Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye

Born in London in 1970, Ione Skye is the daughter of folk singer-songwriter Donovan and fashion model Enid Karl. Her father Donovan is known for the hits “Catch the Wind,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch,” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” 

"My parents met in 1966, at the Whisky a Go Go in LA. She was twenty-one and Donovan was twenty. Mom had dated famous men before—Jim Morrison, Keith Richards, and Denny Doherty from the Mamas and the Papas. But the night she spotted Donovan across the crowded Whisky, that was it for her. The Sunshine Superman, as they called him, swept her off her feet and away to Greece, then London. When she got pregnant with my brother Dono, they moved into a fairy-tale house in the English countryside. Mom was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, but England was her happy place. As she once told me, sounding New Agey: “It was as if I’d lived there in another life.” Donovan was happy there chopping firewood and writing poems and songs about their budding family. His album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden is pretty much all about that time. In “Song of the Naturalist’s Wife” you can even hear my brother’s first cries. Donovan ticked all the boxes for Mom: creative, exciting, handsome, and a good provider. 

By the time I was conceived in Donovan’s gypsy caravan on the Isle of Skye, he was already drifting back to his ex-girlfriend Linda Lawrence. Then my father won Linda back from Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and initiated a new life. Mom hired a lawyer to get child support, using her first check to move us into a small apartment in Los Angeles, my first real home. Mom didn’t love her husband Billy the way he loved her, but it didn’t hurt that Billy was gorgeous—tall, dark, and shaggy, like a 1960s Keith Richards. After a dozen or so proposals, she’d agreed to marry him, and I was all for it. While shooting River's Edge I was careful not to let my hair fall over my face, I straddled Keanu Reeves and kissed him for real, moving around, parts to parts, missing sometimes and grinding on his leg or stomach. “Cut!” said Tim. “Nice work, kids. Stand by.” We pulled apart, a little bashful, a little breathless. “You good?” said Keanu, and I sensed by the husky edge to his voice that it wasn’t just me who wanted more. Tracing my lips to the side of his face, I whispered, “Can I come to your place after wrap?” On the way there, we stopped at an all-night retro diner, Norms. 

It was busy and bright inside, but the clatter and voices fell away as we slid into our booth. I could only marvel at every little thing Keanu did. The way he slung his arm across the back of the booth, tore a sugar packet with his teeth, licked a dot of ketchup from his thumb. Each gesture was sexier than the last. Spacey from lack of sleep and maybe even love, I felt the old diner drifting upward, lifting us into the sky. Just above the city. Just above real life. Keanu had his own barebones studio apartment to stay in during filming. A brown carpet, a mattress on the living room floor. We lay on our sides on his mattress and I ran my hands over Keanu’s smooth back as he kissed my face and neck. I felt both shy and proud of my body, my soft skin and full breasts in my Calvin Klein bra. I knew I was nice looking but wished I were the most beautiful girl in the world. This might have been the most beautiful boy. He was different from any boy I’d known, self-possessed and calm. But when I tried to maneuver him on top of me, he wouldn’t budge. “Let me drive you home,” he said abruptly, pulling up my bra strap. 

I wound my way up Mulholland, then Woodrow Wilson, finally pulling up outside the Zappas’ compound. The road was empty, but the canyon was rippling and alive. I sat on my hood and lit a shoebox joint, checking over my shoulder. I didn’t smoke often—yet—partly because you couldn’t at the Zappas’. It was no secret that Frank was staunchly against drugs of any sort, unless you counted the Winstons he chain-smoked. Anything stronger dulled the intellect and killed ambition, he believed. And because Frank was no ordinary father but something more like a cult leader to his kids, they were proud straight arrows too. Me, I was whoever they wanted me to be. Inside the compound, at least. You never knew who you might find there. That was part of the fun. Maybe it was Molly Ringwald on a pool float, pale and lovely as a forties Vargas girl. Molly and Dweezil Zappa were no longer together but still friends. Though newly famous, thanks to Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Molly was wonderfully un-stuckup. 

