A 'death dwarf' meets his ruthless slave: Lester Bangs vs. his hero, Deceased Artiste Lou Reed (Part 2 of four)

In the first part of this piece I focused on the public persona of Lou Reed — a talented performer, indelible songwriter, and “punk pioneer” who relished the notion of being nasty in interviews. In this part I will talk about the one journalist he couldn’t openly insult (at least not without getting some truth spat back in his face). In the next and last part, I'll be touching upon some of his odder kitsch moments, and, finally (yes, I’m a fucking fan!), my vote for most underappreciated Reed album, containing some of his most nuanced and emotional songwriting.

First let’s talk about Lester. Lester Bangs was an incredibly talented writer who wound up being a rock critic. His articles still shine with insight, brilliant turns of phrase, and wonderfully weird notions decades after he wrote them — and the records he was talking about have in many cases disappeared  (I know somebody’s gotta be out there listening to the Godz, but I’ve yet to meet them).

I mentioned in the first part of this piece that Lou Reed was a musician’s musician whose mythos was created by journalists. Inarguably, David Bowie was the most important friend Lou ever made in the music business. The Velvet Underground had a helluva solid critical reputation but never sold records; when Bowie produced Transformer for Lou (at the peak of his Ziggy fame), suddenly Lou Reed had a record on the charts, with “Walk on the Wild Side” instantly becoming his theme song.

Bowie was the most important fan that Lou ever had (he first professed his love for the music on Hunky Dory), but Lester Bangs was the most vociferous, the most dedicated — it’s noted in Jim DeRogatis’ Bangs-bio Let It Blurt that, even after Lester swore he wouldn’t ever write about Lou again, Cynthia Heimel (who dated Lester for a short time) noted, “He did not realize he could talk for sixteen hours about 'Lou Reed, Lou Reed, Lou Reed, Lou Reed!' “

Bangs (seen at right) proselytized about Reed, so when he had a problem with Lou’s music — mostly when his songwriting was getting too facile, or his public image was becoming that of a scrawny glam clown — it mattered and made sense, because Lester felt that Lou was an immense talent who should have become the singer-songwriter of the Seventies. (You must remember that one of Lester’s most memorable pieces is called “James Taylor Marked for Death.”)

Reading Bangs’ writing made me a diehard Lou fan. The incredibly vibrant and enthusiastic way that Lester wrote about the VU and solo Reed, the sheer intensity of it, has been unmatched in modern writing about rock — except, of course, for the way that Lester wrote about the Stooges, Van Morrison, and a few others.

Yes, reading Lester converted me to a Lou Reed fan (the two are seen at left with Patti Smith between them). I previously had two VU LPs and Transformer, but after reading Bangs’ raves and rants about Lou I wanted to hear the body of work, and so I did (comments on the “forgotten” solo albums in the last installment).

Lester served as Lou’s “conscience,” questioning him about topics relating to his music and his persona. As I noted in the first part of this piece, Lou never tolerated questions that didn’t directly relate to whatever he was flogging at the moment, so Lester’s interviews with him (or, more properly, mutual scream sessions) were indeed extraordinary.

Lou found it fun to “joust” with Lester, put him down verbally, and let him go to places that no other journalist was ever allowed. But Bangs got the final laugh, since the pieces he wrote were often better than the albums Lou was making at the time. 

The first full-length interview Lester had with Lou, titled “Lou Reed: Deaf Mute in a Phone Booth” (Nov. 1973) is up in its entirety on The Guardian website. In it we see Lou confronted by his hero at his worst: “His face has a nursing-home pallor, and the fat girdles his sides. He drinks double Johnnie Walker Blacks all afternoon, his hands shake constantly and when he lifts his glass to drink he has to bend his head as though he couldn't possibly get it to his mouth otherwise.” 

The conversation eventually degenerates into a very entertaining shouting match (wherein at one point Lester yells at Lou, “Why doncha write a song like ‘Sugar, Sugar’? That'd be something worthwhile!”). But before it does, Lou actually does get “the question” in about alternative lifestyles that the later, calmer, Tai-chi-practicing Lou refused to go near.

Namely, was Lou’s music and appearance touting the gay lifestyle? Sez Lou in the piece “…You can't fake being gay, because being gay means you're going to have to suck cock, or get fucked. I think there's a very basic thing in a guy if he's straight where he's just going to say no: 'I'll act gay, I'll do this and I'll do that, but I can't do that.'

