Victor Bockris - Transformer - The Complete Lou Reed Story

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.