Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart

“Never apologize, never explain - didn't we always say that? Well, I haven't and I don't.” ―Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) RIP

 

"Now it's Andy Warhol's time. Mystic 60's on a dime. Though she kinda likes Lou Reed, she doesn't really have the need. And now she doesn't know what it is she wants and where she wants to go. And will Delon be still a cunt. Yesterday is gone. There's just today. No tomorrow." ―Song for Nico by Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull told an interviewer her former boyfriend accidentally killed iconic rock singer Jim Morrison. Faithfull told Mojo magazine that her then-boyfriend Jean de Breteuil, known as the heroin dealer to the stars, had accidentally killed Morrison by giving him hard drugs that were too strong. "I could intuitively feel trouble," Faithfull told the magazine. "I thought, I'll take a few Tuinals (barbiturates) and I won't go there. But Jean went to see Jim Morrison and killed him. I mean I'm sure it was an accident. The smack (heroin) was too strong? And he died... everybody connected to the death of this poor guy is dead now. Except me." De Breteuil himself was found dead in Morocco some weeks after Morrison's death. Marianne Faithfull: “He was scared for his life. Jim Morrison had OD’d, and Jean had provided him the heroin. Jean saw himself as dealer to the stars. Now he was just a small time heroin dealer in big legal trouble.” Source: www.mojo4music.com

Lou Reed about Jim Morrison's death to Melody Maker (1975): ''I have no respect for him. I didn't even feel sorry for him when he died. There was a group of us in New York, and the phone rang and somebody told us that Jim Morrison had just died in a bathtub in Paris. And the immediate response was ''How fabulous.'' 'In a bathtub in Paris. Fantastic.' That lack of compassion doesn't disturb me. He asked for it. I had no compassion for that silly Los Angeles person. He brought it on himself. He was SO dumb.''

Interestingly, despite David Bowie achieving mainstream stardom sooner than Lou Reed, it was Bowie who was the mega-fan of the Velvet Underground leader and everything Reed represented. “I’d never heard anything quite like it. It was a revelation to me,” Bowie said in a 1997 interview for the documentary Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, recalling the first time he heard The Velvet Underground in 1965. “It influenced what I was to do for the next few years.” Reed had upended all previous tropes. This was a huge inspiration for Bowie, who continued his appraisal by adding, ”One innovation was the use of background noise to create a kind of an ambience that had been hitherto unknown in rock. And the other thing was the nature of his lyric writing. Bob Dylan had certainly brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting, but then Lou had taken it even further into the avant-garde.” It’s why Bowie always referred to Lou Reed as the “King of New York”: “Lou wrote about the New York that I wanted to know about,” Bowie explained in the 1997 interview. “I think probably everybody has their own New York. For me, New York was always James Dean and the Beatniks wandering in the dark streets.” Bowie died of liver cancer in his New York City apartment on 10 January 2016. Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk

An existential dare—cool as a matter of life and death. What happens when mythmaking becomes part of your daily life? The difficulty for any Lou Reed biographer is that sometimes Reed embraced his own persona and took it as far as it would go, and sometimes he talked as though he were merely its pained victim. “I mimic me probably better than anybody,” he told Lenny Kaye in 1975, adding, “I created Lou Reed. I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well.” How to get a critical bead on someone who could go from the delicately tormented “Berlin” in 1973, to the hilarious live set “Take No Prisoners” five years later? Were Reed’s addictions fuelling the spiel, or was he madly doping himself to live up to the myth? 

Most of the iconic images of Reed frame a certain unvarying look: his blank, granite face; black leather; black shades. Is this someone who can’t feel, or who is frightened of feeling too much? A badass stare, or narcotized indifference? He was one of those people who carry the air of a child hurt so bad he never quite recovered. Reed’s complicated relationship with his father seems to have been key for his despair. Alas, his childhood goes by in a blur—before we know it, he’s dating girls, forming bands, and scoring drugs. Right on the cusp of his eighteenth birthday, he suffers a major mental breakdown, which his parents are persuaded to treat with electroconvulsive therapy. Reed's sister Merrill wrote in 2015: “I know our family was torn apart the day the doctors began those wretched treatments.”