I found her worldly and proper, in a vaguely old-fashioned way. “That’s what makes Hollywood so dynamite,” Anthony Kiedis said. “That desert energy, blowing in. I can really get down with it.” I liked that he thought Hollywood was great and wasn’t too jaded to admit it. But it was the thing about the wind that got me. I’d always had a connection with the Santa Anas. They brought up something in me, a wild yearning feeling. Anthony was now staring at me with focused intensity, his eyes tracing my hair, my mouth, my neck, as if memorizing me. No defensiveness, no beatnik shtick. For hours, we lay there, shedding layers, words flowing into kisses flowing into words. He stroked my face and said I was like an angel and I understood that we were falling under the same spell. And then, like it was Christmas in August, we shared all the things we loved: the Santa Ana winds, and perfect pieces of fruit, and Marilyn Monroe’s arched eyebrows, and the joy of a warm, still ocean, and getting comfortable after being shy and uncomfortable.

The Chili Peppers had just released their third studio album, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, to not much of a bang. Anthony was broke and living with the band’s manager, Lindy Goetz, in the Valley. I’d pick him up at Canter’s Deli, or sometimes we’d just drive around, shouting our life stories over the radio. Anthony drove fast and reckless, and I was driving like a maniac too. Anthony would have to hit rock bottom to quit drugs, just as I’d have to hit my own rock bottom to quit the feeling I had to take care of Anthony. The need to save him was an addiction in itself. I was hooked. If Anthony’s sex drive had a soundtrack, it would be Fun House, the Stooges album he’d turned me on to. He liked to brag that he only exercised in bed and onstage, though I saw him doing push-ups all the time. He was obsessed with leading me to climax, and the pressure could be a lot. After five years of struggle, the Chili Peppers were finally moving on from being just a fringe local band to being played on KROQ. Tickets for the upcoming Uplift Mofo Party Plan tour were selling out and the record was sidling up the charts. If using was what kept Anthony alive, I was willing to help him. 

“If you’re going to do it,” I told Anthony that night, trailing him out the kitchen door, “just do it here with me, where you’re safe.” “I don’t deserve you,” he said, hanging his head. “I’m coming with you,” I said. In my pajamas and robe, I drove Anthony to meet a dealer on the corner of Wilton and Franklin Avenue. Then we came home and I watched, biting my knuckles, as Anthony shot up in my bathroom. The same bathroom where Karis Jagger and I used to stand on the tub’s edge, lip-synching in the mirror. That was the first of many times I went with him to score. He didn’t like me tagging along at first, but then we discovered I had a sixth sense for the fuzz. One time we were parked in the Mayfair Market parking lot and Anthony had just smoked some dope; I got a weird feeling and put the tinfoil in my pocket seconds before a cop car swooped up. They searched the car and questioned us separately, and miraculously, we had the same story: We were just going to the market to get bagels. Heroin would make Anthony remote but also snuggly. We’d curl up on the waterbed, listening to Neil Young or Lou Reed. Sometimes we watched old movies, and not just because I wanted to. 

Anthony had a thing for Veronica Lake and might have seen Sullivan’s Travels as many times as I’d seen The Blue Dahlia. But then there were the nights he shot speedballs, a mixture of coke and heroin. Those nights weren’t sweet at all. I’d try to sleep while he crouched on my floor. “Don’t look at me!” he’d snap when I tried to pull him into bed. “I’m bad. I feel like a demon.” I’d look away for his sake, but Anthony wasn’t a bad person, he was just in a bad way. In the New Year, Anthony and I moved our joint belongings—his duffel, my three suitcases, and whatever else fit into the Toyota—into a quite glamorous 1940s triplex on North Orange Drive. I loved the apartment, with its original pink-tiled bathroom and Art Deco moldings. Heroin was “the worst drug in the world,” the “crossing the line” drug, and needles were so gross. All the same, I’d grown curious about heroin, now that it was in front of me so much. I wanted to know how the drug felt from the inside, why it was so bewitching. “Can I try some?” I asked one night as Anthony laid his lighter and tinfoil on the bathroom sink. 

Anthony looked horrified. “No,” he said sternly. Thankfully I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get hooked. Not long after Hillel’s death, Anthony had gone back to rehab and gotten clean again. My worst nightmare was that he’d relapse if he found out I was falling in love with Adam. People thought Anthony was indestructible, but I wasn’t convinced. I was bound by a strange belief that I had to be with him to keep him safe. Then one beautiful September day—just a perfect day, as the Lou Reed song went—everything changed. Anthony sent me a letter. He was working the Twelve Steps and making his amends.

