Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story

“I thought, look, all these writers are writing about only a very small part of the human experience,” Reed pointed out. “Whereas a record could be like a novel, you could write about this. It was so obvious, it’s amazing everybody wasn’t doing it. Let’s take Crime and Punishment and turn it into a rock-and-roll song!

“But if you’re going to talk about the greats, there is no one greater than Raymond Chandler. I mean, after reading Raymond Chandler and going on to someone else, it’s like eating caviar and then turning to some real inferior dish. Take the sensibility of Raymond Chandler or Hubert Shelby or Delmore Schwartz or Poe and put it to rock music.”

Like any foray into oneself, writing proved to be more than exhilarating. It was, for Lou, a long and painful process. “I love writing,” Lou would tell an interviewer, “except that it’s excruciating. It’s a very strange process, I’ve never really understood it myself. But I’m available for, I’m there for, I try to make things as easy as possible for it. I just try and stay out of the way. So once I start typing, I never stop. I don’t try and stop to fix anything because it will go away and then I’ll never get it back ever again. Raymond Chandler: ‘That blonde was as pleasant as a split lip.’ Hard to beat that. He’s talking about a guy’s thumbnail, he thought his thumbnail looked like the edge of a ice cube. Boom, you can see it. And that’s what I try to do. I try to give you a very visual image in very few words, so that you can picture it in your mind really quick. I spend most of my time taking things out. Taking tons of stuff out. Really chopping it down. That’s the goal. Besides communicating emotion and having a beginning, middle, and an end, I’m really hammering at those words to be concise and get it across to you as quickly and visually as possible.”

During this time, Lou continued to mine his everyday experiences for song material. He spent a lot of time going into New York, scoring drugs and checking out bands. He was fixated on Ornette Coleman and used to try to see him whenever he performed in New York City. In his last semester, his writing, taking drugs, loneliness, and fascination with underground jazz set off a creative explosion. He wrote at least two songs, “Waiting for My Man” and “Heroin.” The precision and scope of these songs heralded the Lou Reed who would become known as the Baudelaire of New York.

“At the time I wrote ‘Heroin,’ I felt like a very rather negative, strung-out, violent, aggressive person. I meant those songs to sort of exorcise the darkness, or the self-destructive element in me, and hoped that other people would take them the same way. ‘Heroin’ is very close to the feeling you get from smack. It starts on a certain level, it’s deceptive. You think you’re enjoying it. But by the time it hits you, it’s too late. You don’t have any choice. It comes at you harder and faster and keeps on coming. The song is everything that the real thing is doing to you.” It would take Lou a year to work up “Heroin” from rough lyrics and bare-bone chords into one of the greatest rock-and-roll songs of all time. Mishkin helped Lou by hammering out its unforgettable bass line. Not until Lou met John Cale in the fall of 1964 did he develop the two Syracuse songs into the form in which they were recorded.

Reed’s senior year was pitted with conflicts and frustrations that emerged in several dramatic incidents. In October the Eldorados had gone down to Sarah Lawrence to play a series of weekend dates. Now that Hyman had graduated and had been replaced by another drummer, Lou was ever more impatient with his plodding bandmates. One night when they got to the venue, Lou didn’t want to play. “So he said, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to play for these assholes,’” remembered Mishkin. “And suddenly, right in front of everybody, he smashed his hand through a plate glass window [in emulation of Lincoln, who had done the same thing years earlier]. Of course he couldn’t play. We took him to the hospital and there were lots of stitches.”

Lou continued to flaunt his bad attitude. Rather than masking his increasing drug consumption, he became its walking advertisement. At 8 a.m., while other students trotted off to class, he would stand outside the Orange Bar to wait for Delmore, on the unmistakable heroin nod. “I was sitting in the Orange one early-spring day,” remembered Sterling. “Lou and this guy were sitting in the guy’s red convertible with the radio on full blast, the top down, and they were both nodding out in the front seat, so I went out and put the top up and turned the radio off. I remember another time sitting in the Orange and Lou came in and thought he was leaning on his elbow, except his elbow was about a foot above the table.” The local campus police, who were determined to crack down on drugs, took note of this behavior and put Reed under surveillance.

