Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story

The Syracuse campus looked like the perfect set for a horror movie about college life in the early 1960s. Its buildings resembled Gothic mansions from a screenwriter’s imagination. Indeed, the scriptwriter of The Addams Family TV show of the 1960s, who attended the university at the same time as Lou, used the classically Gothic Hall of Languages as the basis for the Addams Family mansion. The surrounding four-block-square area of wooden Victorian houses, Depression-era restaurants, stores, and bars completed the college landscape. A pervasive ocher-gray paint lent a somber air to the seedy wooden houses tucked away in side streets covered, most of the time, with snow, wet leaves, or rain. The atmosphere was likely to elicit either poetic contemplation or depressive madness. It provided a perfect backdrop for the beatnik lifestyle.

The surrounding city of Syracuse presented no less smashed a landscape. The manufacturing town got dumped with snow seven months of the year, and heavy bouts of rain the rest of the time. Only during the summer, when most of the students had scattered to their homes on Long Island or New Jersey, did the city receive warmth and sunshine. A thriving industrial metropolis popularly known as the Salt City, also specializing in metals and electrical machinery, it was two hundred miles northwest of Freeport, forty miles south of Lake Ontario on the Canadian border, and five miles southwest of Oneida Lake. Syracuse was aggressively conservative and religious, but at the time of Reed’s arrival it was fast turning into the academic hub of the Empire State. The city proudly supported its prestigious university, whose popular football team, the Orangemen, was undefeated during Lou’s four years, and its residents turned out in great numbers for athletic events. Despite high academic standards, Syracuse was still primarily seen as a football school. “Where the vale of Onondaga / Meets the eastern sky / Proudly stands our Alma Mater / On her hilltop high” ran the opening verse of the school song, a ditty Lewis, as many of his friends called him, would not forget.

As a freshman, Lou was assigned to the far southwestern corner of the North Campus in Sadler Hall, a plain, boxlike dormitory resembling a prison. However, much of his time was spent in the splendid, gray-stone Hall of Languages, which overlooked University Avenue and University Place at the north end of campus and housed the English, history, and philosophy departments.

Syracuse University had excellent faculty and academic courses. Though Lou may have sleepwalked through much of the curriculum, he threw himself into the music, philosophy, and literature studies in which he excelled. In music appreciation, theory, and composition classes, Lou soaked up everything, even opera. First, Lou tried his hand at journalism, but he dropped that after a week when the teacher told him his opinions were irrelevant. However, Lou quickly immersed himself in philosophy. He devoured the existentialists, obsessed over the tortuous dialectics of Hegel, and embraced the Fear and Trembling of Kierkegaard. “I was very into Hegel, Sartre, Kierkegaard,” Reed recalled. “After you finish reading Kierkegaard, you feel like something horrible has happened to you—fear and nothing. That’s where I was coming from.” He also loved Krafft-Ebing and the writing of the beat generation, particularly Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. To complete his freshman image, he took imagistic inspiration from the brash, tortured figures of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and, most of all, Lenny Bruce.

To his advantage, Reed already had the perfect agent to introduce him to the university, the smooth operator and prince of good times Allen Hyman, now entering his sophomore year. Another pampered suburban kid who drove both a Cadillac and Jaguar, Allen was generous, full of good humor, and sharp-witted. Furthermore, he genuinely appreciated Lou and was willing to put up with a lot of flak to remain his friend. Hyman was well connected with the straight fraternity set and eager to introduce Lewis to his world.

However, a highly uncomfortable introduction came about when Allen tried to get Lou to rush his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu (aka the Sammies). “Hazing was a really horrendous experience and most people were very intimidated by it,” recalled Hyman. Inductees were forced to drink themselves into oblivion and were often humiliated physically, sexually, and mentally by the fraternity brothers. When Allen told Lou stories about what he went through to join a fraternity, Lou shot him a hard look, snapping, “What are you into—masochism?”

“He had said that he didn’t want anything to do with it and that it was fascistic and disgusting,” Hyman recalled, “and he couldn’t believe anybody would be willing to go through hazing without killing the person who was hazing them.” However, typically perversely, Reed agreed to attend a rush session.

