When Lou Reed Left the Velvet Underground
How a meeting with David Bowie and a chance reunion with the band marked the start of his solo career
by Aidan Levy
It had been exactly one year and eighteen days since Lou left the Velvets.
The moment was indelibly etched in his consciousness. This was his own private 45, and it sent him spiraling into a turntable-like vertigo. Of the two Lous, the iconoclastic former rocker and the Freeport nine-to-fiver, he knew one was an impostor, and the demure man in the gray flannel suit seemed to be staking a serious claim to his fractured identity. But there at the Ginger Man, Lou knew that Bowie might be the key to resurrection.
Yet with each passing day, launching a solo career felt more elusive. John Lennon had done it — Imagine had just been released — so had Ringo Starr. Why couldn’t Lou Reed? But Lou wasn’t John Lennon. He was the frontman in absentia of a band that blazed briefly until its flame frittered out. To a lot of the suits, he was a has-been. Yet Lou felt ready to emerge from his cocoon.
Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries; the Robinsons; RCA executive Dennis Katz; Bettye; and Angela Bowie were on hand to make sure everything went smoothly. As legend would have it, Bowie was wearing a black bolero hat that matched a crushed velvet black cape, with shoulder-length red hair, mascara, and eye shadow. This close to Lincoln Center, the sartorially unorthodox demigod might be mistaken for a transgender habitue of the Lower East Side or a supernumerary from The Magic Flute. Otherwise, it was just an ordinary dinner. To an outside observer in the apres-theater set, it was the stuff of science fiction — a diplomatic meeting between the bleary-eyed, earthbound ambassador to an occult utopia beyond Gene Roddenberry’s wildest dreams and its taciturn, dubiously hostile emissary. Lou was a neurotic talker, David the guileless picture of serenity; Lou was a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, David possibly not of this Earth; Lou’s head was in the gutter, David’s was somewhere beyond where ground control could reach him. But somehow, they clicked.
Quietly chewing his food, Lou was dumbfounded. There he was, a twenty-nine-year-old erstwhile rocker with squandered potential and no money to show for it, sitting before the next big thing, and it dawned on him why he was summoned out of purgatory that night. The dinner had been arranged not in the hope of resuscitating Lou’s ostensibly moribund career, but to appease the label’s latest acquisition. He could see it in Bowie’s starstruck eyes; Bowie loved the Velvet Underground and had fallen under the spell of Lou. But Lou wouldn’t fall under the spell of Bowie quite yet.
In December, Lou and the Robinsons went to London to record Lou Reed; the title made the split from the Velvets official, but a lot more than Lou went into the record. RCA didn’t take any chances and spared no expense; Lou was the only variable. He had taken up residence at the Four Seasons Inn on the Park, living in the lap of luxury on the label’s dime, submerged in a sedated stupor. He spent his days in North London at Morgan Studios, where Paul McCartney laid down part of his solo debut and Rod Stewart had recently recorded Every Picture Tells a Story, and spent his nights speeding away. To buttress Lou’s maiden voyage, Richard Robinson recruited a group of first-call session players as the backing band: Yes’s Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman, the pianist from Hunky Dory; as well as Clem Cattini, Les Hurdle, Caleb Quaye, Kay Garner, and Brian Odgers. Of the nine members of Lou’s new band, five had logged studio time with Elton John, who had just released Madman Across the Water. Yet their next project had little in common with “Tiny Dancer.”
The material mostly consisted of unreleased Velvet Underground tracks — “Walk and Talk It” and “Wild Child,” which explicitly mentions Bettye, were rehearsed at Max’s in 1970, with songs like “Ride into the Sun” culled from Loaded outtakes. The plodding “Going Down” and the lugubrious “Berlin” were the only tracks not previously played by the Velvets. Lou opened the album with “I Can’t Stand It,” replacing Shelley’s name with Candy. “Walk and Talk It” cribs the opening riff from the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” out earlier that year on Sticky Fingers. “Ocean,” the piece de resistance, opened with a gong hit, and washed over all that had passed with a totalizing undertow that at once recalled Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” — “The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back” — but also Eliot’s Prufrock, Freeport’s Nautical Mile, and the Velvets, who had originated it.
