Lou Reed: Another Complete Unknown

Some fans of The Velvet Underground keep dreaming of an adaptation of Lou Reed’s life in a similar style to Bob Dylan's A Complete Unknown. The crux would be in how to approach such a complex character. A scholar fan suggested that adapting Reed’s life to the big screen would play host to a series of difficulties: “I think it’s an interesting idea precisely because Lou Reed seems so unlikeable as a person, but he wasn’t afraid to show his vulnerabilities. I saw a film about John Lennon (played by Ian Hart who then went on to play Lennon in Backbeat) and Brian Epstein, where Lennon mercilessly taunted Epstein about his sexuality. A Lou Reed/Velvet Underground movie could explore Lou’s ambivalent attitude towards Andy Warhol and their fallout. Also introducing his first love Shelley Albin. Lou Reed would have to be some kind of anti-hero and then find a redemption in the figure of Laurie Anderson. I’m totally down with that, but it would be tough for a wide release.” Source: cultfollowing.co.uk

“We were inseparable from the moment we met,” Shelley Albin recalled. “We were always literally wrapped up in each other like a pretzel.” Soon Shelley and Lou could be seen at the Savoy, making out in public for hours at a time. “He was a great kisser and well coordinated. I always thought of him as a master of the slow dance.” For both of them it was their first real love affair. They had a great sexual relationship. They played tennis together. For all of Lou’s eccentricities, Shelley found him “very straight. He was very coordinated, a good dancer, and he could play a good game of tennis or basketball. His criteria for life were equally straight. He was in essence a fifties guy,” Shelley said. “His appeal was very sexy. It was the combination of a gentle lover and romantic and strong. He had the strength of a man. The electroshock treatments were very fresh in his mind. He immediately established that he was erratic, undependable, and dangerous, and that he was going to control any situation. I could play Lou’s game too, that’s why we got along so well. That’s what really attracted me to him. But he wasn’t controlling me. If you look back at who’s got the power in the relationship, it will turn out that it wasn’t him.” Shelley agreed that Lou had picked up many of his twisted ideas about life from Lincoln Swados. “You couldn’t get much crazier and weirder than Lincoln,” she said, “without being Lou.” Reed wrote two songs, “My Friend George” on New Sensations, and “Harry’s Circumcision” on Magic and Loss inspired by Lincoln Swados.

Ever since he had been put on medication following the electroshock treatments of 1959, Lou had been an inveterate drug user. If he wasn’t popping amphetamines, he was smoking pot, dropping acid, taking Placidyls and alcohol. In 1964 he added heroin to his drug menu. Shelley recalled, “He was getting into heroin and he was having some bad LSD trips too.” But Shelley didn't want to show sympathy for Lou’s cries for help. Moreover, Lou had gone into a total decline when he realized that Shelley was not only not coming back to him, but was in fact living with two other adult men just three doors down from his apartment. Once when Shelley was at the Orange Bar with her new lover Ron Corwin and his Korean vet friends, an acolyte of Lou came frantically telling her that Lou was having a really bad time. Although she fully understood that he might not make it through the night, Shelley sent back the reply, “Lou, if you send somebody over here to tell me that you’re dying, die!” Still, Shelley felt sorry for him. “Lou couldn’t have a good time, it was not in his genes,” she stated. “He felt that he didn't deserve it. Because if you said he was nice, then you didn’t see how terrible he was. He couldn’t have a happy time nor he could accept that people liked him. That’s what’s so sad about Lou.”

Onstage Reed erases all memory of the undignified way people like Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger have lurched into middle age. “I’ve always liked this basic thing,” Reed said. “I like to say that any kid could pick up a guitar and knock one of these songs out. They’re not hard to play or sing, but it is hard to write them: they’re very deceptive." “New Sensations” was one of 1984’s great records. Reed is a man with an impassive face and a New Yorker’s acerbic tongue. Asked about which rock lyricists he rated highly, he gave me a typical, “Generally speaking I like catchy lyrics. Like that Foreigner thing, “I Wanna Know What Love Is”. Now that’s a nice dumb lyric, that I find attractive. I like that kind of sappy music. I always have." Reed often equates his musical work with the cinema, but when more personal matters are raised, so are Reed’s hackles. He simply refuses to talk about the mid-seventies, a time when his drug addictions had him shortlisted for the rock’n’roll casualty ward. It wasn’t until his marriage to Sylvia Morales in 1980 that Reed’s career found a consistent direction. 

How much does his new marriage have to do with the new equilibrium in his career? “I don’t want to answer anything that has to do with my personal life,” he replied in a flat drawl. “I understand why people might have an interest in how Clint Eastwood’s divorce is going to affect his next Dirty Harry movie. I like gossip too. I read the ‘National Enquirer’ when I have nothing else to do and I need some real garbage. And that’s what I think of it – it’s real garbage.” Reed’s latest songs seem to have narrowed the gap between the writer and his songs. “I’ve thought about that. I think the distance between Lou Reed as an image and Lou Reed as a person has shortened on the last couple of albums. Before, a lot of what I wrote about was extreme situations. Also, because I write so much in the vernacular, I always try to present it as though it’s true, as it had happened to me. But it isn’t true, and it didn’t always happen to me.” While Reed continues to have minimal commercial success, nostalgia for the New York art scene which spawned him is rampant. —Interview for The Sydney Morning Herald (January 10, 1985) by Richard Gulliatt

Lou Reed was not a fan of The Who, once proclaiming how much he disliked the band’s rock opera Tommy. He humorously sneered: “Tommy is such – Jesus, how people get sucked into that.” He added, “So talentless, and as a lyricist Pete Townshend is so profoundly untalented and philosophically boring to say the least… like the record ‘The Searcher’ [meaning ‘The Seeker’]; ‘I ask Timothy Leary…’ I wouldn’t ask Timothy Leary the time of day, for cryin’ out loud!” Financially, things began to turn around for Reed in 1984. His lawsuits with his ex-manager Dennis Katz (target of his vitriolic song Dirt), which had dragged on for over a decade, were finally settled with the assistance of Eric Kronfeld, a successful music industry lawyer. 

