Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story

“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.”

“Andy and Nico liked each other’s company,” recalled John Cale. “There was something complicit in the way they both handled Lou Reed, for instance. Lou was straight-up Jewish New York, while Nico and Andy were kind of European. Lou was very full of himself and faggy in those days. We called him Lulu, I was Black Jack, Nico was Nico. He wanted to be queen bitch and spit out the sharpest rebukes of anyone around. Lou always ran with the pack, and the Factory was full of queens to run with. But Lou was dazzled by Andy and Nico. He was completely spooked by Andy, because he could not believe that someone could have such a goodwill and yet be mischievous in the same transvestite way that Lou was, all that bubbling gay humor. It was fun for the rest of us to watch all the shenanigans going on, with Rene Ricard and those spiteful games you just had to laugh at because they were so outrageous. But Lou tried to compete. Unfortunately for him, Nico could do it better.

“Nico and Andy had a slightly different approach, but they caught Lou out time and time again. Andy was never less than considerate to us. Lou couldn’t fully understand this, he couldn’t grasp this amity that Andy had. Even worse, Lou would say something bitchy, but Andy would say something even bitchier, and—nicer. This would irritate Lou. Nico had the same effect. She would say things so he couldn’t answer back.”

The month of March was spent on the road, doing shows at university art departments. The whole entourage was feeling cocky and took a defiant us-against-them attitude. “We all got along very well and had tremendous fun on the road,” recalled Sterling, “Andy and the whole crowd. We used to rent those big recreational vehicles—and pack everyone in there and just roll. It was a self-contained world. We had a generator on the back so we could power all our stuff.”

Warhol’s death-squad entourage, all dressed in black, all on drugs, and all acting out ego traumas and fantasies, caused a sensation wherever they went. “We had a horrible reputation—they thought we were gay,” said Sterling. “They figured we must be—running around with Warhol and all those whips and stuff. In order to eke out a career, you’ve got to start thinking about things like longevity, and markets and tastes. We were quite intelligent, I’m sure we were the most highly scholarshipped band in history. Which made it very difficult to manage us, because the usual bullshit shallow thinking wasn’t going to work for an instant. You couldn’t say, ‘Do this.’ Andy, oddly enough, probably could have, but he never operated that way.”

During their trip to New Jersey’s Rutgers University, a fight broke out in the cafeteria when the members of the group were not allowed to eat there, ensuring that the afternoon’s performance would sell out. But it wasn’t until they got to Ann Arbor, Michigan, that the whole thing finally came together and was a smash hit. “In March we left New York for Ann Arbor in a rented van to play at the University of Michigan,” wrote Warhol. “Nico drove, and that was an experience. I still don’t know if she had a license. She’d only been in this country a little while and she’d keep forgetting and drive on the British side of the road. A cop stopped us near a hamburger drive-in near Toledo when a waitress got upset and complained to him because we kept changing orders, and when he asked, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ Lou shoved me forward and told him, ‘Of all people—Drella!’

“Ann Arbor was crazy. At least the Velvets were a smash. I’d sit on the steps in the lobby during intermissions and people from the local papers would interview me, ask about my movies, what we were trying to do. “If they can take it for ten minutes, then we play it for fifteen,” I’d explain. “That’s our policy. Always leave them wanting less.”

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Back in New York that April, the group reached the zenith of their career when Warhol rented a Polish community hall, the Dom, on St. Marks Place in the East Village, and put on his climactic multimedia show, now called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

When the Velvet Underground performed for a month that April under Warhol’s direction in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Nico undoubtedly became the star of the show. Onstage in her white pantsuit, she was the center of attention. She was an inch taller than Cale, and despite the fact that Reed sang most of the songs, everything was geared so that she just had to stand there to command attention. Every drug-induced movement she made became significant. It was a talent she had developed in her years as a model and with which Lou Reed could not compete. The musicians who stood out were the flamboyant and handsome Welshman John Cale, with his great hawk nose and mop of shiny black hair cut in the style of Prince Valiant, as he bowed his electric viola, and the androgynous little drummer, who stood up behind a bizarre-looking kit composed chiefly of kettledrums, banging away with the relentless ferocity of an insane fourteen-year-old. In fact, Warhol was the dominant influence because his films set the striking backdrop and his conduction of the light show played over the band and the films, creating a whole new way to look at rock-and-roll shows. And people came to see a Warhol show.