Once it occurred to my brother Dono that he might actually be able to date the models he worked with, he went on a mission to woo his big crush, Kate Moss—and by God, he succeeded. I went to see Nirvana perform on MTV Unplugged in New York while Dono and Kate were briefly an item. That winter I met Anthony on Becky's in Brooklyn, I knew that would be our last date. When Anthony started to yell at me, I was on the verge of tears, but fortunately there was Lou Reed who was leaving the bar and stared him in disapproval, which shut Anthony up on the spot. While we were shooting Four Rooms, all the actors shared a makeup trailer, but Madonna was soon moved to a private space because we couldn’t stop staring at her. I mean, it was Madonna. I’d only seen her in the flesh once before, from the audience at her Blond Ambition concert in LA in 1990. Adam had scored prime seats because the Beastie Boys’ first tour had been opening for Madonna. He and I were secret fans. Commercial pop was uncool to us, so we were acting like, Oh, isn’t it ironic that we’re here at this mainstream pop show? 

But from the minute the Blond Queen strutted onstage in her Jean Paul Gaultier bondage gear, all our judgment went out the window. Madonna was very fun and a little bit of a mean girl too. She loved taking the piss out of Tim Roth, who played the bellboy in all four stories. My old friend Paul Starr was Madonna’s makeup artist. Near the end of one long day of filming, when he swooped over for a last touch-up, she playfully smacked his hand and snapped, “If you put any more makeup on my face it will crack!” Paul just laughed and went on doing his thing. “Go ahead, hon,” said Madonna, patting the bed. I’d been summoned! Cinching my terry cloth bathrobe, I lay down next to Madonna. Her eyes were still closed, so I closed mine and we lay quietly, side by side on our backs. Turning my head ever so slightly, I opened one eye to look at her. She was almost otherworldly, with her feathery black lashes and fantastic bone structure. I had the urge to wrap her in a maternal embrace but didn’t dare. 

Madonna took care of herself. Madonna might not have been a fan of my brother, but she took a small shine to me. When Four Rooms wrapped, just before Christmas, I was invited to a holiday dinner party at Castillo del Lago, her Mediterranean-style estate perched above Lake Hollywood. A few decades before Madonna, another bigwig, the mobster Bugsy Siegel, had lived there. It was magnificent, the whole exterior painted in ocher stripes inspired by a church in Portofino. The view from the grand dining room, with its honeycombed Moorish ceilings, stretched from Lake Hollywood to the ocean. Best of all, a Frida Kahlo painting, Self-Portrait with Monkey, hung over a small table in the foyer. It was a small group that night. Debbie Harry was there, with a spiky new haircut. I still worshipped Debbie but my attention was mainly focused on Madonna’s ex-lover and best friend, Ingrid Casares. A few years in the future, when Howard Stern asked me about our romance on his show, I’d say she was my true initiation into the lesbian nation. When I married Adam, my bridesmaids were Karis Jagger and Mick Fleetwood's daughter, Amelia. 

Adam and I had never once fought in our entire seven-year relationship. I’d always thought that was our strength, but in fact it was our greatest weakness. I was reading a letter that had been sent to Adam, handwritten. It meant something. I scanned the lines, trying to understand what. It was from Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill. They’d met at the Summersault music festival in Australia. They were only friends, Adam said. The letter was not overtly flirtatious or inappropriate. She knew he was married and was trying, at least, to be respectful. But I could tell she wanted to leave an impression by the way she wrote—cool and smart and witty. And he must have liked her too, or why else would he have shown it to me? I handed it back to him, my hand shaking. “Should I write back?” Adam asked, his voice soft. I couldn’t, in good conscience, promise to be faithful to him. If my husband was going to like someone else (“like” was as far as I could let my imagination go), at least Kathleen was a good person. I admired her punk feminist mission and loved her songs, especially “Rebel Girl.” —Say Everything: A Memoir (2025) by Ione Skye

Before the End, Lou Reed (Endless Cycle)

 

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison, documentary directed by Jeff Finn. Release date: January 13, 2025 on Apple TV.

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is less an excavation of truth than an exercise in indulgence, a quixotic pilgrimage through the mists of conspiracy and nostalgia. Directed by Jeff Finn, the documentary styles itself as an investigative probe into the final days of The Doors' frontman, but in reality, it is more séance than scholarship. It toys with the well-worn whispers of Morrison faking his death without the burden of serious evidence. Finn and his parade of interviewees seem convinced that the "official story" is somehow suspect, yet they produce little more than speculative embroidery on an already rich tapestry of myth. To his credit, Finn unearths rare archival material and interviews that offer a glimpse into Morrison as a man, not just a spectral figure in rock 'n' roll lore. 