The settlement cost Reed a lot of money, but it did free up royalties from his RCA catalog, notably for “Walk on the Wild Side.” Reed’s relationship with his wife became more complex when she began to function as his default manager, after Reed, following a familiar pattern, fell out with and parted ways with Eric Kronfeld, the man responsible for pulling him out of his financial troubles. In a letter dated December 4, 1991, he confirmed Sylvia her new role as vice-president of Sister Ray Enterprises, overseeing all his projects. Reed dedicated Between Thought and Expression to his family: Sid, Toby, Bunny, and, “most of all,” Sylvia. In his obituary for Lou Reed, Mick Rock wrote: "I really valued our friendship and I always had a fascination with his image, weathering the slings and arrows of that crazed decade, the '70s. Lou was a true gladiator, a fearless warrior and also a man of extreme kindness and compassion. If he was your friend in the fullest sense, he was your friend forever. He had a singing soul. And I miss him so much already." Source: www.content.time.com

Those who met Rachel found a sweet person with a stoic nature. “In my experience of Lou,” longtime friend Dave Hickey said, “all these supposed digressions from the ‘norm’ were just bullshit. Anyway, if you took that much speed for that many years, you don’t know what the hell you are. Physically, you cannot get an erection. Lou was mostly a voyeur. Sex didn’t offer Lou enough—he was just really bored by it.” Reed’s relationship with Rachel was clearly under strains external and internal. How often she started trouble is harder to say. One story came from a neighbor who saw Rachel in bad shape one morning, bruised and curled up on the lobby couch, evidently locked out of their apartment. A recording made in 1977 of Reed’s side of a phone conversation captured him and Rachel bickering over drugs and cash, though the exact context is unclear. “I know you have money hidden,” Reed insisted, exasperated. Around this time, a couple of Reed’s associates noted a nasty abscess on his forearm, the sort caused by frequent injections, which he made barely any effort to conceal. 

Barbara Hodes, a former lover, recalled a harrowing scene in which Reed, in a gesture of bravado and need, stuck a loaded hypodermic into the open wound. Rachel finally had to move out of the apartment they’d shared on Sixty-third Street. On one occasion, Reed received a late-night call from a friend of Rachel, who reported Rachel was suicidal and in need of money. Reed met the friend at an ATM and gave her money to take to Rachel. But Reed wouldn’t go with her to deliver it. After a lifelong struggle with his mental health, his Syracuse roommate and co-conspirator Lincoln Swados died in the fall of 1989. And on January 31, 1990, at age thirty-seven, Rachel Humphreys died. According to Corey Kilgannon's reporting “Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field,” Rachel Humphreys was among the thousands AIDS victims buried anonymously on Hart Island, though the specific cause of Humphreys’s death remained unknown.

The between-song spiels in Take No Prisoners reflected Reed’s satirical writing at Syracuse, his fondness for Lenny Bruce and Henny Youngman. Reed challenged the audience, channeling Yeats. The verbal riffs came fast and furious. He mocked Patti Smith (“Fuck Radio Ethiopia, man, I’m Radio Brooklyn. I ain’t no snob, man”) and Barbara Streisand. “I Wanna Be Black” was performed with Reed ad-libbing T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday” and taking mock offense at his backup vocalists when they echo his line about wanting to “fuck up the Jews.” Recasting the song as more overt comedy with Black collaborators in front of an audience clarified its sarcasm. The band comping behind a wired, frequently unintelligible Reed as he spat verbal shrapnel: about working at Jones Beach as a teenager; about quitting the Velvets; about Candy Darling and how he missed her (“and I didn’t even know her that well, she was a scam artist. I’m such a scam artist. She had leukemia from silicone injections, and I’m supposed to feel sorry?”), about Little Joe (“an idiot with an IQ of 12”) and meeting Norman Mailer (“he tries to punch you in the stomach to see how tough you are—he’s pathetic… I told him 'Go write a bible'”). 

By turns absurd, appalling, hilarious, and occasionally touching (a stirring “Coney Island Baby” was personalized with Long Island township shout-outs), the brakes-off flow on Live: Take No Prisoners is also a bit frightening. Reed declared he’d “rather have cancer than be a faggot,” then backpedaled vaguely; he savaged the critics Robert Christgau and John Rockwell. Arista issued Live: Take No Prisoners with a warning sticker that read: “This Album Is Offensive.” Reed recorded Legendary Hearts, his follow-up to The Blue Mask, at RCA Studio C. The sessions were marred by Reed’s studio tantrums. The session engineer, Corky Stasiak, fielded worried calls from Reed at all hours about technical glitches. “I had to turn off my phone,” he recalls. “Waves of Fear” describes his DIY rehab as a rough ride. He hadn’t quit drinking entirely: Stasiak noticed his hands often trembled, especially when he first arrived for a session. Reed had worries about his liver, and was exploring channels of alternative medicine. “We had a great discussion about Finbarr Nolan,” Stasiak recalls. By all indications, Sylvia was Reed’s greatest asset in his struggle to stay healthy. Stasiak is among many who believe she likely saved his life at the time.

In 1983, Lou contributed “Little Sister” to the film Get Crazy and made a playful comment about aging rock stars by appearing in his first scene covered in cobwebs in the famous Bob Dylan pose on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Despite the film’s failure the song was well received, particularly by his little sister Margaret Ellen (who would change her name to Merrill), who was proud to be the only member of his family to receive good press in a Lou Reed song. At the Bottom Line in 1977 he’d snapped, “Nixon was beautiful, if he had bombed Montana and gotten away with it, I would have loved him. I am not scared easily.” In private Lou could still not control his shpilkes. Why was Bob Dylan always getting these awards and special editions when Lou received virtually nothing in the way of honors? You could see his point. The Velvet Underground are generally now considered to be the second most influential rock band of the 1960s. Lou Reed had always been an artist on the same level as John Lennon and Bob Dylan, but, until the 1990s, without anything like the recognition afforded to his peers. —Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (2014) by Victor Bockris

