Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story

This fortuitous opportunity was pivotal for their career. First, since there was so little time between the two dates, they decided to keep Maureen, initially much to Cale’s chagrin. Moe remembered standing in the street with John, who kept saying, “No chicks in the band. No chicks.” Second, at the very time they were playing at the Cafe Bizarre to unreceptive tourists twice a night for $5 apiece per night, the pop artist and entrepreneur Andy Warhol was looking around for a group to manage for a nightclub he had been asked to host by the theatrical impresario Michael Myerberg (who had brought Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to the USA in 1956). Barbara Rubin, for whose film Christmas on Earth the band had played in their previous incarnation, was spending a good deal of time at the Warhol studio, the famous Silver Factory, and thought the Velvets would be the perfect band for Warhol’s upcoming discotheque. She took two of Warhol’s leading talent scouts, the film director Paul Morrissey and the underground film star Gerard Malanga, to see them. Malanga, who has just starred in Warhol’s version of A Clockwork Orange, Vinyl, was an outstandingly handsome young man with a potent sexual aura. Combining the looks of Elvis Presley and James Dean with the long hair of Mick Jagger, Malanga dressed head to foot in black leather and carried, purely for dramatic effect, a black leather bullwhip, which he wore wrapped around the shoulder of his jacket. During the Velvets’ set, Gerard suddenly leapt up from his table onto the empty dance floor. All of the other customers were too terrified by the music to move. Making ample use of his whip, he undulated in a sinister, erotic dance that perfectly illustrated the visceral, throbbing music. The band was dumbfounded by Gerard’s mind-blowing performance. In the intermission Lou and John went over to his table and told him to come back and dance anytime. Instantly spotting a starring role for himself in the scenario, Malanga thought the group would be perfect for Warhol.

Lou performing in the Paraphernalia footage of Gerard Malanga’s Film Notebooks, 1966. (Victor Bockris)

The following night Malanga returned to the Cafe Bizarre with Rubin, Warhol’s business manager Paul Morrissey, and Warhol himself, accompanied by an entourage including his reigning superstar Edie Sedgwick. They were thrilled by the weird and raucous performance of the Velvet Underground. Not only did the group do the same thing Warhol’s films did—make people uncomfortable—but their name, and the fact that they sang about taboo subjects, perfectly fit Warhol’s program. To top it off, Morrissey was intrigued by the band’s androgynous drummer. After the set Barbara brought the Velvets over to Andy’s table. The curly-haired Lou Reed, with his shy smile, shared a temperament with Warhol. He sat next to the pop artist and the two of them immediately hit it off. “Lou looked good and pubescent then,” Warhol recalled. “Paul thought the kids out on the Island would identify with that.”

Morrissey, who was the most influential person in Warhol’s world after Malanga, was fascinated: “John Cale had a wonderful appearance and he played the electric viola, which was a real novelty; but best of all was Maureen Tucker, the drummer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her because you couldn’t work out if she was a boy or a girl. Nobody had ever had a girl drummer before. She made no movement, she was so sedate. I proposed that we sign a contract with them, we’d manage them and give them a place to play.”

“We looked at each other,” Lou Reed remembered, “and said, ‘This sounds like really great fun.’”

Chapter Six

Fun at the Factory

1966

Reality was the key.

Lou Reed

When Andy met the Velvets, they were unglamorous and unknown. “Andy, the problem is these people have no singer,” said Paul Morrissey. “There’s a guy who sings, but he’s got no personality and nobody pays the slightest attention to him.” In the following days Warhol and Morrissey transformed them from a four-piece unit led by Lou to a band fronted by the stunningly beautiful singer-actress Nico, a statuesque German blonde who had walked into Warhol’s studio a week earlier. Lou initially didn’t want her to be their chanteuse, but the arrangement was worked out under the convincing influence of Warhol’s business manager, Paul Morrissey, who “just didn’t think Lou had the personality to stand in front of the group and sing. The group needed something beautiful to counteract the screeching ugliness they were trying to sell, and the combination of a beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed. Right away that sour little Lou Reed bristled. He was hostile to Nico from the start. I told them I thought that Nico could be part of the Velvet Underground and just fit in there under that name.” Quick to grasp the essence of the problem, Lou replied, “Let’s keep Nico separate in this. The Velvet Underground—and Nico.”

