Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story

Dismayed at first by this invasion of their domain, the Reeds were, in time—much to Lou’s chagrin—unexpectedly delighted by the new arrival. As it turned out, the dog possessed some of Lou’s charm without any of his less attractive attributes. Soon Seymour was scurrying around the Reeds’ living room or snuggling up to Toby as if she were her long-lost mother. In short, Seymour became the light of Toby’s life in a way Lewis never could be.

“Can you imagine,” Lou ad-libbed in a 1979 song, “Families,” “when I first took her there nobody wanted her, but soon she became more important than me!”

Naturally, as soon as Lou saw how much his family liked the dog, he quickly reversed his decision to bestow her on Bunny and insisted on taking her back to Syracuse where she would live with him until he graduated, after which Seymour would live out the remainder of her life as the most popular member of the Reed household.

During their visit Lou took Shelley into Harlem to pick up drugs. “He said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to pick something up,’ she recalled. “I remember going up to 125th Street. Really vile, nasty hallways. It was a guy who was a musician, I remember him sitting at this grand piano in his apartment in Harlem. I think there was a connection between the guys in the bar in Syracuse and the guy there. I knew we were going to pick up drugs, my memory was that it was heroin, but I couldn’t swear to it. I was more worried about his driving. And I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in Harlem. I had a bad attitude. For white kids to do that at the time was stupid. It was dangerous. I could have gotten raped or killed. He loved that.”

It was, however, neither the drugs nor the dog that finally caused his relationship with Shelley to break down. Although there was no doubt that Lou was in love with Shelley and their relationship was enlightening for both of them, Lou experimented sexually. According to Mishkin, for example, Lou had a thing for big girls, especially “one big fat ugly bitch who he also really loved to fuck on the side.” He also occasionally had sex with one of the black female singers who accompanied the Eldorados. “I never observed him being particularly nice to Shelley,” Hyman commented, “but then I never observed him being particularly nice to anyone.”

When Lou wasn’t nice to a woman, he could, it turned out, be particularly cruel, constantly pushing them to an edge, thereby testing the strength of their love. His idea, Shelley said, was, “I’m going to remake you and then I’m not going to like you, and I’m going to push you around and see when you’re going to leave me. The worse I treat you the more it proves to me that you love me and you’ll stay with me forever. He clearly got very obnoxious. He had to have somebody to kick around so he felt big, and at that point I was the kickee.”

She was not the sort of girl to take this kind of treatment lying down, and she retaliated with several thrusts of her own. On one occasion the Eldorados were booked to play a fraternity at Cornell. Shelley had been dating one of the fraternity brothers sporadically on the side and decided to go along for the ride. When Lou walked in with the slightly effeminate walk he had mastered, the brothers were enraged to see Shelley on his arm. She had spent several weekends at the fraternity house and now this little Jewish fag … Shelley had not told Lou about the predicament, and even he was impressed by the hostility that greeted him. “Jesus, they’re so nasty, they’re a bunch of animals,” he told Shelley. Somewhere during the evening she casually explained, “They’re so hostile because I’ve been here on various weekends with this guy Peter. I’m his girlfriend.” They barely got out of there alive.

Back at Syracuse the relationship between Lou and Shelley came to a climax one night at another fraternity job, when Lou came up to her between sets and said, “I’m going to go into the back room with that girl. Do you want to watch?” Seeing Ritchie Mishkin smirk at her, Shelley finally snapped, decided that she had taken enough abuse from Lou, and left the fraternity. It was February 1963 and bitterly cold. Lincoln accompanied her on the long walk back to her dorm telling her not to worry, that he was still there and that she was right to leave. That she shouldn’t have let Lou treat her so badly for so long.

“Lou and I had such dire things going on between us for the previous few months,” Shelley explained. “The groupie thing just finally put me over the edge. I never had any doubt that Lou was going to be a rock star and that if I was going to stay with Lou, I was going to be a rock star’s wife. I made the decision to leave him and to stay away from him based on the next ten years of my life.

“The next day he said, ‘I was so stoned I don’t remember doing that. Why are you mad at me? Did I do that?’”

