Transformer

by Victor Bockris

  The music began with an achingly beautiful violin. Then everything Lou had become since meeting Laurie came to the microphone as he emerged as Lulu, singing from deep inside his emotions. He asks her if she would save him from drowning. Lou started telling the story with his hands making beautiful fluid gestures that gave him grandeur and lay some calmness underneath the angst. He pleads to be dominated by an authority figure who would yank him out of the water and kiss his lips.

  Lou looked more like an opera singer than a rock star, while the night sky seemed to be part of the stage. But then—just when you could have heard a pin drop—came barging into the mix the incongruous sound of a nearby fireworks display, which caused Kevin Hearn to fear that it might throw Lou off his spot. This sensation was underlined by Lou’s spectral presence. Both wan and pale, and transported by his great song, he never wavered. Gesturing to the fireworks he wrapped them into his music, ad libbed a few lines that compared them to a cheap imitation of God, and dismissed them. It was, Hearn reflected, the work of a great artist at the pinnacle of his powers.

  There was no doubt that this action sent the song into the sky like a thunderbolt exploding under the stars. The audience, caught in the magic, roared their approval while the band locked into a monolithic riff that carried the song out on its final four minutes of classical composition that merge with Laurie’s music in the heavens. It was—for an assortment of musicians on stage that night—the most magical of rides. Many of them trembled, on the edge of tears.

  After the show, as was his habit, Kevin went to Lou’s dressing room. He found the great star alone, weeping with the mixture of elation and the zooming emotions released by such a great performance. Lou was sitting, crying into his hands. “Kevin, that was so hard,” he said. “Those songs are so personal I really gave everything I had tonight.”

  ***

  It was Robert Wilson’s genius to choose Lou Reed as the medium through which to pin the identity of Lulu. It was Lou’s genius to see that he was Lulu—the female male. If you want to see a portrait of Lou and Laurie at the end of their transformations put the cover of Lou’s Lulu next to the cover of Laurie’s Homeland.

  At first Lulu does not look like a chapter in Lou’s great American novel, but it is. It is here that he finally and for all time confronted his own image as the little girl who had haunted him all his life. Lulu is in fact Lou’s greatest self-portrait. If he found the grail of his sound with Willner, he found his own grail with Wilson, Metallica, and Laurie, who had worked closely with him on finding the story of the original songs in the play.

  In the ultimate step of Lou and Laurie’s transformation, they escaped the pitched battle of the sexes reflected on their conversational albums. Over the years, they had replaced the concept of the either–or male–female identification with their combination of a female male and a male female. They became the united beings revealed in their final portrait published in the New York Post days after Lou’s death. This is why we can see Lou and Laurie’s marriage as a new paradigm.

  The final transformation of Lou and Laurie is portrayed by the female–male voice Fenway Bergamot on the cover of Homeland and the male–female voice of Lou’s alter ego on the cover of Lulu.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Death of Lou Reed

  2013

  I am a graduate of Warhol University and I believe in the power of punk. I want to blow it up. Thank you.

  Lou Reed

  In the summer of 2011 Lou began to show signs of his sickness during the recording of Lulu with Metallica. To treat a case of hepatitis C, he had to take a course of injections of the drug interferon, which often causes the patient to feel nauseous and weak. In the midst of that treatment, doctors discovered liver cancer and an advanced case of diabetes. During the final two years of his life, Lou, always accompanied by Laurie, was in and out of hospitals searching for a cure. Laurie, his practice of tai chi, and the advice of his meditation teacher Mingyur Rinpoche were the three stable factors that he maintained to the end of his life. The ambition and drive that kept him in tip-top condition over the previous decade never left him.