From the outset it was clear that he intended to make a strong impression. Reed came to the socializer in a suit three sizes too small and covered in dirt. It was a radical departure from the blue blazer, smart tie, and neatly combed hair of the other rushees. Allen immediately realized how much Lou was getting off on being outrageous. When one of the brothers criticized Lou’s appearance, Reed riposted, “Fuck you!” and his fraternity career came to an abrupt end. Hyman was asked to escort his friend out immediately. Walking Lou back to his dorm, a chagrined Allen hung his head regretfully, but Lou, far from being despondent, appeared exhilarated by the event. “I guess this isn’t for you,” Allen said.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Lou replied. “I told you I wouldn’t get along with those assholes. How can you live there?”

Another freshman trial that Lou failed was with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. As part of his freshman course requirements, he had to choose between physical education and ROTC. (In those days it was common to join ROTC in order to be able to go into the army as an officer and a gentleman.) Claiming that he would surely break his neck in phys ed or else kill somebody in ROTC, Lou attempted to evade either requirement, but in the end grudgingly signed up for the latter. ROTC consisted of two classes a week about how to be a soldier and possibly a leader. However, Lou’s military experience was almost a short-lived as his fraternity stint. Just weeks into the semester, when he flatly refused a direct order from his officer, he was unceremoniously booted out.

But Reed managed to make an impact on his freshman year with his very own radio show. Employing a considerable boyish charm to overcome the severe doubts of program director Katharine Griffin, during his first semester Lou hustled his way onto the Syracuse University radio station, WAER FM, with a jazz program called Excursions on a Wobbly Rail (named for a wicked Cecil Taylor piece that was used as his introductory theme). The classical, conservative station, Radio House, was situated in a World War II Quonset hut tucked away behind Carnegie Library. Freezing his balls off through many icy Syracuse evenings, hunched over his ancient machinery like some WWII underground resistance fighter for two hours, three nights a week, Lou blasted a mélange of his favorite sounds by the avant-garde leaders of the Free Jazz movement Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, the doo-wopping Dion, and the sexually charged Hank Ballard, James Brown and the Marvelettes. The mixture presented the essence of Lou Reed. “I was a very big fan of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp,” he recalled. “Then James Brown, the doo-wop groups, and rockabilly. Put it all together and you end up with me.”

Unfortunately, the Reedian canon was not appreciated by the station’s staff, and numerous faculty members, including the dean of men, lodged complaints about the—to them—hideous, unintelligible cacophony that was Reed’s program. And the authorities’ reaction was not Lou’s only problem. Disguising his voice, Allen Hyman would often call Lou at the station and harass him with ridiculous requests. On one occasion, “I asked him to play something he hated and I knew he would never play,” Allen recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not going to play that, forget it.’ So I said, ‘Listen, if you don’t play this, I’m gonna fucking have you killed. I’ll wait for you myself and I’m gonna kill you!’ And, thinking it was some lunatic, Lou got scared. Then I called him back and told him it was me and he screamed at me, saying that if I ever did that again he’d never speak to me.”

As it turned out, Allen’s pranks didn’t last long enough to lose him Lou’s friendship because before long Griffin, ever vigilant in her duties as WAER’s program director, concluded that “Excursions on a Wobbly Rail was a really weird jazz show that sounded like some new kind of noise. It was just too weird and cutting edge.” Before the end of the semester, she unceremoniously dumped it from the air, causing Lou considerable anguish.

In retrospect, Griffin and her contemporaries realized that Reed was simply ahead of his time. “Most of us who were in power on campus were children of the fifties,” she explained. “Kids in those days wore chinos and madras shirts, a clean-cut Kingston Trio kind of thing. Lou looked more like what a rock person from later in the sixties would look like. Lou was presaging the sixties and seventies and we just weren’t ready for it. He was right on the cusp of two generations. A little too far ahead to be admired in the fifties.”

During his first year at Syracuse, the scholarly Griffin concluded, “It was just Lou versus everybody else.”