But Shelley had finally come to understand what made Lou tick, and she didn’t like what she understood at all. The struggle to conquer and control was much more important to him than the possession, just as being a voyeur was becoming more important to him than natural sex. Basically, Lou was incapable of maintaining any kind of normal, nurturing relationship. Like a shark, he had an urge to poke at bodies until he found a live one, then devour it as ferociously and completely as he could, letting the blood run down his chin.

By the middle of his junior year, Lou had turned himself into a monster with eight different faces. It was in these various guises that he would slither through his life, building up great bands only to tear them down, devouring and destroying everybody he could seduce, because he resented the whole situation of life and didn’t want anybody else to have any fun if he wasn’t able to.

Ever since Lou had moved into his own apartment, the relationship with Lincoln Swados had been less close. As the junior year ground on, Lincoln showed alarming signs of having a real nervous breakdown. “I don’t think either of us knew that Lincoln was truly schizophrenic,” Shelley remembered. “Lou was so busy pulling so much of his drama from Lincoln that I don’t know how much he realized Lincoln was truly ill, or whether he just thought Lincoln just had a better scam going. He was trying to pick up on Lincoln’s traits and abilities. Much of Lou is Lincoln.” Shelley claimed that for both men, the trajectory of a love relationship went something like this: “I’m going to stroke you and treat you kindly and bless you with my knowledge and presence, and then kill you.” Allen Hyman agreed that Lou had picked up many of his twisted ideas about life from Lincoln. “You couldn’t get much weirder than Lincoln,” he said, “without being Lou.”

Shortly after Shelley left Lou, Lincoln was carted off to the bughouse by his parents, who found him in a state of agitation far beyond their wildest fears. According to Swados’s sister, Elizabeth, he had got into “a helplessly disoriented state. He was unable to go to classes, unable to leave his room. The voices in his head were directing him to do too many different things.”

In short order, Lou had lost his best friends, his two mirrors. Delmore was still there, but he was going in and out of hospital himself and was hardly in a position to give Lou a shoulder to cry on—although he did give him one piece of important advice. He told Lou that he should see a psychiatrist and that it should be a woman, because he wouldn’t listen to a man.

However, despite her determination to avoid her former lover, the break-up threw Shelley into a black depression, and she went out and did the one thing that was bound to draw Lou’s attention back to her—she dyed her hair orange. “I remember Lou seeing it and saying, ‘Wow! Now you’re appealing, now you really look like Miss Trash.’” Typically, Lou had to race back to Freeport to show his parents what he had done to the nice Jewish girl they had so doted on. “They saw this nice, wholesome girl turned into trash and they said, ‘Oh my God, Lou has done it again. He has ruined somebody, he has won, he has turned her into trash,’” Shelley recalled. “At that point, his mother even said to me, ‘I hope he doesn’t treat you like he treats us.’ We did horrify his mother. He loved it.”

As soon as they got back to school, they broke up again. By then she was determined not to go back to him. “He was such a shit.”

***

November 1963 was a cathartic month for Lou. It started with a Syracuse concert by Bob Dylan. “Lou idolized Dylan when Dylan first came on the scene with his first album,” explained Mishkin. “We knew every inch of his music inside and out. All of a sudden there was this music and poetry together, and it wasn’t folk music. Lou was blown away by it. It was an exciting thing. And Lewis immediately got a harmonica and was playing that. And I remember sitting in the apartment with [Eldorado] Stevie Windheim and Lewis figuring out the chords to ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down,’ and we got them and we were playing it and it wasn’t the kind of thing we were going to do for a gig, but we had a good time with it.”

The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a major turning point for Lou. The event struck a blow to Delmore from which he would never recover. Lou watched helplessly as his mentor cum drinking buddy fell into a paranoid depression. He gave up any pretense of continuing to teach and retreated permanently to the Orange Bar. Soon Lou was looking after Delmore, walking him home at night after long sessions at the bar, making sure he had his key, his cigarettes, sometimes picking up groceries or other sundries for him. When Schwartz left the Orange, he was often so transported to other realms he might head off in any direction like some human dowsing wand in search of companionship or, as often as not, trouble. Lou always made sure Delmore got home, got himself to bed, and was not in too much danger of burning down the premises with a carelessly dropped cigarette. After a while, however, this kind of care takes on a spooky quality as the young man begins to recognize his own fate in that of the older man. Suddenly Lou, who had been benefiting from Delmore’s enlightened encouragement, taking seriously his recommendation to go to Harvard, found himself taking care of a man who was increasingly incapable of getting from A to B without assistance. “Lou always felt that he had to stay around and watch Delmore and take care of him,” said Shelley. “I think Lou began to find that a little tedious.”