Lou Reed’s first musical love was doo-wop; as a teenager, he recorded with a nascent group called the Shades, playing guitar and singing backup. 1950s' doo-wop songs were a kind of brief, spectral reveries on 78rpm. A key lesson for Reed, the aspirant songwriter at Pickwick Records, was that the softest song in the world might easily suggest the harshest truths. Lou Reed met Laurie Anderson at an experimental-music festival in New York in 1992. They were together for twenty-one years, the longest relationship of his life, so his late redemption arc with Anderson was heartening. Two days before his death, in 2013, Reed was floating in the “pale blue water of the heated swimming pool at his East Hampton home.” Terminally weak, Reed’s thoughts drifted to his childhood on Long Island’s South Shore. He told Laurie Anderson about a moment when the family was at the beach and Reed affectionately made to hold his father’s hand; he was repaid, he said, with a smack in the face. This was one of the images in Reed’s mind, as he lay dying, of liver disease, at the age of seventy-one. Reed’s father had died of cancer in 2005 at the age of ninety-one. Reed would occasionally visit him when he was in a hospice in the Bronx, but they never truly reconciled. At the service after he died, Merrill delivered a eulogy. Reed did not speak, and he did not stay long. His mother, too, had entered a hospice on Long Island, and Reed would visit her more frequently but, as with his father, only if his sister was there.

Anthony De Curtis: I met Reed in 1996, for a press interview on the occasion of his album “Set the Twilight Reeling.” And what I remember most are his eyes. I got the sense that he was trying to rustle up one of his trademark badass glares but that his heart wasn’t in it. How does it feel, I wondered, to have to navigate not only media obligations but ordinary social encounters as if you are alone in a jungle of adversaries? Now, years later, with all I know about his hurt childhood and addictions, it occurs to me that, under the bravado, Lou actually looked quite scared. His interviews have always been a minefield of irony and false trails. Even his lyrics, as plain-speaking and personal as anything in rock, were more true to the work than to the author. It's a testimony to his complexity that many fans blend the real Reed with his public persona. Even his first wife Bettye Kronstad seemed obfuscated by that conundrum, as her memoir A Perfect Day reflects. “Lou would tell me how much he loved Bettye and get mawkishly sentimental,” Reed’s friend Ed McCormack said. “He’d go on about how he loved Bettye because she wasn’t hip. He’d say, ‘Most of the people I know are like the scum of the earth in a way, and I sometimes think that’s what I’m like. But I believe in fairy-tale princesses.” 

Like many people, McCormack saw a performative element to Reed’s alleged bisexuality. “There was a deeply conventional part of him that was very real. I think his parents didn’t understand him. My feeling was that he had learned from Warhol the art of asexuality. He just didn’t seem that interested in sex. He seemed more interested in drugs than anything else. I think he was one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known. He was not a happy man.” “Writing songs is like making a play,” Reed said after Transformer's release in 1972, “and you give yourself the lead part. And you write yourself the best lines that you could. You’re your own director and you get to play all different kinds of characters. It’s fun. I write through the eyes of somebody else. I don’t have a personality of my own. I just pick up other people’s personalities.” Bettye Kronstad took a pragmatic view of all the homoerotic imagery suffusing the album. “It’s just showbiz,” she said. “It was marketing. I thought it was clever. We were just selling the album. I was always coming from the point of view of, how do we get his career going?” Angie Bowie arranged for Reed and Kronstad to live in a nice duplex in Wimbledon, a suburb just outside London. 

The most scathing negative review of Berlin appeared in Rolling Stone, written by Stephen Davis: “Lou Reed’s Berlin is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence, and suicide. There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them.” He concluded that Berlin was Reed’s “last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou.” A review like that would sour anyone on critics. “It’s one of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen of anything,” Reed said. “I got one paragraph saying I should be physically punished for putting out the album.” Bettye wanted out: "I didn’t like the way Lewis was treating me. Sometimes he was a total sweetheart. He could be a generous lover, but those nasty mood swings were hell. He accused me of sleeping with my theater teacher. So I said to myself I did try. But it’s not working. That’s what I said to him: We tried. It’s not working. I’m out.” On September 17, 1973, Reed headlined the Olympia theater in Paris, and Kronstad made her escape. Just before she and Reed were set to leave their hotel for the theater, she took off after leaving a message for Dennis Katz that she needed a plane ticket back to New York. Her departure, predictably, had a damaging impact on Reed. 

He would collapse onstage from a drug overdose five days later in Brussels. Bettye recalls that some months after their divorce, “Dr. Robert Freymann phoned me to tell me: ‘Look, I’m calling on Lou’s behalf. Lou says he needs you. He wants you back.’ I don’t know exactly how I answered him, but to myself I thought, ‘No. I can’t get back.’” Kronstad never made an effort to reestablish contact with Reed after their divorce, nor did she follow his subsequent career with much beyond a cursory interest. Of the time she spent on the road with Reed, she said, “Bob Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo dodged a bullet.” Shortly after Kronstad remarried, her testimony was subpoenaed in a lawsuit that Reed had filed against his former manager. 