But where the documentary might have explored Morrison's literary ambitions, his existential unraveling, or the paradox of his self-destructive genius, it instead opts for the well-trodden path of counter-narratives that fail to hold up under scrutiny. The introduction of a shadowy "Mr. X," hinted to be Morrison himself is laughable because his name is Frank Wagner and he's younger than Morrison. Critics seem divided, with some lauding Finn's passion and others dismissing the documentary as a hallucinatory echo chamber. Jonita Davis of The Black C.A.P.E. magazine acknowledges its compelling storytelling, while audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes skew toward exasperation, one viewer branding it "filled with innuendo, half-baked theories and outright fiction." Before the End is not an exposé but a testament to our inability to let our icons rest. This documentary does little but add another layer of fog to a legend that scarcely needs it. 

Jeff Finn: I think Oliver Stone’s a brilliant filmmaker: JFK, Natural Born Killers. I think his documentary work on Kennedy is amazing. But that brilliance is not displayed in The Doors. I was just so disappointed because it just clearly presented a one-dimensional view of Jim Morrison as this dark, narcissistic, self-absorbed asshole. And that’s not to say Jim didn’t have his asshole-ish moments. Of course, he did. We all have a dark side. I was doing street interviews in Virginia, outside the library Jim went to as a child. One young man replied, “He was an asshole.” And he knew that from the Oliver Stone movie. So, I’ve tried to do damage control regarding Jim’s legacy from the fallout of that biopic. Everybody has their version of Jim. The notion of Jim as an introvert, as being neurodivergent is not what we generally think of Jim Morrison. I want people to know the Jim that Gayle Enochs, one of his lovers, knew. A man who drank wine and read poetry. A contrast to this rock god. Where are The Doors of today? Why people today aren’t rising up and forming bands the way it was in the late 60s and protesting? I’m probably unaware of them, but I keep my ear to the ground and haven’t seen anything. It could be just as Jim said that it was an incredible springtime, that moment in the late sixties, and it couldn’t be replicated. Source: bandsaboutmovies.com

“I’m most concerned with compassion and happiness these days. I know things that impede happiness; drugs impede it, tension impedes it. People just don’t want to believe there’s any integrity. They’re always looking for some really ugly little thing. I think drugs are the single worst, terrible thing. And if there was any single thing that I thought would be effective to stop people from dealing in drugs and taking them I would do it. However I don’t think there is, apart from telling people to use them with caution. I find self-destructive people very boring. I would like to think that I’m not one of them.” —Lou Reed, interview for BBC Radio 1 (June 5, 1980)

It took years for The Velvet Underground to be understood. Most people caught on with the rise of alternative rock in the ‘90s, 30 years later. Now matter how bad, low, worthless someone feels there is Lou saying: 'I find it hard to believe you don't know, the beauty you are...' You are being told how, despite what you feel, that you are valued and loved. And Reed pulls that trick again and again in his solo work. And the fans of John Cale must know it’s hard to imagine The Velvet Underground commercially successful with Cale staying in the band longer. If they’d delivered another album like White Light/White Heat there’s no way they'd make the jump to Atlantic from Verve. 

MGM kicked the Velvet Underground off the label around the beginning of 1970 as part of its infamous "purge" of artists who supposedly advocated taking drugs. In November 1970 Mike Curb announced the termination of the contracts of eighteen bands that "advocate for drug use." In a December 1970 Rolling Stone news item, an MGM rep claimed that "The cuts were made partly to do with the drug scene—like maybe a third of them had to do with drug reasons. The others were dropped because they weren't selling." Certainly the Velvet Underground would have been at the top of the drug purge list. Sterling Morrison thought so, telling Mix magazine that Curb "wanted to get rid of the controversial bands, including the low-selling Velvets." 

Despite of the chronic painting of Lou Reed as the miscreant in his fallout with John Cale and later with Robert Quine, the reality is in fact quite different. In White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day by Richie Unterberger, Michael Carlucci, longtime friend Lou Reed's guitarist Robert Quine said: "Lou told Quine that the reason why he had to get rid of John Cale in The Velvet Underground was Cale's ideas were just too out there," says Carlucci. "Cale had some really wacky ideas. He wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and Lou just couldn't stand it." Cale's autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen?, which was written in collaboration with Victor Bockris is a clear example of one-side reporting. After the dissolution of The Velvets, Sterling Morrison explained that Cale could be also a hard pill: “People talk about Lou, but John was also truly difficult to work with. Once we were doing “Pale Blue Eyes,” which is a quiet song. I’m playing the solo, which is also quiet, and in the middle of my solo, he purposely steps on the button that turns on my distorter. It’s a Vox distorter, so all of a sudden there’s this blast of sound distorted and three times louder than all the rest. John looks at me like I’m the crazy one, turns it off, and then kicks it! I look over at Lou and we’re both going, OK, what the hell?! But if I had done that to him he would’ve had a stroke.”

