Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story

In an essay, “From the Bandstand,” he wrote about music that year, Lou drew attention to one of the key concepts they both emphasized in their work, repetition. “Every head in America must know the last three drum choruses of ‘Dawn’ by the Four Seasons. Paradiddles. Repetition. Repetition is so fantastic … Andy Warhol’s movies are so repetitious sometimes, so so beautiful. Probably the only interesting films made in the U.S. Rock and roll films. Over and over and over. Reducing things to their final joke. Which is pretty. ‘Sally go ’round the roses / roses they won’t hurt you.’”

“The real idea was to listen all the time,” Reed said. “He had great ideas at the drop of a hat. But so did I. The thing was, he was there. There were a couple of people who were floating around who were there who always seemed to get in touch with one another one way or another. In other words, no other band could have been able to hold it up. It would have been overwhelmed by the lights or the movies. That’s not, in fact, what happened. And that’s because what we did was very strong.”

“You scared yourself with music,” Warhol told him. “I scared myself with paint.”

“It was like heaven,” said Reed of his early days at the Factory. “I watched Andy; I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things. I used to write it down.”

All the Velvets seemed equally snowed by Andy. “It was like bang!” Warhol superstar Mary Woronov recalled. “They were with Andy and Andy was with them and they backed him absolutely. They would have walked to the end of the earth for him. And that happened in one day!”

Gretchen Berg, who often visited the Factory to interview Warhol, noticed that Reed maintained a strong position there. “Lou was very quiet. He almost never spoke to anyone, and when addressed, he would not answer,” she recalled. “He would act as if you weren’t there. I respected him. I saw that he was an artist of some kind and he had his group around him. They were always quite nice, but they always kept their distance. It was a bit snobbish. I also had the feeling that Mr. Warhol created the atmosphere of a family around him and there was a certain amount of competition. He had a lot of power with Andy on a one-on-one basis. You had the feeling that Lou was someone rather special. He was the brother who was away for many years and had to be caught when he came in. The father must now speak to Lewis, who’s just come in, because Lewis will not speak to anyone else but father. It was exactly that feeling. No one else must speak to Lou. And then Lewis would speak to father and then leave. If you came up to him, it was not as if he was rude exactly, but he would just look at you and take a puff of his cigarette. Lou was very much in the background, but he kept himself in the background. There was always something that was being created in the background. While everyone else was going through their thing and living and having all this attention, this in the background was going on very quietly and very steadily. He was like Paul Morrissey in a way.

“There was tension between Paul and everyone. I think he felt that he must not say anything about Lou Reed because he had no power over Lou. Lou Reed came in when he liked, left when he liked.”

In Warhol’s Factory, Reed found a laboratory for his artistic and sexual explorations, a milieu full of psychodrama providing endless fodder for his songs, and a nurturing environment through which he could bring music to the world. “Everyone was very campy,” Cale said. “There was a lot of game playing. Lou felt at home in that environment. I didn’t really.” Before the Factory, Reed had created scenarios for his songs; Warhol provided the cast and the telling details. More importantly, the Factory laid bare all the sexual fantasies and taboos that Reed had been struggling to conceal since his days on Long Island. In Warhol’s light Lou metamorphosed from a rock musician with a negative attitude and a host of complexes into a glamorous member of the Warhol entourage. The fragile, gamin Reed was equally attractive to men and women, looking on the one hand like a pretty girl with his curly brown hair and tentative smile, and exhibiting on the other hand an insouciant attitude regarding sex that presented an ambivalent challenge. Reed soon abandoned the sweaters, casual jackets, and loafers he’d worn since leaving Syracuse and took on the Factory image—Warhol-inspired black leather jacket, boots, and shades. Like Warhol, Reed masked his vulnerable side within the armor of a tough, impenetrable image.

Warhol had often gone on the record saying that sex was too much trouble, but he was fascinated by the idea of sex, and many of his films were semipornographic in a distanced, ironic way. Reed also maintained a detached stance with regard to sex. As a friend recalled, “Lou was mostly a voyeur. In my experience he never had any sustained interest in either sex. Sex didn’t offer Lou enough—he was just really bored by it.” One budding transvestite, Jackie Curtis, tried to have sex with Lou. “He was very tall and heavily built, a big boy,” recalled a mutual friend. “He was eighteen, but he looked about fourteen. And he would come right up to Lou and say, ‘Hi, gee, how are you!’ And Lou would not respond at all. And Jackie would say, ‘Well, thank you very much.’ And then he’d come back to me and say, ‘God, what did I say?’ He was very funny. Then he would go rushing up the next time and Lou would put his head back in an aloof manner.”