"Laurie if you’re sadly listening, the phones don’t work, the birds afire, the smoke curls black. I’m on the rooftop. Liberty to my right still standing, Laurie, evil’s gaunt desire is upon we. Laurie if you’re sadly listening know one thing above all others, you were all I really thought of as the TV blared the screaming, the deathlike snowflakes and sirens screaming." —Poem Laurie Sadly Listening (September 2011) by Lou Reed

Gen Z women on Bob Dylan, Lou Reed's "Women"

‘I’m literally Joan Baez right now’: Gen Z women relate to Bob Dylan’s toxic situationship: Joan Baez met Bob Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City, a Greenwich Village venue, in 1961, when she was a bonafide star and he was new to the scene. They became creative partners, with Baez believing she inspired Dylan classics such as Visions of Johanna and Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan ended the relationship in 1965 as he shot into superstardom, and Baez has since forgiven him: “We were stupid, and you can’t blame somebody for ever. I certainly tried but finally stopped.” Now 84, Baez has emerged as the unlikely hero of A Complete Unknown: yet another woman who stepped out from the shadow of a guitar-playing alt boy. Another woman analyzes their Newport performance of It Ain’t Me Babe, when Baez and Dylan shared the microphone. “Whenever I see this video of Bob and Joan it lowkey fills me with annoyance. I’ve always loved him but ever since watching the biopic it’s like sir why are you screaming over her.” 

One counterpoint, per a comment: “that’s just how he sings I’m afraid.” Stephen Petrus, a scholar of 1960s folk music and director of public history programs at LaGuardia Community College, believes that gen Z is “expressing solidarity” with Baez online. “I think there was a sense of mutual opportunism between the pair,” he said. “But Dylan was not always kind to her, and he wanted to be the dominant one on stage, which is pretty clear both in the movie and certain performances.” Diamonds and Rust was the 1975 confessional Baez penned about her relationship with Dylan. For a generation accustomed to modern dating drudgery, lyrics like “Well I’ll be damned / here comes your ghost again” still hit. Source: www.theguardian.com

‘I’m not in this game for the money or to be a star,’ Lou Reed insisted early on. Of course, all rock stars said that, early on, when they were striving for money and stardom. Lou Reed actually meant it. It was, perhaps, the most truthfully shocking thing about him. Reed grew up playing high-school baseball and taking classical piano lessons. Although he later complained about his musical education (‘I took classical music for fifteen years – does that make me legitimate?’) it left him with an impressive grasp of musical theory and composition and ‘a natural affinity for music’. By 1959, Sidney could stand it no longer and made arrangements to have his terrified but still defiant son admitted to Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital, a state-run facility housing more than 6000 patients. For the next eight weeks, Reed underwent hour-long bouts of ECT. It was a devastating experience that would stay with him, mentally and physically, for the rest of his life. The adult Reed would recall with disgust ‘the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue’. The electrodes methodically attached to his head, held in a brace. His juddering body strapped tight to the bed. 

He was eventually put on a tranquilliser, Placidyl, and would continue to take a daily dose for several years. Known on the street as ‘jelly bellies’, it became a contributory factor in the deadpan expression Reed was to assume for the rest of his life. He also began having weekly sessions with a psychiatrist. It could be argued Reed never stopped writing about the therapy that nearly robbed him of his mind. That he would never forgive the ice-cold father who put him in the ward or the ruthless doctors who performed the ‘therapy’ upon him. That he would never trust anyone again until his life was almost over, throwing up a shield that only the similarly damaged could ever truly see through. 

When John Cale married Betsey Johnson in April 1968, it drove a further rift between him and Lou. Many assumed Lou was so deep into his drugs and his musical trip that he simply had no time to love anybody but himself. It wasn’t true. In fact, Lou was secretly seeing his old flame from Syracuse, the beautiful Shelley Albin. Shelley was now married and had moved with her husband to New York in 1966, since which time Lou and she had begun seeing each other again but only – much to Lou’s disappointment – as ‘good friends’. By 1968, however, the rumour was that this friendship had blossomed once again into a full-blown love affair. Certainly, Lou would claim so, to friends, and by mentioning his love for someone who was married in Pale Blue Eyes. ‘Lou and I connected when we were too young to really put it into words,’ Shelley would recall years later. But, though she loved his fierce intelligence, his flare for the extraordinary bon mot or surprisingly romantic gestures, Shelley had always been wary of what she saw as his ‘crazy side’. And the more he begged her to leave her husband and come and have a real life with him, the more she shrunk from the idea. No matter how hard he implored, accusing her of choosing ‘security’ over ‘love’, Shelley refused to leave her husband. 

The first solo album of Lou Reed (1971) was produced by Richard Robinson for RCA Records. At the insistence of Reed, the cover was designed by Tom Adams, a former illustrator of Raymond Chandler's paperbacks, featuring a forlorn chick looking parentless and doomed. This album bombed in USA and also in the UK. In fact, without the intervention of David Bowie, it seems highly unlikely that Lou Reed would ever have had a career. The two had finally met for real in September that year, when Bowie was flown into New York to great fanfare, in order to celebrate his signing to RCA. Dennis Katz, via Richard and Lisa Robinson, brokered the meeting, organising a party at the Ginger Man, around the corner from Madison Avenue. Lou turned up with Bettye and David showed up with Angie. 

Tony Zanetta had bonded with David and Angie in London, and nervously affected introductions. Despite of Nick Tosches having remarked that hordes of girls would never have pursued Lou Reed and John Cale like all the girls who went hysterical for The Beatles, Bowie, however, expressed to Melody Maker that for him "The Velvet Underground talked to me more than the Beatles ever did. For me, Lou Reed is the greatest songwriter in rock and roll." The Robinsons felt that they had brought Lou out of retirement and saw his alliance with Bowie move as the ultimate betrayal. After the breach when they weren’t speaking, Lou would say of the Robinsons: ‘They’re little pop people.’ To promote their new star, Reed had fashioned himself in the image of what his English fans imagined he was—a junkie hustler. 

