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 bird’s 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 sirens screaming." —Poem Laurie Sadly Listening (September 2011) by Lou Reed