“Andy was this catalyst, always putting jarring elements together,” Lou noted. “Which was something I wasn’t so happy about. He wanted us to use Nico. Andy said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta have a chanteuse.’ I said, ‘Oh, Andy, give us a break.’ But we went along with it at the time. Andy wanted her so he got her.” Unbeknownst to Lou, back in 1963 Andy had tried to put together his own rock-and-roll band with none other than La Monte Young and Walter De Maria. Now, in as much as Warhol saw himself in Nico, Andy could fantasize that he was fronting the band.

The most remarkable thing about Lou Reed’s progress in 1966 was his uncharacteristic willingness to accept Warhol’s control in order to achieve the extraordinary success it would bring him. But, in the process, Lou made something of a Faustian bargain with Andy. Warhol had miraculously pulled the group out of the toilet, elevating them to his level when he was at the height of his fame. In exchange, however, Andy demoted Lou from fronting the band to being, employing a phrase by Nico, its “janitor of lunacy.” Imagine what would have happened if Andrew Loog Oldham had tried to pull the same moves on Mick Jagger, promoting, for example, Brian Jones over his head as the front man, or indeed if Brian Epstein had suggested to John or Paul that they take a backseat in the Beatles and let George Harrison come up and front them. It is very rare that rock groups in their first flush of success find lead singers and songwriters willing to bow into a background role at the very moment of their initial triumph. It revealed several sides of Lou. First, his ambivalence about being in the spotlight. Second, his unusual ability to accept what would be best for the band without thinking about his own fame. Third, his discipleship to Andy Warhol.

Andy choreographed his group within a context that had been predicted by one of Lou’s favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote one hundred years earlier, “The next step may be the electrification of all mankind by the representation of a play that may be neither tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, pantomime, melodrama or spectacle, as we now comprehend these terms, but which may retain some portion of the idiosyncratic excellence of each, while it introduces a new class of excellence as yet unnamed because as yet undreamed of in the world.” It was also based on—some people said ripped off from—the 1965 multimedia performances of La Monte Young and Piero Heliczer as well as the “happenings” that were rife in the art world of the early sixties. In the band’s first performance, at a dinner for a psychiatrists’ convention at the elegant Delmonico’s Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York on the night of January 13, 1966, the group turned the tables on their audience, putting on an act of resentment and rage that Lou characterized as “fun.”

Originally, the psychiatrists had invited Warhol to give an after-dinner speech at their convention. When the artist who had enraged the underground film community by screening epics like Sleep and Blowjob asked if he could show some films instead, they indulged him. Now, as one hundred of the leading psychiatrists in America settled behind coffee and snifters of brandy ready to analyze the contents of the blank screen at the far end of the dining area, their tranquillity was shattered by Barbara Rubin, who came screaming into the room brandishing a movie camera with a powerful sun-gun lamp atop it. The seemingly crazed woman rushed from table to table shoving the camera into their faces and baraging them with questions like, “Do you eat her out?” and “Is your penis big enough?” No sooner had they been blown out of their after-dinner stupor by this horrible spectacle than an unbelievably loud cacophony erupted at the far end of the room, and they swiveled in their seats to see a brand of mangy-looking young men in dirty denim jeans and jackets performing a howling song about heroin. Behind them was a starkly lit, high-contrast black-and-white film of a man tied to a chair being tortured, in front of which a real man was brandishing a whip. Embarrassed, insulted, and perplexed, the psychiatrists reacted by grabbing their partners and storming the exits, or sitting forward with benevolent smiles trying to “understand” the spectacle in front of them. As Warhol stood off to the side, staring impassively at the panicked throng with a trace of a smile, and Nico stared impassively from the stage, Lou reached the climax of his paean to nullification, intoning, “And I guess that I just don’t know, and I guess that I just don’t know.” The event was reported in the New York Times the following day under the title “Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists.”