Lou quickly defined himself as an oddball loner. Eschewing all organizations, he was creating an image that would in time become widely acknowledged as the essence of the hip New York underground man. Lou was a year older than most freshmen and fully grown. Measuring five feet eight inches (although he claimed to be five feet ten) he was a little chubby and some way yet from the Lou Reed of “Heroin.” He wore loafers, jeans, and T-shirts, tending, if anything, to be a little sloppier than the majority of men at school, who wore the fraternity uniform of jacket and tie. His hair was a trifle longer than theirs. Otherwise, he would not have been noticed in a crowd. His looks tended toward the cute, boyish, curly haired, shy, gum-chewing. He had a small scar under his right eye. His most unusual feature was his fingers. Short and strong, they broadened into stubby, almost blocklike fingertips, making them perfect tools for the guitar.

Lou had already formed his ambition to be a rock-and-roller and a writer. The university’s rich music scene consisted of an eclectic mix of talents like Garland Jeffreys, a future singer-songwriter and Reed acolyte two years younger than Lou; Nelson Slater, for whom Lou would later produce an album; Felix Cavaliere, the future leader of the Young Rascals; Mike Esposito, who would form the Blues Magoos and the Blues Project; and Peter Stampfel, an early member of the Holy Modal Rounders, who would become a pioneer of folk rock. While colleges in New York and Boston produced folksingers in the style of Bob Dylan, Syracuse created a bunch of proto-punk rockers.

Most importantly for Lou musically, it was at Syracuse he met fellow guitarist Sterling Morrison, a resident of Bayport, Long Island, who had a similar background. Just after Lou got kicked out of ROTC, Sterling, who was never actually enrolled at Syracuse but spent a lot of time there hanging out and sitting in on some classes, was visiting another student, Jim Tucker, who occupied the room below Lou’s. Gazing out Tucker’s window at the ROTC cadets marching up and down the quad one afternoon, Morrison suddenly heard “earsplitting bagpipe music” wail from someone’s hi-fi. After that, the same person “cranked up his guitar and gave a few shrieking blasts on that.” Excited, Morrison realized, “Oh, there’s a guitar player upstairs,” and prevailed on Tucker for an introduction.

When they met at 3 a.m. the following morning, Lou and Sterling discovered they shared a love for black music and rock and roll. They also loved Ike and Tina Turner. “Nobody even knew who they were then,” Morrison recalled. “Syracuse was very, very straight. There was a one percent lunatic fringe.”

Luckily, the drama, poetry, art, and literary scenes were just as alive as the music scene for that one percent fringe. Soon Lou was spending the majority of his time playing guitar, reading and writing, or engaging in long rap sessions with like-minded students. Many of Lou’s conversations about philosophy and literature took place in the bars and coffee shops he and his friends began to call their own. Each restaurant had its social affiliations. Lou’s crowd set up camp at the Savoy Coffee shop run by a lovable old character, Gus Joseph, who could have walked right out of a Happy Days TV episode. At night, they drank at the Orange Bar, frequented predominantly by intellectual students. According to Lou, he took two steps out of school and there was the bar. “It was the world of Kant and Kierkegaard and metaphysical polemics that lasted well into the night,” he remembered. “I often went to drink alone to that week’s lost everything.” He had become accustomed to taking prescription drugs and smoking pot, but Lou was not yet a heavy user of illegal substances. At the most he might have a Scotch and a beer.

At Syracuse, Lou presented himself as a tortured, introspective, romantic poet. Following the dictate that the first step to becoming a poet is to look and act like one, Lou liked, for example, to give the impression that he was unwashed, but that wasn’t true. According to one friend, “He wasn’t about to go out unless he took a shower first.” As far as his costume was concerned, he was still stuck somewhere between the suburban teenager in loafers and button-down shirts and the rumpled dungarees and work shirts of the Kerouac rebel. Observers remembered him as more chubby and cherubic than thin and ascetic. In fact, he didn’t dress unusually at all. If anything, he dressed poorly, wearing the same pair of dirty jeans for months. As for his demeanor, Lou copped the uptight approach of the young Rimbaud. He was just beginning to swing with the legend of his electroshock treatments, turtleneck sweaters, and the whole James Dean inspired “I’ve suffered so much everything looks upside down” routine.

