Copyright

Harper

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First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson 1994

This edition Harper 2014

© Victor Bockris 1994, 2014

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available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007581894

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Praise

“Bockris’s new work is instantly recognizable as the heavyweight psychological powerplay Lou Reed’s legend deserves … Reed is effectively pinned like a butterfly”—Q

“Transformer depicts the singer’s life as a series of death-defying second acts”—New York Times Book Review

“A very readable portrait … Blending informed biographical narrative with abundant quotes and a dishy, conversational style, Bockris captures the many moods—and mood swings—of a true rock and roll chameleon”—Entertainment Weekly

“Transformer is an even more staggering brief than Wired (about John Belushi)”—Spin

“Bockris provides insight into the private life that led Reed to create many of rock’s memorable songs, including “Heroin” and “Walk on the Wild Side”—Publishers Weekly

“One of the funniest and most memorable time-lined rock documents around”—Philadelphia City Paper

Also by Victor Bockris

Muhammad Ali in Fighter’s Heaven

Keith Richards: The Biography

Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie (with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein)

Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story (with Gerard Malanga)

Warhol: The Biography

With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker

Patti Smith: A Biography

What’s Welsh for Zen: The Autobiography of John Cale (with John Cale)

Beat Punks

Rebel Heart: An American Rock ’n’ Roll Journey (with Bebe Buell)

The Burroughs–Warhol Affair

Burroughs Reloaded (photographs)

Dedication

This book is dedcated to Barney Hoskyns, Gerard Malanga, Bob Gruen, and Legs McNeil

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Also by Victor Bockris

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

One: Kill Your Son, 1959–60

Two: Pushing the Edge, 1960–62

Three: Shelley, If You Just Come Back, 1962–64

Four: The Pickwick Period, 1964–65

Five: The Formation of the Velvet Underground, 1965

Six: Fun at the Factory, 1966

Seven: Exit Warhol, 1966–67

Eight: Exit Cale, 1967–68

Nine: The Deformation of the Velvet Underground, 1968–70

Ten: Fallen Knight, 1970–71

Eleven: The Transformation from Freeport Lou to Frankenstein, 1971–73

Twelve: No Surface, No Depth, 1973–74

Thirteen: The Nervous Years, 1974–76

Fourteen: The Master of Psychopathic Insolence, 1977–78

Fifteen: Mister Reed, 1978–79

Sixteen: Ladybug, 1978–83

Seventeen: The New, Positive Lou (The Blue Lou), 1984–86

Eighteen: The Commercial, Political Lou, 1984–86

Nineteen: Imitation of Andy, 1987–89

Twenty: Death Makes Three, 1990–93

Twenty-One: In Which Lou Reed Cannot Put On the Velvet Underwear, 1990–96

Twenty-Two: The Transformation of Lou and Laurie, 1994–2000

Fast Forward: Val Kilmer’s Ranch, The Pecos, New Mexico, 2005

Twenty-Three: Ecstasy, 1999–2001

Twenty-Four: Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe, 2001–04

Twenty-Five: Lou Reed Classics, 2006

Twenty-Six: Lou Is Lulu, 2011–12

Twenty-Seven: The Death of Lou Reed, 2013

Appendix A: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Inventories of Work

Appendix B: Interviews with Lou Reed

Source Notes

Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

Thanks for input and enlightenment to Andy Warhol, Lisa Krug, Andrew Wylie, Albert Goldman, Robert Dowling, Gerard Malanga, Syracuse University Rare Book Room, the staff of Creedmore Mental Hospital, Paul Sidey, lngrid von Essen, Dawn Fozard, Stellan Holm, Marianne Erdos, Barbara Wilkintson, Jessica Berens, Chantal Rosset, Elvira Peake, Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Allen Ginsberg, David Dalton, Miles, Jeff Goldberg, Ira Cohen, Rosemary Bailey, Phillip Booth, Allen Hymari, Andy Hyman, Richard Mishkin, Bob Quine, Raymond Foye, Diego Cortez, Clinton Heylin, Jan van Willegen, John Holmstrom, Legs McNeil, Bobbie Bristol, Ann Patty, Carol Wood, John Shebar, Charles Shaar Murray, Mick Farren, Michael Watts, Emie Thormahlen, Gisella Freisinger, William Burroughs, John Giomo, Stewart Meyer, Terrence Sellers, Chris Stein, Bob Gruen, David Bourdon, Jonathan Cott, Ed and Laura DeGrazia, Bobby Grossman, Art and Kym Garfunkel, Patti Giordano, Stephen Gaines, Lee Hill, Marcia Resnick, Michelle Loud, Terry Noel, Glenn O’Brien, Robert Palmer, Rosebud, Geraldine Smith, Walter Stedding, David Schmidlapp, Lynn Tillman, Hope Ruff, James Carpenter, Tei Carpenter, Toshiko Mori, Gus Van Sant, Mary Woronov, Matt Snow, Roger Ely, Paul Katz, Gayle Sherman, Cassie Jones, Dominick Anfuso, J. P. Jones, James Grauerholz, Terry and Gail Southern, Heiner Bastian, Danny Fields, Dr. J. Gross, Steve Bloom, Bridget Love, Mary Harron, Jeff Butler, Solveig Wilder, Rick Blume, Lenny Kaye, Tony Zanetta, Doug Yule, Tony Conrad, Richard Meltzer, Nick Kent, Richard Witts, Nick Tosches, Kurt Loder, Julie Burchill, and John Wilcock.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE 2014 EDITION

I am particularly grateful to the writers Barney Hoskyns, Nick Johnstone, and David Fricke, whose profiles of Lou Reed were always spectacular and insightful; Allan Jones for Uncut’s ultimate guide to Lou’s music and all his Lou Reed articles; Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone’s Lou Reed issue; Phil Alexander at Mojo, and all the rock writers who work so passionately to keep us in touch with the music; Roderick Romero, the creative force in his legendary trance rock band Sky Cries Mary and a giant in the tree-house world, who shared some visionary memories of his friendship with Lou; thanks also to Bob Gruen for his eyes and his sense of humor; David Schmidlapp, Barry Miles, and the staff of the beautiful Jane West Hotel.

One of the great ironies of Lou Reed’s life is that he would hardly have had a career if it weren’t for the outstanding writers who wrote glowingly about him in the face of his scorn. I have never understood why people in the rock world look upon biographies as attacks when they are the best free advertising a rock star could possibly get. All those people should thank the writers for taking the time to address their audiences intelligently, just as I am thanking every writer for everything I learned about Lou in his last truly great period. There is something deeply engaging in the Lou and Laurie story. Somebody should write a book about it.

Epigraph

When I think of Lou, I remember what a romantic he was. And fun. And then when he had you hooked with that sweetness, he had to destroy you in order to survive. He couldn’t help himself, like any predator. He always warned his prey, partly as a challenge and partly to cover his ass for any later moral responsibility. What made the process interesting was the fact that it was an ongoing intellectual and artistic work—a performance piece.

An acquaintance

Chapter One

Kill Your Son

ELECTROSHOCK: 1959–60

I don’t have a personality.

Lou Reed

Nineteen fifty-nine was a bad year for Lou, seventeen, who had been studying his bad-boy role ever since he’d worn a black armband to school when the No. 1 R&B singer Johnny Ace shot himself back in 1954. Now, five years later, the bad Lou grabbed the chance to drive everyone in his family crazy. Tyrannically presiding over their middle-class home, he slashed screeching chords on his electric guitar, practiced an effeminate way of walking, drew his sister aside in conspiratorial conferences, and threatened to throw the mother of all moodies if everyone didn’t pay complete attention to him.

That spring, Lou’s conservative parents, Sidney and Toby Reed, sent their son to a psychiatrist, requesting that he cure Lou of homosexual feelings and alarming mood swings. The doctor prescribed a then popular course of treatment recently undergone by, among many others, the British writer Malcolm Lowry and the famous American poet Delmore Schwartz. He explained that Lou would benefit from a series of visits to Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital. There, he would be given an electroshock treatment three times a week for eight weeks. After that, he would need intensive postshock therapy for some time.

In 1959 you did not question your doctor. “His parents didn’t want to make him suffer,” explained a family friend. “They wanted him to be healthy. They were just trying to be parents, so they wanted him to behave.” The Reeds nervously accepted the diagnosis.

Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital was located in a hideous stretch of Long Island wasteland. The large state-run facility was equipped to handle some six thousand patients. Its Building 60, a majestically spooky edifice that stood eighteen stories high and spanned some five hundred feet, loomed over the landscape like a monstrous pterodactyl. Hundreds of corridors led to padlocked wards, offices, and operating theaters, all painted a bland, spaced-out cream. Bars and wire mesh covered the windows inside and out. Among the creepiest of these cells was the Electra Shock Treatment Center.

Creedmore State Mental Hospital. (Victor Bockris)

Into this unit one early summer day walked the cocky, troubled Lou. He was escorted through a labyrinth of corridors, unaware, he later claimed, that his first psychiatric treatment session at the hospital would consist of volts of electricity pulsing through his brain. Each door he passed through would be unlocked by a guard, then locked again behind him. Finally he was locked into the electroshock unit and made to change into a scanty hospital robe. As he sat uncomfortably in the waiting room with a group of people who looked to him like vegetables, Lou caught his first glimpse of the operating room. A thick, milky white metal door studded with rivets swung open revealing an unconscious victim who looked dead. The body was wheeled out on a stretcher and into a recovery room by a stone-faced nurse. Lou suddenly found himself next in line for shock treatment.

He was wheeled into the small, bare operating room, furnished with a table next to a hunk of metal from which two thick wires dangled. He was strapped onto the table. Lou stared at the overhead fluorescent light bars as the sedative started to take effect. The nurse applied a salve to his temples and stuck a clamp into his mouth so that he would not swallow his tongue. Seconds later, conductors at the end of the thick wires were attached to his head. The last thing that filled his vision before he lapsed into unconsciousness was a blinding white light.

In the 1950s, the voltage administered to each patient was not adjusted, as it is today, for size or mental condition. Everybody got the same dose. Thus, the vulnerable seventeen-year-old received the same degree of electricity as would have been given to a heavyweight axe murderer. The current searing through Lou’s body altered the firing pattern of his central nervous system, producing a minor seizure, which, although horrid to watch, in fact caused no pain since he was unconscious. When Lou revived several minutes later, however, a deathly pallor clung to his mouth, he was spitting, and his eyes were tearing and red. Like a character in a story by one of his favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, the alarmed patient now found himself prostrate in a dim waiting room under the gaze of a stern nurse.

“Relax, please!” she instructed the terrified boy. “We’re only trying to help you. Will someone get another pillow and prop him up. One, two, three, four. Relax.” As his body stopped twitching, the clamp was removed, and Lou regained full consciousness. Over the next half hour, as he struggled to return, he was panicked to discover his memory had gone. According to experts, memory loss was an unfortunate side effect of shock therapy, although whatever brain changes occurred were considered reversible, and persisting brain damage was rare. As Reed left the hospital, he recalled, he thought that he had “become a vegetable.”

“You can’t read a book because you get to page seventeen and you have to go right back to page one again. Or if you put the book down for an hour and went back to pick up where you started, you didn’t remember the pages you read. You had to start all over. If you walked around the block, you forgot where you were.” For a man with plans to become, among other things, a writer, this was a terrible threat.

The aftereffects of shock therapy put Lou, as Ken Kesey wrote in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, the gray zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying.” Lou’s nightmares were dominated by the sad, off-white color of hospitals. As he put it in a poem, “How does one fall asleep / When movies of the night await, / And me eternally done in.” Now he was afraid to go to sleep. Insomnia would become a lifelong habit.

Lou suffered through the eight weeks of shock treatments haunted by the fear that in an attempt to obliterate the abnormal from his personality, his parents had destroyed him. The death of the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday in July, and the haunting refrain of Paul Anka’s No. 1 teen-angst ballad, “Lonely Boy,” heightened his sense of distance and loss.

According to Lou, the shock treatments helped eradicate any feeling of compassion he might have had and handed him a fragmented approach. “I think everybody has a number of personalities,” he told a friend, to whom he showed a small notebook in which he had written, “‘From Lou #3 to Lou #8—Hi!” You wake up in the morning and say, ‘Wonder which of them is around today?’ You find out which one and send him out. Fifteen minutes later, someone else shows up. That’s why if there’s no one left to talk to, I can always listen to a couple of them talking in my head. I can talk to myself.”

At the end of the eight-week treatment, Lou was put on strong tranquilizing medication. “I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS. I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS. I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS,” he would later write in one of his best poems, “People Must Have to Die for the Music.” But in his heart he felt betrayed. If his parents had really loved him, they would never have allowed the shock treatments.

***

Lewis Alan Reed was born on March 2, 1942, at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Sidney George Reed, a diminutive, black-haired man who had changed his name from Rabinowitz, was a tax accountant. His mother, Toby Futterman Reed, seven years younger than her husband, a former beauty queen, was a housewife. Both parents were native New Yorkers who in a decade would move to the upper-middle class of Freeport, Long Island. Lewis developed into a small, thin child with kinky black hair, buck teeth, and a sensitive, nervous disposition. By that time, his mother, the model of a Jewish mother, had shaped her beauty-queen personality into an extremely nice, polite, formal persona that Lou later criticized in “Standing On Ceremony” (“a song I wrote for my mother”). She wanted her son to have the best opportunities in life and dreamed that one day he would become a doctor or a lawyer.

The house in Brooklyn where Lou was born. (Victor Bockris)

The emotional milieu that dominated Lewis’s life throughout his childhood was a kind of suffocating love. “Gentiles don’t understand about Jewish love,” wrote Albert Goldman in his biography of one of Lewis’s role models, Lenny Bruce. “They can’t grasp a positive, affectionate emotion that is so crossed with negative impulses, so qualified with antagonistic feelings that it teeters at every second on a fulcrum of ambivalence. Jewish love is love, all right, but it’s mingled with such a big slug of pity, cut with so much condescension, embittered with so much tacit disapproval, disapprobation, even disgust, that when you are the object of this love, you might as well be an object of hate. Jewish love made Kafka feel like a cockroach …”

In the opinion of one family friend, “Lou’s mother had the Jewish-mother syndrome with her first child. They overwatch their first child. The kid says watch me, watch me, watch me. You can’t watch them enough, and they’re never happy, because they’ve spent so much time being watched that’s what they expect. His mother was not off to work every morning, the mothers of this era were full-time mothers. Full-time watchers. They set up a scenario that could never be equaled in later life.”

When Lewis was five, the Reeds had a second child, Elizabeth, affectionately known as Bunny. While Lou doted on his little sister, her arrival was also cause for alarm. His mother’s love had become a trap built around emotional blackmail: first, since the mother’s happiness depends upon the son’s happiness, it becomes a responsibility for the son to be happy. Second, since the mother’s love is all-powerful, it is impossible for the son to return an equal amount of love, therefore he is perennially guilty. Then, with the arrival of the sister, the mother’s love can no longer be total. All three elements combine to put the son in an impossible-to-fulfill situation, making him feel impotent, confused, and angry. The trap is sealed by an inability to talk about such matters so that all the bitter hostility boiling below the surface is carefully contained until the son marries a woman who replaces his mother. Then it explodes in her face.

Goldman could have been describing Reed as much as Bruce when he concluded, “The sons develop into twisted personalities, loving where they should hate and hating where they should love. They attach themselves to women who hurt them and treat with contempt the women who offer them simple love. They often display great talents in their work, but as men they have curiously ineffective characters.”

The Reeds moved from an apartment in Brooklyn to their house in Freeport back in 1953—the year before rock began. Freeport, a town of just under thirty thousand inhabitants at the time, lay on the Atlantic coast, on the Freeport and Middle Bays—protected from the ocean by the thin expanse of Long Beach. The town, one of a thousand spanning the length of Long Island, was designed and operated around the requirements of middle-class families. Though just forty-five minutes from Manhattan by car or train, it could have been a lifetime away from Brooklyn, the city the family had just deserted. In fact, with well-funded parks, beaches, social centres, and schools, Freeport was suburban utopia. Thirty-five Oakfield Avenue, on the corner of Oakfield and Maxon, was a modern single-story house in a middle-class subsection of Freeport called the Village. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were built in colonial or ranch style, but Lewis’s parents owned a house that, in the 1950s, friends referred to as “the chicken coop” because of its modern, angular, single-floor design. Though squat and odd from the outside, it was beautifully laid out and comfortable, furnished in a 1950s modern style. It also had a two-car garage and surrounding lawn perfect for children to play on. In fact, the wide, quiet streets doubled as baseball diamonds and football fields when the local kids got together for a pickup game. Their neighborhood was for the most part upper-middle class and Jewish. The idea of urban Jewish ghettos had become as abhorrent to an increasingly powerful American Jewish population as it was to the continuing wave of European Jewish immigrants. Many Jewish families who had prospered in postwar New York had moved out of the city to similar suburban towns to get away from the last vestiges of the ghetto, and to create for themselves a middle-class life that would Americanize and integrate them. The resulting migration from New York to Long Island created a suburban middle class in which money was equated with stability, and wealth with status and power.

After graduating from Carolyn G. Atkinson Elementary and Freeport Junior High, in the fall of 1956, Lewis and his friends began attending Freeport High School (now replaced by a bunkerlike junior high). A large, stone structure, on the corner of Pine and South Grove, with a carved facade and expanse of lawn, the school resembled a medieval English boarding school like Eton or Rugby. It was a ten-minute walk from Oakfield and Maxon through the tree-lined neighborhood of Freeport Village and just over the busy Sunrise Highway. “I started out in the Brooklyn Public School System,” Lou said, “and have hated all forms of school and authority ever since.”

Lewis was surrounded by children who came from the same social and economic background. His closest friend, Allen Hyman, who used to eat at the Reeds’ all the time and lived only a block and a half away, remembered, “The inside of their house was fifties modern, living room and den. At least from sixth grade on my view of his upbringing was very, very suburban middle class.”

The area has a history of fostering comedians and a particular type of humor. Freeport in the twenties was a clam-digging town with an active Ku Klux Klan and German-American bund in nearby Lindenhurst. In the thirties and forties, it attracted a segment of the East Coast entertainment world, including many vaudeville talents. The vaudevillians brought with them not only their eccentric lifestyles and corny attitudes, but the town’s first blacks, who initially worked as their servants. By the time the Reeds got there, the show people were adding their own artistic bent to the town’s musical heritage. Their immediate neighbours included Leo Carrillo, who played Pancho on the popular TV show The Cisco Kid, as well as Xavier Cugat’s head marimba player and Lassie’s television mother, June Lockhart. Guylanders (Long Islanders) refuse to be impressed by celebrities, dignitaries, and the airs so dear to Manhattanites. “My main memory of Lou was that he had a tremendous sense of satire,” recalled high-school friend John Shebar. “He had a certain irreverence that was a little out of the ordinary. Mostly he would be making fun of the teacher or doing an impersonation of some ridiculous situation in school.”

Much Jewish humor took on a playfully cutting edge, intending to humble a victim in the eyes of God. Despite his modest temperament, Sidney Reed possessed a potent vein of Jewish humor, which he passed on to his son. As a child Lewis mastered the nuances of Yiddish humor, in which one is never allowed to laugh at a joke without being aware of the underlying sadness deriving from the evil inherent in human life. A family friend, recalling a visit to the Reed household, commented, “Lou’s father is a wonderful wit, very dry. He’s a match for Lou’s wit. That’s a Yiddish sense of humor, it’s very much a put-down humor. A Yiddish compliment is a smack, a backhand. It’s always got a little touch of mean. Like, you should never be too smart in front of God. Only God is perfect, and you should remember as pretty as you are that your head shouldn’t grow like an onion if you put it in the ground. You can either take it personally, like I think Lou unfortunately did, or not.”

During Lou’s childhood, Sidney Reed’s sense of humor had curious repercussions in the household. His well-aimed barbs often made his son feel put-down and his wife look stupid. Far from being resentful, Toby admired her husband for his obvious wit. Lou, however, was not so generous. “Lou’s mother thought she was dumb,” recalled a family friend. “I don’t think she was dumb. Lou thought she was dumb for thinking that his father was so clever. I think it was just jealousy. I think it was the boy who wanted all of his mother’s attention.” According to another friend, not only was Sidney Reed a wit, but he maintained a great rapport with Toby, who loved him dearly—much to the chagrin of the possessive, selfish, and often jealous Lewis. “I remember his mother was always amused by his father. His mother admires his father and thinks it’s too bad that Lou doesn’t see his father the way he is.”

One friend who accompanied Lou to school daily recalled that Toby Reed smothered her son with attention and concern. “I think his mother was fairly overbearing. Just in the way he talked about her. She was like a protective Jewish mother. She wanted him to get better grades and be a doctor.” Such attentions, of course, were fairly typical of full-time mothers in the family-oriented fifties. Allen Hyman never found her unusual. “I always thought Lewis’s mother was a very nice person,” he said. “She was very nice to me. I never viewed her as overbearing, but maybe he did. My experience of his parents was that they were very nice people. He might have perceived them as being different than they were. My mother and father knew his parents and my mother knew his mother. They were very involved parents. His mother was never anything but really nice. Whenever we went there, she was anxious to make sure we had food. His father was an accountant and seemed to be a particularly nice guy. But Lewis was always on the rebellious side, and I guess that the middle-class aspect of his life was something that he found disturbing. My experience of his relationship with his parents when we were growing up was that he was really close to them.

“His mother and father put up with a lot from him over the years, and they were always totally supportive. I got the impression that Mr. Reed was a shy man. He was certainly not Mr. Personality. When you went out with certain parents, it was fun and they were the life of the dinner and they bought you a nice meal, but when you went out with Sidney Reed, you paid. When you’re a kid, that’s unusual. The check would come and he’d say, ‘Now your share is …’ Which was weird. But that was his thing, he was an accountant.”

Lou’s father was very quiet; his mother had a lot more energy and a lot more personality. She was an attractive woman, always wore her hair short, had a lovely figure and dressed immaculately. “He’d always found the idea of copulation distasteful, especially when applied to his own origins,” Lou wrote in the first sentence of the first short story he ever published. The untitled one-page piece, signed Luis Reed, was featured in a magazine, Lonely Woman Quarterly, that Lou edited at Syracuse University in 1962. It hit on all the dysfunctional-family themes that would run through his life and work.

His quixotic/demonic relationship to sex was clearly intense. Lou either sat at the feet of his lovers or devised ingenious ways to crush their souls. The psychology of gender was everything. No one understood Lou’s ability to make those close to him feel terrible better than the special targets of his inner rage, his parents, Sidney and Toby. Lou dramatized what was in 1950s suburban America his father’s benevolent dominance into Machiavellian tyranny, and viewed his mother as the victim when this was not the case at all. Friends and family were shocked by Lou’s stories and songs about intra-family violence and incest, claiming that nothing could have been further from the truth. In the story, Lou had his mother say, “Daddy hurt Mommy last night,” and climaxed with a scene in which she seduced “Mommy’s little man.” Lou would later write in “How Do You Speak to an Angel” of the curse of a “harridan mother, a weak simpering father, filial love and incest.” The fact is that Sidney and Toby Reed adored and enjoyed each other. After twenty years of marriage, they were still crazy about each other. As for violence, the only thing that could possibly have angered Sidney Reed was his son’s meanness to his wife. However, these oedipal fantasies revealed a turbulent interior life and profound reaction to the love/hate workings of the family.

In his late thirties, Lou wrote a series of songs about his family. In one he said that he originally wanted to grow up like his “old man,” but got sick of his bullying and claimed that when his father beat his mother, it made him so angry he almost choked. The song climaxed with a scene in which his father told him to act like a man. He did not, he concluded in another song, want to grow up like his “old man.”

Reed’s moodiness was but one indication that he was developing a vivid interior world. “By junior year in high school, he was always experimenting with his writing,” Hyman reported. “He had notebooks filled with poems and short stories, and they were always on the dark side.” Reed and his friends were also drawn to athletics. Freeport High was a football school. Under the superlative coaching of Bill Ashley, the Freeport High Red Devils were the pride of the town. Lou would claim in Coney Island Baby that he wanted to play football for the coach, “the straightest dude I ever knew.” But he had neither the size nor the athletic ability and never even tried out. Instead, during his junior year Lou joined the varsity track team. He was a good runner and was strong enough to become a pole-vaulter. (He would later comment on Take No Prisoners that he could only vault six feet eight inches—“a pathetic show.”) Although he preferred individual events to team sports, he was known around Freeport as a very good basketball player. “Lou Reed was not only funny but he was a good athlete,” recalled Hyman. “He was always kind of thin and lanky. There was a park right near our house and we used to go down and play basketball. He was very competitive and driven in most things he did. He would like to do something that didn’t involve a team or require anybody else. And he was exceptionally moody all the time.”