The tension between the band and Nico was somewhat ameliorated in the following weeks when Lou fell madly in love with the tall European with long flaxen hair. According to Richard Mishkin, to whom Lou expressed his emotions about her, Lou loved the fact that Nico was big. According to Lou, “Nico’s the kind of person that you meet and you’re not quite the same afterwards. She has an amazing mind.”

Lou, John, and Sterling had all moved to 450 Grand Street at the end of 1965. Now Lou would often stay at the apartment Nico was subletting on Jane Street, where he wrote three songs for her. “One night Nico came up to me and said, ‘Oh, Lou, I’ll be your mirror,’” he recalled. “A close friend of mine always said that I bring out the idiocy in people, but I can also bring out something in them which is the best they’ve ever done. It’s like with Nico and John Cale. They were fantastic with the Velvet Underground. They helped produce a great sound then. When I gave Nico a song of mine to sing, I knew she would totally understand what was being said and perform it from that standpoint.” Nico described Lou as “very soft and lovely. Not aggressive at all. You could just cuddle him like a sweet person when I first met him, and he always stayed that way. I used to make pancakes for him. Everybody loved him around the Factory; he was rather cute, you know, and he said funny things.”

According to Cale, “We had no idea what Nico could bring to the band, it was just something Andy came up with and it was very difficult to accept. Lou kind of fell in love with the idea, but we didn’t understand it.” In fact, with Warhol’s encouragement, Nico became something of an inspiration for Lou. “Andy said I should write a song about Edie Sedgwick. I said, ‘Like what?’ and he said, ‘Oh, don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou?’ So I wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ and we gave it to Nico.” But this also caused conflicts within the group. The tough-minded Moe felt Nico “was a schmuck, from the first. She was this beautiful person who had traveled through Europe being a semistar. Her ego had grown very large. The songs Lou wrote for her were great, and she did them very well. Her accent made them great, but there was a limit! I kept to myself until she wanted to sing ‘Heroin.’ But then I had to speak my piece.” “There were problems from the very beginning,” added Sterling, “because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for Nico, and she wanted to sing them all—‘l’m Waiting for the Man,’ ‘Heroin,’ all of them. We said, ‘No, no!’ She wasn’t very egotistical, she was out of it. I always explained it by saying she’s not very good at English.”

“When I started with the Velvets, I wanted to sing Lou’s song ‘I’m Waiting for the Man,’” said Nico, “but he wouldn’t let me. I guess he thought I didn’t understand its meaning, and he was right. And we had the song ‘Heroin,’ which I thought was a provocation. But I have to say that Lou and John took heroin, and those songs were songs of realism.” Cale looked on at what transpired with Welsh amusement. “Lou and Nico had some kind of an affair, both consummated and constipated,” he said. “At the time he wrote these psychological love songs for her like ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Femme Fatale,’ which gave the band a new dimension. It was a difficult situation, I must admit, and sometimes I don’t know how we accepted it. Still, Andy brought her into the band, and we nearly always accepted Andy’s decisions. He was so much on our side, so enthusiastic about everything we did, that we couldn’t help it.”

“My favorite Lou Reed song is … aah … ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’” Warhol told an interviewer many years later in a mild put-down. “By Nico. She wrote it, I think.”

Lou himself recalled most vividly two memories of Nico and Andy that had an eerie similarity: “I sat in an ice cream shop late one night watching Andy take the hand of a less than ordinary person sitting opposite him and slap his [Andy’s] own face with it. It somehow reminded me of Delmore raging in a bar, asking me to call the White House to tell them we were aware of the plot.

“I loved after-hours bars. It’s where I first saw someone beaten to death. The woman I was with, Nico, threw a glass that shattered in a mob guy’s face. He thought the man behind me did it.”

January to April 1966 was the golden period for the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol. After the psychiatrists’ convention, Warhol shot a scintillating film of the band rehearsing at the Factory, Symphony of Sound, which remains the single best visual record of the Velvet Underground. They also recorded soundtracks for two of Warhol’s best movies shot at the beginning of the year, Hedy and More Milk Yvette.