According to one student who occasionally jammed with him, “Part of his aura was that he was a psychologically troubled person who in his youth had had electroshock treatments which clearly had an effect on him. He used that as part of his persona. Where the reality and the fantasy of what he was crossed, who knew.” For a sarcastic kid who had grown up with buck teeth, braces, and a nerd’s wardrobe, Lou wasn’t doing badly turning himself into the image of a totally perverse psycho. However, whatever he did with his wardrobe and his attitude to make himself hip, there was one nightmarish detail about his looks that seemed always to overwhelm him—his hair. His frizzy helmet had plagued him since he’d started looking into the mirror with intense interest in his twelfth year. What stared back at him throughout his adolescence was a Jewish version of Alfred E. Neumann.

Since America had been a largely anti-Semitic nation, the Jewish “Afro” was seen as geekishly ethnic. In the early sixties, Bob Dylan would single-handedly change the image of what a hip young boy could look like. Though the film industry and media characters like Allen Ginsberg had begun to turn the whole Jewish male persona into something ultra-chic, nobody came close to having the pervasive influence of Bob Dylan. As Ginsberg explained to his biographer Barry Miles, when Dylan appeared, particularly in his 1965 Bringing It All Back Home incarnation, he made the hooked nose and frizzy hair the very emblem of the hip, intellectual avant-garde. By the time Lou got to college, however, and started to resculpt himself into the Lou Reed who would emerge in 1966 as the closest competition to Dylan for the hippest rock star in the world, he was ready to do something about his hair. At Syracuse he discovered a hair-treatment place in the black neighborhood and on several occasions had his hair straightened.

Just like his British counterparts Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones or John Lennon of the Beatles, Lou rejected the lifestyle that came before the bomb and was remaking himself out of a combination of his favorite stars. Such self-creation was not difficult for Lou, who often claimed he had as many as eight personalities. He now clothed these personalities in the costumes and attitudes of a cast of media characters who were as important to his image as the first creative friends he would hook up with at Syracuse.

First among them was Lenny Bruce. Though damned by his legal problems to a horrible fate, Bruce was at the apogee of his career. In the eyes of the public he was the hippest, fastest-talking American poet and philosopher around. Bruce spiked his act—a kind of Will Rogers on fast-forward—by injections of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride, which would in time become Lou’s own drug of choice. Many of Reed’s mannerisms, his hand gestures, the way he answered the phone as if he was asleep, the rhythm of his speech, came directly from Bruce.

As for the rest of Lou’s media idols, you only have to look at a panel of head shots of the stars of the era to see what Lou would take in time from Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy, Montgomery Clift, and William Burroughs, to name but a few of the more obvious ones. In fact, one of Lou’s most attractive characteristics was the way he appreciated and celebrated his heroes. He was always trying to get Hyman, for example, a straight law student whose path would lead in a direction diametrically opposite to Lou’s, to read Kerouac and then rap with him about it. Lou loved turning people on to the new sounds, the new scenes, and the new people.

A lot of the artistic kids who went to Syracuse look back upon it with disdain as a football school dominated by the “fucking” Orangemen. In fact, in that watershed period between the end of McCarthyism and the death of Kennedy, a new permissiveness swept through colleges across the country. Syracuse contained and nurtured a lot of different environments. Certainly the fraternity environment still dominated the American campus, and the majority of male and female students still aligned themselves with a fraternity or sorority in sheeplike fashion. There was, however, a vital cultural split between the Jewish and the non-Jewish fraternities. The Jewish fraternities were for the most part hipper, more receptive to the new culture and more open to alternative ways of living. Despite completely rejecting Sigma Alpha Mu and attaching himself primarily to the arty intellectual crowd, some of whom had apartments off campus, Lou maintained a loyal friendship with Hyman and was, in fact, adopted as something of a mascot by the Sammies as their resident oddball. They weren’t about to miss out completely on a character who had already, in the first half of his freshman year, carved out an image for himself as tempestuous and evil. In fact, Jewish fraternities in colleges across America would provide some of the most receptive of Lou Reed’s audiences throughout his career.