However, Andy Warhol, a man with a telling eye for these things, pointed out, “When John Cale and Lou were in the Velvets, they really had style. But when Lou went solo, he started copying other people.” The figure he presented to the public didn’t really exist. Lou didn’t shut up, his insecurities raging as he confronted the English star he’d been told had been featuring Velvet Underground songs in his set, and who he was now connected directly to through their shared relationship with RCA and, specifically, its vice-president of A&R, Dennis Katz. Bowie for his part remained relatively quiet, overwhelmed by the force of the always heavily loaded New York conversation, not sure who was putting who on, or who was being put down. While Angie Bowie, of course, could match Lou or anyone else for fast-track trash talk, NY-style. Bettye, meanwhile, sat quietly, obediently, in her pants suit, looking like ‘an airline stewardess’. Lou, for his part, hardly looked like the hip young former Factory imp that Bowie had been expecting. While David was going through his ‘Lauren Bacall phase’, his blonde hair long and swept over one shoulder, his eyelashes fluttering under the weight of heavy blue shadow, Lou had turned up looking like the guy who came to fix the plumbing; dressed down in head-to-toe denim, paunchy, his hair cut almost Army short. 

As Angie wrote in her autobiography: "David always had that knack of looking you in the eye and making you feel you were his only priority at the time. I think David saw Lou and to a lesser extent Iggy as his competition, and his master game was to drag them to his dominion and try to neuter them in some capacity." Leading the backlash in Britain was the NME, whose Charles Shaar Murray characterised Transformer in his review as ‘a collection of songs witty, songs trivial, songs dull, songs sad, none of them really much cop’. It was in America, though, where Lou and Bettye returned home, in time for its release, that the knives were really out. The New Yorker called the album ‘lame, pseudo-decadent lyrics, lame pseudo-something-or-other singing, and a just plain lame band’. Henry Edwards also panned the album in the New York Times. So it was that Lou Reed began recording the album Berlin, that would both become his masterpiece and effectively end his career as a major recording star at that time. Considering where Lou Reed had spent his entire musical career – in the backrooms of the music biz, making records for the doomed to gaze at their reflections in – the subject matter of Berlin is arguably in keeping with the arc of his own artistic narrative. Yet considering he was now coming off the back of a bona fide worldwide hit, it’s staggering how prepared he was to risk it all for an album, masterpiece though it is, as profoundly disenchanted as Berlin. 

That while shrewd David Bowie was busy releasing crowd-pleasers like Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed would almost deliberately sabotage his own career in the name of what? Art? Arrogance? Disdain? While in Creem magazine, Robert Christgau refused to be shocked, just merely "too bored to puke at it." He said that the story was lousy and ‘coughed up by some avant-garde asshole’ and he gave it a C. In response, sales were abysmal. Recorded at New York’s Bottom Line club in May 1978, and featuring a superbly splenetic Lou Reed in absolutely blistering form, Take No Prisoners was the live summation of everything the post-Velvets Lou Reed had become. Before the band comes absolutely smashing into the riff of ‘Sweet Jane’, which then goes on for over eight minutes as Lou digresses again into the kind of backstories that future MTV-style story-behind-the-song programmes could never hope to match, including how much Lou hates ‘fucking Barbra Streisand’ for thanking ‘all the little people’ in her Academy Awards. From there the album takes off into something that is part rock’n’roll, part Lenny Bruce comedy act, part confessional, part pure confrontation. ‘Hey, shut up!’ when someone interrupts his flow. ‘Are you fucking deaf?’ at another juncture. A weird musical milieu where ‘I Wanna Be Black’ is suddenly hilarious and self-mocking: ‘Let’s ask the chicks…’ Where ‘Satellite Of Love’ and ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ are soulful and wincingly revealing, played virtually straight. ‘So now everybody’s gonna say Lou Reed’s mellowed, he’s older. He didn’t act mean, he talked. Oh boy. I say we’ll mug you later, all right? You feel better?’

Along the way we are treated to some more classic asides: ‘I do Lou Reed better than anybody else, so I thought I’d get in on it,’ he announces to braying laughter. ‘Hey, watch me turn into Lou Reed!’ He also takes the opportunity to mock his critics, raging at Robert Christgau, calling him ‘a toe fucker’ for his pathetic A, B, C ratings system, telling on John Rockwell of the New York Times, who ‘comes to CBGBs with a bodyguard’. Back home in New York, when pressed whether it was true he had actually hit David Bowie, an unrepentant Lou snapped: ‘Yes, I hit him – more than once. It was a private dispute. It had nothing to do with sex, politics or rock’n’roll.’ That he had ‘a New York code of ethics’. He scowled. ‘In other words, watch your mouth.’ Word eventually crept out though that the basis of Lou’s rage was in David’s response to Lou’s only-half-joking inquiry about whether he would like to produce Lou’s next album. When Bowie answered in the affirmative, but only on condition that Lou ‘clean up his act first’, Lou went insane. His second wife and manager Sylvia would occasionally accompany Lou on his tours, but mainly her role would be as the traditional homemaker. According to Lou, “Sylvia’s very, very smart, so I have a realistic person I can ask about things: ‘Hey, what do you think of this song?’ She helped me so much in bringing things together and getting rid of certain things that were bad for me, certain negative people. I’ve got help, for the first time in my life. And that’s a real change. I don’t know what I would have done without her.” 