In February 1966, Andy appeared on WNET TV in New York, coyly announcing in his usual deadpan voice, “I’m sponsoring a new band. It’s called the Velvet Underground. Since I don’t really believe in painting anymore, I thought it would be a nice way of combining music, art, and films all together. The whole thing’s being auditioned tomorrow at nine o’clock. If it works out, it might be very glamorous.” That week, with the help of Barbara Rubin, he launched the Velvets at the underground film center Cinémathèque, as part of a multimedia show called Andy Warhol Uptight, a paean to conflict, which developed out of the psychiatrists’ convention. Gerard Malanga came into his own as the whip dancer, improvising a series of story dances that illustrated Lou’s songs. Behind the band was a backdrop of Warhol films, most of which starred Edie Sedgwick, like Beauty #2. Nico sang three songs and rattled a tambourine. “They also played the record of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine,’” she said, “because I didn’t have enough to sing otherwise. I had to stand there and sing along with it. I had to do this every night for a week. It was the most stupid concert I have ever done.”

According to one disappointed observer, these shows amounted to nothing more than “ritual dances devised by dope fiends with nothing better to do.” But as the photographer Nat Finkelstein, who was working on a photo documentary of the Factory, remembered, “From the first time I saw them I said, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow! They’re going to kick these guys out on their ass for the next ten years!’ Everybody hated them. The whole macho East Village group really hated the Velvets—just put-down after put-down—the hatred had nothing to do with their music; a lot of it had to do with the gay image. Also, Lou and John were really good musicians, whereas Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg [of the Fugs] wouldn’t have known music if it bit them on the ass.”

The engagement was a hit on every level. Warhol successfully launched his multimedia show, and the group managed to make some money while sending shock waves through the city. “They made twelve thousand dollars, I think,” recalled Morrison. “A lot of people would come to see any kind of Warhol endeavor. The first time we played ‘Heroin,’ two people fainted. I didn’t know if they OD’d or fainted. So that was our real debut—playing in Manhattan.” Reed characterized the band’s performance at the Cinémathèque as “a dog whistle for all the freaks in the city.”

Outside of a small coterie who recognized him, Lou was not seen as the leader of the group. Nico became the Mick Jagger of the Velvet Underground, while Lou took the more humble Keith Richards role. This initially caused some tension, but Lou may not have minded being left out of the spotlight since he often felt uncomfortable onstage. “At the age when identity is a problem some people join rock and roll bands and perform for other people who share the same difficulties,” he later wrote in a revealing essay on the pitfalls of pop stardom. “The age difference between performer and beholder in rock is not large. But unfortunately, those in the fourth tier assume those on stage know something they don’t. Which is true. It simply requires a very secure ego to allow yourself to be loved for what you do rather than for what you are, and an even larger one to realize you are what you do. The singer had a soul but he feels he isn’t loved off-stage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only on stage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia.” Also, by this time Lou was so taken by Andy and his world that he would probably have done anything Andy suggested. The same month Andy signaled Lou’s acceptance into his domain by making him the subject of one of his Screen Tests—three-minute films focusing on the frozen gaze of a Factory citizen.

Film frame enlargement from Screen Tests by Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. (Archives Malanga)

Warhol’s studio, a large, floor-through single room in a factory building on West 47th Street in Manhattan, was called the Factory. Here Warhol painted his pop pictures, made his movies, and held court as the hippest, hardest bellwether of his times. The famous room was painted and tinfoiled silver. The people who worked with him and hung around him were the most hard-core group in New York at the time. They all dressed in black jeans and black T-shirts. Their drug of choice was amphetamine. The majority of them were gay. They were exotic, talented people, young, full of energy and ideas, satellites.