  In the last six months of his life, Lou oversaw the remastering of his entire catalog for numerous box sets. He worked with John Cale on the Deluxe Edition of White Light/White Heat; he and Willner were co-hosting their radio show New York Shuffle on SiriusXM; he was working on his final collection of photographs, since released as Rimes/Rhymes. In September 2013, he even went to England to publicize Mick Rock’s limited edition of Transformer, his great collection of Lou Reed photographs. Lou was still talking about his novel. “If you thought of the collected records as a book, it tells you all about me growing up in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, to the 2000s. That’s what it was like for one person, trying to do the best he could. With all the problems that go along with life except mine took place in public. And I wrote about that too.”

  In April, Lou received a last-minute liver transplant. At first it worked well and he seemed to have fully recovered, but after a few weeks it failed. He was told there were no more options. Lou preferred not to hear that.

  THE FINAL WEEKS

  Some friends said he was cool and together. Others claimed he was suicidal. When Lou’s grown-up little sister Bunny, now Merrill Weiner, called and asked him if he was going to hurt himself, Lou summoned up his sense of humor to crack, “‘Oh Bunny, come on! I can’t hurt myself with the tai chi swords. They’re too dull.’ But he was scared,” she said. A few days before his death, Julian Schnabel was watching Berlin, the movie of his 2006 live concert performance, with him when Lou asked him, “‘Does anybody know?’ He always felt, in a way, unappreciated. He never felt like people really got it.” He didn’t, he told his sister, “want to be erased.”

  It seemed like a peculiar remark from a man who had spent his last decade showered by a parade of appreciation for even his most reviled works. Perhaps Schnabel put his finger on the pulse of it: “One day, Lou told me a story from his childhood. He was standing with his father, he put his hand near his father and his father smacked him. He never got over the cruelty of that.”

  On October 27, 2013, the death of Lou Reed sent shockwaves around the world. The wall of emotion that split open on the news caught many of us unaware. It was his enormous strength, combined with the great sensitivity of his poetry and music, which held us together. In a tribute to his lifelong partner on the frontier, John Cale wrote, “The news I feared most pales in comparison to the lump in my throat and the hollow in my stomach. Two kids have a chance meeting and 47 years later we fight and love the same way. We have the best of our fury laid out on vinyl, for the world to have a glimpse. The laughs we shared just a few weeks ago will forever remind me of all that was good between us.”

  THE BARDO

  According to Roderick Romero: “After Lou died Laurie did a beautiful thing by inviting their friends to stay with him mentally through the 49 Days of the Bardo. This is based on the Buddhist belief that the soul needs 49 days to get away. Every Sunday for seven weeks she hosted these two- or three-hour gatherings at Lou’s apartment.

  “It was like, OK, this Sunday is going to be for the people who built his guitars and knew Lou very well; this Sunday will be for the poets who inspired him (and I was lucky enough to be a part of that); after that it was like, now we are going to do the artists he loved who also sang—and that was Bowie and Bono at Julian Schnabel’s place.

  “If you wanted to talk, you would talk; if you wanted to listen, then fantastic. Laurie would say, ‘Do you want to say something?’ One would say, ‘No, I’m sorry’ and then another person would say, ‘Yeah, I’m willing to do something.’ You know, each person talked as if we were all part of a family.

  “I had this thing that I wrote for Lou burning in my journal and then Laurie said, ‘Does anyone else have anything to say?’ And I had a couple of glasses of wine, so I was like, yeah. ‘Oh, Roderick, come sit down. You’re not just an “anybody.” Sit down.’
I was like, you know, really nervous because I was surrounded by the greatest poets in the world, and Hal Willner and everyone was there at Julian’s that night. So I just read it straight out of the heart … People really got it because I was talking about times when Lou would mimic Andy.”

  ***

  In The Villager, Jim Fourratt reported: “Lou Reed’s memorial service took place in the evening of December 16, 2013 at his favorite Apollo Theater in Harlem. At 7.15 p.m., Laurie Anderson walked on stage and stood in a silent pool of light. She told us we were gathered to celebrate a life of her husband Lou Reed and reminded us not to cry. She said that Lou had finally left the world and there were to be no tears: ‘You are his friends and fellow artists gathered to honor his creative energy and life force and path.’”