Lou was not, however, always aloof. “Lou tried to put the make on me once,” Malanga remembered. “It didn’t go anywhere. He was the aggressor and I was gentle with him but … We came back from a gig real late—we were traveling somewhere and we came back to New York really late and he called up Barbara Hodes and Barbara put the two of us up that night. And I remember Lou making advances toward me under the sheet. I think in the end we ended up just hugging each other. I kind of sent him the signal that I wasn’t interested.”

Reed was more interested in the sexual role-playing of transvestisms and S&M. Yet this didn’t stop him from having a number of friendships with men and women. At the Factory he met Danny Fields, a young medical school dropout with whom he developed a connection that lasted over thirty years. “I first heard ‘Heroin’ and I thought it was beautiful music,” Fields recalled. “But I was terrified of Lou. I was always trying to figure out things to say to him that would be sharp. Everybody was in love with him back then. Around 1966, he was the sexiest boy in town.”

“Lou’s relationship with Danny Field was collegial,” explained Gerard Malanga. “They were in the same business and there was a lot of history between them. Lou and I may have crashed at Danny’s one night. Danny’s pad was basically a crash pad. Thank God for Danny. We would have been homeless. We always knew he could be relied to put us up. He was living on West 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues above a coffee shop, which in those years was a very unfashionable place to live. So Danny was a pioneer. He had a floor-through loft in a two-story building. There were couches and pillows and mattresses on the floor with a few people staying there.”

In the midst of all the ego collisions and role-playing, screaming guitars, and parties, Fields observed, “We all had this feeling about Lou—that he would bury us. He was much too smart to get sucked into the whirlpool. Others may have been too fragile, too beautiful to survive—but he knew what he was doing. I was ever so in love with Lou. Everyone was in love with him—me, Edie, Andy, everyone. I thought he was just the hottest-looking, sexiest person I ever had seen. He was a major sex object of everybody in New York in his years with the Velvet Underground. The Velvets were ahead of everybody. It was the only thing that ever, ever, ever swept me off my feet as music since early Mahler. They were a revolution.

“The anguish Lou was reflecting upon was not his own. He was personalizing what he’d seen. As an artist he kept his distance and refused to be destroyed by it. Oh, he’d had his ups and downs, but he’s in no way a tragic figure. He simply had the brilliance to turn it all into art.”

Another Factory denizen, Tally Brown, said, “Lou is one of the most interesting lyricists of urban life in the world. He also is one of the best theoreticians about rock and roll. I mean, he can write about it and talk about it. He’s very verbal. Besides that, he’s a fascinating, fucked-up guy.”

After Warhol and Fields, Reed made strong, long-term connections with Billy Name, Ondine, and Gerard, the three strongest influences on Warhol. Each man had his separate function for Lou. Factory manager, photographer, and permanent resident Billy Name provided an outlet for Lou’s mystical side. Lou and Billy spent hours hanging out and talking about their favorite subjects such as Eastern religion and matters of the occult. “When I first met Lou, we immediately bonded as if we were guys who grew up on the same block,” Name recalled. “He’s from Long Island, I’m from Poughkeepsie, with the same experience. We just got along so great we were like best buddies. We had a good love for each other and great respect. Lou was a great conversationalist, very congenial, very interested, never the type of person who would just say what he wanted to say—he explored what you were and heard what you said, always with camaraderie.” Lou saw Billy as “a divinity in action on Earth. He did pictures that were unspeakably beautiful. Just pure space. For the people who have one foot on Earth and another foot on Venus, they would like that kind of picture because it was out-and-out space.”

Gerard Malanga was a widely published and well-connected poet who was familiar with many of the poets Lou was interested in, including Delmore Schwartz. “I identified more with Lou on a poetry level than on a rock-and-roll level,” said Malanga, “even when I was choreographing for the Velvets. I identified with Lou as a fellow poet as opposed to someone making music. Lou was a good guy to bring around. If you tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s go here,’ he would go. He wouldn’t ask, ‘Where are we going?’ and ‘What for?’ and all that. He was good to have with you. He was good to hang out with. But he wasn’t very humorous, and he didn’t speak much. He wasn’t an articulate person.”