Allen’s brother Andy recalled that it was typical of Lou to maintain a number of mutually exclusive friendships, which served different purposes. Allen was Lewis’s conservative friend, while his friend and neighbor Eddie allowed him to exercise quite a different aspect of his personality. “Eddie was a real wacko,” commented another high-school friend, Carol Wood, “and he only lived about four houses away from Lou. He had all these weird ideas about outer-space Martians landing and this and that. During that time there was also a group in town that was robbing houses. They were called the Malefactors. It turned out that Eddie was one of them.”

“Eddie was friendly with Lou and with me, but Eddie was a lunatic,” agreed Allen Hyman. “He was the first certifiable person I have ever known. He was one of those kids who your mother would never want or allow you to hang out with because he was always getting into trouble. He had a BB gun and he would sit up in his attic and shoot people walking down the street. Lou loved him because he was as outrageous as he was, maybe more. He used to get arrested, he was insane.”

“There was a desire on Lewis’s part—of course I didn’t know this at the time—to be accepted by the regular kinds of guys, and on the other hand he was very attracted to the degenerates,” Andy recalled. “Eddie was kind of a crazy guy who was into petty theft, smoking dope at a very early age, and into all kinds of strange stuff with girls. And Lewis was into all that kind of stuff with Eddie while he was involved with my brother in another scene.” Having managed to convince his parents to buy him a motorcycle, Lou would ride around the streets of Freeport in imitation of Marlon Brando.

Where Lou spent his troubled teen years in Freeport. (Victor Bockris)

According to his own testimony, what made Lewis different from the all-American boys in Freeport was the fact, discovered at the age of thirteen, that he was homosexual. As he explained in a 1979 interview, the recognition of his attraction to his own sex came early, as did attempts at subterfuge: “I resent it. It was a very big drag. From age thirteen on I could have been having a ball and not even thought about this shit. What a waste of time. If the forbidden thing is love, then you spend most of your time playing with hate. Who needs that? I feel I was gypped.”

“There was no indication of homosexuality except in his writing,” said Hyman. “Towards our senior year some of his stories and poems were starting to focus on the gay world. Sort of a fascination with the gay world, there was a lot of that imagery in his poems. And I just thought of it as his bizarre side. I would say to him, ‘What is this about, why are you writing about this?’ He would say, ‘It’s interesting. I find it interesting.’”

“I always thought that the one way kids had of getting back at their parents was to do this gender business,” recalled Lou. “It was only kids trying to be outrageous. That’s a lot of what rock and roll is about to some people: listening to something your parents don’t like, dressing the way your parents won’t like.”

Throughout his adolescence, Lou was saved by his real passion, rock and roll. Lou had fallen for the new R&B sounds in 1954, when he was twelve. Almost instantly, he had started composing songs of his own. Like his fellow teenager Paul Simon, who grew up in nearby Queens, Lou formed a band and put out a single of his own composition at the age of fifteen, appropriately called “So Blue.” To Lou’s parents, these early signposts of a musical career were ominous. Their dreams of having their only son become a doctor or, like his father, an accountant were vanishing in the haze of pounding music and tempestuous moods. Since puberty Lou had honed a sharp edge, wounding his parents with both public and private insults. In his teens, Lou led Mr. and Mrs. Reed to believe he would become both a rock-and-roll musician and a homosexual—the stuff of nightmares for suburban parents of the 1950s. Actively dating girls at the time, and giving his friends every impression of being heterosexual, Lou enjoyed the shock and worry that gripped his parents at the thought of having a homosexual son. “His mother was very upset,” recalled a friend. “She couldn’t understand why he hated them so much, where that anger came from. At first, they had no malice, they tried to understand. But they got fed up with him.”

Reed playing in one of his highschool bands, the C.H.D. or, backwards, Dry Hump Club.

Throughout his teens, Lou would try anything to break the tedium of life in Freeport, especially if it was considered outside conventional norms. Lou found other characters who were also desperate to elude boredom. One such moment came about indirectly through his interest in music. Every evening, the better part of the high-school population of Freeport and its neighboring towns would tune into WGBB radio to hear the latest sounds, make requests, and dedicate songs. Often the volume of telephone calls to the station would be so great that the wires would get crossed, creating a teenage party-line over which friendships developed. On one occasion, Lou became friendly with a caller. “There was this girl who lived in Merrick,” explained Allen Hyman. “She was fairly advanced for her time, and Lou ended up going out on a date with her. He came back from the date, and he called me up and he said, ‘I’ve just had the most amazing experience. I took this girl to the Valley Stream drive-in and she took out a reefer.’ And I said, ‘Is she addicted to marijuana?’ Because in those days we thought if you smoked marijuana, you were an addict. He said, ‘No, it was cool. I smoked this reefer, it was really great.’”

The decades in which Lewis grew up, the fifties and early sixties, were characterized by middle-class unconsciousness and safety. Much like in the TV series Happy Days, most teenagers were more interested in having a good time than experiencing a wider worldview. “There was not a tremendous amount of consciousness about what was happening on the planet,” commented Allen Hyman. “But Lou was always interested in questioning authority, being a little outrageous, and he was certainly a person who would be characterized as mildly eccentric.”

Lou’s eccentric rebellious side found a lot to gripe about within the conservative, white confines of his neighborhood. Hyman remembered that, though outwardly polite, Lou harbored a hatred of his environment that was manifested in an ill will for Allen’s right-wing father. “The reason he disliked my father so much was because he always viewed him as the consummate Republican lawyer. He was very aware early on of political differences in people. We lived in an area that was Republican and conservative, and he always rebelled against that. I couldn’t understand why that upset him so much. But he was always very respectful to my parents.”

Mr. Reed, along with Mr. Hyman, discouraged musical careers for their sons. “He thought there were bad people involved, which there were,” recalled Lou. However, as Richard Aquila wrote in That Old Time Rock and Roll, “adult fear of rock and roll probably says more about the paranoia and insecurity of American society in the 1950s and early 1960s than it does about rock and roll. The same adults who feared foreigners because of the expanding Cold War, and who saw the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss as evidence of internal subversion, often viewed rock and roll as a foreign music with its own sinister potential for corrupting American society.”

Lewis enjoyed the comforts of his middle-class upbringing, but acted as if he were estranged from the dominant values of suburban American life. Lou would rewrite his childhood repeatedly in an attempt to define himself. Some of his most famous songs, written in reaction to his parents’ values, have a stark, despairing tone that spoke for millions of children who grew up in the stunned and silent fifties of America’s postwar affluence. One friend put her finger on the pulse of the problem when she pointed out that Lou had an extreme case of shpilkes—a Yiddish term that perfectly sums up his contradictory nature: “A person with shpilkes has to scratch not only his own itch, he can’t leave any situation alone or any scab unpicked. If the teenage Lewis had come into your home, you would have said, ‘My God, he’s got shpilkes!’ Because he’s cute and he’s warm and he’s lovable, but get him out of here because he’s knocking the shit out of everything and I don’t dare turn my back on him. He’s causing trouble, he’s aggravating me, he’s a pain in the ass!” According to Lou, he never felt good about his parents. “I went to great lengths to escape the whole thing,” he said when he was forty years old. “I couldn’t relate to it then and I can’t now.” As he saw himself in one of his favorite poems by Delmore Schwartz: “… he sat there / Upon the windowseat in his tenth year / Sad separate and desperate all afternoon, / Alone, with loaded eyes …”

Another charge Lou would lob at his unprotected parents was that they were filthy rich. This was, however, purely an invention Lou used to dramatize his situation. During Lou’s childhood his father made a modest salary by American standards. The kitchen-table family possessed a single automobile and lived in a simply though tastefully furnished house with no vestiges of luxury or loosely spent funds. Indeed, by the end of the 1950s, what with the shock treatments, Lou’s college tuition, and their daughter Elizabeth’s coming into her teens, the Reeds were stretched about as far as they could reach.

***

The year of his electroshock treatments, 1959, through the summer of 1960 was a lost time for Lou. From then on, the central theme of his life became a struggle to express himself and get what he wanted. The first step was to remove himself from the control of his family, which he now saw as an agent of punishment and confinement. “I came from this small town out on Long Island,” he stated. “Nowhere. I mean nowhere. The most boring place on earth. The only good thing about it was you knew you were going to get out of there.” In August he registered and published a song called “You’ll Never, Never Love Me.” A gut resentment of his parents was blatantly expressed in another song, “Kill Your Sons.” The music, he later said, gave him back his heartbeat so he could dream again. “The music is all,” he wrote in a wonderful piece of prose called “From the Bandstand.” “People should die for it. People are dying for everything else, so why not for the music. It saves more lives.”

Chapter Two

Pushing the Edge

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY: 1960–62

Lou liked to play with people, tease them and push them to an edge. But if you crossed a certain line with Lou, he’d cut you right out of his life.

Allen Hyman

In order to continue their friendship, Lou and Allen Hyman had conspired to attend the same university. “In my senior year in high school Lou and I and his father drove up to Syracuse for an interview,” recalled Allen. “We didn’t speak to his father much, he was quiet. Quiet in the sense of being formal—Mr. Reed. We stayed at the Hotel Syracuse, which was then a real old hotel. There were also a bunch of other kids who were up for that with their parents. Would-be applicants to Syracuse. Lou’s father took one room and Lou and I took another. We met a bunch of kids in the hall that were going to Syracuse and we had this all-night party with these girls we met. We thought this was going to be a gas, this is terrific. The following day we both knew people who were going to Syracuse at the time who were in fraternities, and the campus was so nice, I think it was the summer, it was warm at the time, it looked so nice.”

The two boys made an agreement that if they were both accepted, they would matriculate at Syracuse. “We both got in,” said Hyman. “And the minute I got my acceptance I let them know I was going to go and I called Lou very excited and said, “I got my acceptance to Syracuse, did you?” And he said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘Are you going?’ and he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, no? I thought we were going, we had an agreement.’ He said, ‘I got accepted to NYU and that’s where I’m going.’ I said, ‘Why would you want to do that, we had such a good time up there, we liked the place, I told them I was going, I thought you were going.’ He said, ‘No, I got accepted at NYU uptown and I’m going.’”

Lewis Reed, 17, 1959. ‘I don’t have a personality.’

In the fall of 1959, Lou headed off to college. Located in New York City, New York University seemed like a smart choice for a man who loved nothing more than listening to jazz at the Five Spot, the Vanguard, and other Greenwich Village clubs. But the Village was not the NYU campus Lou chose. Almost incomprehensibly, he signed up for the school’s branch located way uptown in the Bronx. NYU uptown provided Reed with neither the opportunities nor the support that he needed. Instead, Lou was left floundering in a strange and hostile environment. One of his few pleasures came from visiting the mecca of modern jazz, the Five Spot, regularly, but he didn’t always have the money to get in and often stood outside listening to Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman as the music drifted out to the street.

However, Lou’s main concern was not college. The Bronx campus was convenient to the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he was undergoing an intensive course of postshock treatments. According to Hyman, who talked to him on the phone at least once a week through the semester, Lou was having a very, very bad time. “He was in therapy three or four times a week,” Hyman recalled. “He hated NYU. He really hated it. He was going through a very difficult time and he was taking medication. He was having a lot of difficulty dealing with college and day-to-day business. He was a mess. He was going through a lot of very, very bad emotional stuff at the time and he probably had something very close to a minor breakdown.”

After two semesters, in the spring of 1960, having completed the Payne Whitney sessions although still on tranquilizers, Lou couldn’t take the NYU scene anymore.

One of the few people who encouraged Lou during his yearlong depression was his stalwart childhood friend, Allen Hyman, who now urged him to get away from his parents. Allen encouraged Lou to join him at Syracuse—a large, prestigious, private university, hundreds of miles from Freeport. In the fall of 1960, shaking off the shadows of Creedmore and the medication of Payne Whitney, Reed took Hyman’s advice and enrolled at Syracuse.

***

The coeducational university, attended by some nineteen thousand sciences and humanities students, had been established in 1870. It was located on a 640-acre campus atop a hill, in the middle of the city. Its $800 per term tuition was relatively high for a private university. Most of the students lived in sororities and fraternities and were enjoying one last four-year party before putting aside childish notions for the economic responsibilities of adulthood. There was, among the student population, a large and wealthy Jewish contingent, generally straight-arrow fraternity men and sorority women bound for careers in medicine and law. There was a small margin of artists, writers, and musicians with whom Lou would throw in his lot, enjoying, for the first time in his life, a niche in which he could find a degree of comfort. Among many other talented and successful people, the artist Jim Dine, the fashion designer Betsey Johnson, and the film producer Peter Guber all graduated in Reed’s class of 1964.

The Syracuse campus looked like the perfect set for a horror movie about college life in the early 1960s. Its buildings resembled Gothic mansions from a screenwriter’s imagination. Indeed, the scriptwriter of The Addams Family TV show of the 1960s, who attended the university at the same time as Lou, used the classically Gothic Hall of Languages as the basis for the Addams Family mansion. The surrounding four-block-square area of wooden Victorian houses, Depression-era restaurants, stores, and bars completed the college landscape. A pervasive ocher-gray paint lent a somber air to the seedy wooden houses tucked away in side streets covered, most of the time, with snow, wet leaves, or rain. The atmosphere was likely to elicit either poetic contemplation or depressive madness. It provided a perfect backdrop for the beatnik lifestyle.

The surrounding city of Syracuse presented no less smashed a landscape. The manufacturing town got dumped with snow seven months of the year, and heavy bouts of rain the rest of the time. Only during the summer, when most of the students had scattered to their homes on Long Island or New Jersey, did the city receive warmth and sunshine. A thriving industrial metropolis popularly known as the Salt City, also specializing in metals and electrical machinery, it was two hundred miles northwest of Freeport, forty miles south of Lake Ontario on the Canadian border, and five miles southwest of Oneida Lake. Syracuse was aggressively conservative and religious, but at the time of Reed’s arrival it was fast turning into the academic hub of the Empire State. The city proudly supported its prestigious university, whose popular football team, the Orangemen, was undefeated during Lou’s four years, and its residents turned out in great numbers for athletic events. Despite high academic standards, Syracuse was still primarily seen as a football school. “Where the vale of Onondaga / Meets the eastern sky / Proudly stands our Alma Mater / On her hilltop high” ran the opening verse of the school song, a ditty Lewis, as many of his friends called him, would not forget.

As a freshman, Lou was assigned to the far southwestern corner of the North Campus in Sadler Hall, a plain, boxlike dormitory resembling a prison. However, much of his time was spent in the splendid, gray-stone Hall of Languages, which overlooked University Avenue and University Place at the north end of campus and housed the English, history, and philosophy departments.

Syracuse University had excellent faculty and academic courses. Though Lou may have sleepwalked through much of the curriculum, he threw himself into the music, philosophy, and literature studies in which he excelled. In music appreciation, theory, and composition classes, Lou soaked up everything, even opera. First, Lou tried his hand at journalism, but he dropped that after a week when the teacher told him his opinions were irrelevant. However, Lou quickly immersed himself in philosophy. He devoured the existentialists, obsessed over the tortuous dialectics of Hegel, and embraced the Fear and Trembling of Kierkegaard. “I was very into Hegel, Sartre, Kierkegaard,” Reed recalled. “After you finish reading Kierkegaard, you feel like something horrible has happened to you—fear and nothing. That’s where I was coming from.” He also loved Krafft-Ebing and the writing of the beat generation, particularly Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. To complete his freshman image, he took imagistic inspiration from the brash, tortured figures of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and, most of all, Lenny Bruce.

To his advantage, Reed already had the perfect agent to introduce him to the university, the smooth operator and prince of good times Allen Hyman, now entering his sophomore year. Another pampered suburban kid who drove both a Cadillac and Jaguar, Allen was generous, full of good humor, and sharp-witted. Furthermore, he genuinely appreciated Lou and was willing to put up with a lot of flak to remain his friend. Hyman was well connected with the straight fraternity set and eager to introduce Lewis to his world.

However, a highly uncomfortable introduction came about when Allen tried to get Lou to rush his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu (aka the Sammies). “Hazing was a really horrendous experience and most people were very intimidated by it,” recalled Hyman. Inductees were forced to drink themselves into oblivion and were often humiliated physically, sexually, and mentally by the fraternity brothers. When Allen told Lou stories about what he went through to join a fraternity, Lou shot him a hard look, snapping, “What are you into—masochism?”

“He had said that he didn’t want anything to do with it and that it was fascistic and disgusting,” Hyman recalled, “and he couldn’t believe anybody would be willing to go through hazing without killing the person who was hazing them.” However, typically perversely, Reed agreed to attend a rush session.

From the outset it was clear that he intended to make a strong impression. Reed came to the socializer in a suit three sizes too small and covered in dirt. It was a radical departure from the blue blazer, smart tie, and neatly combed hair of the other rushees. Allen immediately realized how much Lou was getting off on being outrageous. When one of the brothers criticized Lou’s appearance, Reed riposted, “Fuck you!” and his fraternity career came to an abrupt end. Hyman was asked to escort his friend out immediately. Walking Lou back to his dorm, a chagrined Allen hung his head regretfully, but Lou, far from being despondent, appeared exhilarated by the event. “I guess this isn’t for you,” Allen said.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Lou replied. “I told you I wouldn’t get along with those assholes. How can you live there?”

Another freshman trial that Lou failed was with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. As part of his freshman course requirements, he had to choose between physical education and ROTC. (In those days it was common to join ROTC in order to be able to go into the army as an officer and a gentleman.) Claiming that he would surely break his neck in phys ed or else kill somebody in ROTC, Lou attempted to evade either requirement, but in the end grudgingly signed up for the latter. ROTC consisted of two classes a week about how to be a soldier and possibly a leader. However, Lou’s military experience was almost a short-lived as his fraternity stint. Just weeks into the semester, when he flatly refused a direct order from his officer, he was unceremoniously booted out.

But Reed managed to make an impact on his freshman year with his very own radio show. Employing a considerable boyish charm to overcome the severe doubts of program director Katharine Griffin, during his first semester Lou hustled his way onto the Syracuse University radio station, WAER FM, with a jazz program called Excursions on a Wobbly Rail (named for a wicked Cecil Taylor piece that was used as his introductory theme). The classical, conservative station, Radio House, was situated in a World War II Quonset hut tucked away behind Carnegie Library. Freezing his balls off through many icy Syracuse evenings, hunched over his ancient machinery like some WWII underground resistance fighter for two hours, three nights a week, Lou blasted a mélange of his favorite sounds by the avant-garde leaders of the Free Jazz movement Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, the doo-wopping Dion, and the sexually charged Hank Ballard, James Brown and the Marvelettes. The mixture presented the essence of Lou Reed. “I was a very big fan of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp,” he recalled. “Then James Brown, the doo-wop groups, and rockabilly. Put it all together and you end up with me.”

Unfortunately, the Reedian canon was not appreciated by the station’s staff, and numerous faculty members, including the dean of men, lodged complaints about the—to them—hideous, unintelligible cacophony that was Reed’s program. And the authorities’ reaction was not Lou’s only problem. Disguising his voice, Allen Hyman would often call Lou at the station and harass him with ridiculous requests. On one occasion, “I asked him to play something he hated and I knew he would never play,” Allen recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not going to play that, forget it.’ So I said, ‘Listen, if you don’t play this, I’m gonna fucking have you killed. I’ll wait for you myself and I’m gonna kill you!’ And, thinking it was some lunatic, Lou got scared. Then I called him back and told him it was me and he screamed at me, saying that if I ever did that again he’d never speak to me.”

As it turned out, Allen’s pranks didn’t last long enough to lose him Lou’s friendship because before long Griffin, ever vigilant in her duties as WAER’s program director, concluded that “Excursions on a Wobbly Rail was a really weird jazz show that sounded like some new kind of noise. It was just too weird and cutting edge.” Before the end of the semester, she unceremoniously dumped it from the air, causing Lou considerable anguish.

In retrospect, Griffin and her contemporaries realized that Reed was simply ahead of his time. “Most of us who were in power on campus were children of the fifties,” she explained. “Kids in those days wore chinos and madras shirts, a clean-cut Kingston Trio kind of thing. Lou looked more like what a rock person from later in the sixties would look like. Lou was presaging the sixties and seventies and we just weren’t ready for it. He was right on the cusp of two generations. A little too far ahead to be admired in the fifties.”

During his first year at Syracuse, the scholarly Griffin concluded, “It was just Lou versus everybody else.”

Lou quickly defined himself as an oddball loner. Eschewing all organizations, he was creating an image that would in time become widely acknowledged as the essence of the hip New York underground man. Lou was a year older than most freshmen and fully grown. Measuring five feet eight inches (although he claimed to be five feet ten) he was a little chubby and some way yet from the Lou Reed of “Heroin.” He wore loafers, jeans, and T-shirts, tending, if anything, to be a little sloppier than the majority of men at school, who wore the fraternity uniform of jacket and tie. His hair was a trifle longer than theirs. Otherwise, he would not have been noticed in a crowd. His looks tended toward the cute, boyish, curly haired, shy, gum-chewing. He had a small scar under his right eye. His most unusual feature was his fingers. Short and strong, they broadened into stubby, almost blocklike fingertips, making them perfect tools for the guitar.

Lou had already formed his ambition to be a rock-and-roller and a writer. The university’s rich music scene consisted of an eclectic mix of talents like Garland Jeffreys, a future singer-songwriter and Reed acolyte two years younger than Lou; Nelson Slater, for whom Lou would later produce an album; Felix Cavaliere, the future leader of the Young Rascals; Mike Esposito, who would form the Blues Magoos and the Blues Project; and Peter Stampfel, an early member of the Holy Modal Rounders, who would become a pioneer of folk rock. While colleges in New York and Boston produced folksingers in the style of Bob Dylan, Syracuse created a bunch of proto-punk rockers.

Most importantly for Lou musically, it was at Syracuse he met fellow guitarist Sterling Morrison, a resident of Bayport, Long Island, who had a similar background. Just after Lou got kicked out of ROTC, Sterling, who was never actually enrolled at Syracuse but spent a lot of time there hanging out and sitting in on some classes, was visiting another student, Jim Tucker, who occupied the room below Lou’s. Gazing out Tucker’s window at the ROTC cadets marching up and down the quad one afternoon, Morrison suddenly heard “earsplitting bagpipe music” wail from someone’s hi-fi. After that, the same person “cranked up his guitar and gave a few shrieking blasts on that.” Excited, Morrison realized, “Oh, there’s a guitar player upstairs,” and prevailed on Tucker for an introduction.

When they met at 3 a.m. the following morning, Lou and Sterling discovered they shared a love for black music and rock and roll. They also loved Ike and Tina Turner. “Nobody even knew who they were then,” Morrison recalled. “Syracuse was very, very straight. There was a one percent lunatic fringe.”

Luckily, the drama, poetry, art, and literary scenes were just as alive as the music scene for that one percent fringe. Soon Lou was spending the majority of his time playing guitar, reading and writing, or engaging in long rap sessions with like-minded students. Many of Lou’s conversations about philosophy and literature took place in the bars and coffee shops he and his friends began to call their own. Each restaurant had its social affiliations. Lou’s crowd set up camp at the Savoy Coffee shop run by a lovable old character, Gus Joseph, who could have walked right out of a Happy Days TV episode. At night, they drank at the Orange Bar, frequented predominantly by intellectual students. According to Lou, he took two steps out of school and there was the bar. “It was the world of Kant and Kierkegaard and metaphysical polemics that lasted well into the night,” he remembered. “I often went to drink alone to that week’s lost everything.” He had become accustomed to taking prescription drugs and smoking pot, but Lou was not yet a heavy user of illegal substances. At the most he might have a Scotch and a beer.