As Lou told one reporter a couple of months after the wedding: ‘I now know that certain things will get taken care of and looked out for on the home front… I’ve found my flower, so it makes me feel like a knight.’ There was a temptation for those that had followed his career for longer than 15 minutes to treat such quotes as the further stoned ramblings of an arch-deceiver. But this time Lou actually meant it. Opening with the spellbinding ‘My House’, a hymn to his and Sylvia’s new life at the farmhouse in New Jersey, underneath there was a startling evocation of his old friend and ‘the first great man I ever met’, Delmore Schwartz. ‘My Dedalus to your Bloom,’ he almost weeps, ‘Was such a perfect wit…’ Dissolving into the next track, ‘Women’, a subtle, joyous, almost unbearably straight-talking paean to Sylvia and to the whole concept of womanly love, something Lou had never fully embraced since he’d been a boy, wrapped tight in the arms of his former beauty queen mother Toby. Opening with the rockabilly pop ‘I Love You Suzanne’, a hit single for anybody else, a total flop for Lou Reed, New Sensations was so listenable that attracted the attention of an advertising agency executive, Jim Riswold, then chief copywriter for the Madison Avenue's Wieden & Kennedy. As Sylvia approached thirty, she told Lou the time had come for them to have children, characterizing it as a great adventure. Lou, however, saw the question of children through realistic eyes. Stated one friend, “There’s no way Lou would ever have children, he’s the archetypal constant child. At least he can admit that it would be a big disaster if he had children.“ 

Then Lou met Laurie Anderson. Ironically, the impending collapse of Lou’s marriage did not do him any harm on the professional front. By the time Lou completed work on Magic and Loss, he and Sylvia had begun to talk about getting a divorce and consulted their respective lawyers. Sylvia knew she was going to be comfortable financially—Lou’s financial situation had changed for the better since they had joined forces and even he openly credited Sylvia for this—but the realization that she was going to lose the glamour and drama of being Mrs. Lou Reed weighed upon her. Meanwhile, her lawyer advised her not to move out of their Upper West Side apartment because that would put her in the position of desertion. “He’s got an image to keep up,” said a friend. “Beyond the fact that he’s thinking, ‘God, I’m alone, I’ve got to find somebody else.’ I’m sure in the middle of the night, that’s the reason he calls Sylvia, because that’s when it hits him—‘Oh my God, I’m by myself.’ That picture of him on the cover of Vox [in May 1993] was so awful. He looks like a ghoul. You heard this thing about his liver. 

I’m surprised he’s still alive.” For the most part, the positive chemistry of the former Velvet Underground members overcame their collective fear, and Sterling and Moe worked as a buffer between Lou and John. In fact, the reunion might have been a great success if it hadn’t been for the added pressure of Sylvia, whose ego had ballooned out of proportion. According to several people involved with the shows, Sylvia made no secret of her contempt for John, whom she called stupid and untalented. John was convinced that Sylvia had learned everything in this department from Lou, but others were not so sure. She virtually showered contempt on Cale, going so far at one point as to make the curious remark that as he had grown older John had become exceedingly ugly while Lou had grown more and more handsome. Sources: Transformer (2014) by Victor Bockris and Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall 

A Complete Unknown (Bob Dylan), All Through the Night (Lou Reed - Not Attention Junkie)

Why A Complete Unknown should win the best picture Oscar:  James Mangold’s biopic – told very much with the backing of Bob Dylan – somehow achieved the impossible: keeping the people with working knowledge of the musical rota at the Gaslight Cafe as interested as those with little more than an acquaintance with Blowin’ in the Wind. And that’s perhaps the key case for A Complete Unknown to win the best picture Oscar. Sure, it’s an excellent movie with a hair-raising performance from its lead, but I think the reason so many younger or non-Dylan fans enjoyed it is, curiously, its capturing of the notion that one man’s art can give people hope for change. 

A Complete Unknown might not be a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s already one of the great mainstream films about the visceral power of art – and at a time when the modern political moment is overwhelming any sense of cultural resistance. Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan is so good that it’s been written off by some as no more than a feat of imitation. There are also impeccable supporting turns. Ed Norton is utterly taken by the kind utopian spirit of Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro repositions Joan Baez as a vital artist who exists separately from Dylan's shadow. 

Unlike in the movie, Dylan traveled to Italy in 1962 in pursuit of Suze Rotolo — named Sylvie Russo (played by Elle Fanning) — who had left New York to study abroad. In 1962, Rotolo left the Greenwich Village apartment where she had been living with Dylan and went to Perugia, where she attended the famed University for Foreigners. The Perugia institution has retrieved from its archives an enrollment document in the name of Susan Elisabeth Rotolo, and issued a statement in which professor Sabrina Cittadini claimed that “the love story between Suze and Dylan was full of painful searches.” Cittadini has done some interviews and gathered testimony that one night in 1962 “a very young man emerged from a black taxi” in Perugia’s central Corso Garibaldi, near the university, “with a bouquet of red roses.” 

“It was Bob Dylan and he had come from Rome to Perugia to look for his Suze,” who had moved to a different address, she said. Rotolo was 17 when she met Dylan in 1961, not long after his arrival in New York. A self-described “red diaper baby,” she was the daughter of two Italian immigrants: Gioachino “Pete” Rotolo, an illustrator and union organizer, and his wife Mary, an editor and columnist for the American edition of communist Italian newspaper L’Unità. Rotolo’s separation from Dylan, who didn’t want her to go to Italy, is believed to have inspired the songs “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” 

Following her return from Perugia, Rotolo famously appeared arm-in-arm with Dylan on a slushy Greenwich Village street on the cover of his breakthrough 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” After their relationship drifted, as is shown in the film, Rotolo went back to Italy and in 1970 married Enzo Bartoccioli, an Italian filmmaker whom she had met while a student in Perugia. Bob Dylan called Suze Rotolo his "Soul Twin" in his book "Chronicles" (2016).  Source: variety.com

WHY HASN'T THERE BEEN A LOU REED MOVIE YET: I mean, usually Hollywood can't even wait for the body of a pop/rock star to get cold before the biopics begin to get on production. And Lou Reed's story is unique within the Rock world, full of twists, unexpected turns, and odd life experiences. If handled properly, it would make for a great musical film. So what are they waiting for? Maybe enough drugs but probably not enough sex, and very strange rock'n'roll? Maybe a theatrical release would never fill enough seats or maybe it's Laurie Anderson who acts like an angel custodian of her partner's legacy. There's certainly plenty of source material, like those weird and lengthy conversation between him and Lester Bangs, just imagine the glorious wreck of a set you could have with them. When Lou Reed was asked by VH1 in 1999 about some of his favorite songs, Reed picked “Lovin’ You Too Long” by Otis Redding, “Stay With Me” by Lorraine Ellison, “Outcast” by Eddie & Ernie, “Belle” by Al Green, “I Can’t Stand The Rain” by Ann Peebles and “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies.