"I could say something like if in any way my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something in my life. But I don't feel that way at all. I don't think an album's gonna do anything. You can't listen to a record and say, 'Oh that really turned me onto gay life, I'm gonna be gay.' … By the time a kid reaches puberty they've been determined. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn't men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?"

Lester’s further meditations on Lou’s statement (again, read the article, for the full thing) are also fascinating and spot-on: “If Lou Reed seems like rock's ultimate closet queen by virtue of the fact that he came out of the closet and then went back in, it must also be observed that lots of people, especially lots of gay people, think Lou Reed's just a heterosexual onlooker exploiting gay culture for his own ends.…

“But let's just suppose that Lou Reed is gay. If he is, can you imagine what kind of homosexual would say something like that? Maybe that's what makes him such a master of pop song – he's got such a great sense of shame. Either that or the ultimate proof of his absolute normality is the total offensive triteness of his bannered Abnormality. Like there's no trip cornier'n S&M, every move is plotted in advance from a rigid rulebook centuries old, so every libertine ends up yawning his balls off.”

The “second round” between Lester and Lou can be found in the article “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” which is collected in the utterly essential book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung edited by Greil Marcus (Knopf, 1987). In that encounter, Lester and Lou once again turn the classic rock musician/fan-interviewer model on its head by at first sizing each other up and then hollering (spot-on) insults at each other.

At this point Lou was fully entrenched in his glam persona — the height of which saw him thin as a stick (from speed), sporting dyed blonde hair and nail polish, endlessly posing for a photographer who might or might not be there (the very vision of a faded Warhol superstar, but this was when Lou’s records were selling!).

Again, Lester gets some interesting quotes out of Lou, and the two wind up yelling (incredibly accurate) insults at each other. Lester’s remarks about Lou having become a “self-parody” who delivers “pasteurized decadence” are true (but then again, the band he was traveling with was great at that time — the Hunter-Wagner group of Berlin and Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal fame, so the music he was making onstage was his best-ever, in the minds of many diehard fans).

Only a true fan of an artist could sum up his hero in such a laser-sharp manner: (pp. 170-171) “Lou is the guy who gave dignity and poetry and rock ‘n’ roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch.”

(p. 172) “… Lou realized the implicit absurdity of the rock ‘n’ roll bête-noire badass pose and parodied, deglamorized it. Thought that may be giving him too much credit. Most probably he had no idea what he was doing, which was half the mystique. Anyway, he made a great bozo, a sort of Eric Burdon of sleaze.”

Bangs continued to write about Lou — until he finally felt he’d overdone his Lou-worship in print and swore never to write him again (but still did, more below). The most amusing writing he ever did about Mr. Reed was most certainly his slew of articles about Metal Machine Music, the 1975 feedback-noise album that was either Lou’s giant “fuck you” to his record company, or a complicated, dense piece of experimental work.

Lester wrote not one but two articles that were nothing but lists of things he had thought about the record (the finisher, the K.O., was him declaring “It is the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum. Number Two: KISS Alive!”). These articles can be found in Psychotic Reactions, and its follow-up Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste (Anchor Books, 2003); the first piece is also available online here (for some reason lacking the numbers Lester employed in his original; the article is intended as a numerical list). At one point, he rejoices in the fact that, whatever its starting point,  MMM is an emotional work:

(p. 196) “… Besides which, any record that sends listeners fleeing the room screaming for surcease of aural flagellation or, alternately, getting physical and disturbing your medication to the point of breaking the damn thing, can hardly be accused, at least in results if not original creative man-hours, of lacking emotional content.”

If you want to read what Lou said about the album in recent years — he definitely was sticking to the “dense piece of experimental work” explanation — you can find an interesting interview with him here.

But, once again, Lester hit the mark by recounting in Creem (Feb. '76) a remark Lou made to Funhouse interview subject and favorite Howard Kaylan: “Well, anybody who gets to side four is dumber than I am.” While it’s entirely still possible to enjoy MMM as Lester did and I have, as a sonic “cleanser” — the feedback noises Lou created do do much to play with your mind, if heard on headphones— and it is a damned rebellious move by a guy whose previous LP (Sally Can’t Dance) had been Bowie-less but still sold very well, it’s interesting to know what he said about it behind closed doors….