When Lou Reed joined Andy Warhol, Warhol was thirty-six, wealthy, and the successful driving force behind a devout cult of artistic collaborators. Reed was twenty-three, strong as stainless steel, confident, and as ambitious as his new mentor. Lou Reed had been described by friends and enemies over the years as “a control freak,” “a schizophrenic,” “an asshole.” Not one of those descriptions was “fun.” Andy Warhol had been described as “a mad queen,” “a Zen warrior,” “a creep.” None of them was “fun,” either. And yet, essentially, over the next four months, from January to April 1966, fun was exactly what Lou and Andy had together. Their relationship was exemplified by a photograph at the Factory that year in which they stood eyeballing each other with face-splitting grins in front of a life-size, full-figure Warhol painting of Elvis Presley with a drawn six-gun. Andy, the Lionhearted Leo—his head, with its strong, high cheekbones and muscular jaw, cocked slightly to one side—revealed the Draculian character he possessed in the pencil-thin, sinewy body beneath his trademark black outfit. He looked, one observer later noted, like Sylvester staring at Tweety Pie. Lou, the uncharacteristically shark-hearted Pisces, stared in turn at Andy with all the gaminlike love he had been withholding from his father since he was twelve, with the adoration of a disciple who has just met the master who will open the gates of heaven and hell.

Andy seduced Lou by showering his prodigious ego with the highest compliments. “Andy told me that what we were doing with music was the same thing he was doing with movies and painting, i.e., not kidding around,” Lou recalled. “To my mind, nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us. The first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real. His ideas would stun me. His way of looking at things would stop me dead in my tracks. Sometimes, I would go for days thinking about something he said.”

Lou seduced Andy into spending the next five months trying to make Lou into a marketable persona that would make the most money in the shortest time—in short, a rock-and-roll star. “If Andy had been able to achieve the Walt Disney Hollywood status, Lou would have been able to change his persona to be like an Elvis,” pointed out Factory manager Billy Name. “Andy would have put out Lou Reed movies: Lou in Hawaii, Lou in the army, Lou as a half-breed trying to decide whether he should like the Comanches and stay with the family that raised him.”

Lou would make a career out of finding mentors. In Warhol, Reed found the all-permissive father-mother-protector-catalyst-collaborator he had always craved. In turn, Warhol saw his younger self in Reed and wanted to recapture that vitality. They were both isolated people who kept their innermost thoughts to themselves, and each could empathize with the other’s masked vulnerability. Each had had nervous breakdowns. For Lou a whole new world of possibilities opened up.

He made himself completely available to Warhol—just as he had done with Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse—without selling him his soul. For a time he was able to drop his need to be the only genius in the room. Warhol taught Reed that an artist was a person who had to work hard and not waste time. Whenever Andy asked Lou how many songs he’d written that day, whatever the answer, he would urge, “You should do more.” He taught Lou that work was everything, and that Lou came to believe that his music was so beautiful that people should be willing to die for it. It was the kind of effect Andy Warhol often had on his followers.

Lou’s position at the Factory was significantly different from that of the other members of the band. “When the Velvets came over to the Factory, Lou was the only one I talked to,” recalled Factory manager and photographer Billy Name. “Sterling rarely talked much. John would talk occasionally, and Moe was fun—she would talk—but Lou and I always had the bond thing.” Of all the Velvets, Lou spent the most time at the Factory and was the closest thing to Warhol.

Warhol was not, however, an easy man to work with. Despite taking great joy in his success, he had, like Reed, a resentment of the conditions of his life that never stopped bugging him. “He was an artist who was neither understood nor accepted at the time but who, having been ridiculed and laughed at, had perseverance and ambition for success and “la gloire,” as strong as that of any king in Shakespeare’s history plays,” wrote Gerard Malanga in an introduction to his Secret Diaries. “It was a desire that neither his coterie nor his celebrity could satisfy. Warhol was a man of parts, most of them contradictory, which accounts for his nickname, “Drella,” composed equally of Dracula and Cinderella. He was a person of much generosity and kindness—yet he could slice a person at a glance. Warhol would try to organize other people’s emotions in the same way he drew up shopping lists. He had the unique power of playing people off one another. He could be kind, cruel, friendly, catty, humane, overriding, passionately wild for “la gloire.” And he was also all that was truly vulnerable. Warhol was painfully shy, which accounted for the group of young people he surrounded himself with. He was possessed by the people he had gathered around him, yet he was habitually exploiting, betraying, or otherwise mistreating those who were close, or seemed close to him.”