Waves foreground the album’s dystopian cover as well. Lou reinforced the self-conscious novelistic quality of Lou Reed by tapping illustrator Tom Adams to design it. Adams was responsible for countless Agatha Christie covers, but in 1971, he had painted a series for Ballantine’s paperback editions of Raymond Chandler. Lou scrapped the original idea of using a photograph of himself on the beach in Freeport with his dog, Seymoure — the Long Island kid stripped down to his roots — for a more surrealistic edge that might evoke The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye. For Lou, who defined his compositional ethos as primarily literary, the album represented an answer to the question, “What if Raymond Chandler wrote a rock song?” On Lou Reed, even the cover conjured the feel of the eponymous paperback that spawned the Velvet Underground. With a tidal wave about to envelop a Manhattan block, hummingbirds drink the nectar of Lou’s name writ large in spiky roses, atop an open Faberge egg — symbolic of the Velvets — with a dejected duckling staring at the pavement, resigned to the grim fate of the city. Luckily for Lou, ducks can swim.
The Lou Reed sessions went off without a hitch — just Lou without the distractions of overproduction that had the potential to bog down a reasonably financed studio album. Despite an invitation to rendezvous with Ziggy Stardust on his home turf, Lou needed Bettye, who was finishing her semester at acting school in New York. “I actually still have a letter from Lisa. She said, ‘Can you please come out here,’” Bettye recalls. “In the beginning, Lou would help me, but later on, Lou became dependent.” When she arrived, everything seemed under control. “There wasn’t any craziness going on. Lou was focused at that point — the drinking hadn’t gotten out of control. It was really civilized, and Lou was very pleased with that album,” she says. Playing the role of the dutiful fiancee, she began to realize what life with Lou might be like.
“When you are the person that is in his life, when you’re the person that he loves or he trusts, it’s almost as though you’re like a part of him,” she says. “There’s almost no other way to explain it. You’re actually like an arm or a leg and an extension of him. And that’s why he has this extraordinary dependency upon you. He needs all his parts together.”
After the album was finished, Lou decided to take another look back, though. John Cale and Nico were scheduled to appear at Le Bataclan, a Parisian discotheque in the Eleventh Arrondissement, named for the Offenbach operetta set in China, an influence carried over to the variegated geometric structure with dormer windows and a pagoda roof. With Lou only a train ride away, he decided to join the reunion for an intimate drummerless performance. Following days of back-and-forth bickering, they all agreed to one show, to be broadcast on Pop2, a French television program. The three had not shared a stage together in five years, and though John and Nico remained on good terms — he had even produced her most recent studio album, the phantasmagorical Desertshore — Lou was persona non grata. Following three days of strained rehearsals, bad blood notwithstanding, no one knew if they would perform any of Nico’s Velvet Underground features, especially “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” Nevertheless, it was billed as the first Velvet Underground reunion. It was unclear whether a public appearance would elicit hostility or sentimentality, solidify their estrangement or encourage a more lasting peace. Or even whether they would all show up at all.
Show up they did, though. On January 29, 1972, their names were announced and the unlikely trio took the stage before the packed audience of about a thousand rabid Velvet Underground fans. John wore a plain wool sweater over a button-down shirt; Nico donned a flowing calico dress, having dyed her hair back to its original brunette luster; Lou was in bell-bottoms, a loose-fitting sport jacket, and boots, his hair hanging over his ears, eyes sunken, cheeks pallid. Seated stage right, with Nico far stage left, he looked like Buster Keaton in the silent classic The General, opposite his former lover’s unattainable Germanic ideal, barely acknowledging her with even a sideways glance. Forever stoic, she didn’t crack a smile as she stared off into some distant vanishing point. “Hello. It took us a while to get here,” Lou said laconically. “This is a song about copping drugs in New York.”
He counted off “I’m Waiting for the Man,” played in the French chanson tradition with John sitting humbly at the piano and Lou strumming languorously on an acoustic. Nico just sat there on her stool, frozen like the Venus de Milo, staring daggers at Lou. When he interpolated “waiting for my MainMan” into the lyrics, referring to Defries’s production company with Bowie, shaking his head and smirking malevolently, it was clear who was being condescending to whom.
Lou lit up a cigarette, took a long drag, and John began massaging the keys for the doleful intro to Lou’s morose dirge, “Berlin,” which Lou described as “my Barbra Streisand song.” Nico sat with arms crossed, still staring through Lou. To Lou, who had never been to Germany, it was hard not to read Nico, who was German, grew up in Berlin, and stood five foot ten, into this particular performance of Lou’s ballad of love gone awry.
“In Berlin, by the wall / You were five foot ten inches tall”
As sexual tension permeated the expansive space, Lou gazed out at all the wan faces, entranced in a nostalgic remembrance of things past. “Oh babe, it was paradise,” he chanted, salaciously running his tongue along his lips, yet he didn’t look Nico’s way. After the piano break, Lou came back in on guitar with the verse:
“You know I’m gonna miss you now that you’re gone”
Relishing that last lyric, Lou closed his eyes for seconds, then looked directly at Nico, as though finally confronting whatever unresolved issues they had left behind in the brief affair they’d had years before. Still, it had all the markers of an aggressive gesture.