The rules that governed a freshman’s life at Syracuse were greatly to the advantage of the male students. Whereas the girls in the dorm atop Mount Olympus were locked in at 9 p.m., and any girl who dared break curfew was subject to expulsion, the boys, who had no curfew, were able to use the night to live a whole other life, exploring the town, drinking in the Orange or in frat houses and getting up to all sorts of mischief. Naturally Lou, who had developed the habit of staying up most of the night reading, writing, and playing music, lost no time exploring his new home. He quickly discovered the neighboring black ghetto where at least one club, the 800, presented funky jazz and R&B as well as a whole culture, centered around drugs, music, and danger, that appealed to the explorer of the dark side in Reed.

Lou’s first college girlfriend was Judy Abdullah, and he called her The Arab. It may be that she was of more interest to him as an exotic object than as a person. Judy revealed an interesting quirk in Lou’s sexuality. He was turned on by big women. Judy Abdullah was twice his size. She was a sensual woman and they apparently had a good time in bed, but at least one acquaintance added a shade to Reed’s personality profile when she pointed out that his attraction to big women offered both a challenge and an escape route. Lou could take the attitude that he had no responsibility to be serious about her or even try to satisfy her.

The relationship petered out before the end of the year. Lou, who persisted in not wasting time with dates and always coming on obnoxiously, was mean to Judy, and when they broke up, she was pissed off at him for good reason. Still, they remained acquaintances and Lou saw her occasionally throughout his college years.

By the end of his first year at Syracuse, according to one of the Sammies, “Lou’s uniqueness and stubbornness made him different from anyone I had ever known. He marched to his own drum. He was for doing things for people, but his way. He would never dress or act in a way so that people would accept him. Lou had an unbelievably wry, caustic sense of humor and loved funny things. He played off people. He would often act in a confrontational manner. He wanted to be different. Lou was a funny guy in an extremely dry, witty sense. Certainly not the type of comedian that would make you laugh at him. He wasn’t making fun of things but seeing the humor in things—the banal and the normal. There was an undercurrent of saneness in everything he did. He was screwed up, but that was schizophrenia too.”

***

What Lou Reed needed most was to find a coconspirator, an equal off whom he could bounce his ideas and behavior and receive inspiration in return. Almost miraculously, he found such a person in what would become the second golden period of his life (the first being his discovery of rock and roll). Lou’s first great soul mate, mirror, and collaborator, whom he roomed with in his sophomore year, was the brilliant, eccentric, talented, but tortured and doomed Lincoln Swados. Swados came from an upwardly mobile, middle-class, and, by all accounts, outstandingly empathetic Jewish family from upstate New York. Like Reed, he had a little sister called Elizabeth, upon whom he doted (and to some extent, like Lou, identified with). The two students fell into each other’s arms like lost inmates of some Siberian prison of the soul who finally discover after years of isolated exile a fellow voyager. To make matters perfect from Lou’s point of view, Lincoln was an aspiring writer (working on an endless Dostoyevskian novel); his favorite singer was Frank Sinatra; Lincoln’s side of the room was covered in more crap than Lou’s; and—this was the clincher—Swados was agoraphobic. He spent most of his time holed up in their basement room either hunkered over a battered desk or playing Frank Sinatra records and rapping with Lou. Whenever Lou needed a receiver for one of his new songs, poems, or stories, Lincoln was always there. Their relationship was the first of many constructive collaborations in Lou’s life.

One of Lou’s strongest personalities was the controlling figure who always needed to be the center of attention and the most outstanding person in the room. Here again Lincoln was his perfect match, for if Lou ever worried that he might not yet possess the hippest look in the world, Lincoln presented no threat. He was usually togged out in a pair of pants that ended somewhere above his ankles and were belted in the middle of his chest. His customary short-sleeve shirt invariably clashed with the pants. A pair of bugged-out eyes that made Caryl Chessman in the electric chair look like a junkie on the nod stared out of a cadaverous face capped by a head of dirty, disheveled blondish hair. Lincoln’s body was as much of a mess as was his mind. He rarely bathed or brushed his teeth and at times emanated an odor that obviated any close physical relationships. The whole ensemble was tied together by a disembodied smile that clearly indicated, at least to somebody of Lou’s perceptiveness, just how far out in space Lincoln really was most of the time.