If Billy and Lou connected on a metaphysical level, and Gerard and Lou connected through poetry, then it was with Ondine that Lou shared his love of drugs. Like Lou and many denizens of the Factory, Ondine had chosen amphetamine as his drug of choice, and he became Lou’s main supplier. “He was intelligent about his use of drugs,” said Ondine. “He knew what he was doing, he studied it. I always thought that the whole heroin thing was an artistic expression. A lot of people experimented with heroin.”

Lou’s most famous song may be “Heroin,” but the drug most associated with his image was undoubtedly amphetamine. It’s easy to see why. According to the Amphetamine Manifesto by Harvey Cohen, “It is a drug for those who despair: shy, retarded, unhappy creatures who need love and had been rejected and had their natural instincts rejected and almost atrophied. Amphetamine is very much an overachiever’s type of chemical. Methedrine rolls back the stone from the mouth of the cave. It is the most profound of all drugs, the most unexplored and the freakiest. It can be so many things; there’s always a place to go behind methedrine that you’ve never been before. Amphetamine stimulates the central nervous system. It lessens the patient’s inhibitions, relieving him of pent-up emotions often associated with some previously suppressed trauma. The ideal patient for this treatment has an obsessional, tense personality and has difficultly expressing his real feelings, particularly if they are aggressive. Patients with obsessional personalities become relaxed, but are awake and alert after injection.”

Amphetamine had two vital functions for Lou creatively. By allowing him to stay up for three to five days at a time without sleep, it altered the synapses of his brain, cutting off a lot of static that had previously stymied the flow of words, and gave him—particularly in writing—the energy to pursue each vision to its conclusion. (One can see its effects in his essay “From the Bandstand,” published in Aspen Magazine, December 1966, or in songs such as “White Light/White Heat”—pure amphetamine—or “Murder Mystery”).

Methedrine is also, perhaps, the greatest male aphrodisiac, giving a man an erection that could break a plate, as well as Homeric duration in the act. On top of that, the methedrine available in 1966 was pharmaceutical and cheap. Being a favored customer, Lou could buy a film canister of the powder, which he cooked up and shot, for as little as $5.

The “amphetamine glories” who gathered around the central figure of Ondine at the Factory saw themselves as religious, heroic, and immortal. Of course they weren’t, and many of them, like Ondine, died sad deaths. But when they lived, they lived beyond the barriers of society. As Lou wrote in one of his finest pieces of prose, the liner notes to Metal Machine Music, “For those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush. Professional, no sniffers please, don’t confuse superiority (no competition) with violence, power or other justifications. The tacit speed agreement with self. We did not start World War I, II, or III, or the Bay of Pigs for that matter. My week beats your year.”

At first, the only dissenting opinion about Lou at the Factory came from Paul Morrissey, who felt that Nico was a far strong performer and presence onstage. “Lou was always ill at ease as a performer, and that’s what his act still is—a remote, ill-at-ease person.” The two of them shared a certain hardness, which led one observer to comment that Lou was “like Paul Morrissey with a guitar.”

Nico was the first person at the Factory to taste the dregs of Lou’s meanness just after her breakup with Lou following the show at Cinémathèque. According to Cale, Lou was “absolutely tom up by it all. When it fell apart, we really learnt how Nico could be the mistress of the destructive one-liner.” Cale recalled one morning rehearsal at the Factory shortly thereafter: “Nico came late, as usual. Lou said, ‘Hello,’ to her in a rather cold way, but just ‘Hello,’ or something. She simply stood there. You could see she was waiting to reply, in her own time. Ages later, out of the blue, came her first words: ‘I cannot make love to Jews anymore.’”

“Lou was absolutely magnificent, but we quarreled a lot, he made me very sad then,” she said later.

Lou may have lost his lover, but when it came to the Velvet Underground, he maintained control over Nico. “He wouldn’t let me sing some of his songs because we’d split,” she lamented. “Lou likes to manipulate women, you know, like program them. He wanted to do that with me. He told me so. Like, computerize me. Lou was the boss and he was very bossy.”

“He was mean to Nico,” said Malanga. “Lou could not stand to be around somebody who has a light equal to his or who shines more intensely.”

According to Cale, he was intimidated by Reed. But despite Lou’s immersion in the Warhol world, Cale was still the person who understood him best. “John idolized Lou,” Paul Morrissey recalled. “He thought anything Lou said was wonderful.” “John and Lou were very close,” agreed a mutual friend. “They loved each other, but they also hated each other. It was competitive musically. John knew Lou got much more attention because he was the singer in the group, but then John cut a more flamboyant figure. Lou used to call him the “Welsh Bob Dylan.” They were two guys fighting to be stars. They were the perfect match but they were the perfect mismatch in that their true deep-down directional head for music was very different.”