“I had recently been asked by the Tactical Police Force of the city which housed my large eastern university to leave town well before graduation because of various clandestine operations I was alleged to be involved in,” wrote Reed in one essay. “In those days few people had long hair and those who did recognized each other as, at the very least, a good guy and one who smoked marijuana. They couldn’t catch me.”

In fact, Lou suffered police surveillance more than he knew. In 1963, as drugs spread rapidly through college campuses across the country, the Syracuse Police Department had taken a small group of officers led by Sgt. Robert Longo from the vice squad and created a brand-new narcotics squad. The heat was closing in, to employ the opening sentence of Lou’s favorite book, William Burroughs’s recently published Naked Lunch. To counterbalance the police pressure, Shelley and a friend of hers had developed a friendship with two of the members of this new Syracuse narcotics squad. “The police squad car would pull up outside my apartment and they’d supposedly be working, but they’d be having a beer and hanging out,” she recalled. “And getting a little bit of nooky without my having to commit myself in any way. They came up and got a few hugs and kisses and thought they were making real progress with the lewd, evil girls of the campus. Lou met the cops and knew them through his senior year. He used to see them in the Varsity a lot. Lou was harassed by the same police. They just plain hated Lou.”

Shelley was more aware of how much the cops really wanted to get Lou (“They thought he was a gay faggot evil shit,” she said) and knew that if they got their hands on him, they would beat him up badly. She repeatedly made it a condition of seeing the cop that he promise they would not touch Lou. “Touch Lou,” she told him, “and you don’t touch me.”

At first, the fact that the heavies from the narcotics squad were on Lou’s tail was more of an amusement than a hassle for him. He enjoyed entertaining friends with stories about how, after being tipped off about an impending bust, he had buried his stash at a nearby Boy Scout camp. Lou felt confident that he could outsmart the police just as he had outwitted authorities throughout his life.

There were also signs that a calmer, more confident Lou was emerging, a Lou who had passed through the very center of some internal tornado and survived stronger, surer, and more his own man. Larry Goldstein, a freshman whose band the Downbeats won the battle of the bands at Syracuse in 1963, and who had briefly joined LA and the Eldorados, got a chance to hang out with Lou one night.

“We started playing together, doing mostly college gigs,” Goldstein recounted. “We played Cornell for one, and we used to play the FI—the Fayetteville Inn—which was about twenty miles from Syracuse. Lou was really nothing but very nice to us. We were just kids in comparison, but he wasn’t a prima donna or a rock-star type, he was very supportive. There was a restaurant called Ben’s in the Fifteenth Ward near Lou’s apartment that served really greasy soul food, and Lou used to go there a lot. One night after we played a gig we were sitting around Lou’s apartment and I remember him as being very gentle and very nice, like a kind of father figure. And he suggested that we go to Ben’s to get something to eat. Lou seemed a lot older than us. And he was much more mature in many ways. He had an alternative type of personality that was unlike anyone else. I never remembered him being arrogant about it. He was just advanced.”

In June 1964, Reed graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the Syracuse College of Arts and Sciences. The richness of Lou’s character, and yet at the same time its awful limitation, was revealed in Lou’s last act of human kindness at Syracuse. According to Reed, “As soon as exams were over, at the graduation ceremony, I was told by the Tactical Police Squad that if I wasn’t gone within an hour, they’d beat me up. They couldn’t get me, but they’d break every bone, every movable part of my body. So I split, but I still graduated with honors.”