At Syracuse, Lou presented himself as a tortured, introspective, romantic poet. Following the dictate that the first step to becoming a poet is to look and act like one, Lou liked, for example, to give the impression that he was unwashed, but that wasn’t true. According to one friend, “He wasn’t about to go out unless he took a shower first.” As far as his costume was concerned, he was still stuck somewhere between the suburban teenager in loafers and button-down shirts and the rumpled dungarees and work shirts of the Kerouac rebel. Observers remembered him as more chubby and cherubic than thin and ascetic. In fact, he didn’t dress unusually at all. If anything, he dressed poorly, wearing the same pair of dirty jeans for months. As for his demeanor, Lou copped the uptight approach of the young Rimbaud. He was just beginning to swing with the legend of his electroshock treatments, turtleneck sweaters, and the whole James Dean inspired “I’ve suffered so much everything looks upside down” routine.

According to one student who occasionally jammed with him, “Part of his aura was that he was a psychologically troubled person who in his youth had had electroshock treatments which clearly had an effect on him. He used that as part of his persona. Where the reality and the fantasy of what he was crossed, who knew.” For a sarcastic kid who had grown up with buck teeth, braces, and a nerd’s wardrobe, Lou wasn’t doing badly turning himself into the image of a totally perverse psycho. However, whatever he did with his wardrobe and his attitude to make himself hip, there was one nightmarish detail about his looks that seemed always to overwhelm him—his hair. His frizzy helmet had plagued him since he’d started looking into the mirror with intense interest in his twelfth year. What stared back at him throughout his adolescence was a Jewish version of Alfred E. Neumann.

Since America had been a largely anti-Semitic nation, the Jewish “Afro” was seen as geekishly ethnic. In the early sixties, Bob Dylan would single-handedly change the image of what a hip young boy could look like. Though the film industry and media characters like Allen Ginsberg had begun to turn the whole Jewish male persona into something ultra-chic, nobody came close to having the pervasive influence of Bob Dylan. As Ginsberg explained to his biographer Barry Miles, when Dylan appeared, particularly in his 1965 Bringing It All Back Home incarnation, he made the hooked nose and frizzy hair the very emblem of the hip, intellectual avant-garde. By the time Lou got to college, however, and started to resculpt himself into the Lou Reed who would emerge in 1966 as the closest competition to Dylan for the hippest rock star in the world, he was ready to do something about his hair. At Syracuse he discovered a hair-treatment place in the black neighborhood and on several occasions had his hair straightened.

Just like his British counterparts Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones or John Lennon of the Beatles, Lou rejected the lifestyle that came before the bomb and was remaking himself out of a combination of his favorite stars. Such self-creation was not difficult for Lou, who often claimed he had as many as eight personalities. He now clothed these personalities in the costumes and attitudes of a cast of media characters who were as important to his image as the first creative friends he would hook up with at Syracuse.

First among them was Lenny Bruce. Though damned by his legal problems to a horrible fate, Bruce was at the apogee of his career. In the eyes of the public he was the hippest, fastest-talking American poet and philosopher around. Bruce spiked his act—a kind of Will Rogers on fast-forward—by injections of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride, which would in time become Lou’s own drug of choice. Many of Reed’s mannerisms, his hand gestures, the way he answered the phone as if he was asleep, the rhythm of his speech, came directly from Bruce.

As for the rest of Lou’s media idols, you only have to look at a panel of head shots of the stars of the era to see what Lou would take in time from Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy, Montgomery Clift, and William Burroughs, to name but a few of the more obvious ones. In fact, one of Lou’s most attractive characteristics was the way he appreciated and celebrated his heroes. He was always trying to get Hyman, for example, a straight law student whose path would lead in a direction diametrically opposite to Lou’s, to read Kerouac and then rap with him about it. Lou loved turning people on to the new sounds, the new scenes, and the new people.

A lot of the artistic kids who went to Syracuse look back upon it with disdain as a football school dominated by the “fucking” Orangemen. In fact, in that watershed period between the end of McCarthyism and the death of Kennedy, a new permissiveness swept through colleges across the country. Syracuse contained and nurtured a lot of different environments. Certainly the fraternity environment still dominated the American campus, and the majority of male and female students still aligned themselves with a fraternity or sorority in sheeplike fashion. There was, however, a vital cultural split between the Jewish and the non-Jewish fraternities. The Jewish fraternities were for the most part hipper, more receptive to the new culture and more open to alternative ways of living. Despite completely rejecting Sigma Alpha Mu and attaching himself primarily to the arty intellectual crowd, some of whom had apartments off campus, Lou maintained a loyal friendship with Hyman and was, in fact, adopted as something of a mascot by the Sammies as their resident oddball. They weren’t about to miss out completely on a character who had already, in the first half of his freshman year, carved out an image for himself as tempestuous and evil. In fact, Jewish fraternities in colleges across America would provide some of the most receptive of Lou Reed’s audiences throughout his career.

The rules that governed a freshman’s life at Syracuse were greatly to the advantage of the male students. Whereas the girls in the dorm atop Mount Olympus were locked in at 9 p.m., and any girl who dared break curfew was subject to expulsion, the boys, who had no curfew, were able to use the night to live a whole other life, exploring the town, drinking in the Orange or in frat houses and getting up to all sorts of mischief. Naturally Lou, who had developed the habit of staying up most of the night reading, writing, and playing music, lost no time exploring his new home. He quickly discovered the neighboring black ghetto where at least one club, the 800, presented funky jazz and R&B as well as a whole culture, centered around drugs, music, and danger, that appealed to the explorer of the dark side in Reed.

Lou’s first college girlfriend was Judy Abdullah, and he called her The Arab. It may be that she was of more interest to him as an exotic object than as a person. Judy revealed an interesting quirk in Lou’s sexuality. He was turned on by big women. Judy Abdullah was twice his size. She was a sensual woman and they apparently had a good time in bed, but at least one acquaintance added a shade to Reed’s personality profile when she pointed out that his attraction to big women offered both a challenge and an escape route. Lou could take the attitude that he had no responsibility to be serious about her or even try to satisfy her.

The relationship petered out before the end of the year. Lou, who persisted in not wasting time with dates and always coming on obnoxiously, was mean to Judy, and when they broke up, she was pissed off at him for good reason. Still, they remained acquaintances and Lou saw her occasionally throughout his college years.

By the end of his first year at Syracuse, according to one of the Sammies, “Lou’s uniqueness and stubbornness made him different from anyone I had ever known. He marched to his own drum. He was for doing things for people, but his way. He would never dress or act in a way so that people would accept him. Lou had an unbelievably wry, caustic sense of humor and loved funny things. He played off people. He would often act in a confrontational manner. He wanted to be different. Lou was a funny guy in an extremely dry, witty sense. Certainly not the type of comedian that would make you laugh at him. He wasn’t making fun of things but seeing the humor in things—the banal and the normal. There was an undercurrent of saneness in everything he did. He was screwed up, but that was schizophrenia too.”

***

What Lou Reed needed most was to find a coconspirator, an equal off whom he could bounce his ideas and behavior and receive inspiration in return. Almost miraculously, he found such a person in what would become the second golden period of his life (the first being his discovery of rock and roll). Lou’s first great soul mate, mirror, and collaborator, whom he roomed with in his sophomore year, was the brilliant, eccentric, talented, but tortured and doomed Lincoln Swados. Swados came from an upwardly mobile, middle-class, and, by all accounts, outstandingly empathetic Jewish family from upstate New York. Like Reed, he had a little sister called Elizabeth, upon whom he doted (and to some extent, like Lou, identified with). The two students fell into each other’s arms like lost inmates of some Siberian prison of the soul who finally discover after years of isolated exile a fellow voyager. To make matters perfect from Lou’s point of view, Lincoln was an aspiring writer (working on an endless Dostoyevskian novel); his favorite singer was Frank Sinatra; Lincoln’s side of the room was covered in more crap than Lou’s; and—this was the clincher—Swados was agoraphobic. He spent most of his time holed up in their basement room either hunkered over a battered desk or playing Frank Sinatra records and rapping with Lou. Whenever Lou needed a receiver for one of his new songs, poems, or stories, Lincoln was always there. Their relationship was the first of many constructive collaborations in Lou’s life.

One of Lou’s strongest personalities was the controlling figure who always needed to be the center of attention and the most outstanding person in the room. Here again Lincoln was his perfect match, for if Lou ever worried that he might not yet possess the hippest look in the world, Lincoln presented no threat. He was usually togged out in a pair of pants that ended somewhere above his ankles and were belted in the middle of his chest. His customary short-sleeve shirt invariably clashed with the pants. A pair of bugged-out eyes that made Caryl Chessman in the electric chair look like a junkie on the nod stared out of a cadaverous face capped by a head of dirty, disheveled blondish hair. Lincoln’s body was as much of a mess as was his mind. He rarely bathed or brushed his teeth and at times emanated an odor that obviated any close physical relationships. The whole ensemble was tied together by a disembodied smile that clearly indicated, at least to somebody of Lou’s perceptiveness, just how far out in space Lincoln really was most of the time.

Their basement room was furnished like some barren writer’s cell out of Franz Kafka’s imagination. The two black iron bedsteads, identical desks, and battered chairs ensconced upon a green concrete floor and lit by a harsh bare lightbulb could not have better symbolized both the despair and ambition at the heart of their twin souls. They both despised the world of their parents from which they had at least temporarily escaped. Both were intent upon destroying it and all of its values with some of the most vitriolic, driven pages since Burroughs spat Naked Lunch out of his battered typewriter in Tangier. The room became their arsenal, their headquarters, their cave of knowledge and learning, and the engine of their voyage into the unknown. In time, Lou would rip off Lincoln’s entire repertoire of attitudes, gestures, and habits. Lou later confessed, “I’m always studying people that I know, and then when I think I’ve got them worked, I go away and write a song about them. When I sing the song, I become them. It’s for that reason that I’m kind of empty when I’m not doing anything. I don’t have a personality of my own, I just pick up other people’s.”

Having met his male counterpart, Lou now needed, in order to pull out the male and female sides warring within him, a female companion. Within a week of settling in with Swados, Lou saw her riding down the university’s main drag, Marshall Street, in the front seat of a car driven by a blond football player who belonged to the other Jewish fraternity on campus and recognized Reed as their local holy fool. Thinking to amuse his date, a scintillatingly beautiful freshman from the Midwest named Shelley Albin, he pulled over, laughing, and said, “Here’s Lou! He’s very shocking and evil!” making, as it turned out for him, the dreadful mistake of offering “the lunatic” a ride.

Although in no way as twisted and bent as Lincoln Swados, Shelley was as perfect a match for Lou as his roommate was. Born in Wisconsin, where she had lived the frustrated life of a beatnik tomboy, Shelley had elected Syracuse because it was the only university her parents would let her attend. In preparation for the big move away from home, Shelley, along with a childhood girlfriend, had come to Syracuse fully intending to mend her ways and acquiesce to the college and culture’s coed requirements. Discarding the jeans and work shirts she wore at home, she donned instead the below-the-knee skirt, tasteful blouse, and string of pearls seen on girls in every yearbook photo of the period. When Lou hopped into the backseat eager to make her acquaintance, Shelley was squirming with the discomfort of the demure uniform as well as her dorky date’s running commentary.

She vividly recalled Lou’s skinny hips, baby face, give-away eyes, and knew “we were going to go out as soon as he got into the car.” She also knew she was making a momentous decision and that Lou was going to be trouble, but that it certainly wasn’t going to be boring. “It was such a relief to see Lou, who was to me a normal person. And I was intrigued by the evil shit.”

The feeling was clearly mutual. As soon as the couple let Lou off in front of his dorm, Reed sprinted into their room and breathlessly told Swados about the most beautiful girl in the world he had just met, and his plans to call her immediately.

Lincoln had a strangely paternal side that would often appear at inappropriate moments. Seeing his role as steering Lou through his emotional mood swings, Swados immediately put the kibosh on Reed’s notion of seducing Shelley by informing him that this would be out of the question since he, Lincoln, had already spotted the pretty coed and, despite not yet having met her, was claiming her as his own.

Lou, for his part, saw his role in the relationship as primarily to calm the highly strung, hyperactive Swados. Reasoning that the nerdy Lincoln, who had been unable to get a single date during the freshman year, would only be wounded by the rejection he was certain to get from Shelley, Lou wasted no time in cutting his friend off at the pass by calling Shelley at her dorm within the hour and arranging an immediate date. That way, Lou told himself, he would soon be able to give Swados the pleasure of her company.

Shelley Albin would not only become Lou Reed’s girlfriend through his sophomore and junior years—“my mountaintop, my peak,” as he would later describe her—but would remain for many years thereafter his muse. “Lou and I connected when we were too young to really put it into words,” Shelley said. “There was some innate connection there that was very strong. I knew him before everything was covered up. My strongest image of Lou is always as a Byronesque character, a very sweet young man. He was interesting, he wasn’t one of the bland, robotic people, he had a wonderful poetic nature. Basically, Lou was a puffball, he was a sweetie.” 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. His criteria for life were equally straight. He was a fifties guy, the husband of the house, the God. He wanted a woman who was the end-all Barbie and would make bacon when he wanted bacon. I was very submissive and naive and that’s what appealed to him.”

But Lou also had his “crazy” side, which he played to the hilt. Like many bright kids who have just discovered Kierkegaard and Camus, he was the classic, arty bad boy. Alternating between straight and scary, Lou reveled in both. “There was a part of Lou that was forever fifteen, and a part of him that was a hundred,” Shelley fondly recalled. Fortunately for Lou, she embraced both parts equally. And going out with Lou gave Shelley the jolt she needed to throw off her skirt and pearls for jeans and let her perm return to her natural long, straight hair. Seeing her metamorphosis, the boy Shelley had left so brazenly for Lou was soon chiding her, “You went to the dogs and became a beatnik. Lou ruined you!” In fact, Shelley, an art student, had simply reverted to being herself. But she enjoyed the taunt, knowing how much Lou liked it when people accused him of corrupting her and enjoyed the notoriety it won him. Shelley was also astonishingly beautiful, and to this day, Lou’s Syracuse teachers and friends remember above all else that Lou Reed had an “outrageously gorgeous girlfriend who was also very, very nice.”

Shelley Albin had a unique face. Looked at straight on, what struck you first were her eyes. An inner light glimmered through them. Her nose was straight and perfect. Her jawline and chin were so finely sculpted they became the subject of many an art student at Syracuse. It was an open and closed face. Her mouth said yes. Yet her eyes had a Modigliani/Madonna quality that bayed, you keep your distance. Her light brown hair reflected in her pale cream skin gave it at times, a reddish tint. At five feet seven inches and weighing 115 pounds, she was close enough in size to Lou to wear his clothes.

“We were inseparable from the moment we met,” Shelley 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. When we met, it was like long-lost friends.” For both of them it was their first real love affair. They quickly discovered that they could relate across the boards. They had a great sexual relationship. They played basketball and tennis together. When Lou wrote a poem or a story, Shelley found herself doing a drawing or a painting that perfectly illustrated it. She had been sent to a psychiatrist in her teens for refusing to speak to her father for three years. Lou wrote “I’ll Be Your Mirror” two years later about Shelley. And Shelley was Lou’s mirror. Just as he had rushed a fraternity, she, much to his delight, rushed a sorority and then told them to go fuck themselves an hour after she got accepted.

“His appeal was as a very sexy, intricate and convoluted boy/man,” Shelley said. “It was the combination of private gentle lover and romantic and strong, driven thug. He was, however, a little too strong, a dangerous little boy you can’t trust who will turn on you and is much stronger than you think. He had the strength of a man. You really couldn’t win. You had to catch him by surprise if you wanted to deck him.

“The electroshock treatments were very fresh in his mind when we met. He immediately established that he was erratic, undependable, and dangerous, and that he was going to control any situation by making everyone around him nervous. It was the ultimate game of chicken. But I could play Lou’s game too, that’s why we got along so well.

“What appealed to me about Lou was that he always pushed the edge. That’s what really attracted me to him. I was submissive to Lou as part of my gift 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.”

Whereas the entrance of a stunning female often offsets the male bonding between collaborators, in the tradition of the beats established by Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady, Lou correctly presumed that Shelley would enhance, rather than break up, his collaboration with Lincoln. In fact, it became such a close relationship that Lou would occasionally suggest, only half-jokingly, that Shelley should spend some time in bed with Lincoln. Their relationship mirrored that of the famous trio at the core of their generation’s favorite film, Rebel Without a Cause, with Lou as James Dean, Shelley as Natalie Wood, and Lincoln as the doomed Sal Mineo.

Lou presented Lincoln to Shelley as an important but fragile figure who needed to be nurtured. Lincoln was homely, but Shelley’s vision of him in motion was “like Fred Astaire, Lincoln was debonair and he would spin a wonderful tale and I think Lou could see this fascination. Lou felt very responsible and protective toward Lincoln because nobody would see Lincoln and we liked Lincoln.” The first thing Lou said to Shelley was, “Lincoln wants you, and if I were a really good guy, I should give you to Lincoln because I can get anybody and Lincoln can’t. Lincoln loves you, but I’m not going to give you to him because I want you.” Shelley realized that many of Lou’s ways of being charming and his gestures were taken straight from Lincoln. “A lot of what I really loved about Lou was Lincoln, who was in many ways like Jiminy Cricket standing on Lou’s shoulder, whispering words into his ear. They were going to take care of me and straighten me out and educate me.”

The most important thing about Lincoln and Shelley was their understanding and embracing of Lou’s talent and personality. If Lincoln was a flat mirror for Lou, Shelley was multidimensional, reflecting Lou’s many sides. Perceptive and intuitive, she understood that Lou appreciated events on many different levels and often saw things others didn’t. For the first time in his life Lou found two people to whom he could actually open up without fear of being ridiculed or taken for a ride. For a person who depended so much on others to complete him, they were irreplaceable allies.

Initially, Lou’s first love affair was idyllic. Lou rarely arose before noon, since he stayed up all night. He and Shelley would sometimes meet in the snow at 6 a.m. at the bottom of the steps leading to the women’s dorm. Or else in the early afternoon she would take the twenty-minute hike from the women’s dorm to Lou and Lincoln’s quarters. Like all coeds on campus, she was forbidden to enter a men’s dorm on threat of expulsion, so she would merely tap on their basement window and wait for Lou to appear. When he did, he would gaze up at one of his favorite views of his lover’s face smiling down at him with her long hair and a scarf hanging down. “I liked looking in on their pit,” she recalled. “It was truly a netherworld. I liked being outside. I liked my freedom. And Lou liked that I had to go back to the dorm every night.” From there, the threesome would repair to a booth at the Savoy where they would be joined by art student Karl Stoecker—a close friend of Shelley’s—and English major Peter Locke, a friend of Lou’s to this day, along with Jim Tucker, Sterling Morrison, and a host of others, to commence an all-day session of writing, talking, making out, guitar playing, and drawing. Lou was concentrating on playing his acoustic guitar and writing folk songs. The rest of the time was spent napping, with an occasional sortie to a class. When the threesome got restless at the Savoy, they might repair to the quaint Corner Bookstore, just half a block away, or the Orange Bar. But they always came back to home base at the Savoy, and to the avuncular owner, Gus Joseph, who saw kids come and go for fifty years, but remembered Lou as being special.

***

Lou was so enamored of Shelley that in the fall of 1961 he decided to bring her home to Freeport for the Christmas/Hanukkah holidays. Considering the extent to which Lou based his rebellious posture on the theme of his difficult childhood, Shelley was fully aware of how hard it would be for Lou to take her to his parents’ home. She remembered him thinking that he would score points with his parents: “It was sort of subtle. He was going to show his father that he was okay. He knew that they would like me. And I suspect in some ways he still wanted to please his parents and he wanted to bring home somebody that he could bring home.”

Much to her surprise, Lou’s parents welcomed her to their Freeport home with open arms, making her feel comfortable and accepted. Lou had given her the definite impression that his mother did not love him, but to Shelley, Toby Reed was a warm and wonderful woman, anything but selfish. And Sidney Reed, described by Lou as a stern disciplinarian, seemed equally loving. They appeared to be the exact opposite of the way Lou had portrayed them. In her impression, Mr. Reed “would have walked over the coals for Lou.”

At the same time Shelley realized that Lou was just like them. He not only looked like them, but possessed all their best qualities. However, when she made the mistake of communicating her positive reaction, commenting on the wonderful twinkle in Mr. Reed’s eyes and noting how similar his dry sense of humor was to Lou’s, her boyfriend snapped, “Don’t you know they’re killers?!”

Given their kind, gracious, outgoing manner, the Reeds were sitting ducks for Lou’s brand of torture. He would usually begin by embracing the rogue cousin in the Reed family called Judy. As soon he got home, Lou would enthusiastically inquire after her activities and prattle on about how he wanted to emulate her more than anyone else in the family, often reducing his mother to tears. Next, Lou would make a bid to monopolize the attentions of thirteen-year-old Elizabeth. Confiding to her his innermost thoughts, he would make a big point of excluding his parents from the powwow. “She was cute,” thought Shelley, “she looked just like Lou. So did his mother and father. They all looked exactly like him. It was hysterical. Lou was very protective of her. And she was so sweet. She didn’t have that much of a personality, but she was not unanimated.” Every action aimed to cut his parents out of his life, while keeping them prisoners in it. Meanwhile, like every college kid home on vacation, Lou managed to extract from them all the money he could, and the freedom to come and go as if the house were a hotel. As soon as everybody at 35 Oakfield Avenue was in position ready to do exactly as he wanted, Lou began to enjoy himself.

In fact, so extreme was the situation that, on this first visit, Toby Reed, looking upon her as the perfect daughter-in-law, took Shelley into her confidence. “They were very nervous about what was he bringing home,” she remembered. “So they really took it as a sign that, ‘Oh, God, maybe he was okay.’ We recognized with each other, she and I, that we both really liked him and we both loved him.” Mrs. Reed filled her in on Lou’s troublesome side and tried to find out what Lou was saying about his parents. Shelley got the impression that the Reeds bore no malice toward Lou, but just wanted the best for him. Mrs. Reed seemed completely puzzled as to how Lou had gotten on the track of hating and blaming them. Pondering the strange state of affairs unfolding behind the facade of the Reeds’ attractive home, Shelley drew two conclusions. On the one hand, since his family seemed quite normal and had no apparent problems, Lou was moved to create psychodrama in order to fuel his writing. On the other hand, Lou really did crave his parents’ approval. He was immensely troubled by their refusal to recognize his talent and needed to break away from their restricted life. One point of Lou’s frustration was the feeling that his father was a wimp who gave over control of his life to his wife. This both horrified and fascinated Lou, who was a dyed-in-the-wool male supremacist. Lou was secretly proud of his father and wanted more than anything else for the old man to stand up for himself. But Lou simply could not stand the thought of sharing the former beauty queen’s attention with his father.

After spending a wonderful, if at times tense, week in the Reed household, Shelley put together the puzzle. In a war of wits that had been going on for years, Lou went on the offensive as soon as he stepped through the portals of his home. Attempting by any means necessary to horrify and paralyze his loving parents, Lou had learned to control them by threatening to explode at any moment with some vicious remark or irrational act that would shatter their carefully developed harmony. For example, one night Mr. Reed gave Lou the keys to the family car, a Ford Fairlane, and some money to take Shelley out to dinner in New York. However, such an exchange between father and son could not pass without conflict straight out of a cartoon. As Lou was heading for the door with Shelley, Sid had to observe that if he were going to the city, he might, under the circumstances, put on a clean shirt. Instantly spinning into a vortex of anger that made Sid feel like a cockroach, Lou threw an acerbic verbal dart at his mother before slamming out the door.

On the way into New York he almost killed himself and Shelley by driving carelessly and with little awareness of his surroundings. “I remember him taking this little flower from the Midwest to the big city,” Shelley said. “Chinatown. We drove in a hair-raising ride I’ll never forget in my whole life. Lou showed me how to hang out on the heating grate of the Village Gate so you could hear the music and stay warm.”

His parents, she realized, “had no sense of what was really in his mind, and they were very upset and frightened by what awful things he was thinking. He must have been really miserable, how scary.” As a result, in order to obviate any disturbance, Lou’s tense and nervous family attended to his every need just as if he were the perennial prodigal son. The only person in the house who received any regular affection from Lou was his little sister, Elizabeth, who had always doted on Lou and thought he was the best.