Meanwhile, Lou had initiated his own decline. Ever since he had been put on medication following the electroshock treatments of 1959, Lou had been an inveterate drug user. Or, to use his own description, a “smorgasbord schmuck.” If he wasn’t popping pills, he was inhaling pot, dropping acid, eating mushrooms, horning coke, or dropping Placidyls—not to mention bolting down enough booze to keep the Orange Bar in business around the clock. Now, for the first time, he added heroin to his drug menu, whereas previously he had only sold it.

Shelley marked Lou’s downslide from the time he started to inject heroin. He had always been petrified by needles and said that he would never shoot any drugs into his veins. Once he began taking heroin, he insisted he could control it all the time and stop whenever he wanted to simply because he had elected to do so. Shelley recalled, “He was getting into heroin on and off. The experience was pretty horrifying to him and he was having some bad LSD trips too.”

Shelley had no sympathy for Lou’s cries for help. However, Lou had gone into a decline when he realized that Shelley was not only not coming back to him, but was in fact living with two other adult men just three doors down from his apartment. On another occasion when she was sitting in the Orange Bar with her new lover and his Korean vet friends, an acolyte of Lou’s came racing in frantically telling her that Lou was having a really bad time. Although she fully expected that he might not make it through the night, Shelley sent back the reply, “If you send somebody over here to tell me that you’re dying, die!”

Still, Shelley felt sorry for him. “Lou can’t have a good time, it’s not in his genes,” she stated later. “He feels that he doesn’t deserve it. The moment you say Lou’s okay, he thinks there’s something wrong with you. Because if you say he’s okay, then you don’t see how evil he is, you don’t see all the bad things. He can’t have a wonderful time any more than he can accept that people like him. That’s what’s so sad about Lou.”

Swados, after Schwartz the most perceptive man Reed knew at university, was the first to note (in a conversation with a girlfriend a year later) that beneath Lou’s often waiflike desperation, his need to be mothered, existed a much tougher, harder, more realistic man. He possessed an ambition and drive of which very few people who knew him at Syracuse had any idea. The fact alone, for example, that he would continue to experiment with drugs for the next fifteen years and survive suggests that he was at heart not only a survivor, but a student of narcotics who took care to know what it was he was ingesting.

***

The most important development in his senior year was literary. Lou leapt across a great gap when he switched from making the short story his primary form to song lyrics, taking his knowledge of the short story structure with him. In many ways Bob Dylan was a major influence on Lou in this decision as well as in his subsequent decision not to apply to the graduate writing program at Harvard, but to pursue his love of rock and roll as a career. Dylan not only showed him a way to write lyrics, he legitimized being a singer/songwriter with intellectual credentials. That was the vital point. Lou needed to be recognized intellectually. He was concerned about Delmore’s response to his decision; he didn’t want Delmore to think that he didn’t consider his words valuable. And yet, Delmore’s collapse may have freed him to journey into that region he had always aspired to—the combination of writing and rock-and-roll lyrics.

“I thought, look, all these writers are writing about only a very small part of the human experience,” Reed pointed out. “Whereas a record could be like a novel, you could write about this. It was so obvious, it’s amazing everybody wasn’t doing it. Let’s take Crime and Punishment and turn it into a rock-and-roll song!

“But if you’re going to talk about the greats, there is no one greater than Raymond Chandler. I mean, after reading Raymond Chandler and going on to someone else, it’s like eating caviar and then turning to some real inferior dish. Take the sensibility of Raymond Chandler or Hubert Shelby or Delmore Schwartz or Poe and put it to rock music.”

Like any foray into oneself, writing proved to be more than exhilarating. It was, for Lou, a long and painful process. “I love writing,” Lou would tell an interviewer, “except that it’s excruciating. It’s a very strange process, I’ve never really understood it myself. But I’m available for, I’m there for, I try to make things as easy as possible for it. I just try and stay out of the way. So once I start typing, I never stop. I don’t try and stop to fix anything because it will go away and then I’ll never get it back ever again. Raymond Chandler: ‘That blonde was as pleasant as a split lip.’ Hard to beat that. He’s talking about a guy’s thumbnail, he thought his thumbnail looked like the edge of a ice cube. Boom, you can see it. And that’s what I try to do. I try to give you a very visual image in very few words, so that you can picture it in your mind really quick. I spend most of my time taking things out. Taking tons of stuff out. Really chopping it down. That’s the goal. Besides communicating emotion and having a beginning, middle, and an end, I’m really hammering at those words to be concise and get it across to you as quickly and visually as possible.”