One thing’s for sure: like any devoted fan, Lester dreamed of being able to influence his hero to do his best, and in his writing it often seemed like he was having a conversation with Lou. This is nowhere more apparent than in two previously unseen fragments from 1980 that were first published in Psychotic Reactions. Lester was a marvelously talented writer whose style was copied by most every music critic that followed (whether they knew it or not). But what did he write about when he was writing for himself?

(p. 168) “Aw, Lou, it’s the best music ever made, the instrumental intro to ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ is like watching dawn break over a bank of buildings through the windows of those elegantly hermetic cages, which feels too well spoken, which I suspect is the other knife that cuts through your guts, the continents that divide literature and music and don’t care about either.”

(p. 201) “The real question is what to live for. And I can’t answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art’s sake, corny as that. And I bet Andy believes it too. Otherwise he woulda killed himself a long time ago.” 

In the next two parts of this tribute, I will finally tackle Lou's music, spotlighting the worst and the very best of his (legal) output. If you want to see a great collection of Lou posin' for the camera, visit the "Fuck Yeah Lou Reed" Tumblr.

Darker Velvet: Deceased Artiste Lou Reed (part 1 of four)

Lou Reed took himself very seriously. At times that made him a great artist. At others it made him a nasty son of a bitch. At still others it made him an imminently satirizable figure (who wound up not being satirized, mostly because he was a cult icon but never a massive mainstream success). Now that he has departed this mortal coil, we can deal with what mattered most, his music, the best and the worst, the songs that will hopefully remain around forever (“Sweet Jane,” "Satellite of Love," “Dirty Boulevard”) and those that should've never seen a legal release (that one where he bellows about his then-wife Sylvia, sounding like John in the worst throes of Yoko-worship). But before I get to the music, let's just review what we can call, for lack of a better term, the prickish side of Mr. Lou Reed.

Reed was certainly an NYC institution, but not a friendly one. That seemed to have changed after he and Laurie Anderson became “an old couple” together – they'd could constantly be run into attending events downtown, out in Brooklyn, or in Lincoln Center.

They performed regularly, either together or separately, at events produced by their good friend, the wonderfully talented Hal Willner. They even dressed up in silly outfits and served as “king and queen” of the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. Through it all, Laurie remained a sort of smiling beacon; Lou, on the other hand, maintained a really good glower.

Even as his lifestyle mellowed, Lou maintained an adversarial – no, let's be honest, a hostile – relationship with the press. His standard line was that he loathed journalists. What was interesting about that (and very telling) was that it was journalists who created Lou Reed.

He was certainly a musician's musician (cue the Eno quote about the folks who bought VU albums), but he also was lionized and mythologized in the press. Rock critics treated him very seriously, and although they did pan his work – and a LOT of the criticism was merited, let's be honest (I'm a fan, folks) – they also helped him craft a public persona as a “poet of the streets” and “punk forefather.”

I remember reading an interview in a British mag just a few years back where Lou got pissy with a gent who was merely asking him about the various grades of guitars he'd used over the years. This after Lou had mellowed out and could've become the kind of genteel, classy “elder statesman” that various singer/songwriters have become (Leonard Cohen is the very ideal of this).

He felt a need, though, to tell off interviewers and maintain a hostile position to the press, even as the press kept throwing garlands at his feet (even when his work wildly missed the mark – but I'll talk about “The Raven” soon enough). Let's run through some history....

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Although Lou hated it (or perhaps, precisely because Lou hated it), the Victor Bockris book Transformer offers us a look at the many guises of Mr. Reed throughout the years. Bockris' preceding book, written with “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” member Gerard Malanga, Up-tight: The Velvet Underground Story, sketches how Lou and the band were broken on the “scene” by Andy Warhol, and how, once they had moved away from the Warhol camp, Lou tossed out the immensely talented John Cale (his main rival for leadership of the group) and then estranged the other two members (especially Sterling Morrison) by mixing them “down” on the band's third, self-titled LP (you can hear the original mix on the VU box set).