However, according to Shelley, Lou in fact stayed after graduation strictly to take care of her through a particularly bad illness. The two of them had been living half a block apart. Shelley was installed on McDonald Street with her killer boyfriend; Lou was living alone on the corner of Adams. Near the end of the semester, Shelley’s boyfriend had gone on a trip. Lou visited and found her unable to attend classes. He scooped her up and moved her into his apartment. Knowing she’d fail her course with Phillip Booth if he didn’t do something drastic, Lou took her over to Booth’s house. “I remember being bundled over there and being plunked down on the couch and being told, ‘Just sit there and look hopeless,’” she recalled. “Which was no effort. My eyes must have been rolling in my head. He just told Booth, ‘Pass this person,’ and he did.” As the other students left campus, Shelley was still too ill to travel, so Lou stayed with her and, she said, “really put me back together.”

Shelley remembered thinking, “I really love him, he’s really fantastic,” but also being exhausted and foggy. “You know how it is when you get back together with someone. He was just terrific. We were really pigs in shit, like two kids let out of jail. He was adorable. It was a perfect time. We were really amazed at having such a good time.”

She stayed with him for one to two weeks. Unfortunately, it was too long, and Shelley found herself being unpleasantly reminded of Lou’s need to be in control and had an intuitive feeling that things would never work out between them. And so, when he put her onto the plane to Chicago, she waved good-bye to Lou without wondering when she would see him again.

Chapter Four

The Pickwick Period

WITH PICKWICK INTERNATIONAL: 1964–65

The Pickwick experience was the first plateau of Lou’s maturation as a musician. It gave him a point of departure that I think was critical to his becoming what he became.

Donald Schupak

Instead of going into New York like the majority of the other bright English-literature graduates coming down from Syracuse University, Lou retreated to the comfort and safety of his parents’ home. In the summer of 1964, he turned his full attention toward evading the draft. He knew he’d have to put on a good show at the draft hearing to convince the army officials he was sick, crazy, or both. He chose both.

Providentially, he was aided in his cause by a real illness that struck a few days after he got home to Freeport. Feeling feverish and exhausted, he was diagnosed as having a bad case of hepatitis, which he later claimed to have acquired in a shooting gallery by sharing a needle with a mashed-faced Negro named Jaw. Upon receiving this news, Lou immediately placed an expensive long-distance phone call to Shelley, warning her that she too might have acquired the disease during their recent rapprochement. Then he set about lining up medical evidence sufficient to stave off his recruitment into the army.

According to Lou, he managed to pull off his feat in a record ten minutes by walking into his local draft board chewing on his favorite downer, a 750-milligram Placidyl, a large green pill prescribed for its hypnotic, calming effects and to induce sleep. The effects of the pill come on within fifteen minutes to an hour and may be greatly enhanced when combined with alcohol, barbiturates, and or other central nervous system depressants. Although Placidyl was available over the counter through the 1960s, due to its potential to cause severe, often suicidal depression, as well as drug dependence, it is now available in America by prescription only. “I said I wanted a gun and would shoot anyone or anything in front of me,” Reed recalled. If this smart-aleck claim didn’t do the trick, the yellow pall cast over his visage by the incipient hepatitis did. “I was pronounced mentally unfit and given a classification that meant I’d only be called up if we went to war with China. It was the one thing my shock treatments were good for.”

It was the summer of 1964. His father offered him a job in his tax accountancy business, which he insisted Lou take over and inherit upon his retirement. Lou did not fancy sitting behind a desk peering at a calculator. He told Sidney that he should give his business to Elizabeth (aged sixteen) because she had a better head for such things. Instead, Lou put together a band and hacked his way through the summer playing local shows, which included, as often as possible, gay bars. Resenting his family’s earlier embrace of electroshock treatments and their current disapproval of his lifestyle, Lou set about stinging them with rejection. As he would sing in one of his catalogs of contempt, “Families,” that families who dwell in the suburbs often reduce each other to tears.

However, the battle was not over. Summer fun was one thing allowed the indolent rich graduates on the island, but come fall, every one of them was expected to take up a calling. Hyman was already in law school. Lou’s parents presumed their son would also buckle down to some kind of acceptable career.

How wrong they were! In a move calculated to upset both Delmore Schwartz and his parents, Lou took a job writing made-to-order pop songs for a cheap recording company called Pickwick International and, in their eyes, threw away an expensive education.