Lou Reed was one of the coolest and most vitriolic music artists ever. The stuff that rock and roll legends are made of. It would probably be impossible to make such a film without incorporating his attacks on rock journalists, and possibly offering some straightforward insight into the machinery of the music industry. After all, here is a guy who contributed to Paul Simon's One Trick Pony, which has its own harsh critique of the industry's marketing methods, so it wouldn't be certainly PC. So I really don't think any major studio would invest in a film based only in its ability to draw Lou Reed fans to the theaters. Lou Reed was a cult figure, and with the exception of Take a Walk on the Wild Side and his album New York, he spent four decades in a sort of well-publicized semi-obscurity. What would be the dramatic arc of a Lou Reed biopic? Besides, the most notable highlights of his personal life are probably events a mass audience could not assimilate easily. Another reason why a Lou Reed biopic has never been mooted might be due to some legal protections from Reed's sister Merrill Weiner and his widow Laurie Anderson. Source: forums.stevehoffman.tv

Lester Bangs: Lou Reed just may have a better perspective on this supposed upheaval in sexual roles than any of these Gore Vidals and Jill Johnstons. Dudes are coming outta the closet in droves and finding out they are heterosexual! Ha! After recording Transformer, Lou returned to his New York home and surprised the glam-rock fans in 1973 by getting married to a theatre actress named Betty (stage name Krista) Kronstadt. Today I'm going to walk into the dining room of the Holiday Inn, filled with expectation at finally getting to interview at length one of the musical and psychological frontiersmen of our time, Lou Reed. Although it does disturb his friends and fans to see him in such failing health, Lou can find a joke even there. 

At one point I asked him when he intended to die. Lou replied: "I would like to live to a ripe old age and raise watermelons in Wyoming." About the glam hysteria, he deadpanned: "The makeup thing is just a style thing now, like platform shoes. If people have homosexuality in them, it won't necessarily involve to wear makeup. The notion that everybody's bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say that if my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something. But I don't feel that way at all. I don't think an album's gonna do anything. It's beyond the control of a straight person to turn gay or a gay person to turn straight. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn't men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?" —Lou Reed: A Deaf Mute in a Telephone Booth (interview by Lester Bangs for Let It Rock magazine, November 1973)

The Bells is by turns exhilarating, almost unbearably poignant and as vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool. And all through the LP, Reed plays the best guitar anyone’s heard from him in ages. As for the lyrics — well, people tend to forget that in numbers like “Candy Says,” “Sunday Morning” and “Oh! Sweet Nothing,” Lou Reed wrote some of the most compassionate songs ever recorded. This album is about love and dread — and redemption through a strange commingling of the two. To have come close to spiritual or physical death is ample reason to testify, but it’s love that brings both artist and audience, back from that cliff, and back from the gulf that can sometimes, in states of extreme pain, be mistaken for the blue empyrean ever. In “Stupid Man,” someone who’s been self-exiled too long, “living all alone by those still waters,” rushes home to his family, desperate not to have lost the affection of his little daughter. Like all of Reed’s people on this record, he’s looking for love. “City Lights” isn’t only about Charlie Chaplin but about a lost America, the implication being that, in these late modern times, all the lights in the world might not be enough to bring us together. In “All through the Night” Reed sings: “My best friend Sally. She got sick. And I’m feelin’ mighty ill myself. It happens all the time. All through the night. I went to St. Vincent’s. And she’s lyin’ on the ground. And I sat and cried. All through the night.”

“Families” is the most personal of all them: “And no Daddy you’re not a poor man anymore. And I hope you realize it before you die. There’s nothing here we have in common except our name. And I don’t think that I’ll come home much anymore.” With “The Bells,” like in “Street Hassle,” Lou Reed achieves his often stated ambition — to become a great writer, in the real literary sense. Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we’ll be your family. We promise to respect your privacy. It’s like what Tennessee Williams said to Dotson Rader when, as described in Rader’s Blood Dues, the latter made an anguished confession about wanting children. Williams just touched the head of a young artist sitting nearby and said: “These are my children.” Lou, you gave us reason to think there might still be meaning to be found in this world beyond all the nihilism, and thereby spawned and kept alive a whole generation whose original parents may or may not have been worthy of them. —The Bells Review by Lester Bangs (June, 14, 1979) for Rolling Stone magazine

 

Lou Reed - America (Star-Spangled Banner song), 1992. 

Reed explained: “I was one of the first Medicare patients. A drug I shot in San Francisco froze all my joints. The doctors suspected terminal lupus but they were wrong. It didn’t matter since I checked myself out of the hospital to go to Delmore Schwartz’s funeral.” “Into the destructive element, that is the only way,” Schwartz had written on a note found in his hotel room. It proved to be a destructive guide Reed would follow for many years. Before The Velvet Underground, there was no such thing as alternative rock. You either had hits or you didn’t. “‘Lou Reed was a character, you know,” said Bob Dylan's friend Bob Neuwirth, who ran into Reed at Max’s a number of times. “There was Lou the kid from Long Island, and then there was the public persona, the professional Lou Reed. But he was very casual. He wasn’t really an attention junkie. Lou didn't like being pursued by groupies like David Bowie or Iggy Pop. He wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to dance on tables, much less so than people like Bowie and Iggy, who were more obsessed with enticing their audiences. Lou was much more dignified. I never found him to be in competition with anybody else. I never felt he was comparing his music to anybody else’s.” 