Lou was a literary-minded guy who wanted to break into rock 'n' roll badly, so badly that he toiled for the amazing Pickwick Records, which just appropriated trends from the major labels and had their “house writers” come up with songs that sounded like the hits. Here is the best example of his work from that period, “Cycle Annie.” Notice the chuckle in his voice here – he knows this stuff is crap, but in fact it's really fun, solid rock 'n' roll:

The Pickwick Records are not the weirdest early Lou recordings you can hear. Those would have to be the 1965 demo tape (found on the VU CD box set) that the three piece Velvets did of songs in a funky folk vein (with a fucking harmonica!). Here is their bluesy, seemingly endless version of “I'm Waiting for the Man.” Lou's whiny voice is absolutely bizarre – you'd never believe that would be the same guy whose “pretty voice” would be found on the opening VU song “Sunday Morning”:

The four Velvet Underground albums are indeed perfection – although some fans prefer the first two because the clear tension between Reed and Cale was what “fueled” the band, the third and fourth LPs are perfect examples of Reed's young, acid-tinged genius. Here is an “interview” with Lou conducted by famed producer Tom Wilson in 1967 (this, of course, before his “rival” had left the band):

The Velvets' albums are easily available all over the Internet (and have been rhapsodized about by better souls than I), but a few of the artifacts have to be seen to be experienced. One is the Warhol film of the Velvets jamming with Nico (and her kid) in tow (which has been on and off YouTube for years, thanks to the furor of the Warhol estate). Here it is, from Italian TV, with the MoMA intro card left intact!

The other is the mini- “reunion” that occurred when Lou and John Cale played with Nico in Bataclan in '72; it was a magical musical occurrence that wouldn't happen again – Cale would work with Nico often, and Lou and Cale would collaborate on “Songs for Drella” and the VU reunion tour. You can see the TV broadcast of highlights from the '72 concert here.

The best account of Lou's solo career can, as mentioned above, be found in the Bockris biography (also a debunking of his tales of a terrible childhood – probably the reason he hated the book so much).

Even when seemingly stoned (watch him slurp at his drink!) in interviews, as here (in Australia in '74), he did the Dylan-in-'65 thing of being sarcastic and acting as if the interviewers weren't worthy of his time (although it's obnoxious as hell, it clearly works – the folks can't wait to write about ya when you're a rude asshole to them). At this point he was still in his glam phase, replete with dyed hair and nail polish:

That is indeed a funny strategy when dealing with mainstream, “square” interviewers, but as time went on that became Lou's default mode. Here you see a British interviewer talking about how you could warm Lou up by talking about old rock singles:

And you can see a fledgling interviewer whose English isn't very good going through the traumatic experience of having Lou as one of his first interviews. Sure, the editors, knowing Lou's rep as a dick with interviewers, should've sent someone who actually knew something about Reed's music to talk to him, but Lou really seems to love playing cat-and-mouse with this young guy.

Friend Steve suggested that Lou “does a great imitation of Jerry Lewis” in the interview above, and there's a lot to be said about the similarities between the two performers – although I do think Jerry would've been kinder to a foreign interviewer than Lou was. I've been trying to verify a story I read once that said that Lou was kicked off his college radio station for doing a nasty impression of Jerry Lewis (has anyone got a tape of that?), but it is indeed true that the mannerisms of both men when pissed off at journalists are quite the same.

Let me close out this part of my tribute (yes, I actually really love a whole bunch of Lou's music!) with two interviews from very different periods in his life. First, let's start with the recent years – I will cite in the next part the album I think that was a watershed, in that he was finest personal statement and his last truly great album from start to finish. After that he involved himself in a bunch of projects that stretched him as an artist but were really misguided, uninteresting, or just plain awful on a musical level.

One of his most laid-back projects ever was a “quiet” album of mediation music called Hudson River Wind Meditations. So by the time that came out (2007) he was a “mellow” individual who had a perfect life mate, had won extreme honors in his profession, and had done whatever the fuck he had wanted in music and had it all released by major labels. So did that make him a nicer guy? Well, why don't you read David Marchese's interview in Spin from 2010?

Lou expects his interviewer by that point to know his work cold, does not want to be asked about whether he exposed listeners to the gay lifestyle (he answers snottily and then stares at Marchese when that topic is mentioned), and really gets riled when asked about the possibly commercial enterprises he did like that silly-ass Honda ad (when he was in his “muscle-Lou” phase), complaining that has “nothing to do with music.”

After barking at Marchese for asking him about tai chi (which supposedly became Lou's one major past time and fascination – some folks like to talk about that stuff; ever read David Lynch talking about TM?), he tells the interviewer he's “not interested in music” and declares “we're done talking.” This from the man who crafted Hudson River Wind Meditations....