John Cale obsessively blames Lou Reed of the acrimonious reunion of The Velvet Underground in 1993, with a great deal of jealousy. In What's Welsh for Zen? Cale whines about Reed to no end: "We supported U2 for Swiss stadium dates. As soon as we did that we were no longer the focus of attention and Lou could not bear the fact that he was a small fish in a big pond. Everybody else was having a great time, U2 were fun people to be around. Eden and Rise joined the tour in Switzerland. Rise was very worried and tried to understand what was going on between Lou and me, via Sylvia, which was a big mistake. One afternoon in the first week I was sitting around with a bass riff and Lou started playing guitar through this echo machine he had that was just making gorgeous noise. It was floating around in a miasma and then he started singing. I asked 'What did you say? You said "coyote"?' He said, 'Yeah.' So that song got done. And I expected that when we got out on the road we'd start trying new songs. In the middle of it all, I brought up this thing about publishing. All of a sudden Lou stopped the rehearsal, went outside and got on the phone. Sylvia showed up and came up to me and said, 'You can't talk like that to Lou. If you do, you're going to be very disappointed.' 'This is band business,' I said, 'are you a member of the band? You're not, are you? Right, so why don't you stay out of it?' She said, 'I manage Lou Reed.' That was a dead end. We knew we would attract a lot of ambulance chasers, people who wanted to see us fail. I read an article that said, 'There are some bands who shouldn't even think about re-forming.' We were one of them. 

Lou was trying to control everything and I knew a storm was coming. One night in Italy, I was doing 'Waiting for the Man' with a huge orchestral introduction, and I was trying to give them the tempo from the piano, but I was too far away. Lou went and told my tech to turn the piano off. At that point I was ready to knock his teeth down his throat. He was getting stranger and I couldn't deal with that. As soon as the tour was over, Lou was completely lost. I looked at him on the plane back from England to the US, and I realized: this guy is empty. He does not know where to draw the line. He's completely adrift. MTV wanted the Velvet Underground as part of their series of 'Unplugged'. Lou was insisting that he had to produce the 'Unplugged' album. 'I'm the only one who can produce the VU,' he said. I pointed out that we could have Chris Thomas or George Martin. Lou likes to obsess over things. I have different production values, in that Lou will go for the audiophile situation and I will go for the excitement. Everybody left Lou alone and he was very quiet, saying only, 'I must produce.' 'Absolutely not,' I replied. That night I dreamed he did not drive back to Manhattan; he swam away, just drifted off into the wild blue yonder and drowned. The thing about being a star is it's so one-sided that it's corrosive. 

Nico, for instance, was really in need of being completed as an artist and at the same time she could hold that grandiose position of being a star. Lou attempted to do the same, but he wasn't truly elegant enough in his demeanour to pull it off. People laugh at Lou a lot, but the thing is, Lou doesn't know when he's funny. He can be absolutely hysterical and have you rolling on the floor grasping your stomach, begging him to stop, and he still doesn't know what's going on. The point is, I don't think that Lou would like it if you told him. Lou and Sylvia had earlier insisted that the reunion tour would only happen if everyone refused to cooperate with Victor Bockris's work on his Lou Reed biography. And now they demanded that the mixing and production of any Velvet Underground recordings be Lou's domain. To me, if he did not want our input, fine, he would not get it. Certainly our only reason to refuse him was our conviction that we were best served by an outside ear. As a solo performer, I had been earning an income the equivalent of what we each could have expected from the reunion tour. What attracted me to the reunion tour, therefore, had not been the financial bonuses that were on offer, but the artistic stimulus of recreating the still uncompromised values of the original entity. 