“Andy and Nico liked each other’s company,” recalled John Cale. “There was something complicit in the way they both handled Lou Reed, for instance. Lou was straight-up Jewish New York, while Nico and Andy were kind of European. Lou was very full of himself and faggy in those days. We called him Lulu, I was Black Jack, Nico was Nico. He wanted to be queen bitch and spit out the sharpest rebukes of anyone around. Lou always ran with the pack, and the Factory was full of queens to run with. But Lou was dazzled by Andy and Nico. He was completely spooked by Andy, because he could not believe that someone could have such a goodwill and yet be mischievous in the same transvestite way that Lou was, all that bubbling gay humor. It was fun for the rest of us to watch all the shenanigans going on, with Rene Ricard and those spiteful games you just had to laugh at because they were so outrageous. But Lou tried to compete. Unfortunately for him, Nico could do it better.

“Nico and Andy had a slightly different approach, but they caught Lou out time and time again. Andy was never less than considerate to us. Lou couldn’t fully understand this, he couldn’t grasp this amity that Andy had. Even worse, Lou would say something bitchy, but Andy would say something even bitchier, and—nicer. This would irritate Lou. Nico had the same effect. She would say things so he couldn’t answer back.”

The month of March was spent on the road, doing shows at university art departments. The whole entourage was feeling cocky and took a defiant us-against-them attitude. “We all got along very well and had tremendous fun on the road,” recalled Sterling, “Andy and the whole crowd. We used to rent those big recreational vehicles—and pack everyone in there and just roll. It was a self-contained world. We had a generator on the back so we could power all our stuff.”

Warhol’s death-squad entourage, all dressed in black, all on drugs, and all acting out ego traumas and fantasies, caused a sensation wherever they went. “We had a horrible reputation—they thought we were gay,” said Sterling. “They figured we must be—running around with Warhol and all those whips and stuff. In order to eke out a career, you’ve got to start thinking about things like longevity, and markets and tastes. We were quite intelligent, I’m sure we were the most highly scholarshipped band in history. Which made it very difficult to manage us, because the usual bullshit shallow thinking wasn’t going to work for an instant. You couldn’t say, ‘Do this.’ Andy, oddly enough, probably could have, but he never operated that way.”

During their trip to New Jersey’s Rutgers University, a fight broke out in the cafeteria when the members of the group were not allowed to eat there, ensuring that the afternoon’s performance would sell out. But it wasn’t until they got to Ann Arbor, Michigan, that the whole thing finally came together and was a smash hit. “In March we left New York for Ann Arbor in a rented van to play at the University of Michigan,” wrote Warhol. “Nico drove, and that was an experience. I still don’t know if she had a license. She’d only been in this country a little while and she’d keep forgetting and drive on the British side of the road. A cop stopped us near a hamburger drive-in near Toledo when a waitress got upset and complained to him because we kept changing orders, and when he asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ Lou shoved me forward and told him, ‘Of all people—Drella!’

“Ann Arbor was crazy. At least the Velvets were a smash. I’d sit on the steps in the lobby during intermissions and people from the local papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. “If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen,” I’d explain. “That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”

***

Back in New York that April, the group reached the zenith of their career when Warhol rented a Polish community hall, the Dom, on St. Marks Place in the East Village, and put on his climactic multimedia show, now called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

When the Velvet Underground performed for a month that April under Warhol’s direction in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Nico undoubtedly became the star of the show. Onstage in her white pantsuit, she was the center of attention. She was an inch taller than Cale, and despite the fact that Reed sang most of the songs, everything was geared so that she just had to stand there to command attention. Every drug-induced movement she made became significant. It was a talent she had developed in her years as a model and with which Lou Reed could not compete. The musicians who stood out were the flamboyant and handsome Welshman John Cale, with his great hawk nose and mop of shiny black hair cut in the style of Prince Valiant, as he bowed his electric viola, and the androgynous little drummer, who stood up behind a bizarre-looking kit composed chiefly of kettledrums, banging away with the relentless ferocity of an insane fourteen-year-old. In fact, Warhol was the dominant influence because his films set the striking backdrop and his conduction of the light show played over the band and the films, creating a whole new way to look at rock-and-roll shows. And people came to see a Warhol show.

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