However, at least for the time being, Lou’s introduction of Shelley into their lives caused his parents unexpected joy. Ecstatic that his son had brought home a clean, white, beautiful Jewish girl, Mr. Reed increased Lou’s allowance.

If he had had any idea of the life Lou and Shelley were leading at Syracuse, he would probably have acted in the reverse. As the year wore on, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and their influences began to play a bigger role in both their lives, although Shelley did not take drugs. Already a regular pot smoker, Lou dropped acid for the first time and started experimenting with peyote. Taking drugs was not the norm on college campuses in 1961. Though pot was showing up more regularly in fraternities, and a few adventurous students were taking LSD, most students were clean-cut products of the 1950s, preparing for jobs as accountants, lawyers, doctors, and teachers. To them, Lou’s habits and demeanor were extreme. And now, not only was Lou taking drugs, he began selling them to the fraternity boys. Lou kept a stash of pot in a grocery bag in the dorm room of a female friend. Whenever he had a customer, he’d send Shelley to go get it.

Lou was by now on his way to becoming an omnivorous drug user and, apart from taking acid and peyote, would at times buy a codeine-laced cough syrup called turpenhydrate. Lou was stoned a lot of the time. “He liked me to be there when he was high,” Shelley remembered. “He used to say, ‘If I don’t feel good, you’ll take care of me.’ Mostly he took drugs to numb himself or get relief, to take a break from his brain.”

Meanwhile, having presented himself as a born-again heterosexual, Lou now wasted no time in making another shocking move by shoring up his homosexual credentials. In the second semester of his sophomore year, he had what he later described as his first, albeit unconsummated, gay love affair. “It was just the most amazing experience,” Lou explained. “I felt very bad about it because I had a girlfriend and I was always going out on the side, and subterfuge is not my hard-on.” He particularly remembered the pain of “trying to make yourself feel something towards women when you can’t. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I wanted to fix it up and make it okay. I figured if I sat around and thought about it, I could straighten it out.”

Lou and Shelley’s relationship rapidly escalated to a high level of game playing. Lou had more than one gay affair at Syracuse and would often try to shock her by casually mentioning that he was attracted to some guy. Shelley, however, could always turn the tables on him because she wasn’t threatened by Lou’s gay affairs and often turned them into competitions that she usually won for the subject’s attentions. If Shelley was a match for Lou, Lou was always ready to up the stakes. They soon got out of their depth playing these and other equally dangerous mind games, which led them into more complexities than they could handle.

Friends had conflicting memories of Lou’s gay life at Syracuse. Allen Hyman viewed him as being extraordinarily heterosexual right through college, whereas Sterling Morrison, who thought Lou was mostly a voyeur, commented, “He tried the gay scene at Syracuse, which was really repellent. He had a little fling with some really flabby, effete fairy. I said, ‘Oh, man, Lou, if you want to do it, I hate to say it but let’s find somebody attractive at least.’”

Homosexuality was generally presented as an unspeakable vice in the early 1960s. Nothing could have been considered more distasteful in 1962 America than the image of two men kissing. The average American would not allow a homosexual in his house for fear he might leave some kind of terrible disease on the toilet seat, or for that matter, the armchair. There were instances reported at universities in America during this time when healthy young men fainted, like Victorian ladies, at the physical approach of a homosexual. In fact, as Andy Warhol would soon prove, at the beginning of the 1960s the homosexual was considered the single most threatening, subversive character in the culture. According to Frank O’Hara’s biographer, Brad Gooch, “A campaign to control gay bars in New York had already begun in January 1964 when the Fawn in Greenwich Village was closed by the police. Reacting to this closing by police department undercover agents, known as ‘actors,’ the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined, ‘Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.’” Besides the refuge large cities such as San Francisco and New York provided for homosexuals, many cultural institutions, especially the private universities, became home to a large segment of the homosexual community. Syracuse University, where there was a hotbed of homosexual activity, led by Lou’s favorite drama teacher, was no exception.

“As an actor, I couldn’t cut the mustard, as they say,” Reed recalled. “But I was good as a director.” For one project, Lou chose to direct The Car Cemetery (or the Automobile Graveyard) by Fernando Arrabal. Reed could scarcely have found a more appropriate form (the theater of the absurd) or subject (it was loosely based on the Christ mythology) as a reflection of his life. The story line followed an inspired musician to his ultimate betrayal to the secret police by his accompanist. Everything Lou wrote or did was about himself, and had the props been available, perhaps Reed would have considered a climactic electroshock torture scene. In giving the musician a messianic role against a backdrop of cruel sex and prostitution, the play appealed to the would-be writer-musician. “I’m sure Lou had a homosexual experience with his drama teacher,” attested another friend. “This drama teacher used to have guys go up to his room and put on girls’ underwear and take pictures of them and then he’d give you an A. One dean of men himself either committed suicide or left because he was associated with this group of faculty fags who were later indicted for doing all kinds of strange stuff with the students.”

The “first” gay flirtation cannot simply be overlooked and put aside as Morrison and Albin would want it to be. First of all, it had happened before. Back in Freeport during Lou’s childhood, he had indulged in circle jerks, and the gay experience left him with traits that he would develop to his advantage commercially in the near future. Foremost among them was an effeminate walk, with small, carefully taken steps that could identify him from a block away.

Despite an apparent desire originally to concentrate on a career as a writer, just as his guitar was never far from his hand, music was never far from Reed’s thoughts. Lou’s first band at Syracuse was a loosely formed folk group comprising Reed; John Gaines, a striking, tall black guy with a powerful baritone; Joe Annus, a remarkably handsome, big white guy with an equally good voice; and a great banjo player with a big Afro hairdo who looked like Art Garfunkel.

The group often played on a square of grass in the center of campus at the corner of Marshall Street and South Crouse. They also occasionally got jobs at a small bar called the Clam Shack. Lou didn’t like to sing in public because he felt uncomfortable with his voice, but he would sing his own folk songs privately to Shelley. He also played some traditional Scottish ballads based on poems by Robert Burns or Sir Walter Scott. Shelley, who would inspire Lou to write a number of great songs, was deeply moved by the beauty of his music. For her, his chord progressions were just as hypnotic and seductive as his voice. She was often moved to tears by their sensitivity.

Though he was devoting himself to poetry and folk songs, Lou had not dropped his initial ambition to be a rock-and-roll star. In addition to how to direct a play, Lou also learned how to dramatize himself at every opportunity. The showmanship would come in handy when Lou hit the stage with his rock music. Reed’s development of folk music was put in the shade in his sophomore year when he finally formed his first bona fide rock-and-roll band, LA and the Eldorados. LA stood for Lewis and Allen, since Reed and Hyman were the founding members. Lou played rhythm and took the vocals, Allen was on drums, another Sammie, Richard Mishkin, was on piano and bass, and Mishkin brought in Bobby Newman on saxophone. A friend of Lou’s, Stephen Windheim, rounded out the band on lead guitar. They all got along well except for Newman, a loud, obnoxious character from the Bronx who, according to Mishkin, “didn’t give a shit about anyone.” Lou hated Bobby and was greatly relieved when he left school that semester and was replaced by another sax player, Bernie Kroll, whom Lou fondly referred to as “Kroll the troll.”

Reed playing in his Syracuse college band, LA and the Eldorados, with (left) Richard Mishkin. (Victor Bockris)

There was money to be made in the burgeoning Syracuse music scene, and the Eldorados were soon being handled by two students, Donald Schupak, who managed them, and Joe Divoli, who got them local bookings. “I had met Lou when we were freshmen,” Schupak explained. “Maybe because we were friends as freshmen, nothing developed into a problem because he could say, ‘Hey, Schupak, that’s a fucking stupid idea.’ And I’d say, ‘You’re right.’” Soon, under Schupak’s guidance and Reed’s leadership, LA and the Eldorados were working most weekends, playing frat parties, dances, bars, and clubs, making $125 a night, two or three nights a week.

Lou was strongly drawn to the musician’s lifestyle and haunts. Just off campus was the black section of Syracuse, the Fifteenth Ward. There he frequented a dive called the 800 Club, where black musicians and singers performed and jammed together. Lou and his band were accepted there and would occasionally work with some of the singers from a group called the Three Screaming Niggers. “The Three Screaming Niggers were a group of black guys that floated around the upstate campuses,” said Mishkin. “And we would pretend we were them when we got these three black guys to sing. So we would go down there once in a while and play. The people down there always had the attitude, the white man can’t play the blues, and we’d be down playing the blues. Then they’d be nice to us.” The Eldorados also sometimes played with a number of black female backing vocalists.

However, at first what made LA and the Eldorados stick out more than anything else was their car. Mishkin had a 1959 Chrysler New Yorker with gigantic fins, red guitars with flames shooting out of them painted on the side of the car, and “LA and the Eldorados” on the trunk. Simultaneously they all bought vests with gold lamé piping, jeans, boots, and matching shirts. Togged out in lounge-lizard punk and with Mishkin’s gilded chariot to transport them to their shows, the band was a sight when it hit the road. They had the kind of adventures that bond musicians.

Mishkin remembered, “One time we played Colgate and we were driving back in Allen’s Cadillac in the middle of a snowstorm, which eventually stopped us dead. So we’re sitting in the car smoking pot around 1 a.m., and we realized that we can’t do that all night because we’d die. The snow was deep, so we got out of the car and schlepped to this tiny town maybe half a mile away. We needed a place to stay so we went to the local hotel, which was, of course, full. But they had a bar there. Schupak was in the bar telling these stories about how he was in the army in the war, and Lewis and I are hysterical, we are dying it was so funny. Then the bartender said, ‘You can’t stay here, I have to close the bar.’ We ended up going to the courthouse and sleeping in jail.”

The Eldorados further distinguished themselves by mixing some of Lou’s original material into their set of standard Chuck Berry covers. One of Lou’s songs they played a lot was a love song he wrote for Shelley, an early draft of “Coney Island Baby.” “We did a thing called ‘Fuck Around Blues,’” Mishkin recalled. “It was an insult song. It sometimes went over well and it sometimes got us thrown out of fraternity parties.”

LA and the Eldorados played a big part in Lou’s life, providing him with many basic rock experiences, but he kept the band separate from the rest of his life at Syracuse. At first Lou wanted to make a point of being a writer more than a rock-and-roller. In those days, before the Beatles arrived, the term rock-and-roller was something of a put-down associated more with Paul Anka and Pat Boone than the Rolling Stones. Lou preferred to be associated with writers like Jack Kerouac. This dichotomy was spelled out in his limited wardrobe. Like the classic beatnik, Lou usually wore black jeans and T-shirts or turtlenecks, but he also kept a tweed jacket with elbow patches in his closet in case he wanted to come on like John Updike. However, in either role—as rocker or writer—Lou appeared somewhat uncomfortable. Therefore, in each role he used confrontation as a means both to achieve an effect and dramatize an inner turmoil that was quite real. For Hyman and others, this sometimes made working with Lou exceedingly difficult.

According to Allen, “One of the biggest problems we had was that if Lou woke up on the day of the job and he decided he didn’t want to be there, he wouldn’t come. We’d be all set up and looking for him. I remember one fraternity party, it was an afternoon job, we were all set up and ready to go and he just wasn’t there. I ran down to his room and walked through about four hundred pounds of his favorite pistachio nuts, and then I found him in bed under about six hundred pounds of pistachio nuts—in the middle of the afternoon. I looked at him and said, ‘What are you doing? We have a job!’ And he said, ‘Fuck you, get out of here. I don’t want to work today.’ I said, ‘You can’t do this, we’re getting paid!’ Mishkin and I physically dragged him up to the show. Ultimately he did play, but he was very pissed off.”

Reed seemed to at once want the spotlight and to hate it.

“Lou’s uniqueness and stubbornness made him really different than anyone I had ever known,” added Mishkin. “He was a terrible guy to work with. He was impossible. He was always late, he would always find fault with everything that the people who had hired us expected of us. And we were always dragging him here and dragging him there. Sometimes we were called Pasha and the Prophets because Lou was such a son of a bitch at so many gigs he’d upset everyone so much we couldn’t get a gig in those places again. He was as ornery as you can get. People wouldn’t let us back because he was so absolutely rude to people and just so mean and unappreciative of the fact that these people were paying us to get up and play music for them. He couldn’t have cared less. So we used the name Pasha and the Prophets in order to play there again. And then the people who hired us were so drunk they wouldn’t remember. He would never dress or act in a way so that people would accept him. He would often act in a confrontational manner. He wanted to be different.

“But Lou was ambitious. He wanted to be—and said this to me in no uncertain terms—a rock-and-roll star and a writer.”

***

In May 1962, sick of the stodgy university literary publication and keen to make their mark, Lewis and Lincoln, along with Stoecker, Gaines, Tucker, et al., put out two issues of a literary magazine called the Lonely Woman Quarterly. The title was based on Lou’s favorite Ornette Coleman composition, “Lonely Woman.”

Originating out of the Savoy with the encouragement of Gus Joseph, the first issue contained an untitled story, mentioned in the previous chapter, signed Luis Reed. It described Sidney Reed as a wife-beater, and Toby as a child molester. Shelley, who was involved in the publication, was convinced that just as Lou’s homosexual affair was mostly an attempt to associate with the offbeat gay world, the story was a conspicuous attempt to build his image as an evil, mysterious person. He was smart enough, she thought, to see that this was going to make readers uncomfortable. “And that’s what Lou always wanted to do,” she said, “make people uncomfortable.”

The premier issue of LWQ brought “Luis” his first press mention. In reviewing the magazine, the university’s newspaper, the Daily Orange, had interviewed Lincoln, who boasted that the magazine’s one hundred copies had sold out in three days. Indeed, the first issue was well received, but when everyone else on its staff apparently got lazy, Lou put out issue number two, which featured his second explosive piece, printed on page one. Called “Profile: Michael Kogan—Syracuse’s Miss Blanding,” it was the most attention-grabbing project Lou ever pulled off at Syracuse: a deftly executed, harsh attack upon the student who was head of the Young Democrats Party at the University. Allen Hyman recalled, “It said something like he [Kogan] should parade around campus with an American flag up his ass, which at the time was a fairly outrageous statement.” Unfortunately, Kogan’s father turned out to be a powerful corporation lawyer. “He decided that the piece was libelous,” remembered Sterling, “and he’d bust Lou’s ass. So they hauled him before the dean. But … the dean started shifting to Lou’s side. Afterwards, the dean told Lou to finish up his work and get his ass out of there, and nothing would happen to him.” By May of 1962, Reed’s literary career was off to a running start.

Despite this, Lou’s relationship with Shelley—not his classes—had dominated his sophomore year. They had spent as many of their waking hours together as was possible, camping out over the weekends in friends’ apartments, using fraternity rooms, cars, and sometimes even bushes to make love. Lou received a D in Introduction to Math and an F in English History. Then he got in trouble with the authorities again when a friend was busted for smoking pot and ratted on a number of people, including Lewis and Ritchie Mishkin.

“We smoked all the time,” admitted Mishkin. “But we didn’t smoke and work. We may have played and then smoked after and then jammed. Anyway, the dean of men called Lou, me, and some other people into his office and said, ‘We know you were smoking pot, so give us the whole story.’ We were terrified, at least I was. But nothing happened. Lou was angry. With the authorities and with the informer. But they were pretty soft on us. We were lucky, but then all they had to go on was the ‘he said, she said’ kind of evidence, so there was a limit to what they could do. But they had us in the office and they did the old, ‘We know because so-and-so said …’”

As a result of these numerous transgressions, and with his apparent academic torpor at the end of his sophomore year, Reed was put on academic probation.

***

The summer of 1962 was somewhat difficult for Lou. This was the first time he had been separated from Shelley for more than a day, and he took it hard. First, in an attempt to exert his control over her across the thousand miles that separated them, he embarked on a zealous letter-writing campaign, sending her long, storylike letters every day. They would begin with an account of his daily routine—he would go to the local gay bar, the Hayloft, every night—and tweak Shelley with suggestive comments. Then, in the middle of a paragraph the epistle would abruptly shift from reality to fiction and Lou would take off on one of his short stories, usually mirroring his passion and longing for Shelley. An exemplary story sent across the country that summer was “The Gift,” which appeared on the Velvet Underground’s second album, White Light/White Heat, and perfectly summed up Lou’s image of himself as a lonely Long Island nerd pining for his promiscuous girlfriend. “The Gift” climaxed with the lovelorn author desperately mailing himself to his lover in a womblike cardboard box. The final image, in the classic style of Yiddish humor that informed so much of Reed’s work, had the boyfriend being accidentally killed by his girlfriend as she opened the box with a large sheet-metal cutter.

Shelley, a classic passive-aggressive character, rarely responded in kind, but she did talk to Lou on the phone several times that summer, and he did not like what he heard at all. Lou had expected Shelley to remain locked in her room thinking of nothing but him. But Shelley wasn’t that kind of girl. Despite having commenced the vacation with a visit to the hospital to have her tonsils out, by July she was platonically dating more than one guy and at least one was madly in love with her. Despite the fact that Shelley was really loyal to Lou, the emotions Lou addressed in “The Gift” were his. He paced up and down his room in frustration. He couldn’t stand not having Shelley under this thumb. It was driving him insane.

Then he hit on a plan. Why not go out and visit her? After all, he was her boyfriend, he was writing to her every day or so and had called her several times. It sounded like the right thing to do. His parents, who had kept a wary eye on their wayward son that summer, still frowning on his naughty visits to the Hayloft and daily excursions on the guitar, were only too happy to support a venture that they felt was taking him in the right direction. At the beginning of August he flew out to Chicago.

Shelley had been adamantly against the planned visit, warning Lou on the phone that her parents wouldn’t like him, that it was a big mistake and wouldn’t work out at all. But Lou, who wanted, she recalled, “to be in front of my face,” insisted.

By now Lou had developed a pattern of reaction to any new environment he entered. His plan was to split up any group, polarizing them around him. In a family situation, as soon as he walked into anybody’s house, he took the position that the father was a tyrannical ogre whom the mother had to be saved from. On his first night in the Albins’ home, he cleverly drew Mr. Albin into a political discussion and then, marking him for the bullheaded liberal Democrat that he was, expertly lanced him with a detailed defense of the notorious conservative columnist William Buckley. While Shelley sat back and watched, half-horrified, half-mesmerized, Mr. Albin became increasingly apoplectic. Lou was obviously not the right man for his daughter. In fact, he didn’t even want him in the house.

The Albins had rented a room for Lou in nearby Evanston, at Northwestern University. Using every trick in his book, Lou pulled a double whammy on Mr. Albin, driving his car into a ditch later the same night when bringing Shelley back from the movies at 1 a.m., forcing her father to get up, get dressed, come out, and help haul out the mauled automobile.

Things went downhill from there. Lou made a valiant attempt to win over Mrs. Albin. Having dinner with her and Shelley one night when the man of the house was absent, Lou launched into his classic rap, saying, “Gee, you’re clearly very nice. If it wasn’t for the ogre living in the house …” But Mrs. Albin was having none of his boyish charm. She had surreptitiously read Lou’s letters to Shelley that summer and formed a very definite opinion about Lou Reed: she hated him with a passion—and still does more than thirty years later. In her opinion, Lou was ruining her daughter’s life.

As an upshot of Lou’s visit, Shelley’s parents informed her that if she continued to see Lou in any way at all, she would never be allowed to return to Syracuse. Naturally, swearing that she would never set eyes upon the rebel again, Shelley now embarked upon a secret relationship with Lou that trapped her exactly where Reed wanted. Since Shelley had no one outside of Lou’s circle in whom she could confide about her relationship with him, she was essentially under his control. From here on Lou would always attempt to program his women. His first move would always be to amputate them from their former lives so that they accepted that the rules were Lou’s.

Chapter Three

Shelley, If You Just Come Back

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY: 1962–64

The image of the artist who follows a brilliant leap to success with a fall into misery and squalor, is deeply credited, even cherished in our culture.

Irving Howe, from his foreword to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories by Delmore Schwartz

When Lou returned to Syracuse for his junior year, he rented a room in a large apartment inhabited by a number of like-minded musicians and English majors on Adams Street. The room was so small that it could barely contain the bed, but that was okay with Lou because he lived in the bed. He had his typewriter, his guitar, and Shelley, who was now living in one of the cottage-style dorms opposite Crouse College, which were far less supervised than the big women’s dorm. She was consequently able to live with Lou pretty much full-time.

The semester began magically with Shelley’s arrival. Lou whipped out his guitar and a new instrument he had mastered over the summer, a harmonica, which he wore in a rack around his neck, and launched into a series of songs he had written for Shelley over the vacation, including the beautiful “I Found a Reason.” Shelley, who was completely seduced by Lou’s music, was brought to tears by the beauty and sensitivity of his playing, the music and the lyrics. Lou played the harmonica with an intense, mournful air that perfectly complemented his songs, but was unfortunately so much like Bob Dylan’s that, so as not to be seen as a Dylan clone, he had to retire the instrument. It was a pity because Lou was a great, expressive harmonica player. In his new pad, he played his music as loud as he wanted and took drugs with impunity. It also became another stage on which to develop “Lou Reed.” He rehearsed with the band there, often played music all night, and maintained a creative working environment essential to his writing. He was really beginning to feel his power. His band was under his control. He had already written “The Gift,” “Coney Island Baby,” “Fuck Around Blues,” and later classics like “I’ll Be Your Mirror” were in the works.

By the mid-1960s, the American college campus was going through a remarkable transformation that would soon introduce it to the world as one of the brighter beacons of politics and art. One of the marks of a particularly hip school was its creative writing department. Few American writers were able to make a living out of writing books. Somewhere in the 1950s some nut put together the bogus notion that you could haul in some bigwig writer like Ernest Hemingway or Samuel Beckett and get him to teach a bunch of some ten to fifteen young people how to write. However, it had succeeded in dragging a series of glamorous superstars like T. S. Eliot (a rival with Einstein and Churchill as the top draw in the 1950s) to Harvard for six weeks to give a series of lectures about how he wrote, leading hundreds of students to write poor imitations of The Waste Land. The concept of the creative writing program looked good on paper, but it was, in reality, a giant shuck, and the (mostly) poets who were on the lucrative gravy train in the early sixties were, for the most part, a bunch of wasted men who had helped popularize the craft during its glorious moment 1920–50, when poets like W. H. Auden had the cachet rock stars would acquire in the second half of the century.

Delmore Schwartz was one of the most charismatic, stunning-looking poets on the circuit. He had been foisted on the Syracuse University creative writing program by two heavyweights in the field—the great poet Robert Lowell and the novelist Saul Bellow, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize—who had known him in his prime as America’s answer to T. S. Eliot. Unfortunately for both him and his students, Schwartz had by then, like so many of his calling, expelled his muse with near-lethal daily doses of amphetamine pills washed down by copious amounts of hard alcohol. Despite having as recently as 1959 won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for his selected poems, Summer Knowledge, when he arrived on campus in September 1962, Schwartz was, in fact, suffering through the saddest and most painful period of his life.

Sporting on his forty-nine-year-old face a greenish yellow tinge, which gave the impression he was suffering from a permanent case of jaundice, and a pair of mad eyes that boiled out from under his big, bloated brow with unrestrained paranoia, on a good day this brilliant man could still hold a class spellbound with the intelligence, sensitivity, and conviction of his hypnotic voice once it had seized upon its religion—literature. Schwartz once received a ten-minute standing ovation at Syracuse after giving his class a moving reading of The Waste Land. Unfortunately, by 1962 his stock was so low that none of the performances he gave at Syracuse—in the street, in the classroom, in bars, in his apartment, at faculty meetings, anywhere his voice could find receivers—was recorded.

Until the arrival of Delmore Schwartz, Lou Reed had not been overly impressed by his instructors at Syracuse. However, Lou only had to encounter Delmore once to realize that he had finally found a man impressively more disturbed than himself, from whom he might be able to get some perspective on all the demons that were boiling in his brain.

If Lou had been looking for a father figure ever since rejecting his old man as a silent, suffering Milquetoast, he had now found a perfect one in Delmore Schwartz. In both Bellow’s novel about Schwartz, Humboldt’s Gift, and James Atlas’s outstanding biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, many descriptions of Schwartz’s salient characteristics could just as well apply to what Lou Reed was fast becoming.