The final stroke in this conflict was a fax Lou wrote Moe in reply to a gentle note from her suggesting another producer. Moe told me it said something like, 'Moe, of course your drums sounded great because I made them sound great. John of course doesn't realize that, because his viola never sounded better because I picked the amplifiers and the PA system.' Now I wanted to say to him, 'While you were making holes in your arm, Maureen was raising her children, so fuck you! And as far as making remarks about my knowledge of recording and production, I've been known for producing people and I've been a successful at it, so I'd be careful if you're accusing me of not knowing what goes on in studios too, because I have my own studio that's fairly well equipped and I know what I'm doing down there.' So I said, 'If you don't stop doing this, you're not going to have me as a friend anymore.' 

Moe called me up again and said, 'I just got a very nice fax from Sylvia.'  I saw red. Yeah, what does it say?' 'Well, it says, "John's a musician, don't listen to him." The resentment I felt at the end of the day was the same I had felt throughout the years. The situation with him and Sylvia just went on and on like that. I don't want to see Lou and I don't want to talk to him and I don't want to hear anything about him. I went through the roof. My subsequent letter to him was intended to purge him of even the slightest doubt of what I saw as his motives, total control. Moe could not have known how deeply offended I was by the meanness of his tone. I was not going to forgive him again. So I wrote Lou a nine-page fax that I knew he wouldn't get up from and he hasn't. There were many blow-ups. I'm sure there will be many more. The fax machine should have been taken away from Lou and me."

Lou Reed in RockBill magazine (August 1984): “I’ve never wanted to offend anybody. I’ve never wanted to make fun of anybody. This might sound strange coming from me. I have written songs where the characters are very bitter or are borderline psychotics. But I try to be non-judgmental about things.” After his break-up with Bettye, Lou rekindled a relationship with Barbara Hodes, a clothing designer that Lou had met at the Factory. She designed knitwear-style mohair jumpers. Betsey Johnson had given Barbara a whole corner of her boutique Paraphernalia. Barbara and Lou reconnected—he moved in with her and they had a romantic and sexual relationship before Barbara married Michael Gross, a reporter from The New York Times. According to Barbara, Lou was 'tender and polite' while he was not on drugs. She said Sally Can't Dance was critiziced by Lou because of Steve Katz's involvement. "I fear that I am a lone voice in proclaiming the brilliance of that record! Seriously. I think it contains some of his loveliest melodies. “Sally Can’t Dance” is actually about a woman who lived life on the edge and was always into the latest fashions, but later wound up in a rent-controlled apartment living a hum drum life." 

“When Lou Reed talks in Coney Island Baby about wanting to play football for the coach and “giving the whole thing up for you,” he is expressing the profound dream of the damned—and his loss is given greater intensity because both he and we know that such wishes were impossible from the very beginning. And it hurts all over again. It's also a way of recapturing his more innocent days.” —Paul Nelson for Rolling Stone magazine (25 March, 1976)

Bob Quine had a singular sound but he was just a sideman. Quine was a Velvet Underground superfan—something Reed’s wife Sylvia appreciated when she scouted him for The Blue Mask. A musicologist, Quine gave Lou a thorough analysis of why Lou’s particular guitar playing was genius and what an impact it had. “We recorded it in this gigantic orchestral soundstage that was built inside a mid-century office tower on 6th Avenue in Midtown,” Fred Maher says about those sessions: “Lou was in very good humor and we really stretched out. It was just me on drums, Lou, Bob, and Fernando Saunders. During the recording, everything was hunky-dory, and Bob and Lou were getting along. But when the final mixes were done, I think Bob wasn’t very happy with the mixes. He complained bitterly to Lou, and that was pretty much that.” “Bob didn’t really have ambitions beyond being a sideman,” Richard Hell recalled: “He didn’t like having his stuff edited. He couldn’t handle it. I talked to him about it. I was like, ‘Bob, it’s their record, not yours.’ But he was not rational that way.” 

 

Even those who say that Lou Reed had "normal parents" acknowledge that his father had a cutting sense of humor, cutting people down to size. That might seem innocuous from the outside, but for a child it can have a big impact. "Beginning of a Great Adventure" shows us Reed facing down the impossibility of being a father. Reed had grown as an artist, as a writer, and tapped into universal truths in New York and Magic & Loss and expressed them in such a crystalline way that almost everyone could relate. The true depth of Reed’s artistry sunk deeper and deeper whereas most of his 60s contemporaries were out of ideas and churning out drivel. The last song on his last album Lulu: Junior Dad is absolutely heartbreaking. It belongs alongside with other songs that paint negative or frightening portrayals of father figures: Kill Your Sons, My Old Man, Endless Cycle, Sex With Your Parents, Rock Minuet, etc. —Sources: Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall and Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis

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