  We were deeply moved by how tenderly Laurie took Lou through his death and how elegantly she stage-managed its aftermath and his memorial service. This was one of the most nurturing things Anderson has ever done in a career that seeks to witness and comfort the distressed. She gave the whole population of the culture that she and Lou came out of and spoke to a real shot of hope for themselves and the future of the human race. She illustrated the value of the arts, the value of her husband’s art, and the value of art as a way of life. She turned Lou’s death into a masterpiece.

  Appendix A

  Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Inventories of Work

  When Michael Jackson died, I found myself crying in a supermarket—and I wasn’t even a fan. Rock stars touch us on so many emotional levels. After all, rock is the most emotional music that a large global audience prays with every day. When Lou Reed died, rather than crying, I found myself exulting over the fact that he looked so richly content in the first post-death photographs we saw of Lou with Laurie Anderson.

  After Lou died in October 2013, I bought everything he had produced from 1994—when this book was first published—onwards. I read in the introduction to his updated book of lyrics, Pass Thru Fire, “Love and desire for transcendence run through these songs. The characters are always moving towards something; there is conflict, and they try to deal with it. They understand the desire to hear the announcement of transcendence and freedom. And that’s what all the lyrics are about.”

  Lou had always said that each of his albums was a chapter in the novel of his life. The lyrics take us through the transformations by which Lou counted out his life. As I immersed myself in reading the new albums, from Set the Twilight Reeling to Lulu, I discovered a life that Lou had recorded in intimate detail.

  I also made a point of buying and reading everything Laurie Anderson had put out at the same time. It soon emerged that during his years with Laurie, Lou went through a transformation, which would be unimaginable to those who only know him up to this point. Reed and Anderson had indeed made the “Lou and Laurie music” he had predicted. Except that they didn’t record albums together—they made parallel albums over twenty years on which they conducted a series of revealing conversations.

  Some key steps of Lou Reed’s last transformation can be seen in the achievements he exhibited alongside the music, such as his collaborations on three plays and his four books of photographs.

  LOU REED’S INVENTORY OF WORK, 1994–2013

  “In Our Sleep” (first single, Reed duets with Laurie Anderson from her Bright Red album) 1994

  Peel Slowly and See (official VU box set) 1995

  The Best of Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground (compilation) 1995

  Set the Twilight Reeling (studio album) 1996

  “Hang On to Your Emotions” (single, duet with Laurie Anderson) from Set the Twilight Reeling 1996, video format 1997

  Time Rocker (songs for Robert Wilson play) 1996

  Different Times (Lou Reed compilation) 1996

  Live in Concert (re-release of Lou Reed’s Live in Italy record) 1996

  Trainspotting (film soundtrack, includes “Perfect Day”) 1996

  “Perfect Day” (celebrity charity single, including Laurie Anderson) 1997

  A Retrospective (Lou Reed compilation) 1998

  A Perfect Night in London (live album, including booklet by Reed) 1998

  American Masters: Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart (TV documentary) 1998

  The Definitive Collection (Lou Reed compilation) 1999

  Ecstasy (studio album) 2000

  The Very Best of Lou Reed (Lou Reed compilation) 2000

  Best of The Velvet Underground Millennium Collection (VU compilation) 2000

  Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics 2000

  The Bootleg Series Volume One: The Quine Tapes: VU Live (1969) (VU live album) 2001

  American Poet (Lou Reed compilation) 2001

  Rock and Roll: An Introduction to The Velvet Underground (VU compilation) 2001

  “Laurie Sadly Listening,” New York Times, November 11, 2001

  Legendary Lou Reed (Lou Reed compilation) 2002

  The Velvet Underground & Nico (Deluxe Edition) 2002

  The Raven (studio album) 2003

  “Call On Me” (single, duet with Laurie Anderson from The Raven) 2003

  Emotions in Action (photographs) 2003

  The Very Best of The Velvet Underground (VU compilation) 2003

  NYC Man (Lou Reed compilation) 2004

  Le Bataclan ’72 (Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico live album, 1972) 2004