As Lou already did, Delmore entangled his friends in relationships with unnatural ardor until he was finally unbearable to everyone. Like Lou, Delmore ultimately caused those around him more suffering than pleasure. Like Lou, Delmore possessed a stunning arrogance along with a nature that was as solicitous as it was dictatorial. Both possessed astonishing displays of self-hatred mixed with self-love and finally concluded in concurrence with many of their friends that they were evil beings. Both were wonderful, hectic, nonstop inspirational improvisators and monologuists as well as expert flatterers. Grand, erratic, handsome men, they both gained much of their insights during long nights of insomnia.

But there the comparison ended. For Delmore Schwartz was already singing himself in and out of madness, and when his heart danced, it never danced for joy, whereas Lou possessed a marvelous ability for unadulterated joy and a carefully locked hold on reality. He had no doubt that he was going to succeed, and most of his friends equally believed in his talent. Lou may have shared with Delmore moments of sublime inspiration alternated with moments of indescribable despair, but unlike Schwartz, Reed had not read himself out of American culture.

In his junior year, Reed took a number of courses with Schwartz apart from creative writing. They read Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, and Joyce together, and when studying Ulysses, Lou saw himself as Dedalus to Schwartz’s Bloom. They developed a friendship that would go on until Lou graduated.

At first Schwartz would attend classes in which it was his duty to entertain students. Soon, however, rather than attempting to teach them how to write, he would fall into wandering, often despondent rants about the great men he had known, the sex life of the queen of England, etc., conveying his information in tones so authoritative and confiding that he convinced his astonished audiences that he really knew what he was talking about. When he grew tired of these exercises of nostalgia for a lost life, he would often fill in the time reading aloud or, on bad days, mumbling incoherently. He also set up an office at the far back left-hand corner table of the Orange Bar, where, usually sitting directly opposite Lou, who was one of the few students able to respond to him, and surrounded by several rows of chairs, Schwartz would do what he had now become best at. Saul Bellow called him “the Mozart of conversation.”

Shelley, who was always at the table with them, recalled that Lou and Delmore “adored each other. Delmore was always drinking, popping Valiums, and talking. He was kind of edgy, big, he would move but in a very contained manner. His hands would move, picking things up, putting them down; he was always lurking over and I always got the feeling he was slobbering because he was always eating and talking and spitting things out. He was very direct to me. He said, ‘I love Lou. You have to take care of Lou because he has to be a writer. He is a writer. And it is your job to give up your life to make sure that Lou becomes a writer. Don’t let him treat you like shit. But tolerate everything he does to stay with him because he needs you.’”

Later in his life, perhaps to some extent to disarm the notion that he was just a rock-and-roll guitar player, Lou liked nothing better than to reminisce about his relationship with Delmore. “Delmore was my teacher, my friend, and the man who changed my life. He was the smartest, funniest, saddest person I had ever met. I studied with him in the bar. Actually, it was him talking and me listening. People who knew me would say, ‘I can’t imagine that.’ But that’s what it was. I just thought Delmore was the greatest. We drank together starting at eight in the morning. He was an awesome person. He’d order five drinks at once. He was incredibly smart. He could recite the encyclopedia to you starting with the letter A. He was also one of the funniest people I ever met in my life. He was an amazingly articulate, funny raconteur of the ages. At this time Delmore would be reading Finnegans Wake out loud, which seemed like the only way I could get through it. Delmore thought you could do worse with your life than devote it to reading James Joyce. He was very intellectual but very funny. And he hated pop music. He would start screaming at people in the bar to turn the jukebox off.

“At the time, no matter how strange the stories or the requests or the plan, I was there. I was ready to go for him. He was incredible, even in his decline. I’d never met anybody like him. I wanted to write a novel; I took creative writing. At the same time, I was in rock-and-roll bands. It doesn’t take a great leap to say, ‘Gee, why don’t I put the two together?’”

Schwartz’s most famous story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” was a real eye-opener for Lou. The story centers around a hallucination by a son who finds himself in a cinema watching a documentary about his parents and flips out, screaming a warning to them not to have a son. “‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ really was amazing to me,” Lou recalled. “To think you could do that with the simplest words available in such a short span of pages and create something so incredibly powerful. You could write something like that and not have the greatest vocabulary in the world. I wanted to write that way, simple words to cause an emotion, and put them with my three chords.”

Delmore, for his part, clearly believed in Lou as a writer. The climax of Lou’s relationship with Delmore came when the older poet put his arm around Lou in the Orange Bar one night and told him, “I’m gonna be leaving for a world far better than this soon, but I want you to know that if you ever sell out and go work for Madison Avenue or write junk, I will haunt you.”

“I hadn’t thought about doing anything, let alone selling out,” Reed recalled. “I took that seriously. He saw even then that I was capable of writing decently. Because I never showed him anything I wrote—I was really afraid. But he thought that much of me. That was a tremendous compliment to me, and I always retained that.”

Close though they were, they had two serious differences of opinion. As a man of the forties, Delmore was an educated hater of homosexuals. The uncomprehending attitudes common among straight American males toward gays in the early sixties put homosexuals on the level of communists or drug addicts. Therefore, Lou was unable to show Delmore many of his best short stories, since they were based on gay themes.

Then there was rock and roll. Delmore despised it, and in particular the lyrics, which he saw as a cancer in the language. Delmore knew Lou was in a band but wrote it off as a childish activity he would outgrow as soon as he commenced his graduate studies in literature.

Delmore Schwartz was thus barred from two of the most powerful strands of Lou’s work.

***

Lou’s relationship with Shelley reached its apotheosis in his junior year when, she felt, he really gained in confidence and began to transform himself. Ensconced together in the Adams Street apartment debris of guitars and amps, books, clothing, and cigarettes, Lou now lived in a world of music accompanied by the spirit of Shelley. She knew every nook and cranny of him better than anybody, and before he put his armor on. She had become his best friend, the one who could look into his eyes, the one he wrote for and played to.

Lou needed to be grounded because although Lincoln could be cooler than whipped cream and smarter than amphetamine, he was a lunatic. Lou always needed a court jester nearby to keep him amused, but he also required the presence of a straight, 1950s woman who could cool him down when the visions got too heavy. Shelley Albin became everything to Lou Reed: she was mother, sister, muse, lover, fixer-upper, therapist, drug mule, mad girl. She did everything with Lou twenty-four hours a day.

Lou was drinking at the Orange as Delmore told stories of perverts and weirdos and fulminated over the real or imaginary plots that were afoot in Washington. Lou was flying on a magic carpet of drugs. Pages of manuscripts and other debris piled up in his room, which Shelley felt was a purposeful pigsty. Lou was having an intensely exciting relationship with Lincoln, who was going bonkers, lost in a long, hysterical novel mostly dictated by a series of voices giving him conflicting orders in his head. Lou was also displaying that special nerve that is given to very few men, getting up in front of audiences three or four times a week, blowing off a pretty good set of rock and roll, playing some wild, inventive guitar, becoming a lyrical harmonica player, turning his voice into a human jukebox.

Everything was changing. Rock was “Telstar” by the Tornadoes, “Walk Like a Man” by the Four Seasons, “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons—all great records in Lou’s mind—but what was really happening on campuses across the USA was folk music. Dylan was about to make his big entrance, beating Lou to the title of poet laureate of his generation.

At this point, Lou appeared to have several options. He could have gone to Harvard under the wing of Delmore Schwartz and perhaps been an important poet. He could have married Shelley and become a folksinger. He could have collaborated with any number of musicians at Syracuse to form a rock-and-roll band. Instead, he began to separate himself from each of his allies and collaborators one by one.

***

The trouble started with Lou’s acquisition of a dog, Seymour, a female cross between a German shepherd and a beagle cum dachshund, three and a half feet long standing four inches off the ground. If you believe that dogs always mirror their owners, then Seymour was, in Shelley’s words, “a Lou dog.” Lou appeared to be able to open up more easily and communicate more sympathetically with Seymour than with anybody else in the vicinity. As far as Shelley could tell, the only times Lou seemed to feel really at peace with himself were when he was rolling on the floor with Seymour, or sitting with the mutt on the couch staring into space. Soon, however, Lou’s love for the dog became obsessive, and he started remonstrating with Shelley about treating Seymour better and paying more attention to her.

Meanwhile, Lou’s behaviour increasingly hinted at the complex nature Shelley would have to deal with if she stayed with him. “I mean he got crazy about being nice to that dog,” she commented later. “He was a total shit about it, so that was a clue.” But then he couldn’t be bothered to take the dog out for a walk in the freezing cold. It soon became evident that it fell to Shelley to feed and walk the dog. Even then the mercurial Lewis decided to dump the dog. Shelley had to persuade him not to. Then Lewis hit on another diabolical plan. He would take the dog home to Freeport and dump it on his family, without warning. And he knew exactly how to do it.

That Thanksgiving, Lou and Shelley returned to Freeport with the surprise gift. Displaying its Lou-like behavior, at La Guardia airport the dog rushed out of the cargo area where it had been forced to travel and immediately pissed all over the floor, leading Lou’s mother to start screaming, “A dog! Oh my God, a dog in my house! We don’t need a dog!” Riposting with the artful aplomb that would lead so many of Reed’s later collaborators to despair, Lou presented an offer that could not be refused, announcing that the dog was, in fact, a gift for Bunny.

Dismayed at first by this invasion of their domain, the Reeds were, in time—much to Lou’s chagrin—unexpectedly delighted by the new arrival. As it turned out, the dog possessed some of Lou’s charm without any of his less attractive attributes. Soon Seymour was scurrying around the Reeds’ living room or snuggling up to Toby as if she were her long-lost mother. In short, Seymour became the light of Toby’s life in a way Lewis never could be.

“Can you imagine,” Lou ad-libbed in a 1979 song, “Families,” “when I first took her there nobody wanted her, but soon she became more important than me!”

Naturally, as soon as Lou saw how much his family liked the dog, he quickly reversed his decision to bestow her on Bunny and insisted on taking her back to Syracuse where she would live with him until he graduated, after which Seymour would live out the remainder of her life as the most popular member of the Reed household.

During their visit Lou took Shelley into Harlem to pick up drugs. “He said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to pick something up,’ she recalled. “I remember going up to 125th Street. Really vile, nasty hallways. It was a guy who was a musician, I remember him sitting at this grand piano in his apartment in Harlem. I think there was a connection between the guys in the bar in Syracuse and the guy there. I knew we were going to pick up drugs, my memory was that it was heroin, but I couldn’t swear to it. I was more worried about his driving. And I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in Harlem. I had a bad attitude. For white kids to do that at the time was stupid. It was dangerous. I could have gotten raped or killed. He loved that.”

It was, however, neither the drugs nor the dog that finally caused his relationship with Shelley to break down. Although there was no doubt that Lou was in love with Shelley and their relationship was enlightening for both of them, Lou experimented sexually. According to Mishkin, for example, Lou had a thing for big girls, especially “one big fat ugly bitch who he also really loved to fuck on the side.” He also occasionally had sex with one of the black female singers who accompanied the Eldorados. “I never observed him being particularly nice to Shelley,” Hyman commented, “but then I never observed him being particularly nice to anyone.”

When Lou wasn’t nice to a woman, he could, it turned out, be particularly cruel, constantly pushing them to an edge, thereby testing the strength of their love. His idea, Shelley said, was, “I’m going to remake you and then I’m not going to like you, and I’m going to push you around and see when you’re going to leave me. The worse I treat you the more it proves to me that you love me and you’ll stay with me forever. He clearly got very obnoxious. He had to have somebody to kick around so he felt big, and at that point I was the kickee.”

She was not the sort of girl to take this kind of treatment lying down, and she retaliated with several thrusts of her own. On one occasion the Eldorados were booked to play a fraternity at Cornell. Shelley had been dating one of the fraternity brothers sporadically on the side and decided to go along for the ride. When Lou walked in with the slightly effeminate walk he had mastered, the brothers were enraged to see Shelley on his arm. She had spent several weekends at the fraternity house and now this little Jewish fag … Shelley had not told Lou about the predicament, and even he was impressed by the hostility that greeted him. “Jesus, they’re so nasty, they’re a bunch of animals,” he told Shelley. Somewhere during the evening she casually explained, “They’re so hostile because I’ve been here on various weekends with this guy Peter. I’m his girlfriend.” They barely got out of there alive.

Back at Syracuse the relationship between Lou and Shelley came to a climax one night at another fraternity job, when Lou came up to her between sets and said, “I’m going to go into the back room with that girl. Do you want to watch?” Seeing Ritchie Mishkin smirk at her, Shelley finally snapped, decided that she had taken enough abuse from Lou, and left the fraternity. It was February 1963 and bitterly cold. Lincoln accompanied her on the long walk back to her dorm telling her not to worry, that he was still there and that she was right to leave. That she shouldn’t have let Lou treat her so badly for so long.

“Lou and I had such dire things going on between us for the previous few months,” Shelley explained. “The groupie thing just finally put me over the edge. I never had any doubt that Lou was going to be a rock star and that if I was going to stay with Lou, I was going to be a rock star’s wife. I made the decision to leave him and to stay away from him based on the next ten years of my life.

“The next day he said, ‘I was so stoned I don’t remember doing that. Why are you mad at me? Did I do that?’”

But Shelley had finally come to understand what made Lou tick, and she didn’t like what she understood at all. The struggle to conquer and control was much more important to him than the possession, just as being a voyeur was becoming more important to him than natural sex. Basically, Lou was incapable of maintaining any kind of normal, nurturing relationship. Like a shark, he had an urge to poke at bodies until he found a live one, then devour it as ferociously and completely as he could, letting the blood run down his chin.

By the middle of his junior year, Lou had turned himself into a monster with eight different faces. It was in these various guises that he would slither through his life, building up great bands only to tear them down, devouring and destroying everybody he could seduce, because he resented the whole situation of life and didn’t want anybody else to have any fun if he wasn’t able to.

Ever since Lou had moved into his own apartment, the relationship with Lincoln Swados had been less close. As the junior year ground on, Lincoln showed alarming signs of having a real nervous breakdown. “I don’t think either of us knew that Lincoln was truly schizophrenic,” Shelley remembered. “Lou was so busy pulling so much of his drama from Lincoln that I don’t know how much he realized Lincoln was truly ill, or whether he just thought Lincoln just had a better scam going. He was trying to pick up on Lincoln’s traits and abilities. Much of Lou is Lincoln.” Shelley claimed that for both men, the trajectory of a love relationship went something like this: “I’m going to stroke you and treat you kindly and bless you with my knowledge and presence, and then kill you.” Allen Hyman agreed that Lou had picked up many of his twisted ideas about life from Lincoln. “You couldn’t get much weirder than Lincoln,” he said, “without being Lou.”

Shortly after Shelley left Lou, Lincoln was carted off to the bughouse by his parents, who found him in a state of agitation far beyond their wildest fears. According to Swados’s sister, Elizabeth, he had got into “a helplessly disoriented state. He was unable to go to classes, unable to leave his room. The voices in his head were directing him to do too many different things.”

In short order, Lou had lost his best friends, his two mirrors. Delmore was still there, but he was going in and out of hospital himself and was hardly in a position to give Lou a shoulder to cry on—although he did give him one piece of important advice. He told Lou that he should see a psychiatrist and that it should be a woman, because he wouldn’t listen to a man.

However, despite her determination to avoid her former lover, the break-up threw Shelley into a black depression, and she went out and did the one thing that was bound to draw Lou’s attention back to her—she dyed her hair orange. “I remember Lou seeing it and saying, ‘Wow! Now you’re appealing, now you really look like Miss Trash.’” Typically, Lou had to race back to Freeport to show his parents what he had done to the nice Jewish girl they had so doted on. “They saw this nice, wholesome girl turned into trash and they said, ‘Oh my God, Lou has done it again. He has ruined somebody, he has won, he has turned her into trash,’” Shelley recalled. “At that point, his mother even said to me, ‘I hope he doesn’t treat you like he treats us.’ We did horrify his mother. He loved it.”

As soon as they got back to school, they broke up again. By then she was determined not to go back to him. “He was such a shit.”

***

November 1963 was a cathartic month for Lou. It started with a Syracuse concert by Bob Dylan. “Lou idolized Dylan when Dylan first came on the scene with his first album,” explained Mishkin. “We knew every inch of his music inside and out. All of a sudden there was this music and poetry together, and it wasn’t folk music. Lou was blown away by it. It was an exciting thing. And Lewis immediately got a harmonica and was playing that. And I remember sitting in the apartment with [Eldorado] Stevie Windheim and Lewis figuring out the chords to ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down,’ and we got them and we were playing it and it wasn’t the kind of thing we were going to do for a gig, but we had a good time with it.”

The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a major turning point for Lou. The event struck a blow to Delmore from which he would never recover. Lou watched helplessly as his mentor cum drinking buddy fell into a paranoid depression. He gave up any pretense of continuing to teach and retreated permanently to the Orange Bar. Soon Lou was looking after Delmore, walking him home at night after long sessions at the bar, making sure he had his key, his cigarettes, sometimes picking up groceries or other sundries for him. When Schwartz left the Orange, he was often so transported to other realms he might head off in any direction like some human dowsing wand in search of companionship or, as often as not, trouble. Lou always made sure Delmore got home, got himself to bed, and was not in too much danger of burning down the premises with a carelessly dropped cigarette. After a while, however, this kind of care takes on a spooky quality as the young man begins to recognize his own fate in that of the older man. Suddenly Lou, who had been benefiting from Delmore’s enlightened encouragement, taking seriously his recommendation to go to Harvard, found himself taking care of a man who was increasingly incapable of getting from A to B without assistance. “Lou always felt that he had to stay around and watch Delmore and take care of him,” said Shelley. “I think Lou began to find that a little tedious.”

Meanwhile, Lou had initiated his own decline. Ever since he had been put on medication following the electroshock treatments of 1959, Lou had been an inveterate drug user. Or, to use his own description, a “smorgasbord schmuck.” If he wasn’t popping pills, he was inhaling pot, dropping acid, eating mushrooms, horning coke, or dropping Placidyls—not to mention bolting down enough booze to keep the Orange Bar in business around the clock. Now, for the first time, he added heroin to his drug menu, whereas previously he had only sold it.

Shelley marked Lou’s downslide from the time he started to inject heroin. He had always been petrified by needles and said that he would never shoot any drugs into his veins. Once he began taking heroin, he insisted he could control it all the time and stop whenever he wanted to simply because he had elected to do so. Shelley recalled, “He was getting into heroin on and off. The experience was pretty horrifying to him and he was having some bad LSD trips too.”

Shelley had no sympathy for Lou’s cries for help. However, Lou had gone into a 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. On another occasion when she was sitting in the Orange Bar with her new lover and his Korean vet friends, an acolyte of Lou’s came racing in frantically telling her that Lou was having a really bad time. Although she fully expected that he might not make it through the night, Shelley sent back the reply, “If you send somebody over here to tell me that you’re dying, die!”

Still, Shelley felt sorry for him. “Lou can’t have a good time, it’s not in his genes,” she stated later. “He feels that he doesn’t deserve it. The moment you say Lou’s okay, he thinks there’s something wrong with you. Because if you say he’s okay, then you don’t see how evil he is, you don’t see all the bad things. He can’t have a wonderful time any more than he can accept that people like him. That’s what’s so sad about Lou.”

Swados, after Schwartz the most perceptive man Reed knew at university, was the first to note (in a conversation with a girlfriend a year later) that beneath Lou’s often waiflike desperation, his need to be mothered, existed a much tougher, harder, more realistic man. He possessed an ambition and drive of which very few people who knew him at Syracuse had any idea. The fact alone, for example, that he would continue to experiment with drugs for the next fifteen years and survive suggests that he was at heart not only a survivor, but a student of narcotics who took care to know what it was he was ingesting.

***

The most important development in his senior year was literary. Lou leapt across a great gap when he switched from making the short story his primary form to song lyrics, taking his knowledge of the short story structure with him. In many ways Bob Dylan was a major influence on Lou in this decision as well as in his subsequent decision not to apply to the graduate writing program at Harvard, but to pursue his love of rock and roll as a career. Dylan not only showed him a way to write lyrics, he legitimized being a singer/songwriter with intellectual credentials. That was the vital point. Lou needed to be recognized intellectually. He was concerned about Delmore’s response to his decision; he didn’t want Delmore to think that he didn’t consider his words valuable. And yet, Delmore’s collapse may have freed him to journey into that region he had always aspired to—the combination of writing and rock-and-roll lyrics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Four

The Pickwick Period

WITH PICKWICK INTERNATIONAL: 1964–65

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

Donald Schupak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Five

The Formation of the Velvet Underground

ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE: 1965

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

Henry James

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

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

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

The two underground artists, who took their work highly seriously, went along with Phillips as a kind of joke, claiming they did have a drummer so as not to jeopardize the opportunity to make some pocket money. The next day, along with their good friend Walter De Maria, who would soon emerge as one of the leading avant-garde sculptors in the world and was doing a little drumming on the side, they showed up at Pickwick studios as instructed.

Cale, Conrad, and De Maria were highly amused by the bogus setup at Pickwick. To them, the Pickwick executives in polyester suits, who suspiciously pressed contracts into their hands, were hilarious caricatures of rock moguls. On close inspection, as Conrad recalled, the contracts stipulated that they would sign away the rights to everything they did for the rest of their lives in exchange for nothing. After brushing aside this attempt to extract an allegiance more closely resembling indentured servitude than business management, Conrad, Cale, and De Maria were introduced to Lou Reed. He assured them that it would take no time at all to learn their parts to “The Ostrich” since all the guitar strings were tuned to a single note. This information left John Cale and Tony Conrad openmouthed in astonishment since that was exactly what they had been doing at La Monte Young’s rigorous eight-hours-a-day rehearsals. They realized Lou had some kind of innate musical genius that even the salesmen at the studio had picked up on. Tony got the impression that “Lou had a close relationship with these people at Pickwick because they recognized that he was a very gifted person. He impressed everybody as having some particularly assertive personal quality.”

Cale, Conrad, and De Maria agreed to join “The Primitives” and play shows to promote the record on the East Coast. It was primarily a camp lark, but it would also give them a glimpse into the world of commercial rock and roll, in which they were not entirely uninterested.

And so it came about that in their first appearance together, Lou Reed and John Cale found themselves, without prior rehearsal, running onto the stage of some high school in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley following a bellowed introduction: “And here they are from New York—The Primitives!” Confronting a barrage of screaming kids, the band launched into “The Ostrich.” At the end of the song the deejay screamed, rather portentously, “These guys have really got something. I hope it’s not catching!”

Far from being catching, “The Ostrich” died a quick death. After racing around the countryside in a station wagon for several weekends getting a taste of the reality of the rock life without roadies, the band packed it in. Terry Phillips and the Pickwick executives ruefully left off their dream of seeing “The Ostrich” sail into the hemisphere of the charts and returned to the dependable work of Jack Borgheimer.

The attempted breakout had its repercussions though, primarily in introducing Lou to John, who held the keys to a whole other musical universe. The fact was that Lou, like many creative people, had a low threshold for boredom and realized that Terry Phillips’s vision was too narrow to allow him to grow.

***

When Lou started to visit John Cale in his bohemian slum dwelling at 56 Ludlow Street in the deepest bowels of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Reed knew nothing of La Monte Young, or his Theater of Eternal Music, and had little sense of the world he was entering. In keeping with the egocentric personalities he had been cultivating since his successes on the Syracuse University poetry, music, and bohemian scenes, Lou was out for his own ends and at first showed little interest in whatever it was that John was into. Instead, the rock-and-roller set about seducing the classicist.

Cale, for his part, was taken by Reed’s rock-and-roll persona and what little he had witnessed of his spontaneous composition of lyrics, but took a somewhat snooty view of Reed’s initial attempts to strike up a collaborative friendship. “He was trying to get a band together,” Cale said. “I didn’t want to hear his songs. They seemed sorry for themselves. He’d written ‘Heroin’ already, and ‘I’m Waiting for My Man,’ but they wouldn’t let him record it, they didn’t want to do anything with it. I wasn’t really interested—most of the music being written then was folk, and he played his songs with an acoustic guitar—so I didn’t really pay attention because I couldn’t give a shit about folk music. I hated Joan Baez and Dylan. Every song was a fucking question!”