But to really get the feel of Lou being a jerk to an interviewer you have to go back to primo Lou, back to when he was still writing great songs (albeit maybe two or three per album of 10 or 12 – I've got too many of 'em, kiddies). In 1978 the great writer Josh Alan Friedman (whose Tales of Times Square I count among the best books about our burg) was assigned by the Soho Weekly News to interview Lou and told to ask him about Brooklyn by his editors (talk about sending a kid into the lions' den!).

You can read Josh's interview in its entirely on his Black Cracker Online blog, but I'll note that Lou has nothing nice to say about either Brooklyn or Long Island, does get misty about old r&b records and Andy Warhol (side note: what was all the Andy worship about in interviews and Songs for Drella when Warhol's own diaries record the number of times that Lou snubbed him publicly?), and he tells Josh that only good-looking people should be rockstars (not “ugly” Tom Waits, “four-eyed” Elvis Costello, and “niggers like Donna Summer”).

So, go and read the interview – it gets to the point where Lou tells Josh how he would kill him. The most memorable pullquote? “You oughta fuckin’ kiss the ground that you’re walking on that I’m even talking to you. I’ll chew you up on any level you want to get to. You’re a fucking moron, and you oughta fuckin’ know it man, ’cause you don’t know what you’re talking to, or how you’re talking to it.”

Admittedly, Lou was, to put it plainly, a really nasty drunk at this point in his life (cue “The Power of Positive Drinking”). But, again, go back to the 2010 interview above, and you see that Lou has taken the death-threats out of his interviews and the “faggot”/“niggers”/“lowlife Jewish asshole” stuff out of his vocabulary, but he still was a petulant, pissed-off prima donna.

Is there any trace of that Lou on record? Well, I'm sure it exists in several bootlegs, but for some unknown reason, most likely fulfillment of a record contract (personally produced by Lou himself), one of the MOST RIDICULOUS-EVER live albums is Lou's two-record Lou Reed Live: Take No Prisoners, recorded in May 1978 at the Bottom Line in NYC. If you want to hear really *great* Lou Reed live, listen to Rock and Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live (the one to the right). But if you want to hear a NYC rock icon try desperately to sound like Lenny Bruce, and fail, big-time, then check out this atrocity. (It was indeed released on CD and now is available as a legal MP3 download – Lou musta liked it!)

Lou is drunk or stoned (or both) and never stops fucking talking throughout certain songs – and he's less funny than Francis Albert was in his “comedy routine” in the middle of the Sinatra at the Sands LP. During “Sweet Jane”, he goes on about, among other things, Barbra Streisand being condescending at an awards ceremony, people from Wyoming (?), politics, and Henny Youngman. He affects a bitchy pose to those who talk in the audience, but also never stops doing Lenny's nasal voice.

The whole set is really Lou at his most indulgent and awful, but to experience him at his most drunk/stoned/indulgent/rambling/unfunniest, you must hear him doing “Walk on the Walk Side.” He starts the song, returns to the actual lyrics every so often, but mostly conducts an ongoing monologue consisting of short lines that mean nothing at all.

It's a 15-minute abomination that finds him running down Robert Christgau at some length, then moving on to mock the folks mentioned in “Walk,” Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, “the Sugar-Plum Fairy,” and Joe Dallessandro. At this point Lou clearly thinks he's Ondine in addition to Lenny – but unlike those two, again, Lou is just NOT FUNNY.

The band continues to play the melody, assuming he'll come back to speak-singing the song, but he's relentless in supplying quick quips. Eventually the band ends the tune because, well, he's just not gonna shut up.

The fact that he included one of his more embarrassing tunes, “I Wanna Be Black,” on this LP is entirely appropriate. During a really looooong version of “I'm Waiting for the Man,” he goes back to being Lenny, and even obliquely refers to Groucho's “Show Me a Rose (and I'll Show You a Girl Named Sam),” but at times seems to be talking to himself, not the audience.

In re-listening to the album to write this post, I should note that the only really great things about it are the cover illustration by Brent Bailer and the collage design on the gatefold (and the album sleeves) by Phenografix Inc. and Dennis Weeden.

In the next three parts of this post I'll discuss the one journalist who called Lou out on his bullshit and will finally praise the guy's music.