Victor Bockris - Transformer - The Complete Lou Reed Story

“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.”