Despite having been a musical prodigy and, before the age of twenty-five, studied with some of the greatest avant-garde composers of the century, by 1965 Cale felt his career was going nowhere. “I was going off into never-never land with classical notions of music,” he said, desperate for a new angle from which to approach music. The sentiment was shared by his family, putting additional pressure on him to get a job. Just like Lou’s mother, Mrs. Cale, a schoolteacher in a small Welsh mining village married to a miner, complained that John would never make a living as a musician and should become a doctor or a lawyer.

Like a bullterrier nipping at pants legs, Lou kept after John, feeling intuitively that the Welshman might provide a necessary catalyst for his music. Eventually, Lou got his way and Cale began to take Lou’s lyrics seriously. “He kept pushing them on me,” Cale recalled, “and finally I saw they weren’t the kind of words you’d get Joan Baez singing. They were very different, he was writing about things other people weren’t. These lyrics were very literate, very well expressed, they were tough.”

Once John grasped what Lou was doing—Method acting in song, as he saw it—he glimpsed the possibility of collaborating to create something vibrant and new. He figured that by combining Young’s theories and techniques with Lou’s lyrical abilities, he could blow himself out of the hole his rigid studies had dug him into. Lou also introduced John to a hallmark of rock-and-roll music—fun—and his youthful enthusiasm was infectious. “We got together and started playing my songs for fun,” Reed recalled. “It was like we were made for each other. He was from the other world of music and he fitted me perfectly. He would fit things he played right into my world, it was so natural.”

“What I saw in Lou’s musical concept was something akin to my own,” agreed Cale. “There was something more than just a rock side to him too. I recognized a tremendous literary quality about his songs which fascinated me—he had a very careful ear, he was very cautious with his words. I had no real knowledge of rock music at that time, so I focused on the literary aspect more.” Cale was so turned on by the connection he started weaning Reed away from Pickwick.

Cale immediately got to work with Reed on orchestrations for the songs. The two men labored over the pieces, each feeding off the fresh ideas of his counterpart. “Lou’s an excellent guitar player,” Cale said. “He’s nuts. It has more to do with the spirit of what he’s doing than playing. And he had this great facility with words, he could improvise songs, which was great. Lyrics and melodies. Take a chord change and just do it.” Cale was an equally exciting player. Unaware of any rock-and-roll models to emulate, he answered Reed’s sonic attacks with illogical, inverted bass lines or his searing electric viola, which sounded, he said, “like a jet engine!”

Meanwhile, as he got to know Lou, and Reed began to unwrap the elements of his legend, John discovered that they had something else in common, “namely,” Lou would deadpan, “dope.” Reed joked dismissively about their heroin use, commenting that when he and Cale first met, they started playing together “because it was safer than dealing dope,” which Reed was apparently still dabbling in. Whilst fully admitting his involvement with heroin, Lou always insisted, and friends tended to concur, that “I was never a heroin addict. I had a toe in that situation. Enough to see the tunnel, the vortex. That’s how I handled my problems. That’s how I grew up, how I did it, like a couple hundred thousand others. You had to be a gutter rat, seeking it out.”

While rationalizing his drug use, Reed also made it clear that it provided him with a shield necessary for both his life and work: “I take drugs just because in the twentieth century in a technological age, living in the city, there are certain drugs you can take just to keep yourself normal like a caveman. Not just to bring yourself up and down, but to attain equilibrium you need to take certain drugs. They don’t get you high, even, they just get you normal.”

Despite the fact that drug taking was widely accepted, practiced, and even celebrated among the artistic residents of Cale’s Lower East Side community, because it was addictive, dangerous, and could be extremely destructive, heroin had a stigma attached to it that led users to keep it private. Thus Cale and Reed found themselves bonded not only by a musical vision and youthful anarchy, but by the secret society heroin users tend to form. The cozy, intimate feelings the drug can bring on magnified their friendship.

Lou started spending a lot of his spare time at John’s. Before long he was staying there for weeks at a time without bothering to return to his parents’ house in Freeport. Lou had long since become fed up with his parents, avoiding them at all costs, and stopping by their house only when in need of money, food, clean laundry, or to check up on the well-being of his dog. Even his involvement with Pickwick was fading under the spell of the Lower East Side rock-and-roll lifestyle. “Lou was like a rock-and-roll animal and authentically turned everybody on,” recalled Tony Conrad. “He really had a deep fixation on that, and his lifestyle was completely compatible and acclimatized to it.”

Cale’s was a match for Reed’s mercurial personality. Moody and paranoid, he too was easily bored and looking for action. John responded to Lou’s driving energy with equal passion, not only sharing Reed’s musical explosions but also providing a creative atmosphere and spiritual home for him. Conrad saw that Lou “was definitely a liberating force for John, but John was an incredible person too. He was very idealistic, putting himself behind what he was interested in and believed in in a tremendous way. John was moving at a very, very fast pace away from a classical training background through the avant-garde and into performance art then rock.” The relationship between John and Lou grew quickly, and it wasn’t long before they started thinking about Lou’s getting out of Freeport, where he was still living very uncomfortably under the disapproving gaze of his parents. Lou was eager to get something happening. “I took off, so there was more room in the pad, and John invited him to come over and stay where I had been staying,” said Conrad. “Lou moved in, which was great because we got him out of his mother’s place.”

“We had little to say to each other,” Lou said of the deteriorating relationship with his parents. “I had gone and done the most horrifying thing possible in those days—I joined a rock band. And of course I represented something very alien to them.”

The hard edge of the Lower East Side kicked Lou into gear. The neighborhood was the loam, as Allen Ginsberg had said, out of which grew “the apocalyptic sensibility, the interest in mystic art, the marginal leavings, the garbage of society.” As Lou discovered John’s ascetic yet sprawling Lower East Side landscape with its population of what Jack Kerouac described as like-minded bodhisattvas, he found himself walking in the footsteps of Stephen Crane (who had come there straight from Syracuse University at the end of the previous century to write Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and wrote to a friend “the sense of a city is war”), John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, and, most recently, the beats. Indeed, Reed could have walked straight out of the pages of Ginsberg’s Howl for he too would, like one of the poem’s heroes, “purgatory his torso night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls.” Most importantly, the Ludlow Street inhabitants shared with Lou a communal feeling that society was a prison of the nervous system, and they preferred their individual experience. The gifted among them had enough respect for their personal explorations to put them in their art, just as John and Lou were doing, and make them new. Friends from college who visited him there couldn’t believe Lou was living in these conditions, but among the drug addicts and apocalyptic artists of every kind, Lou found, for the first time in his life, a real mental home.

The funky Ludlow Street had for a long time been host to creative spirits like the underground filmmakers Jack Smith and Piero Heliczer. When Lou moved in, an erratic but inventive Scotsman named Angus MacLise, who often drummed in La Monte’s group, lived in the apartment next door. Cale’s L-shaped flat opened into a kitchen, which housed a rarely used bathtub. Beyond it was a small living room and two bedrooms. The whole place was sparsely furnished, with mattresses on the floor and orange crates that served as furniture and firewood. Bare lightbulbs lit the dark rooms, paint and plaster chipped from the woodwork and the walls. There was no heat or hot water, and the landlord collected the $30 rent with a gun. When it got cold during February to March of 1965, they ran out into the streets, grabbed some wooden crates, and threw them into the fireplace, or often sat hunched over their instruments with carpets wrapped around their shoulders. When the toilet stopped up, they picked up the shit and threw it out the window. For sustenance they cooked big pots of porridge or made humongous vegetable pancakes, eating the same glop day in and day out as if it were fuel.

As he began to work with Cale to transform his stark lyrics into dynamic symphonies, he drew John into his world. John found Lou an intriguing, if at times dangerous, roommate. What they had in common was a fascination with the language of music and the permanent expression of risk. “In Lou, I found somebody who not only had artistic sense and could produce it at the drop of a hat, but also had a real street sense,” John Cale recalled. “I was anxious to learn from him, I’d lived a sheltered life. So, from him, I got a short, sharp education. Lou was exorcising a lot of devils back then, and maybe I was using him to exorcise some of mine.”

Lou maintained a correspondence with Delmore Schwartz that led his mentor to believe that he was still definitely on the path to distilling his essence in words. Lou wrote in one letter in early 1965, just after moving to New York City, “If you’re weak NY has many outlets. I can’t resist peering, probing, sometimes participating, other times going right to the edge before sidestepping. Finding viciousness in yourself and that fantastic killer urge and worse yet having the opportunity presented before you is certainly interesting.”

With John in tow, Lou would befriend a drunk in a bar and then, after drawing him out with friendly conversation, according to Cale, suddenly pop the astonishing question, “Would you like to fuck your mother?” John recalled this side of Lou during his early days at Ludlow Street, commenting, “From the start I thought Lou was amazing, someone I could learn a lot from. He had this astonishing talent as a writer. He was someone who’d been around and was definitely bruised. He was also a lot of fun then, though he had a dangerous streak. He enjoyed walking the plank and he could take situations to extremes you couldn’t even imagine until you’d been there with him. I thought I was fairly reckless until I met Lou. But I’d stop at goading a drunk into getting worse. And that’s where Lou would start.” This kind of behavior got them into some hairy situations, abhorred by Cale—who was not as verbally adroit as Lou and was at times agoraphobic and lived in fear of random violence. “I’m very insecure,” said Cale. “I use cracks on the sidewalk to walk down the street. I’d always walk on the lines. I never take anything but a calculated risk, and I do it because it gives me a sense of identity. Fear is a man’s best friend.”

Money was a constant problem. Although Lou had use of his mother’s car and could return to Freeport whenever he desired, and kept working at Pickwick until September, he had nothing beyond his $25.00 per week. He picked up whatever money he could in doing gigs with John, some of them impromptu. Once, they went up to Harlem to play an audition at a blues club. When the odd-looking couple were turned down by the club management, they went out to play on the sidewalk and raked in a sizable amount of money. “We made more money on the sidewalks than anywhere else,” John recalled.

“We were living together in a thirty-dollar-a-month apartment and we really didn’t have any money,” Lou testified. “We used to eat oatmeal all day and all night and give blood among other things, or pose for these nickel or fifteen-cent tabloids they have every week. And when I posed for them my picture came out and it said I was a sex-maniac killer and that I had killed fourteen children and had tape-recorded it and played it in a barn in Kansas at midnight. And when John’s picture came out in the paper, it said he had killed his lover because his lover was going to marry his sister, and he didn’t want his sister to marry a fag.”

Lou was creating the myth of his own Jewish psychodrama. It had become a custom of Lou’s to sicken people with stories of his shock treatment, drug use, and problems with the law. This was the sort of image-building Reed would, in a search for a personality and voice to call his own, perfect in the coming years, culminating in a series of infamous personas in the 1970s. “At that time Lou was relating to me the horrors of electric-shock therapy, he was on medication,” Cale recounted. “I was really horrified. All his best work came from living with his parents. He told me his mother was some sort of ex-beauty queen and his father was a wealthy accountant. They’d put him in a hospital where he’d received shock treatments as a kid. Apparently he was at Syracuse and was given this compulsory choice to do either gym or ROTC. He claimed he couldn’t do gym because he’d break his neck, and when he did ROTC, he threatened to kill his instructor. Then he put his fist through a window or something, and so he was put in a mental hospital. I don’t know the full story. Every time Lou told me about it he’d change it slightly.”

Lou and John resolved to form a band, orchestrate their material into a performable and recordable body of work, and venture out into the world to unleash their music. “When we first started working together, it was on the basis that we were both interested in the same things,” said Cale. “We both needed a vehicle; Lou needed one to carry out his lyrical ideas and I needed one to carry out my musical ideas. It seemed to be a good idea to put a band together and go up onstage and do it, because everybody else seemed to be playing the same thing over and over. Anybody who had a rock-and-roll band in those days would just do a fixed set. I figured that was one way of getting on everybody’s nerves—to have improvisation going on for any length of time.”

***

While Lou was wrapping himself in the troubled dreams and screams of his music, elevating himself, as one friend saw it, to another level of anger and coolness, and becoming progressively weirder, he began to put some distance between himself and his past. True, he still borrowed his mother’s car to go into dangerous parts of town to score drugs, and made the occasional trip or phone call home, but he began to amputate those friends with whom he had maintained contact post-Syracuse. The first to go was the stalwart Hyman. Living in Manhattan with his wife and going to law school, his former buddy had lost the ability to provide anything for Lou (save a free meal). Mishkin still fulfilled a function in that he had a big space in Brooklyn where Lou sometimes rehearsed, and a yacht called the Black Angel tethered at the 79th Street Boat Basin where they sometimes socialized, but Mishkin was maintaining contact with Lou at a price. “At that point he was putting me down more than he would have at Syracuse,” Ritchie recalled. “He was on the way to what he became.”

Parting ways is common among former schoolmates who move on to new jobs and allegiances. The amputations that struck more deeply and perhaps more definitively were made by Lou of the people who had been most influential, the ones who knew too much about him.

After a period of psychiatric rehabilitation, Lincoln Swados had re-emerged on the New York scene, living in the East Village not far from Lou. For a short time he was making a reputation for himself as a comic-strip illustrator and stand-up comedian. But soon he beat Lou hands down in the lunatic sweepstakes by stepping in front of an oncoming subway train, saying, “I am a very bad person, I am a very bad person …” Moving aside at the last minute, he survived—minus an arm and a leg. Subsequently, he became something of a fixture on the Lower East Side as a crippled street performer. Lincoln’s sister, Elizabeth, who had gone on to a distinguished career as a playwright, was apparently quite upset by the extent to which Lou, rather than opening up to Lincoln after this tragic episode, put even more distance between them. Lincoln, though, apparently had a perceptive understanding of his friend’s motives. “Lou pretends to be like us,” he told his ex-girlfriend, the journalist Gretchen Berg, “but he’s really not, he’s really someone else. He’s really a businessman who has very definite goals and knows exactly what he wants.”

Interestingly, Delmore Schwartz, who was now in the final year of his life, had drawn a similar conclusion. A Syracuse classmate of Lou’s who ran into Schwartz in Manhattan one day was astonished to discover that “he looked really bad. He had on a black raincoat which looked like it was covered with toothpaste stains. He seemed to have been drinking, maybe he was drunk. And the only thing he was interested in discussing was his dislike for everyone at Syracuse; how Lou Reed and Peter Locke were spies paid by the Rockefellers.” When Lou discovered that Schwartz was living in the dilapidated fleabag Dixie Hotel on West 48th Street, he went there to make contact, but Delmore let him have it with both barrels, screaming, “If you ever come here again, I’ll kill you!” scaring off a shaken Reed, who recalled, “He thought I’d been sent by the CIA to spy on him, and I was scared because he was big and he really would have killed me.”

The third mind in his life at Syracuse, Shelley Albin, reversed the amputation, cutting Lou out of her life when she married Ronald Corwin, who had been a big wheel on the Syracuse campus from 1963 to 1965 as the head of the local chapter of CORE, and whom Lou subsequently characterized as an “asshole airhead.” The marriage was a blow to Lou in as much as he still considered Shelley to be “his” girlfriend, even though he had neither seen nor apparently made any attempt to contact her since the summer of 1964. Still, he had not carried on a romantic relationship with anyone else. Shelley would remain a thorn in his side at least throughout the end of the 1970s, inspiring some of his most poignant, if vicious, love songs.

The only people Lou seemed incapable of amputating were his parents, who were vividly remembered by friends as a pair of never seen but constantly present just off stage ogrelike specters threatening at any moment to have Lou committed (despite the fact that he was now twenty-three years old and legally beyond their reach).

***

A month into his collaboration with Cale, one of those chance meetings that have often formed rock groups took place when Lou bumped into his friend from Syracuse, Sterling Morrison, walking in the West Village. Lou invited Sterling to Ludlow Street to play some music. By then Angus MacLise was playing drums around Lou and John. The next time Tony Conrad dropped by, he discovered that the Reed–Cale relationship had blossomed with MacLise and Morrison into what they were beginning to call a group. They had even made a first stab at a name, trying on for several months the Warlocks (which, incidentally, was the name being used at the same time on the West Coast by the proto-Grateful Dead), and were taping rehearsals. The music, heavily influenced by La Monte Young via MacLise and Cale, but equally by the doo-wop and white rock favored by Reed and Morrison, was ethereal and passionate.

Lou and Angus collaborated on an essay called “Concerning the Rumor That Red China Has Cornered the Methedrine Market and Is Busy Adding Paranoia Drops to Upset the Mental Balance of the United States,” a nutty, stoned credo of the band’s basic precepts. It read, in part, “Western music is based on death, violence and the pursuit of PROGRESS … The root of universal music is sex. Western music is as violent as Western sex … Our band is the Western equivalent to the cosmic dance of Shiva. Playing as Babylon goes up in flames.”

Their original precepts were to dedicate themselves with an almost religious fervor to their collective calling, to sacrifice being immediately successful, to be different, to hold on to a personality of their own, never to try to please anyone but themselves, and never to play the same song the same way. The group discovered and exploited musical traditions lost to their contemporaries, rejecting outright the popular conventions of the day. “We actually had a rule in the band,” Reed explained. “If anybody played a blues lick, they would be fined. Everyone was going crazy over old blues people, but they forgot about all those groups, like the Spaniels, people like that. Records like ‘Smoke from Your Cigarette,’ and ‘I Need a Sunday Kind of Love,’ the ‘Wind’ by the Chesters, ‘Later for You, Baby’ by the Solitaires. All those really ferocious records that no one seemed to listen to anymore were underneath everything we were playing. No one really knew that.”

“Our music evolved collectively,” Sterling reported. “Lou would walk in with some sort of scratchy verse and we would all develop the music. It almost always worked like that. We’d all thrash it out into something very strong. John was trying to be a serious young composer; he had no background in rock music, which was terrific, he knew no clichés. You listen to his bass lines, he didn’t know any of the usual riffs, it was totally eccentric. ‘Waiting for the Man’ was very weird. John was always exciting to work with.”

Their first complete success in terms of arrangements was “Venus in Furs.” When Cale initially added viola, grinding it against Reed’s “ostrich” guitar, illogically and without trepidation, a tingle of anticipation shot up his spine. They had, he knew, found their sound, and it was strong. Cale, who applied the mania to the sound, recalled, “It wasn’t until then that I thought we had discovered a really original, nasty style.” With the words of this song, wrote the British critic Richard Williams, “Lou Reed was to change the agenda of pop music once and for all. But it wasn’t just the words either. ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’ were given music that fitted their themes, and that didn’t sound like anything anybody had played before. Out went the blues tonality and the Afro-American rhythms, the basic components of all previous rock and roll. The prevailing sound was the grinding screech of Cale’s electric viola and Reed’s guitar feedback, while the tempo speeded up and slowed down according to the momentary requirements of the lyric.”

The chemistry of their personalities was more fragile. On one occasion, Lou played a new song he had written and John immediately started adding an improvised viola part. Sterling muttered something about its being a good viola part. Lou looked up and snapped, “Yeah, I know. I wrote the song just for that viola part. Every single note of it I knew in advance.” Although unable to outdo Lou verbally, John stuck to his guns through music. Several observers of the scene believed that John did more than that—he actually brought Lou Reed out of himself, completed him as it were. Some believe that without John Cale, the Lou Reed who became a legend would not have been born.

“It’s a fascinating relationship,” commented one friend. “That John worked with Cage and La Monte Young would be interesting enough if his career ended there, but that he met Lou and saw something in Lou despite the fact that Lou did not have the same kind of training that he had. I think he recognized that and must have done much in his way to nurture it and allowed it also to change the course of his life.”

Sterling Morrison hid this nervousness under a cloud of silence when anything went wrong. His personality often made him a useful buffer between Reed and Cale, but it could also cause problems when, without informing anybody that he was upset, he would simply clam up. Insecure about his playing, and in need of constant encouragement, Sterling stood in the background and tentatively muttered the choruses he was supposed to sing. One friend recalled that “it was typical of Sterling to play a wonderful solo and pretend he didn’t care, but then after an hour sidle up and ask, ‘How was the solo?’”

The joker in the deck was Angus MacLise. Not only did the band get the majority of their electricity from his apartment, but Angus was, by all accounts, a lovely, whimsical, gnomelike man, inspired, inspirational, and a serious methedrine addict. As a drummer, he was intuitive and complex, pounding out an amazing variety of textures and licks culled from cultures around the world. He was influenced a lot by his travels, by the dervishes of the Middle East and people he had met in India and Nepal. A visionary poet and mystic who also belonged to La Monte Young’s coterie, MacLise believed in listening to the essence of sound and relating it to one’s inner being. “Angus had dreamy notions of art—I mean real dreamy,” commented Sterling. “So did we, otherwise we could have made a whole lot more money. We were never in it for the money, we felt very strongly about the material, and we wanted to be able to play it. We said screw the marketing.”

Both Cale and MacLise continued to play with the Theater of Eternal Music through 1965 in between rehearsing with the Warlocks, although this contravened Lou’s need for total allegiance and commitment. This made La Monte Young almost a third mind in the construction of the band’s basic precepts. It was characteristic of that period and place—specifically the East Village—that certain figures, such as La Monte Young, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ginsberg, were ensconced with an adoring, disciplelike entourage of followers and fellow workers. It is significant that despite his two bandmates’ close connections with one of the most charismatic figures of the period, Lou Reed never met La Monte Young during his entire career with the Velvet Underground. Reed understood that people who really wanted to make it on their own—to be stars—had to keep their distance from the vortex of such strong groups.

In fact, the central paradox of Lou’s career—particularly in the 1960s—was that by entering the highly competitive, fast-paced world of rock and roll, he was by definition entering the one art form that relied completely and uniquely on intense, rapid, often nerve-racking collaboration—the thing he had the most trouble with. Soon his new bandmates would discover what the Eldorados had collided with at Syracuse—that Lou could be the sweetest, most charming companion socially, but he was virtually always a motherfucker to work with. His biggest problem, apart from demanding complete control and having a Himalayan ego, was the matter of credit. Just as the Rolling Stones had done when creating their music, the Velvet Underground worked up almost all of their songs collectively. Reed, who composed the simple, inspirational chord structures or sketchy lyrics, was under the impression, however, that he had single-handedly crafted masterpieces like “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Black Angel’s Death Song,” etc. In truth, although Reed undoubtedly supplied the brilliant lyrics and chord structures, the various and greater parts of the music—Cale’s viola; Morrison’s guitar; MacLise’s drumming—were invented by each individually. In short, Reed should have shared the majority of his writing credits with other members of the band. At first, of course, before the question of signing any contract came up, everything was copacetic—since there was nothing to argue about. The group was also under the impression, due to the nature of the material, that no one would ever record or cover their music. In time, however, this vital subject of artistic collaboration, credit, and, most importantly, of publishing rights (which is where the most money is made in rock and roll in the long run) would become the deepest wound in the band’s history of battles.

Still, in early 1965, Angus became a devoted, if crazy, friend to Lou, in the tradition of Lincoln Swados. Angus turned Lou on to the easily available pharmaceutical, methamphetamine hydrochloride, which was the drug of choice of a particularly intense group of visionary seekers centered around Jack Smith, and later, Andy Warhol. Methamphetamine hydrochloride—speed—is a key to understanding what set Reed and Cale’s sound aside from the mainstream of American pop in the second half of the 1960s, which was based more on soft and hallucinogenic drugs.

The tension between these four disparate personalities became the emotional engine of their music. Twenty years later, Reed would vigorously deny that the friction, particularly between him and Cale, was constructive. But this was simply one of his many attempts to write or control his own history. Morrison remembered, “I love Lou, but he has what must be a fragmented personality, so you’re never too sure under any conditions what you’re going to have to deal with. He’ll be boyishly charming, naive—Lou is very charming when he wants to be. Or he will be vicious—and if he is, you have to figure out what’s stoking the fire. What drug is he on, or what mad diet? He had all sorts of strange dietary theories. He’d eat nothing, live on wheat husks. He was always trying to move mentally and spiritually to some place where no one had ever gone before. He was often very antisocial and difficult to work with, but he was interesting, and people were interested in the conflict and some of the good things that came out of it.”