The agent of this first step on Lou’s path to becoming a songwriter was none other than Lou’s old friend from Syracuse, the manager of LA and the Eldorados, Don Schupak. “I introduced Lou to a guy who I had developed a partnership with back here in the city, Terry Phillips,” Schupak recalled. Phillips, who had roomed with the record-producing genius Phil Spector in the early 1960s, had convinced Pickwick to venture into the rock business. “They were taught the notion of rock and roll by Terry Phillips and me,” Schupak continued. “They eventually became Musicland, and the people we had to convince to start this studio at the cost of eighty dollars have made tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in the rock-and-roll business since then.”

Reed was hired on Schupak’s recommendation. “Pickwick started Lou’s career,” Donald recalled. “It taught him the discipline of showing up. It put him into the industry.”

The grand, British-sounding Pickwick International consisted, in fact, of a squat cinder-block warehouse in Long Island City, across the river from Manhattan. The whole operation was run out of this warehouse full of cheap, slapdash records, with a small basement recording studio in a converted storeroom containing, as Schupak, who also worked there as a “record executive,” recalled, “a shitty old spinet piano and a Roberts tape recorder.” Lou, who received $25 a week for his endeavors—and no rights to any of his material—made the twenty-five-minute commute from Freeport to Long Island City every day. Once there, he would find himself locked into the tiny studio with three collaborators: the pasty-faced Phillips, whose pencil mustache, slicked-back hair, and polyester suits evinced his weird distance from life, and two other songwriters, Jerry Vance (alias Jerry Pellegrino) and Jimmie Sims (Jim Smith). While Schupak tried to figure out what he was supposed to be doing, Phillips took it upon himself to direct the fledgling rock arm of the Pickwick label.

Pickwick specialized in producing bargain-basement rip-off albums for a naive mass audience. For example, something like Bobby Darin Sings the Blues featured Darin crooning on exactly one song, squeezed in amidst ten other sung by Jack Borgheimer; the album of ten hot-rod songs by the Roughnecks sported a cover (minus Lou) of four gallivanting lads who looked, at a distance, suspiciously like the Beatles, but were in fact a bunch of pasty-faced session musicians wearing wigs. In other words, the album would say it featured four groups but it wouldn’t really be four groups, it would just be various permutations of the writers, and they would sell them at supermarkets for ninety-nine cents or a dollar. In retrospect, observed Phil Milstein, one of Lou’s most informed and appreciative critics and the founder in 1978 of the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, “in many ways this is the craziest part of the entire crazy story. No work Lou has done is so trivial, so prefabricated, so tossed off, as what he did at Pickwick.”

The Roughnecks’ song “You’re Driving Me Insane” opened with a tuneless buzz of guitars and then applied the unschooled, scratchy sound of the Kinks to some riffs refined from Chuck Berry. Over the dense, muddy instrumental came the lyrics—half-spoken, half-forced—droned-out words that were supported by the eerie abandon of a rabble of party goers in the background: “The way you rattle your brain / You know you’re driving me insane.” Another contribution by another fake group, the Beachnuts’ “Cycle Annie,” with lyrics by Lou, mixed the surf sound with the first hints of the Velvet Underground. The song allowed Reed to assert himself lyrically with a tale of “a real tough chick” who “just didn’t come any meaner.” Filled with Reedian characters and his playful love of three-chord rock and roll, “Cycle Annie” would have fitted just as well on Loaded.

Lou and his fellow songwriters wrote as fast as they could. Although the setup lacked the glamour of the rock-and-roll lifestyle, it had redeeming educational value. “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs,” Reed recounted. “We just churned out songs, that’s all. They would say, ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’ then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. While I was doing that, I was doing my own stuff and trying to get by, but the material I was doing, people wouldn’t go near me with it at the time. I mean, we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let the Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’ I didn’t see it as schizophrenic at all. I just had a job as a songwriter. I mean, a real hack job. They’d come in and give me a subject, and we’d write.