  Animal Serenade (live album from The Raven tour, 2003) 2004

  “Satellite of Love ’04” (single) 2004

  Gold (VU compilation) 2005

  Lou Reed’s New York (photographs) 2006

  Hudson River Wind Meditations (studio album) 2007

  Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse (Julian Schnabel’s concert film, and live album) 2008

  The Creation of the Universe (Metal Machine Trio) 2008

  The Stone: Issue Three (Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and John Zorn live album) 2008

  Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics (updated edition) 2008

  The Velvet Underground Playlist Plus (VU and Nico compilation)2008

  Romanticism (photographs) 2009

  Red Shirley (film: On the eve of her 100th birthday, Lou Reed sat down with his cousin Shirley for a tête-à-tête) 2010

  Lulu (studio album) 2011

  The Raven (Fantagraphics Books) 2011

  White Light/White Heat (45th Anniversary box set) 2012

  Rimes/Rhymes (photographs) 2012

  LAURIE ANDERSON’S INVENTORY OF WORK, 1994–2013

  Bright Red (studio album) 1994

  Puppet Motel (CD-ROM) 1994

  Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective: 1972–1992 (book) 1994

  The Ugly One with the Jewels (spoken-word album) 1995

  “Hang On to Your Emotions” (Lou and Laurie single and video) 1996, 1997

  The Path to Tranquility by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (co-narrator) 1999

  Talk Normal: The Laurie Anderson CD Anthology 2000

  “Baton Rouge” (single from Ecstasy with Lou Reed) 2000

  Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (multimedia presentation) 1999–2000

  Supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica 2001

  The Body Artist by Don DeLillo (sole narrator) 2001

  Life on a String (studio album) 2001

  Life on a String (film) 2002

  Live in New York (live album) 2002

  The End of the Moon (NASA performance piece) 2003

  “Call On Me” (as Rowena on Lou Reed’s The Raven) 2003

  “Gentle Breeze” (song with Lou Reed on Mary Had a Little Amp, a preschool education benefit CD) 2004

  “The Fifth Plague” (song on The Death of Livestock) 2006

  Hidden Inside Mountains (film) 2006

  Night Life (diary and drawings) 2007

  “Big Science 2” (single) 2007

  “Mambo and Bling” (single) 2008

  The Stone: Issue Three (Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, and John Zorn live album) 2008

&n
bsp; “The Electrician” (song on Music Inspired by the Film Scott Walker: 30 Century Man) 2009

  Night Life (diary) 2009

  Nothing in My Pockets (diary) 2009

  Homeland (studio album) 2010

  “Only an Expert” (single) 2010

  Rio de Janeiro museum Anderson retrospective, attended by over half a million people in 2011

  Appendix B

  Interviews with Lou Reed

  EXTRACT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH LOU REED, THE SINATRA OF THE 70s

  BY VICTOR BOCKRIS, NEW YORK, 1974

  VICTOR BOCKRIS: Are you interested in Frank Sinatra at all?

  LOU REED: Oh, Sinatra’s fantastic! Somebody really gave him a really good song, with real lyrics, coming from him, and at this point he certainly could do it, you know. I mean shit, Frank. Tell us what you know, come on, Frank. You know, and I’ll bet he could lay something coherent down.

  VB: Well, why doesn’t he?

  LR: I don’t know, why don’t you ask him?

  VB: He does actually, ’cause he was gonna get that guy who had to hire two bodyguards and stuff.

  LR: See, like he did that song, “I was seventeen …” That one. That was like scratching the surface, but imagine if he got a little deeper than that.

  VB: So, does he just need a good song, or does he have to change his head around? I mean, he won’t do anything.

  LR: He … you know … I’m just saying, wouldn’t it be fantastic, Frank Sinatra, in his style, with his type of music, for his audience, everything the same except the lyrics.

  VB: Well, is politics part of it?

  LR: I don’t see why.

  VB: Would you like to work with him?