Some of the good things that came out of it were the songs that began to soar out over the gritty, dangerous drug supermarkets next to Ludlow Street from Eldridge to the Bowery. Lou, Sterling, Angus, and John hammered away at songs day in and day out, honing down the ones that would appear on the first Velvet Underground album two years later. According to Cale, “We actually worked very hard on the arrangements for the first album. We used to meet once a week for about a year, just to work on arrangements. I felt when we were doing those first arrangements back in Ludlow Street, ’65, that we had something that was going to last. What we did was unique, it was powerful. We spent our entire weekends going over and over and over the songs. We had no big problem with the work ethic; in fact, we were hanging on to the work ethic for dear life.”

By the spring of 1965, the music began to soar. John Cale remembered these earliest days of playing as their best. Cale contributed his unique electric viola, Morrison his hauntingly beautiful electric guitar, MacLise his ethereal Far Eastern drumming, and Reed his raw lyrics and hard delivery of them. Often the band improvised a riff and Reed simply made up the lyrics as he went along. “He was amazing,” Cale said. “One minute he’d be a southern preacher, then he’d change character completely and be someone totally different.”

“In my head it would be great if I could sing like AI Green,” Reed said. “But that’s in my head. It wasn’t true. I had to work out ways of dealing with my voice and its limitations. I wrote for a certain phrase and then bent the lyric to fit the melody. Figured out a way to make it fit.” In 1965 he was remarkably creative, carving a dark, macabre, Poe-like beauty out of Cale’s orchestration of the band’s musical chaos. “We heard our screams turn into songs,” Reed later wrote, “and back into screams again.”

Meanwhile, Cale, traveling back and forth between London and New York on his classical-scholarship funds, was bringing back the latest singles of the most exciting new British groups—the Who, and the Kinks, with whom they felt some affinity. It was an intensely creative, highly energized moment in rock history, and the band gorged themselves on everything they liked. In fact, Reed, who admired a wide range of musicians from Burt Bacharach to the Beach Boys, insisted that the best popular music should be as artistically recognized as poetry. “How can they give Robert Lowell a poetry prize?” he complained in another essay written the following year for Aspen magazine. “Richard Wilbur. It’s a joke. What about the Excellents, Martha and the Vandellas (Holland, Dozier, Jeff Barry, Elle Greenwich, Bacharach and David, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, the best songwriting teams in America). Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with the CHORDS. Phil Spector being made out to be some kind of aberration when he put out the best record ever made, ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.’”

Drugs were both a catalyst and inhibitor for the music. “There were no heavy addictions or anything, but enough to get in our way, hepatitis and so on,” Sterling recalled. “I would take pills, amphetamines, not psychedelics, we were never into that. Drugs didn’t inspire us for songs or anything like that. We took them for old-fashioned reasons—it made you feel good, braced you for criticism. It wasn’t just drugs, there were vitamins, ginseng, experimental diets. Lou once went on a diet so radical there was no fat showing on his central-nerve chart … his spinal column was raw!

“We took a lot of downers—that’s what I used to do. We did all sorts of junk. There was just so much going on, you had to keep up with it, that was all. I never got really A-headed out. But if you had two members of the band heavily sedated and the other on uppers, it is gonna affect your sensibilities. They wanted to do slow dirges and I wanted to do up-tempo songs!”

That summer two parallel events catapulted the Warlocks, who also occasionally used the in-your-face drug-innuendo name the Falling Spikes, out of the obscurity of Ludlow Street toward the limelight that would soon illuminate them.

First, through MacLise’s connections in the Lower East Side underground-film scene, the most potent movement of the moment embracing arguably the largest, most intelligent, and creative audience in New York, they were invited to play their rehearsal tapes or sometimes perform live to accompany screenings of the mostly silent underground films by Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, and Barbara Rubin, which were making a big splash that season. Nineteen sixty-five was the climactic year of the Lower East Side art community and in particularly the underground-film scene. One of the scene’s most outstanding, enigmatic figures, the poet and filmmaker Piero Heliczer, who often screened films at his enormous art factory loft on Grand Street, three blocks from 56 Ludlow Street, first offered the group a venue to play. Soon they were playing regularly at Heliczer’s and other artists’ spaces, sitting behind the film screens or off to the side. The most popular underground-film cheater space at the time was Jonas Mekas’s Cinémathèque, which became the band’s most regular venue. “Center stage of the old Cinémathèque was a movie screen, and between the screen and the audience a number of veils were spread out in different places,” recalled Sterling. “These were lit variously by slide projections and lights, as Piero’s films shone through them onto the screen. Dancers and incense swirled around, poetry and song rose up, while from behind the screen a strange music was generated by Lou Reed, John Cale, Angus, and me, with Piero back there too playing his sax.” Occasionally they would play bare-chested with painted torsos or try to look outrageous in some other way. They gained enthusiastic audiences, among whom Barbara Rubin would become their most influential fan.

Their second breakthrough came in July when they recorded a demo tape at 56 Ludlow Street that included early versions of “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” and “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.” “‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,’ that’s relentless,” said John Cale. “Lou’s often said, ‘Hey, some of these songs are just not worthy of human endeavor, these things are best left alone.’ He may be right.” The tape also included a song that Morrison later recalled as “Never Get Emotionally Involved with a Man, Woman, Beast or Child.” Cale took the tape over to London in the hope of securing a recording contract with one of the most adventurous British companies (after all, the Who and the Kinks used similar techniques), and there was considerable interest from, among others, Miles Copeland, who would go on to manage the Police.

By the fall, with their music mature and their audience growing, they felt that something was happening. This seemed confirmed in November when they stumbled upon the name they would keep, the Velvet Underground, “swiping it,” as Lou put it, from the title of a cheap paperback book about suburban sex Tony Conrad literally picked out of the gutter and brought to Ludlow Street. The name Velvet Underground seemed to fit perfectly their affiliations and intentions. That same month they got their first media boost when filmed playing “Venus in Furs” for a CBS documentary on New York underground film, featuring Piero Heliczer and narrated by Walter Cronkite. When the prestigious rock journalist Alfred G. Aronowitz offered to manage them, they accepted.

AI Aronowitz, who had an influential pop column in the New York Post and had written extensively about the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, was an important player on the New York rock scene. “Aronowitz was famous,” wrote one onlooker. “Aronowitz was the man who’d introduced Allen Ginsberg to Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan to the Beatles. He’d known Billie Holiday and Jack Kerouac and Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. He could get Ahmet Ertegun, George Plimpton, Clive Davis, or Willem de Kooning on the phone. He’d been Brian Jones’s American connection and Leon Russell’s New York guru and the one who introduced Pete Hamill to Norman Mailer. Only Aronowitz could write a rock column in a daily newspaper that’d make the whole country snap to attention.” His interest in the Velvets was a sure sign of impending success.

Suddenly, however, their unorthodox background clashed with their progress. As soon as Aronowitz presented them with their first paying job, opening for another group he managed, the Myddle Class, Angus MacLise, as Lou recalled, “asked a very intriguing question. He said, ‘Do you mean we have to show up at a certain time—and start playing—and then end?’ And we said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Well, I can’t handle that!’ And that was it. I mean, we got our electricity out of Angus’s apartment, but that was it. He was a great drummer.”

Lou, who put his beloved group before anything and anyone, never forgave MacLise. But as it developed, Angus’s withdrawal set in motion one last chance meeting that would perfectly complete the band. With the Aronowitz date booked for December 11, only days away, Lou and Sterling suddenly remembered that their Syracuse friend Jim Tucker had a sister who played drums and wondered if she might be able to fill in. Cale, horrified by the mere suggestion that a “chick” should play in their great group, had to be placated by the promise that it was strictly temporary. When he acquiesced, Lou shot out to the suburbs of Long Island to audition Moe Tucker. “My brother had been telling me about Lou for a while, because he had known him for a few years before that,” Maureen recalled. “I was nineteen at the time, living at home and had a job, keying stuff into computers. Lou came out to my house to see if I could really play the drums. He said, ‘Okay, that’s good.’”

When she first went to John’s apartment in New York to hear the band play their repertoire, Maureen, whose favorite drummer was Charlie Watts, was knocked out. She could see that Lou was a bona fide rock-and-roll freak, and the whole band was amazing. “When they played ‘Heroin,’ I was really impressed. You could just tell that this was different.”

Maureen’s drumming was a distillation of all the rock and roll that had gone before, and yet, influenced by African musicians, she played with mallets on two kettledrums while standing up. “I developed a really basic style,” she said, “mainly because I didn’t have any training—to this day I couldn’t do a roll to save my life, or any of that other fancy stuff, nor have I any wish to. I always wanted to keep a simple but steady beat behind the band so no matter how wild John or Lou would get, there would still be this low drone holding it together.” Methodical and steady as a person and a drummer, Maureen kept up the backbeat. But, young as she was in comparison to her older brother’s friends, she held her own, rarely keeping her opinions to herself when they mattered. Though bowled over by the Velvets’ music, she was not always impressed with the lifestyle that went along with it. She thought it was crazy for John and Lou to go out and look for firewood to heat their apartment. “It wasn’t very romantic,” she commented later about the flat. “It stank.”

The Velvet Underground’s first job took place at Summit High School in Summit, New Jersey, on December 11, 1965. They were squeezed in between a band called 40 Fingers and the Myddle Class. “Nothing could have prepared the kids and parents assembled in the auditorium for what they were about to experience that night,” wrote Rob Norris, a Summit student. “Our only clue was the small crowd of strange-looking people hanging around in front of the stage.”

What followed the gentle strains of 40 Fingers was a performance that would have shocked anyone outside of the most avant-garde audiences of the Lower East Side. The curtain rose on the Velvet Underground, revealing four long-haired figures dressed in black and poised behind a strange variety of instruments. Maureen’s tiny hermaphroditic figure stood behind her kettledrums, making everyone immediately wonder uneasily whether she was a girl or a boy. Sterling’s tall, angular frame shuffled nervously in the background. Lou and John, both in sunglasses, stared blankly at the astonished students, teachers, and parents, Cale wielding his odd-looking viola. As they charged into the opening chords of the cacophonous “Venus in Furs” louder than anyone in the room had ever heard music played, they rounded out an image aptly described as bizarre and terrifying. “Everyone was hit by the screeching urge of sound, with a pounding beat louder than anything we’d ever heard,” Norris continued. “About a minute into the second song, which the singer had introduced as ‘Heroin,’ the music began to get even more intense. It swelled and accelerated like a giant tidal wave which was threatening to engulf us all. At this point most of the audience retreated in horror for the safety of their homes, thoroughly convinced of the dangers of rock and roll music.” According to Sterling, “the murmur of surprise that greeted our appearance as the curtain went up increased to a roar of disbelief once we started to play ‘Venus’ and swelled to a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment by the end of ‘Heroin.’”

“Backstage after their set, the viola player was seen apologizing profusely to an outraged Myddle Class entourage for scaring away half the audience,” Norris concluded. “AI Aronowitz was philosophical about it, though. He said, ‘At least you’ve given them a night to remember,’ and invited everyone to a party at his house after the show.”

Observing that the group seemed to have an oddly stimulating and polarizing effect on audiences, Aronowitz advised them to get some experience playing in public by doing a residency at a small club. Four days later they started a two-week stand at the Cafe Bizarre on MacDougal Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. “We played some covers, ‘Little Queenie,’ ‘Bright Lights Big City,’ the black R-and-B songs Lou and I liked—and as many of our own songs as we had,” Sterling reported. “We needed a lot more of our own material, so we sat around and worked; that’s when we wrote ‘Run Run Run,’ all those things. Lou usually would have some lyrics written, and something would grow out of that with us jamming. He was a terrific improvisational lyricist. I remember we had the Christmas tree up, but no decorations on it, we were sitting around busy writing songs, because we had to, we needed them that night!”

This fortuitous opportunity was pivotal for their career. First, since there was so little time between the two dates, they decided to keep Maureen, initially much to Cale’s chagrin. Moe remembered standing in the street with John, who kept saying, “No chicks in the band. No chicks.” Second, at the very time they were playing at the Cafe Bizarre to unreceptive tourists twice a night for $5 apiece per night, the pop artist and entrepreneur Andy Warhol was looking around for a group to manage for a nightclub he had been asked to host by the theatrical impresario Michael Myerberg (who had brought Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to the USA in 1956). Barbara Rubin, for whose film Christmas on Earth the band had played in their previous incarnation, was spending a good deal of time at the Warhol studio, the famous Silver Factory, and thought the Velvets would be the perfect band for Warhol’s upcoming discotheque. She took two of Warhol’s leading talent scouts, the film director Paul Morrissey and the underground film star Gerard Malanga, to see them. Malanga, who has just starred in Warhol’s version of A Clockwork Orange, Vinyl, was an outstandingly handsome young man with a potent sexual aura. Combining the looks of Elvis Presley and James Dean with the long hair of Mick Jagger, Malanga dressed head to foot in black leather and carried, purely for dramatic effect, a black leather bullwhip, which he wore wrapped around the shoulder of his jacket. During the Velvets’ set, Gerard suddenly leapt up from his table onto the empty dance floor. All of the other customers were too terrified by the music to move. Making ample use of his whip, he undulated in a sinister, erotic dance that perfectly illustrated the visceral, throbbing music. The band was dumbfounded by Gerard’s mind-blowing performance. In the intermission Lou and John went over to his table and told him to come back and dance anytime. Instantly spotting a starring role for himself in the scenario, Malanga thought the group would be perfect for Warhol.

Lou performing in the Paraphernalia footage of Gerard Malanga’s Film Notebooks, 1966. (Victor Bockris)

The following night Malanga returned to the Cafe Bizarre with Rubin, Warhol’s business manager Paul Morrissey, and Warhol himself, accompanied by an entourage including his reigning superstar Edie Sedgwick. They were thrilled by the weird and raucous performance of the Velvet Underground. Not only did the group do the same thing Warhol’s films did—make people uncomfortable—but their name, and the fact that they sang about taboo subjects, perfectly fit Warhol’s program. To top it off, Morrissey was intrigued by the band’s androgynous drummer. After the set Barbara brought the Velvets over to Andy’s table. The curly-haired Lou Reed, with his shy smile, shared a temperament with Warhol. He sat next to the pop artist and the two of them immediately hit it off. “Lou looked good and pubescent then,” Warhol recalled. “Paul thought the kids out on the Island would identify with that.”

Morrissey, who was the most influential person in Warhol’s world after Malanga, was fascinated: “John Cale had a wonderful appearance and he played the electric viola, which was a real novelty; but best of all was Maureen Tucker, the drummer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her because you couldn’t work out if she was a boy or a girl. Nobody had ever had a girl drummer before. She made no movement, she was so sedate. I proposed that we sign a contract with them, we’d manage them and give them a place to play.”

“We looked at each other,” Lou Reed remembered, “and said, ‘This sounds like really great fun.’”

Chapter Six

Fun at the Factory

1966

Reality was the key.

Lou Reed

When Andy met the Velvets, they were unglamorous and unknown. “Andy, the problem is these people have no singer,” said Paul Morrissey. “There’s a guy who sings, but he’s got no personality and nobody pays the slightest attention to him.” In the following days Warhol and Morrissey transformed them from a four-piece unit led by Lou to a band fronted by the stunningly beautiful singer-actress Nico, a statuesque German blonde who had walked into Warhol’s studio a week earlier. Lou initially didn’t want her to be their chanteuse, but the arrangement was worked out under the convincing influence of Warhol’s business manager, Paul Morrissey, who “just didn’t think Lou had the personality to stand in front of the group and sing. The group needed something beautiful to counteract the screeching ugliness they were trying to sell, and the combination of a beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed. Right away that sour little Lou Reed bristled. He was hostile to Nico from the start. I told them I thought that Nico could be part of the Velvet Underground and just fit in there under that name.” Quick to grasp the essence of the problem, Lou replied, “Let’s keep Nico separate in this. The Velvet Underground—and Nico.”

“Andy was this catalyst, always putting jarring elements together,” Lou noted. “Which was something I wasn’t so happy about. He wanted us to use Nico. Andy said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta have a chanteuse.’ I said, ‘Oh, Andy, give us a break.’ But we went along with it at the time. Andy wanted her so he got her.” Unbeknownst to Lou, back in 1963 Andy had tried to put together his own rock-and-roll band with none other than La Monte Young and Walter De Maria. Now, in as much as Warhol saw himself in Nico, Andy could fantasize that he was fronting the band.

The most remarkable thing about Lou Reed’s progress in 1966 was his uncharacteristic willingness to accept Warhol’s control in order to achieve the extraordinary success it would bring him. But, in the process, Lou made something of a Faustian bargain with Andy. Warhol had miraculously pulled the group out of the toilet, elevating them to his level when he was at the height of his fame. In exchange, however, Andy demoted Lou from fronting the band to being, employing a phrase by Nico, its “janitor of lunacy.” Imagine what would have happened if Andrew Loog Oldham had tried to pull the same moves on Mick Jagger, promoting, for example, Brian Jones over his head as the front man, or indeed if Brian Epstein had suggested to John or Paul that they take a backseat in the Beatles and let George Harrison come up and front them. It is very rare that rock groups in their first flush of success find lead singers and songwriters willing to bow into a background role at the very moment of their initial triumph. It revealed several sides of Lou. First, his ambivalence about being in the spotlight. Second, his unusual ability to accept what would be best for the band without thinking about his own fame. Third, his discipleship to Andy Warhol.

Andy choreographed his group within a context that had been predicted by one of Lou’s favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote one hundred years earlier, “The next step may be the electrification of all mankind by the representation of a play that may be neither tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, pantomime, melodrama or spectacle, as we now comprehend these terms, but which may retain some portion of the idiosyncratic excellence of each, while it introduces a new class of excellence as yet unnamed because as yet undreamed of in the world.” It was also based on—some people said ripped off from—the 1965 multimedia performances of La Monte Young and Piero Heliczer as well as the “happenings” that were rife in the art world of the early sixties. In the band’s first performance, at a dinner for a psychiatrists’ convention at the elegant Delmonico’s Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York on the night of January 13, 1966, the group turned the tables on their audience, putting on an act of resentment and rage that Lou characterized as “fun.”

Originally, the psychiatrists had invited Warhol to give an after-dinner speech at their convention. When the artist who had enraged the underground film community by screening epics like Sleep and Blowjob asked if he could show some films instead, they indulged him. Now, as one hundred of the leading psychiatrists in America settled behind coffee and snifters of brandy ready to analyze the contents of the blank screen at the far end of the dining area, their tranquillity was shattered by Barbara Rubin, who came screaming into the room brandishing a movie camera with a powerful sun-gun lamp atop it. The seemingly crazed woman rushed from table to table shoving the camera into their faces and baraging them with questions like, “Do you eat her out?” and “Is your penis big enough?” No sooner had they been blown out of their after-dinner stupor by this horrible spectacle than an unbelievably loud cacophony erupted at the far end of the room, and they swiveled in their seats to see a brand of mangy-looking young men in dirty denim jeans and jackets performing a howling song about heroin. Behind them was a starkly lit, high-contrast black-and-white film of a man tied to a chair being tortured, in front of which a real man was brandishing a whip. Embarrassed, insulted, and perplexed, the psychiatrists reacted by grabbing their partners and storming the exits, or sitting forward with benevolent smiles trying to “understand” the spectacle in front of them. As Warhol stood off to the side, staring impassively at the panicked throng with a trace of a smile, and Nico stared impassively from the stage, Lou reached the climax of his paean to nullification, intoning, “And I guess that I just don’t know, and I guess that I just don’t know.” The event was reported in the New York Times the following day under the title “Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists.”

The tension between the band and Nico was somewhat ameliorated in the following weeks when Lou fell madly in love with the tall European with long flaxen hair. According to Richard Mishkin, to whom Lou expressed his emotions about her, Lou loved the fact that Nico was big. According to Lou, “Nico’s the kind of person that you meet and you’re not quite the same afterwards. She has an amazing mind.”

Lou, John, and Sterling had all moved to 450 Grand Street at the end of 1965. Now Lou would often stay at the apartment Nico was subletting on Jane Street, where he wrote three songs for her. “One night Nico came up to me and said, ‘Oh, Lou, I’ll be your mirror,’” he recalled. “A close friend of mine always said that I bring out the idiocy in people, but I can also bring out something in them which is the best they’ve ever done. It’s like with Nico and John Cale. They were fantastic with the Velvet Underground. They helped produce a great sound then. When I gave Nico a song of mine to sing, I knew she would totally understand what was being said and perform it from that standpoint.” Nico described Lou as “very soft and lovely. Not aggressive at all. You could just cuddle him like a sweet person when I first met him, and he always stayed that way. I used to make pancakes for him. Everybody loved him around the Factory; he was rather cute, you know, and he said funny things.”

According to Cale, “We had no idea what Nico could bring to the band, it was just something Andy came up with and it was very difficult to accept. Lou kind of fell in love with the idea, but we didn’t understand it.” In fact, with Warhol’s encouragement, Nico became something of an inspiration for Lou. “Andy said I should write a song about Edie Sedgwick. I said, ‘Like what?’ and he said, ‘Oh, don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou?’ So I wrote ‘Femme Fatale’ and we gave it to Nico.” But this also caused conflicts within the group. The tough-minded Moe felt Nico “was a schmuck, from the first. She was this beautiful person who had traveled through Europe being a semistar. Her ego had grown very large. The songs Lou wrote for her were great, and she did them very well. Her accent made them great, but there was a limit! I kept to myself until she wanted to sing ‘Heroin.’ But then I had to speak my piece.” “There were problems from the very beginning,” added Sterling, “because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for Nico, and she wanted to sing them all—‘l’m Waiting for the Man,’ ‘Heroin,’ all of them. We said, ‘No, no!’ She wasn’t very egotistical, she was out of it. I always explained it by saying she’s not very good at English.”

“When I started with the Velvets, I wanted to sing Lou’s song ‘I’m Waiting for the Man,’” said Nico, “but he wouldn’t let me. I guess he thought I didn’t understand its meaning, and he was right. And we had the song ‘Heroin,’ which I thought was a provocation. But I have to say that Lou and John took heroin, and those songs were songs of realism.” Cale looked on at what transpired with Welsh amusement. “Lou and Nico had some kind of an affair, both consummated and constipated,” he said. “At the time he wrote these psychological love songs for her like ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Femme Fatale,’ which gave the band a new dimension. It was a difficult situation, I must admit, and sometimes I don’t know how we accepted it. Still, Andy brought her into the band, and we nearly always accepted Andy’s decisions. He was so much on our side, so enthusiastic about everything we did, that we couldn’t help it.”

“My favorite Lou Reed song is … aah … ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’” Warhol told an interviewer many years later in a mild put-down. “By Nico. She wrote it, I think.”

Lou himself recalled most vividly two memories of Nico and Andy that had an eerie similarity: “I sat in an ice cream shop late one night watching Andy take the hand of a less than ordinary person sitting opposite him and slap his [Andy’s] own face with it. It somehow reminded me of Delmore raging in a bar, asking me to call the White House to tell them we were aware of the plot.

“I loved after-hours bars. It’s where I first saw someone beaten to death. The woman I was with, Nico, threw a glass that shattered in a mob guy’s face. He thought the man behind me did it.”

January to April 1966 was the golden period for the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol. After the psychiatrists’ convention, Warhol shot a scintillating film of the band rehearsing at the Factory, Symphony of Sound, which remains the single best visual record of the Velvet Underground. They also recorded soundtracks for two of Warhol’s best movies shot at the beginning of the year, Hedy and More Milk Yvette.

In February 1966, Andy appeared on WNET TV in New York, coyly announcing in his usual deadpan voice, “I’m sponsoring a new band. It’s called the Velvet Underground. Since I don’t really believe in painting anymore, I thought it would be a nice way of combining music, art, and films all together. The whole thing’s being auditioned tomorrow at nine o’clock. If it works out, it might be very glamorous.” That week, with the help of Barbara Rubin, he launched the Velvets at the underground film center Cinémathèque, as part of a multimedia show called Andy Warhol Uptight, a paean to conflict, which developed out of the psychiatrists’ convention. Gerard Malanga came into his own as the whip dancer, improvising a series of story dances that illustrated Lou’s songs. Behind the band was a backdrop of Warhol films, most of which starred Edie Sedgwick, like Beauty #2. Nico sang three songs and rattled a tambourine. “They also played the record of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine,’” she said, “because I didn’t have enough to sing otherwise. I had to stand there and sing along with it. I had to do this every night for a week. It was the most stupid concert I have ever done.”