“Put all the songs together and it’s certainly an autobiography,” Reed declared to NME in 1990, “but not necessarily mine.” On August 23, 1970, towards the end of a two-month season at Max’s Kansas City, Reed walked off stage and quit The Velvet Underground. It came out of the blue. Loaded was going to be Reed’s most accessible outing yet, and Atlantic were already talking up Sweet Jane as a potential radio hit. “I didn’t belong there,” Reed insisted. “I didn’t want to be in a mass pop national hit group.” He was demoralised. Sterling Morrison had lost interest and thought that Reed had simply “gone insane.” There were rumours that his parents turned up at Max’s one night and drove him home. At the time of the release of Coney Island Baby, Reed had told Lenny Kaye that he was done with the stereotypical “Lou Reed” image: “No more bullshit, dyed hair, faggot junkie trip,” he said. 

Street Hassle contains a repudiation of the lifestyle he had been sharing with Rachel. The three-part title track, one of the masterpieces of Reed’s solo career, stands as something of a requiem for their tawdry, druggy street lives. As Rachel disappeared and Sylvia Morales became a romantic force in his life, Reed identified as heterosexual, and in the cover of Street Hassle, he looks more masculine in contrast with his hedonistic image of Coney Island Baby. Reed once described the nearly eleven-minute “Street Hassle” as his answer to the question, “What would happen if Raymond Chandler wrote a rock-and-roll song?” Take No Prisoners was released in November of 1978. Repeatedly, Reed rails against critics, insulting John Rockwell and Robert Christgau. “Fuck you! I don’t need you to tell me I’m good,” Reed spits. Christgau’s response in his Village Voice column was: “I thank Lou for pronouncing my name right. C+.” 

DeCurtis: I asked him if the Velvets legacy ever became a burden. “Not really,” Reed said. “What could be a cooler thing to be a member of? It’s like playing for the New York Jets when Namath was there. And every lyric that was ever sung by the Velvet Underground was written by me.” In 1989, Reed released his masterpiece “New York,” his grittiest effort after “Berlin” and his best work since 1978’s “Street Hassle.” It was not a celebration of his town. He dealt with the corruption of patriotism, the selfishness of the elites, poverty, drug addiction, and child abuse. While some of Reed’s work seemed intensely personal, he told me that most songs he wrote were “not autobiographical.” “It’s more of an amalgam of people,” he said, adding that even songs he sang from a first-person point of view should be regarded as if they’d been written from the third person. “They’re very personal, done with a great deal of distance,” he said. “I try to keep myself invisible.”

Though Reed was very proud of “Magic and Loss,” he was frustrated by its mixed reception. “I kept getting told, 'This is too depressing,'” Reed said. “I think that “Magic and Loss” was about love and friendship. It is sad, but very emotional, also. These are not bad things. And I don’t see why a contemporary work of music can’t contain all these things. But when they do contain these things, you’re thought of as being too cerebral, or too down. I remember reading this book by Saul Bellow where he was quoting Walt Whitman and he wrote, ‘Until Americans and American poetry can deal with death, this is a country that has not grown up.’ There might be something to be said about that.” Over the years, Reed and I also talked about musical good times. 

Reed was not averse to melodic lightness, as can be heard in songs like “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” and "I'm Sticking with You" with the Velvets, and “I Love You, Suzanne,” "Hooky-Wooky" or “Egg Cream” as a solo artist. Sometimes, those upbeat songs took his listeners by surprise. Predictably, the overall sunniness of “I Love You, Suzanne” and New Sensations as a whole alienated some longtime Reed fans who continued to measure his every move by the standards of the Velvet Underground. Reed said they shouldn’t. “There seem to be people who only like it when I write—in quotes—‘depressive’ things,” Reed said. “It’s not that I resent it, but I can’t pay any attention to that. I mean, there’s got to be more to life and more to me than that. And I’m not about to sit down and write another song about drugs. Somebody else will have to do that for this generation. I already did it." Reed noted that one critic’s take on his persona in the ‘70s had been “very dark and foreboding. 'A poet that’s going to burn out quietly at 5:30 in the morning with no one there to care.' A very negative notion that bears no relationship to myself.” Reed admitted he was bipolar and he had certainly wrestled with his demons—in song and in person. Source: www.newyorker.com