John picked up his viola for “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” which Lou announced as “a song from our first album that was termed unintelligible, and it very well may be.” This was followed with “Wild Child,” with John accompanying on guitar, and “Heroin,” which elicited thunderous applause. All sans Nico. John played “Ghost Story,” a cut from Vintage Violence, his debut solo album, then launched into an unreleased song, the clap-along “The Biggest, Loudest, Hairiest Group of All,” a folksy elegy about an unnamed hirsute rock group that made a reputation “satisfying crowds, pill-heads, and the rest that come to hear,” but had since disbanded and might “make a comeback any day.” Could he have been singing about the Velvets? It certainly seemed likely; depending on the show’s outcome, perhaps the comeback was an imminent, if remote, possibility. Even through “Empty Bottles,” John’s glass-half-full love song, Nico still sat silently brooding, though.
Then came the decisive moment: Nico tentatively walked into the spotlight, and Lou began strumming the opening chords to “Femme Fatale.” Did she still have the pipes? It got off to a rocky start, though. Lou was playing in the wrong key, and stopped. Nico laughed awkwardly; evidently it wasn’t just like riding a bike. Lou then started again, nodding at Nico and smiling impishly. Somehow, Lou himself making a mistake had dispelled the anxiety; Nico didn’t miss a beat. Then, in the last chorus, she left out her lines, leaving the men harmonizing, and trained her eyes on Lou for a long, mischievous moment. Nico’s lips, whose legendary pout had the severity of an arctic tundra and rarely showed signs of glacial drift, curled into a deep, sanguine half-smile. As soon as Lou met her gaze, though, she looked down and away sheepishly, as though they were in on a secret that neither had been sure the other one remembered. Yet they still hadn’t played the song everyone was waiting for.
Frustrating that expectation, Nico played “No One Is There,” “Frozen Warnings,” and “Janitor of Lunacy,” excerpts from The Marble Index and Desertshore, disembodied sounds that emanated from the composer’s existential bottomless pit, rendered with mournful orchestration for harmonium and viola; rarely had despair been distilled so purely. Maybe by Richard Strauss. It was as though she were the Berlin Wall itself, or Dreyer’s Joan of Arc burst forth from the screen to indict the true heretics; if Lou was Jesus’s son, Nico was descended from Mary Magdalene. It did not exactly set the tone for warm reconciliation.
Then, as the harmonium petered out in its final death agony, she started coughing. Not a little clearing of the throat, not a tickle that could be washed down with a glass of water — a full-on consumptive coughing fit; it would have brought La Traviata to a halt. “John, have Nico tell them this is the last song,” Lou said. It was a passive-aggressive move; she was standing right there, and could hardly catch her breath anyway. She coughed for over a minute — dead air onstage — as though giving birth to a black lung. “I want to sing a last song now. If I can. I try my best,” she said. Then, perhaps defensively, but with a hint of humor, she added, “I don’t smoke cigarettes.” The fact was, though, Nico’s cough was probably symptomatic of a larger problem: heroin addiction.
Though she claimed not to shoot anything during her stint with the Velvets, she had become a hardcore junkie while romantically involved with French film director Philippe Garrel, starring in his film The Inner Scar, which used Desertshore as its soundtrack. Outwardly, she still retained the uncanny beauty of Munch’s Madonna, yet her angular appearance and dewy eyes evoked a haunting mortality.
Then Lou strummed the wistful opening to “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” With great difficulty, Nico delivered the opening lines, gasping for breath, but John and Lou joined in on background vocals to bolster her frayed vocal cords. Yet she managed to muster the fortitude to belt out the closing chorus, which resounded throughout the cavernous space against the open sonorities of John and Lou’s harmonizing. Finally, Lou’s love-conquers-all ballad had realized its nostalgic mise en abyme structure — looking back into the mirror of the past through the lens of the present, a transient romance forever encased in amber. The song had not originally been written with Nico in mind, but it had taken on a double meaning that memorialized their time together as well as the contradiction of love itself, indelibly etched in memory yet always slipping through the fingers of the lover. They knew they might never play the song together again. In fact, they wouldn’t. Perhaps with that foreknowledge, they gave an encore, playing “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” For John, Lou, and Nico as a Jules and Jim menage a trois, this party would be their last.
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Excerpted from Dirty Blvd. The Life and Music of Lou Reed, by Aidan Levy, published by Chicago Review Press. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.