Victor Bockris - Transformer - The Complete Lou Reed Story

“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.”