During this time, Lou continued to mine his everyday experiences for song material. He spent a lot of time going into New York, scoring drugs and checking out bands. He was fixated on Ornette Coleman and used to try to see him whenever he performed in New York City. In his last semester, his writing, taking drugs, loneliness, and fascination with underground jazz set off a creative explosion. He wrote at least two songs, “Waiting for My Man” and “Heroin.” The precision and scope of these songs heralded the Lou Reed who would become known as the Baudelaire of New York.

“At the time I wrote ‘Heroin,’ I felt like a very rather negative, strung-out, violent, aggressive person. I meant those songs to sort of exorcise the darkness, or the self-destructive element in me, and hoped that other people would take them the same way. ‘Heroin’ is very close to the feeling you get from smack. It starts on a certain level, it’s deceptive. You think you’re enjoying it. But by the time it hits you, it’s too late. You don’t have any choice. It comes at you harder and faster and keeps on coming. The song is everything that the real thing is doing to you.” It would take Lou a year to work up “Heroin” from rough lyrics and bare-bone chords into one of the greatest rock-and-roll songs of all time. Mishkin helped Lou by hammering out its unforgettable bass line. Not until Lou met John Cale in the fall of 1964 did he develop the two Syracuse songs into the form in which they were recorded.

Reed’s senior year was pitted with conflicts and frustrations that emerged in several dramatic incidents. In October the Eldorados had gone down to Sarah Lawrence to play a series of weekend dates. Now that Hyman had graduated and had been replaced by another drummer, Lou was ever more impatient with his plodding bandmates. One night when they got to the venue, Lou didn’t want to play. “So he said, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to play for these assholes,’” remembered Mishkin. “And suddenly, right in front of everybody, he smashed his hand through a plate glass window [in emulation of Lincoln, who had done the same thing years earlier]. Of course he couldn’t play. We took him to the hospital and there were lots of stitches.”

Lou continued to flaunt his bad attitude. Rather than masking his increasing drug consumption, he became its walking advertisement. At 8 a.m., while other students trotted off to class, he would stand outside the Orange Bar to wait for Delmore, on the unmistakable heroin nod. “I was sitting in the Orange one early-spring day,” remembered Sterling. “Lou and this guy were sitting in the guy’s red convertible with the radio on full blast, the top down, and they were both nodding out in the front seat, so I went out and put the top up and turned the radio off. I remember another time sitting in the Orange and Lou came in and thought he was leaning on his elbow, except his elbow was about a foot above the table.” The local campus police, who were determined to crack down on drugs, took note of this behavior and put Reed under surveillance.

“I had recently been asked by the Tactical Police Force of the city which housed my large eastern university to leave town well before graduation because of various clandestine operations I was alleged to be involved in,” wrote Reed in one essay. “In those days few people had long hair and those who did recognized each other as, at the very least, a good guy and one who smoked marijuana. They couldn’t catch me.”

In fact, Lou suffered police surveillance more than he knew. In 1963, as drugs spread rapidly through college campuses across the country, the Syracuse Police Department had taken a small group of officers led by Sgt. Robert Longo from the vice squad and created a brand-new narcotics squad. The heat was closing in, to employ the opening sentence of Lou’s favorite book, William Burroughs’s recently published Naked Lunch. To counterbalance the police pressure, Shelley and a friend of hers had developed a friendship with two of the members of this new Syracuse narcotics squad. “The police squad car would pull up outside my apartment and they’d supposedly be working, but they’d be having a beer and hanging out,” she recalled. “And getting a little bit of nooky without my having to commit myself in any way. They came up and got a few hugs and kisses and thought they were making real progress with the lewd, evil girls of the campus. Lou met the cops and knew them through his senior year. He used to see them in the Varsity a lot. Lou was harassed by the same police. They just plain hated Lou.”

