radio Mix of “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou nakedly adds the name of James Dean to his pantheon of heroes.