Reed and the Velvet Underground are often perceived as representing a kind of anti-sixties, a tough corrective to the era’s psychedelic utopianism. As always with Reed, however, that impulse in him was counterbalanced by his intense interest in transcendence. Reed attended the Easter Sunday Central Park Be-In in March of 1967. Rob Norris from Hoboken, who would later join The Bongos, met Reed at the Boston Tea Party. “Lou would hold court,” Norris said. “Jonathan Richman was always there, very quiet. People would ask Lou stuff like, ‘How’s Nico?’ or ‘What’s Jackson Browne [who wrote for Nico on Chelsea Girl] doing now?’ Lou would say, ‘What do I look like, a billboard?’ I remember this fan girl who screamed at Lou, ‘You make me so crazy, I just want to kill you!’ Lou just looked at her very kindly and said, ‘Why don’t you just bake me a cake instead?’ It was the sweetest thing.” Jonny Podell, the agent who managed Reed in 1975, asked about Reed’s relationship with Rachel, replied, “You want me to tell you my real feelings? I almost feel bad saying this, but I mean it with real love. I think Lou was a total act. Look, we all present ourselves a certain way, and for me, he was Lou from Long Island seeing how far he could rebel against Daddy the accountant. I thought he became a drug addict because it was cool and rebellious. I thought he wanted to be with Rachel because it was shock and awe. Lou’s feelings about music were real, but the rest was shock and awe.”

Reed himself would later observe that “I always thought one way kids had of getting back at their parents was to do this gender business. It was only kids trying to be outrageous.” According to his biographer Victor Bockris, Reed later denied any involvement in homosexual relationships, insisting he had seen Rachel as a woman. The edgiest moment of Rock'N'Roll Heart comes on its closing track, “Temporary Thing,” a grippingly dramatic confrontation between lovers that Reed acts out as if it were a play. The singer’s bitterness and angry insistence that the relationship is “just a temporary thing” suggest, conversely, that he’s much more deeply invested than he is letting on, and more than he even understands. The effect is powerful and unsettling. On a few occasions, Reed would admit to having done too many interviews while drunk or stoned. The anger he would often express to reporters was, in part, a projection of the anger he felt toward himself for having allowed himself to lose control. He felt humiliated and, consequently, lashed out. Reed once surmised, “You’re going to get interviewed, and you’d better figure out who you are right now, because that’s who you’re going to be forever for them.” That was a fate Reed viewed as a kind of hell, all the worse because he had condemned himself to it with his excesses. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Psychotic Reactions: Lou Reed vs Lester Bangs

Lester Bangs's “feud” with Lou Reed comes to some kind of insane mutually drunken apex in 1975, where Bangs “interviews” Lou Reed – heckles him, really – trying to get a reaction. This was one of Lester Bangs’ interview tactics anyway: he went in with guns blazing, asking combative questions of his heroes, usually under the influence of a devastating drug cocktail. There seemed to be a method to his madness, or at least an intention behind it: He was driven to distraction by what he saw as the self-seriousness of “rock stars”, and he wanted to pierce through the veil. You read this “interview” though and what you get is the alcoholism, first of all: it’s front and center in Lester’s writing, and it’s how this whole situation even came about. He and Lou Reed sit around drinking, and Lester heckles Lou, and Lou calmly responds, and even when Lou’s people keep coming over and saying, “Lou, it’s late”, trying to wrap things up, Lou brushes it off. He wants to hang out with Lester. Even though Lester is basically screaming at him, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Knowing what we do about Lou Reed, it is amazing that he lasted so long, that he basically survived the 1970s. We were talking about this the other night at the Algonquin: some people’s constitutions are clearly different than the rest of us. What would kill your or me did not kill Lou Reed. But Lester Bangs didn’t make it. Now he was a serious alcoholic from high school, mixed with a dangerous addiction to amphetamines. He was told at age 16 he would die if he kept it up. And he raced to the bottom.

Drugs were such a huge part of the 70s scene, and Lou Reed (obviously) was a huge part of that. Lester Bangs wants to talk about that and there are sections of this interview that reads creepily like two old drug buddies comparing notes on what they take. But Lester can’t help himself: any time Lou seems to settle in, he has to throw some combative barb at him. He is bored by polite chit-chat. Additionally, Lester Bangs was annoyed at Bowie’s influence over his New York heroes. This was published in Creem in 1975. It was one of the many things that Lester wrote about Lou Reed during those mid-70s years. He was obsessed. These were the years of Metal Machine Music, an entire album just of electronic feedback. Lester Bangs’ love often came out as heckling. You can see that in his interviews with Captain Beefheart, too. He asks questions in a rude blunt manner, with a kind of “Now let’s cut through all the BS, shall we?” – he is extremely obnoxious. As rude as he was, Lou Reed seemed to enjoy Lester Bangs, in his smileless way, and had made the mistake of informing Lester that he liked his writing. So Bangs, already out of his mind with sleep deprivation, uppers, and booze, went nuts with ego: Lou Reed likes me, man!! – and then had to deflate it by attacking Lou. But drugs notwithstanding, I love when Lou Reed turns it around to criticize Lester. Lester wants Lou Reed to take responsibility for glamorizing drug use, and he wants to know how Lou Reed feels about the fact that bozos are now going around imitating his lifestyle. 

Lou Reed refuses to take responsibility: he’s an artist, he was writing what was true for him, the fact that he had all this influence is just a byproduct. I don’t blame Lou Reed at all for being like, “Hey, man, that is not on me.” But Lester Bangs was interested in those intersections of morality and culture. LB: “Hey, Lou, why dontcha turn off all that jazz shit?” LR: “That’s not jazz shit, and you wouldn’t know the difference anyway.” LB: “David Bowie has ripped off all his stuff that’s decent from you, you and Iggy!” LR: “What does Iggy have to do with it?” LB: “You were the originals!” LR: “The original what?” I went on about Iggy and Bowie, and he surprised me with an unexpected blast at Iggy: “David tried to help the cat. David’s brilliant and Iggy is… stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he’d listened to David or me, if he’d asked questions every once in a while… I’d say, ‘Man, just make a one-five chord change, and I’ll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It’s so simple, but the way you’re doin’ it now you’re just making a fool out of yourself. And it’s just gonna get worse and worse.’ He’s not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and Jim Morrison was never any good anyway….” Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer (“You hit me with a flower”) and Berlin. 