Shelley was more aware of how much the cops really wanted to get Lou (“They thought he was a gay faggot evil shit,” she said) and knew that if they got their hands on him, they would beat him up badly. She repeatedly made it a condition of seeing the cop that he promise they would not touch Lou. “Touch Lou,” she told him, “and you don’t touch me.”

At first, the fact that the heavies from the narcotics squad were on Lou’s tail was more of an amusement than a hassle for him. He enjoyed entertaining friends with stories about how, after being tipped off about an impending bust, he had buried his stash at a nearby Boy Scout camp. Lou felt confident that he could outsmart the police just as he had outwitted authorities throughout his life.

There were also signs that a calmer, more confident Lou was emerging, a Lou who had passed through the very center of some internal tornado and survived stronger, surer, and more his own man. Larry Goldstein, a freshman whose band the Downbeats won the battle of the bands at Syracuse in 1963, and who had briefly joined LA and the Eldorados, got a chance to hang out with Lou one night.

“We started playing together, doing mostly college gigs,” Goldstein recounted. “We played Cornell for one, and we used to play the FI—the Fayetteville Inn—which was about twenty miles from Syracuse. Lou was really nothing but very nice to us. We were just kids in comparison, but he wasn’t a prima donna or a rock-star type, he was very supportive. There was a restaurant called Ben’s in the Fifteenth Ward near Lou’s apartment that served really greasy soul food, and Lou used to go there a lot. One night after we played a gig we were sitting around Lou’s apartment and I remember him as being very gentle and very nice, like a kind of father figure. And he suggested that we go to Ben’s to get something to eat. Lou seemed a lot older than us. And he was much more mature in many ways. He had an alternative type of personality that was unlike anyone else. I never remembered him being arrogant about it. He was just advanced.”

In June 1964, Reed graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the Syracuse College of Arts and Sciences. The richness of Lou’s character, and yet at the same time its awful limitation, was revealed in Lou’s last act of human kindness at Syracuse. According to Reed, “As soon as exams were over, at the graduation ceremony, I was told by the Tactical Police Squad that if I wasn’t gone within an hour, they’d beat me up. They couldn’t get me, but they’d break every bone, every movable part of my body. So I split, but I still graduated with honors.”

However, according to Shelley, Lou in fact stayed after graduation strictly to take care of her through a particularly bad illness. The two of them had been living half a block apart. Shelley was installed on McDonald Street with her killer boyfriend; Lou was living alone on the corner of Adams. Near the end of the semester, Shelley’s boyfriend had gone on a trip. Lou visited and found her unable to attend classes. He scooped her up and moved her into his apartment. Knowing she’d fail her course with Phillip Booth if he didn’t do something drastic, Lou took her over to Booth’s house. “I remember being bundled over there and being plunked down on the couch and being told, ‘Just sit there and look hopeless,’” she recalled. “Which was no effort. My eyes must have been rolling in my head. He just told Booth, ‘Pass this person,’ and he did.” As the other students left campus, Shelley was still too ill to travel, so Lou stayed with her and, she said, “really put me back together.”

Shelley remembered thinking, “I really love him, he’s really fantastic,” but also being exhausted and foggy. “You know how it is when you get back together with someone. He was just terrific. We were really pigs in shit, like two kids let out of jail. He was adorable. It was a perfect time. We were really amazed at having such a good time.”

She stayed with him for one to two weeks. Unfortunately, it was too long, and Shelley found herself being unpleasantly reminded of Lou’s need to be in control and had an intuitive feeling that things would never work out between them. And so, when he put her onto the plane to Chicago, she waved good-bye to Lou without wondering when she would see him again.

Chapter Four

The Pickwick Period (#u38abb036-9b1c-55df-a553-8dc550b33194)

WITH PICKWICK INTERNATIONAL: 1964–65

The Pickwick experience was the first plateau of Lou’s maturation as a musician. It gave him a point of departure that I think was critical to his becoming what he became.

Donald Schupak

Instead of going into New York like the majority of the other bright English-literature graduates coming down from Syracuse University, Lou retreated to the comfort and safety of his parents’ home. In the summer of 1964, he turned his full attention toward evading the draft. He knew he’d have to put on a good show at the draft hearing to convince the army officials he was sick, crazy, or both. He chose both.