“I really liked doing it, it was really fun, but I wasn’t doing the stuff I wanted to do. I was just hoping I could somehow get an in, which, in fact, worked out. It’s just worked out in an odd way. But, at least it was something to do with music.”

Naturally, Lou told friends that he hated working at Pickwick and expressed endless bitterness over Phillips’s failure to see any merit in Reed’s own compositions. “I’d say, why don’t we record these?” remembered Reed. “And they’d say ‘No, we can’t record stuff like that.’” (One can only wonder how Johnny Don’t Shoot No More, Ten Drug Songs would have gone over in that halcyon era.) But the truth is that the detached observer in Lou was making out like a bandit in this situation. In fact, he should have been paying them for the very useful education in how to use a recording studio and work with helpful collaborators for whom he would in time come to realize a strong need. Never was he more prolific than during his Pickwick days. Over the course of a few months Reed and his three collaborators published at least fifteen songs. The five months he spent at Pickwick from September 1964 to February 1965 provided the best on-the-job training he could possibly have had for a career in rock and roll.

Chapter Five

The Formation of the Velvet Underground

ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE: 1965

The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to stimulus and suggestion, comparison, emulation.

Henry James

It was through Pickwick that Lou met the man who would be the single most important long-lasting collaborator in his life, John Cale. One day in January 1965, Lou, who had not let hepatitis slow him down, had ingested a copious quantity of drugs. As he felt the rush of creativity coming on, he leafed through Eugenia Sheperd’s column in a local tabloid and came across an item about ostrich feathers being the latest fashion craze. Flinging down the paper and grabbing his guitar with the manic pent-up humor that fueled so much of his work, Lou spontaneously created a new would-be dance craze in a song called “The Ostrich.” It joyously told the dancer to put his head on the floor and let his partner step on it. What better self-image could Lou have possibly come up with than this nutty notion, except that the dancers give each other electroshocks?

Although it appeared unlikely that even rock-crazed teenagers, currently dancing the twist and the frug, would go for this masochistic idea, Shupak’s partner, Terry Phillips, desperate for a hit to exonerate his claim that the wave of the future was in rock, immediately snapped that this could be the hit single they had been looking for. With his spacey head full of images of millions of kids across America stomping on each other’s head (he was ten years ahead of his time), the ersatz Andrew Oldham (the Rolling Stones’ equally young and inexperienced producer) got the rock executives out in the warehouse to agree to his proposal that they release “The Ostrich” as a single by a make-believe band called the Primitives. When the record came out, they received a call from a TV dance show, much to their surprise, requesting a performance of “The Ostrich” by “the band.” Eager to promote his project, Phillips persuaded the Pickwick people to let him put together a real band to fill the bill. He saw the pleasingly pubescent-looking Lewis as a natural for lead singer. But he was less than enthusiastic about the other musicians, who did not have the requisite look to con the teen market into spending their spare dollars on “The Ostrich.” Frantic to get the show on the road, Phillips began to search for a backup band for Lou Reed.

From the Pickwick studio the story cuts to Terry Phillips at an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment jammed with a bunch of pasty-faced party people all yukking it up and trying to be cool despite having no idea at all about anything. Ensconced among them, highly amused and somewhat above it all, were the unlikely duo of a big-boned Welshman with a sonorous voice named John Cale and his partner and flatmate, the classic nervy-looking underground man Tony Conrad. In their early twenties and sporting hair unfashionably long for those days, Cale was a classical-music scholar, Conrad an underground filmmaker, and they were both members of one of the midsixties most avant-garde music groups in the world, La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. On the trail of female companions and good times, they had been brought to the party by the brother of the playwright Jack Gelber, who had recently written a famous play about heroin called The Connection. Spotting these reasonably attractive and slightly eccentric-looking guys with long hair, Terry Phillips immediately asked them if they were musicians. Receiving an affirmative response, he took it for granted that they played guitars (in fact Cale played an electrically amplified viola as well as several Indian instruments) and snapped, “Where’s the drummer?”