According to one disappointed observer, these shows amounted to nothing more than “ritual dances devised by dope fiends with nothing better to do.” But as the photographer Nat Finkelstein, who was working on a photo documentary of the Factory, remembered, “From the first time I saw them I said, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow! They’re going to kick these guys out on their ass for the next ten years!’ Everybody hated them. The whole macho East Village group really hated the Velvets—just put-down after put-down—the hatred had nothing to do with their music; a lot of it had to do with the gay image. Also, Lou and John were really good musicians, whereas Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg [of the Fugs] wouldn’t have known music if it bit them on the ass.”

The engagement was a hit on every level. Warhol successfully launched his multimedia show, and the group managed to make some money while sending shock waves through the city. “They made twelve thousand dollars, I think,” recalled Morrison. “A lot of people would come to see any kind of Warhol endeavor. The first time we played ‘Heroin,’ two people fainted. I didn’t know if they OD’d or fainted. So that was our real debut—playing in Manhattan.” Reed characterized the band’s performance at the Cinémathèque as “a dog whistle for all the freaks in the city.”

Outside of a small coterie who recognized him, Lou was not seen as the leader of the group. Nico became the Mick Jagger of the Velvet Underground, while Lou took the more humble Keith Richards role. This initially caused some tension, but Lou may not have minded being left out of the spotlight since he often felt uncomfortable onstage. “At the age when identity is a problem some people join rock and roll bands and perform for other people who share the same difficulties,” he later wrote in a revealing essay on the pitfalls of pop stardom. “The age difference between performer and beholder in rock is not large. But unfortunately, those in the fourth tier assume those on stage know something they don’t. Which is true. It simply requires a very secure ego to allow yourself to be loved for what you do rather than for what you are, and an even larger one to realize you are what you do. The singer had a soul but he feels he isn’t loved off-stage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only on stage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia.” Also, by this time Lou was so taken by Andy and his world that he would probably have done anything Andy suggested. The same month Andy signaled Lou’s acceptance into his domain by making him the subject of one of his Screen Tests—three-minute films focusing on the frozen gaze of a Factory citizen.

Film frame enlargement from Screen Tests by Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. (Archives Malanga)

Warhol’s studio, a large, floor-through single room in a factory building on West 47th Street in Manhattan, was called the Factory. Here Warhol painted his pop pictures, made his movies, and held court as the hippest, hardest bellwether of his times. The famous room was painted and tinfoiled silver. The people who worked with him and hung around him were the most hard-core group in New York at the time. They all dressed in black jeans and black T-shirts. Their drug of choice was amphetamine. The majority of them were gay. They were exotic, talented people, young, full of energy and ideas, satellites.

When Lou Reed joined Andy Warhol, Warhol was thirty-six, wealthy, and the successful driving force behind a devout cult of artistic collaborators. Reed was twenty-three, strong as stainless steel, confident, and as ambitious as his new mentor. Lou Reed had been described by friends and enemies over the years as “a control freak,” “a schizophrenic,” “an asshole.” Not one of those descriptions was “fun.” Andy Warhol had been described as “a mad queen,” “a Zen warrior,” “a creep.” None of them was “fun,” either. And yet, essentially, over the next four months, from January to April 1966, fun was exactly what Lou and Andy had together. Their relationship was exemplified by a photograph at the Factory that year in which they stood eyeballing each other with face-splitting grins in front of a life-size, full-figure Warhol painting of Elvis Presley with a drawn six-gun. Andy, the Lionhearted Leo—his head, with its strong, high cheekbones and muscular jaw, cocked slightly to one side—revealed the Draculian character he possessed in the pencil-thin, sinewy body beneath his trademark black outfit. He looked, one observer later noted, like Sylvester staring at Tweety Pie. Lou, the uncharacteristically shark-hearted Pisces, stared in turn at Andy with all the gaminlike love he had been withholding from his father since he was twelve, with the adoration of a disciple who has just met the master who will open the gates of heaven and hell.

Andy seduced Lou by showering his prodigious ego with the highest compliments. “Andy told me that what we were doing with music was the same thing he was doing with movies and painting, i.e., not kidding around,” Lou recalled. “To my mind, nobody in music was doing anything that even approximated the real thing, with the exception of us. The first thing I liked about Andy was that he was very real. His ideas would stun me. His way of looking at things would stop me dead in my tracks. Sometimes, I would go for days thinking about something he said.”

Lou seduced Andy into spending the next five months trying to make Lou into a marketable persona that would make the most money in the shortest time—in short, a rock-and-roll star. “If Andy had been able to achieve the Walt Disney Hollywood status, Lou would have been able to change his persona to be like an Elvis,” pointed out Factory manager Billy Name. “Andy would have put out Lou Reed movies: Lou in Hawaii, Lou in the army, Lou as a half-breed trying to decide whether he should like the Comanches and stay with the family that raised him.”

Lou would make a career out of finding mentors. In Warhol, Reed found the all-permissive father-mother-protector-catalyst-collaborator he had always craved. In turn, Warhol saw his younger self in Reed and wanted to recapture that vitality. They were both isolated people who kept their innermost thoughts to themselves, and each could empathize with the other’s masked vulnerability. Each had had nervous breakdowns. For Lou a whole new world of possibilities opened up.

He made himself completely available to Warhol—just as he had done with Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse—without selling him his soul. For a time he was able to drop his need to be the only genius in the room. Warhol taught Reed that an artist was a person who had to work hard and not waste time. Whenever Andy asked Lou how many songs he’d written that day, whatever the answer, he would urge, “You should do more.” He taught Lou that work was everything, and that Lou came to believe that his music was so beautiful that people should be willing to die for it. It was the kind of effect Andy Warhol often had on his followers.

Lou’s position at the Factory was significantly different from that of the other members of the band. “When the Velvets came over to the Factory, Lou was the only one I talked to,” recalled Factory manager and photographer Billy Name. “Sterling rarely talked much. John would talk occasionally, and Moe was fun—she would talk—but Lou and I always had the bond thing.” Of all the Velvets, Lou spent the most time at the Factory and was the closest thing to Warhol.

Warhol was not, however, an easy man to work with. Despite taking great joy in his success, he had, like Reed, a resentment of the conditions of his life that never stopped bugging him. “He was an artist who was neither understood nor accepted at the time but who, having been ridiculed and laughed at, had perseverance and ambition for success and “la gloire,” as strong as that of any king in Shakespeare’s history plays,” wrote Gerard Malanga in an introduction to his Secret Diaries. “It was a desire that neither his coterie nor his celebrity could satisfy. Warhol was a man of parts, most of them contradictory, which accounts for his nickname, “Drella,” composed equally of Dracula and Cinderella. He was a person of much generosity and kindness—yet he could slice a person at a glance. Warhol would try to organize other people’s emotions in the same way he drew up shopping lists. He had the unique power of playing people off one another. He could be kind, cruel, friendly, catty, humane, overriding, passionately wild for “la gloire.” And he was also all that was truly vulnerable. Warhol was painfully shy, which accounted for the group of young people he surrounded himself with. He was possessed by the people he had gathered around him, yet he was habitually exploiting, betraying, or otherwise mistreating those who were close, or seemed close to him.”

In an essay, “From the Bandstand,” he wrote about music that year, Lou drew attention to one of the key concepts they both emphasized in their work, repetition. “Every head in America must know the last three drum choruses of ‘Dawn’ by the Four Seasons. Paradiddles. Repetition. Repetition is so fantastic … Andy Warhol’s movies are so repetitious sometimes, so so beautiful. Probably the only interesting films made in the U.S. Rock and roll films. Over and over and over. Reducing things to their final joke. Which is pretty. ‘Sally go ’round the roses / roses they won’t hurt you.’”

“The real idea was to listen all the time,” Reed said. “He had great ideas at the drop of a hat. But so did I. The thing was, he was there. There were a couple of people who were floating around who were there who always seemed to get in touch with one another one way or another. In other words, no other band could have been able to hold it up. It would have been overwhelmed by the lights or the movies. That’s not, in fact, what happened. And that’s because what we did was very strong.”

“You scared yourself with music,” Warhol told him. “I scared myself with paint.”

“It was like heaven,” said Reed of his early days at the Factory. “I watched Andy; I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things. I used to write it down.”

All the Velvets seemed equally snowed by Andy. “It was like bang!” Warhol superstar Mary Woronov recalled. “They were with Andy and Andy was with them and they backed him absolutely. They would have walked to the end of the earth for him. And that happened in one day!”

Gretchen Berg, who often visited the Factory to interview Warhol, noticed that Reed maintained a strong position there. “Lou was very quiet. He almost never spoke to anyone, and when addressed, he would not answer,” she recalled. “He would act as if you weren’t there. I respected him. I saw that he was an artist of some kind and he had his group around him. They were always quite nice, but they always kept their distance. It was a bit snobbish. I also had the feeling that Mr. Warhol created the atmosphere of a family around him and there was a certain amount of competition. He had a lot of power with Andy on a one-on-one basis. You had the feeling that Lou was someone rather special. He was the brother who was away for many years and had to be caught when he came in. The father must now speak to Lewis, who’s just come in, because Lewis will not speak to anyone else but father. It was exactly that feeling. No one else must speak to Lou. And then Lewis would speak to father and then leave. If you came up to him, it was not as if he was rude exactly, but he would just look at you and take a puff of his cigarette. Lou was very much in the background, but he kept himself in the background. There was always something that was being created in the background. While everyone else was going through their thing and living and having all this attention, this in the background was going on very quietly and very steadily. He was like Paul Morrissey in a way.

“There was tension between Paul and everyone. I think he felt that he must not say anything about Lou Reed because he had no power over Lou. Lou Reed came in when he liked, left when he liked.”

In Warhol’s Factory, Reed found a laboratory for his artistic and sexual explorations, a milieu full of psychodrama providing endless fodder for his songs, and a nurturing environment through which he could bring music to the world. “Everyone was very campy,” Cale said. “There was a lot of game playing. Lou felt at home in that environment. I didn’t really.” Before the Factory, Reed had created scenarios for his songs; Warhol provided the cast and the telling details. More importantly, the Factory laid bare all the sexual fantasies and taboos that Reed had been struggling to conceal since his days on Long Island. In Warhol’s light Lou metamorphosed from a rock musician with a negative attitude and a host of complexes into a glamorous member of the Warhol entourage. The fragile, gamin Reed was equally attractive to men and women, looking on the one hand like a pretty girl with his curly brown hair and tentative smile, and exhibiting on the other hand an insouciant attitude regarding sex that presented an ambivalent challenge. Reed soon abandoned the sweaters, casual jackets, and loafers he’d worn since leaving Syracuse and took on the Factory image—Warhol-inspired black leather jacket, boots, and shades. Like Warhol, Reed masked his vulnerable side within the armor of a tough, impenetrable image.

Warhol had often gone on the record saying that sex was too much trouble, but he was fascinated by the idea of sex, and many of his films were semipornographic in a distanced, ironic way. Reed also maintained a detached stance with regard to sex. As a friend recalled, “Lou was mostly a voyeur. In my experience he never had any sustained interest in either sex. Sex didn’t offer Lou enough—he was just really bored by it.” One budding transvestite, Jackie Curtis, tried to have sex with Lou. “He was very tall and heavily built, a big boy,” recalled a mutual friend. “He was eighteen, but he looked about fourteen. And he would come right up to Lou and say, ‘Hi, gee, how are you!’ And Lou would not respond at all. And Jackie would say, ‘Well, thank you very much.’ And then he’d come back to me and say, ‘God, what did I say?’ He was very funny. Then he would go rushing up the next time and Lou would put his head back in an aloof manner.”

Lou was not, however, always aloof. “Lou tried to put the make on me once,” Malanga remembered. “It didn’t go anywhere. He was the aggressor and I was gentle with him but … We came back from a gig real late—we were traveling somewhere and we came back to New York really late and he called up Barbara Hodes and Barbara put the two of us up that night. And I remember Lou making advances toward me under the sheet. I think in the end we ended up just hugging each other. I kind of sent him the signal that I wasn’t interested.”

Reed was more interested in the sexual role-playing of transvestisms and S&M. Yet this didn’t stop him from having a number of friendships with men and women. At the Factory he met Danny Fields, a young medical school dropout with whom he developed a connection that lasted over thirty years. “I first heard ‘Heroin’ and I thought it was beautiful music,” Fields recalled. “But I was terrified of Lou. I was always trying to figure out things to say to him that would be sharp. Everybody was in love with him back then. Around 1966, he was the sexiest boy in town.”

“Lou’s relationship with Danny Field was collegial,” explained Gerard Malanga. “They were in the same business and there was a lot of history between them. Lou and I may have crashed at Danny’s one night. Danny’s pad was basically a crash pad. Thank God for Danny. We would have been homeless. We always knew he could be relied to put us up. He was living on West 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues above a coffee shop, which in those years was a very unfashionable place to live. So Danny was a pioneer. He had a floor-through loft in a two-story building. There were couches and pillows and mattresses on the floor with a few people staying there.”

In the midst of all the ego collisions and role-playing, screaming guitars, and parties, Fields observed, “We all had this feeling about Lou—that he would bury us. He was much too smart to get sucked into the whirlpool. Others may have been too fragile, too beautiful to survive—but he knew what he was doing. I was ever so in love with Lou. Everyone was in love with him—me, Edie, Andy, everyone. I thought he was just the hottest-looking, sexiest person I ever had seen. He was a major sex object of everybody in New York in his years with the Velvet Underground. The Velvets were ahead of everybody. It was the only thing that ever, ever, ever swept me off my feet as music since early Mahler. They were a revolution.

“The anguish Lou was reflecting upon was not his own. He was personalizing what he’d seen. As an artist he kept his distance and refused to be destroyed by it. Oh, he’d had his ups and downs, but he’s in no way a tragic figure. He simply had the brilliance to turn it all into art.”

Another Factory denizen, Tally Brown, said, “Lou is one of the most interesting lyricists of urban life in the world. He also is one of the best theoreticians about rock and roll. I mean, he can write about it and talk about it. He’s very verbal. Besides that, he’s a fascinating, fucked-up guy.”

After Warhol and Fields, Reed made strong, long-term connections with Billy Name, Ondine, and Gerard, the three strongest influences on Warhol. Each man had his separate function for Lou. Factory manager, photographer, and permanent resident Billy Name provided an outlet for Lou’s mystical side. Lou and Billy spent hours hanging out and talking about their favorite subjects such as Eastern religion and matters of the occult. “When I first met Lou, we immediately bonded as if we were guys who grew up on the same block,” Name recalled. “He’s from Long Island, I’m from Poughkeepsie, with the same experience. We just got along so great we were like best buddies. We had a good love for each other and great respect. Lou was a great conversationalist, very congenial, very interested, never the type of person who would just say what he wanted to say—he explored what you were and heard what you said, always with camaraderie.” Lou saw Billy as “a divinity in action on Earth. He did pictures that were unspeakably beautiful. Just pure space. For the people who have one foot on Earth and another foot on Venus, they would like that kind of picture because it was out-and-out space.”

Gerard Malanga was a widely published and well-connected poet who was familiar with many of the poets Lou was interested in, including Delmore Schwartz. “I identified more with Lou on a poetry level than on a rock-and-roll level,” said Malanga, “even when I was choreographing for the Velvets. I identified with Lou as a fellow poet as opposed to someone making music. Lou was a good guy to bring around. If you tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Let’s go here,’ he would go. He wouldn’t ask, ‘Where are we going?’ and ‘What for?’ and all that. He was good to have with you. He was good to hang out with. But he wasn’t very humorous, and he didn’t speak much. He wasn’t an articulate person.”

If Billy and Lou connected on a metaphysical level, and Gerard and Lou connected through poetry, then it was with Ondine that Lou shared his love of drugs. Like Lou and many denizens of the Factory, Ondine had chosen amphetamine as his drug of choice, and he became Lou’s main supplier. “He was intelligent about his use of drugs,” said Ondine. “He knew what he was doing, he studied it. I always thought that the whole heroin thing was an artistic expression. A lot of people experimented with heroin.”

Lou’s most famous song may be “Heroin,” but the drug most associated with his image was undoubtedly amphetamine. It’s easy to see why. According to the Amphetamine Manifesto by Harvey Cohen, “It is a drug for those who despair: shy, retarded, unhappy creatures who need love and had been rejected and had their natural instincts rejected and almost atrophied. Amphetamine is very much an overachiever’s type of chemical. Methedrine rolls back the stone from the mouth of the cave. It is the most profound of all drugs, the most unexplored and the freakiest. It can be so many things; there’s always a place to go behind methedrine that you’ve never been before. Amphetamine stimulates the central nervous system. It lessens the patient’s inhibitions, relieving him of pent-up emotions often associated with some previously suppressed trauma. The ideal patient for this treatment has an obsessional, tense personality and has difficultly expressing his real feelings, particularly if they are aggressive. Patients with obsessional personalities become relaxed, but are awake and alert after injection.”

Amphetamine had two vital functions for Lou creatively. By allowing him to stay up for three to five days at a time without sleep, it altered the synapses of his brain, cutting off a lot of static that had previously stymied the flow of words, and gave him—particularly in writing—the energy to pursue each vision to its conclusion. (One can see its effects in his essay “From the Bandstand,” published in Aspen Magazine, December 1966, or in songs such as “White Light/White Heat”—pure amphetamine—or “Murder Mystery”).

Methedrine is also, perhaps, the greatest male aphrodisiac, giving a man an erection that could break a plate, as well as Homeric duration in the act. On top of that, the methedrine available in 1966 was pharmaceutical and cheap. Being a favored customer, Lou could buy a film canister of the powder, which he cooked up and shot, for as little as $5.

The “amphetamine glories” who gathered around the central figure of Ondine at the Factory saw themselves as religious, heroic, and immortal. Of course they weren’t, and many of them, like Ondine, died sad deaths. But when they lived, they lived beyond the barriers of society. As Lou wrote in one of his finest pieces of prose, the liner notes to Metal Machine Music, “For those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush. Professional, no sniffers please, don’t confuse superiority (no competition) with violence, power or other justifications. The tacit speed agreement with self. We did not start World War I, II, or III, or the Bay of Pigs for that matter. My week beats your year.”

At first, the only dissenting opinion about Lou at the Factory came from Paul Morrissey, who felt that Nico was a far strong performer and presence onstage. “Lou was always ill at ease as a performer, and that’s what his act still is—a remote, ill-at-ease person.” The two of them shared a certain hardness, which led one observer to comment that Lou was “like Paul Morrissey with a guitar.”

Nico was the first person at the Factory to taste the dregs of Lou’s meanness just after her breakup with Lou following the show at Cinémathèque. According to Cale, Lou was “absolutely tom up by it all. When it fell apart, we really learnt how Nico could be the mistress of the destructive one-liner.” Cale recalled one morning rehearsal at the Factory shortly thereafter: “Nico came late, as usual. Lou said, ‘Hello,’ to her in a rather cold way, but just ‘Hello,’ or something. She simply stood there. You could see she was waiting to reply, in her own time. Ages later, out of the blue, came her first words: ‘I cannot make love to Jews anymore.’”

“Lou was absolutely magnificent, but we quarreled a lot, he made me very sad then,” she said later.

Lou may have lost his lover, but when it came to the Velvet Underground, he maintained control over Nico. “He wouldn’t let me sing some of his songs because we’d split,” she lamented. “Lou likes to manipulate women, you know, like program them. He wanted to do that with me. He told me so. Like, computerize me. Lou was the boss and he was very bossy.”

“He was mean to Nico,” said Malanga. “Lou could not stand to be around somebody who has a light equal to his or who shines more intensely.”

According to Cale, he was intimidated by Reed. But despite Lou’s immersion in the Warhol world, Cale was still the person who understood him best. “John idolized Lou,” Paul Morrissey recalled. “He thought anything Lou said was wonderful.” “John and Lou were very close,” agreed a mutual friend. “They loved each other, but they also hated each other. It was competitive musically. John knew Lou got much more attention because he was the singer in the group, but then John cut a more flamboyant figure. Lou used to call him the “Welsh Bob Dylan.” They were two guys fighting to be stars. They were the perfect match but they were the perfect mismatch in that their true deep-down directional head for music was very different.”

“Andy and Nico liked each other’s company,” recalled John Cale. “There was something complicit in the way they both handled Lou Reed, for instance. Lou was straight-up Jewish New York, while Nico and Andy were kind of European. Lou was very full of himself and faggy in those days. We called him Lulu, I was Black Jack, Nico was Nico. He wanted to be queen bitch and spit out the sharpest rebukes of anyone around. Lou always ran with the pack, and the Factory was full of queens to run with. But Lou was dazzled by Andy and Nico. He was completely spooked by Andy, because he could not believe that someone could have such a goodwill and yet be mischievous in the same transvestite way that Lou was, all that bubbling gay humor. It was fun for the rest of us to watch all the shenanigans going on, with Rene Ricard and those spiteful games you just had to laugh at because they were so outrageous. But Lou tried to compete. Unfortunately for him, Nico could do it better.

“Nico and Andy had a slightly different approach, but they caught Lou out time and time again. Andy was never less than considerate to us. Lou couldn’t fully understand this, he couldn’t grasp this amity that Andy had. Even worse, Lou would say something bitchy, but Andy would say something even bitchier, and—nicer. This would irritate Lou. Nico had the same effect. She would say things so he couldn’t answer back.”

The month of March was spent on the road, doing shows at university art departments. The whole entourage was feeling cocky and took a defiant us-against-them attitude. “We all got along very well and had tremendous fun on the road,” recalled Sterling, “Andy and the whole crowd. We used to rent those big recreational vehicles—and pack everyone in there and just roll. It was a self-contained world. We had a generator on the back so we could power all our stuff.”

Warhol’s death-squad entourage, all dressed in black, all on drugs, and all acting out ego traumas and fantasies, caused a sensation wherever they went. “We had a horrible reputation—they thought we were gay,” said Sterling. “They figured we must be—running around with Warhol and all those whips and stuff. In order to eke out a career, you’ve got to start thinking about things like longevity, and markets and tastes. We were quite intelligent, I’m sure we were the most highly scholarshipped band in history. Which made it very difficult to manage us, because the usual bullshit shallow thinking wasn’t going to work for an instant. You couldn’t say, ‘Do this.’ Andy, oddly enough, probably could have, but he never operated that way.”

During their trip to New Jersey’s Rutgers University, a fight broke out in the cafeteria when the members of the group were not allowed to eat there, ensuring that the afternoon’s performance would sell out. But it wasn’t until they got to Ann Arbor, Michigan, that the whole thing finally came together and was a smash hit. “In March we left New York for Ann Arbor in a rented van to play at the University of Michigan,” wrote Warhol. “Nico drove, and that was an experience. I still don’t know if she had a license. She’d only been in this country a little while and she’d keep forgetting and drive on the British side of the road. A cop stopped us near a hamburger drive-in near Toledo when a waitress got upset and complained to him because we kept changing orders, and when he asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ Lou shoved me forward and told him, ‘Of all people—Drella!’

“Ann Arbor was crazy. At least the Velvets were a smash. I’d sit on the steps in the lobby during intermissions and people from the local papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. “If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen,” I’d explain. “That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”

***

Back in New York that April, the group reached the zenith of their career when Warhol rented a Polish community hall, the Dom, on St. Marks Place in the East Village, and put on his climactic multimedia show, now called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

When the Velvet Underground performed for a month that April under Warhol’s direction in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Nico undoubtedly became the star of the show. Onstage in her white pantsuit, she was the center of attention. She was an inch taller than Cale, and despite the fact that Reed sang most of the songs, everything was geared so that she just had to stand there to command attention. Every drug-induced movement she made became significant. It was a talent she had developed in her years as a model and with which Lou Reed could not compete. The musicians who stood out were the flamboyant and handsome Welshman John Cale, with his great hawk nose and mop of shiny black hair cut in the style of Prince Valiant, as he bowed his electric viola, and the androgynous little drummer, who stood up behind a bizarre-looking kit composed chiefly of kettledrums, banging away with the relentless ferocity of an insane fourteen-year-old. In fact, Warhol was the dominant influence because his films set the striking backdrop and his conduction of the light show played over the band and the films, creating a whole new way to look at rock-and-roll shows. And people came to see a Warhol show.

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