I bulldozed on: “Did you shoot speed tonight before you went out?” He acted genuinely surprised. “Did I shoot speed? No, I didn’t. Speed kills. I’m not a speedfreak.” This started out as essentially the same rant Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whisky in 1969, as he sat there in a dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the “energy in the streets of New York,” and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. But now he got downright clinical. “You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do–hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams…?” The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. “I used to shoot Obetrols, man!” “Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols.” Lou was warming to his subject now, rebind up. “You’d be dead, you’d kill yourself.” Then he’s pressing me again. “What’s an Obetrol?” I got mad again. “It’s in the neighborhood of Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyin’ sack of shit! This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed you and you lied every time!” “What’s Desoxyn?” He had just said this, in the same dead monotone. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out. But I was cool. “It’s a Methedrine derivative.” The kill: “It’s fifteen milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some paste to keep it together.” Like an old green iron file slamming shut. “If you do take speed,” he continued, “you’re a good example of why speedfreaks have bad names. There’s addicts and then there’s speedfreaks… Desoxyn’s fifteen milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with paste, Obetrol is fifteen milligrams of  Dextroamphetamine.” 

“Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?” “No… You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. [I told you he’d stop at nothing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don’t mean heroism.] And even if you weren’t poor you wouldn’t know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your metabolism, you don’t know your sleeping quotient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity…” “The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quoting Ralph J. Gleeson for some reason. I was getting a little dazed. “No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure…” I decided to change my tack again. “Lou, we’re gonna have to do it straight. I’ll take off my sunglasses [ludicrously Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album] if you’ll take off yours.” He did. I did. Lou’s sallow skin almost as whitish yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendentally emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day, but he looked straight at me. Maybe through me. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kept rolling off to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I’d pondered over for months. “Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music and your life?” He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about, and he shook his head. “Like,” I pressed on, “I listen to your records shootin’ smack, shootin’ speed, committing suicide–”

“That’s three percent out of my songs.” “Like with all this decadence and glitter – how much of it would have happened if not for you–” “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” “Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc.” “What’s decadent about that?” “Okay, let’s define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence.” “You are. Because you used to be able to write and now you’re just full of crap. You don’t keep track of music, you’re not on top of what’s happening, you don’t know the players or who’s doin’ what. It’s all jive, you’re getting very egocentric.” I let it pass. Because he was half right. But I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated and stood for so many years. He’d done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn’t have anything to do with. But now, post-Sally Can’t Dance, he's apparently ready to clean up much of his act’s exoskeleton. “I dismissed decadence when I wrote ‘The Murdery Mystery.'” “Bullshit, man, when you did Transformer you were playing to pseudo-decadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence….” Barbara interrupted, “Lou… it’s getting late.” Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He seemed now a petulant kid, up past bedtime. “Oh, it’s fun arguing with Lester.” “But you have to get up in the morning,” she insisted, “and go to Dayton.” “Oh,” replied Lou, hardy guy, “I’ll live through it.” Besides other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict! I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album. -"Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature" (1988) by Greil Marcus 

“Lou was starting to become enthusiastic about music,” Allan Hyman said of his high school friend, “and he started taking it a lot more seriously than I did at the time.” Once Hyman missed Reed’s cue to end a song one night while playing with The Jades. “Allan was banging away on his drums and he’s looking up at the ceiling and he’s got his eyes closed. Lou reached over and rapped Allan on the head with his knuckles very hard. Allan looked startled and Lou just gave him a glower and we wrapped up the song. I guess that’s sort of indicative of how Lou dealt with a lot of people in his bands over the years.” While it was typical for Hyman and the other boys in Reed’s crowd to find girls to go steady with, Reed took another approach. “We all had long-term girlfriends. Like, for months on end, or a year, we would be going steady,” Richard Sigal said. “All of a sudden Lou would show up with these girls. They were all weird. I had no idea where he found them.” Allan Hyman had a sense of where Reed found some of his girls. “There was a radio station in Freeport called WGBB, and you could call in and make dedications,” he said. “There were so many people trying to call that the line was always busy. But between busy signals you could actually have a conversation with a girl and get her phone number. Lou met a girl in Merrick that way, and Lou took her to the Grove Theater on Merrick Road for an afternoon matinee. On prom night, Hyman was driving and his date was in the front seat, while Reed was energetically making out with his date, a girl from East Meadow, in the back seat. By contemporary standards, such adventures seem relatively innocent. “We didn’t get a lot of sex in the fifties,” Hyman explained. “It was a different time. Most of the people I knew were fairly conservative in that regard.” Sigal noted that some boys in their school were “effeminate”; they appeared gay—or “faggots,” in the nomenclature of that time. Reed, however, was not one of them. “He was always interested in girls—always,” Hyman said. —Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

Jeff Tweedy: Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed are the only lyricists I've heard that come close to Bob Dylan's level. Reed and Dylan are going to rock out. Cohen, no so much.

Anthony DeCurtis: Lou Reed started many genres and he inspired as many artists as Bob Dylan, usually better artists than Dylan inspired. Without Lou Reed (and The Velvet Underground) it’s likely we wouldn’t have punk music, post-punk, college rock, indie rock, noise rock, grunge, new wave, no wave, etc. Dylan reimagined and molded folk-rock genres into his vision and his is a really beautiful vision. But Lou Reed created new genres out of whole cloth. Also, Dylan’s an invented person, a fact he doesn't like to reckon, unlike Lou Reed who has projected a character in order to protect his real self. 

There is no real Bob Dylan and almost nothing he says can be taken as the truth with regards to himself or his life. He’s an entirely manufactured character. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just a plain observation. Of course, it doesn’t diminish the greatness of Dylan's music, but we shouldn’t assume that his songs have much basis in his real life (whatever that is). Indeed, Dylan once got an award from the ASCAP in 1986. There was a celebratory dinner, which Dylan showed up to with Elizabeth Taylor. Leonard Cohen was there and he actually did a little press conference with Jennifer Warnes. Warnes said that at one point Dylan took Elizabeth Taylor by the hand and marched her over to meet Cohen and said, "Liz, I want to introduce you to a real poet." Source: medium.com