Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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СКАЧАТЬ value. “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs,” Reed recounted. “We just churned out songs, that’s all. They would say, ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’ then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. While I was doing that, I was doing my own stuff and trying to get by, but the material I was doing, people wouldn’t go near me with it at the time. I mean, we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let the Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’ I didn’t see it as schizophrenic at all. I just had a job as a songwriter. I mean, a real hack job. They’d come in and give me a subject, and we’d write.

      “I really liked doing it, it was really fun, but I wasn’t doing the stuff I wanted to do. I was just hoping I could somehow get an in, which, in fact, worked out. It’s just worked out in an odd way. But, at least it was something to do with music.”

      Naturally, Lou told friends that he hated working at Pickwick and expressed endless bitterness over Phillips’s failure to see any merit in Reed’s own compositions. “I’d say, why don’t we record these?” remembered Reed. “And they’d say ‘No, we can’t record stuff like that.’” (One can only wonder how Johnny Don’t Shoot No More, Ten Drug Songs would have gone over in that halcyon era.) But the truth is that the detached observer in Lou was making out like a bandit in this situation. In fact, he should have been paying them for the very useful education in how to use a recording studio and work with helpful collaborators for whom he would in time come to realize a strong need. Never was he more prolific than during his Pickwick days. Over the course of a few months Reed and his three collaborators published at least fifteen songs. The five months he spent at Pickwick from September 1964 to February 1965 provided the best on-the-job training he could possibly have had for a career in rock and roll.

Chapter Five

       The Formation of the Velvet Underground

      ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE: 1965

      The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to stimulus and suggestion, comparison, emulation.

      Henry James

      It was through Pickwick that Lou met the man who would be the single most important long-lasting collaborator in his life, John Cale. One day in January 1965, Lou, who had not let hepatitis slow him down, had ingested a copious quantity of drugs. As he felt the rush of creativity coming on, he leafed through Eugenia Sheperd’s column in a local tabloid and came across an item about ostrich feathers being the latest fashion craze. Flinging down the paper and grabbing his guitar with the manic pent-up humor that fueled so much of his work, Lou spontaneously created a new would-be dance craze in a song called “The Ostrich.” It joyously told the dancer to put his head on the floor and let his partner step on it. What better self-image could Lou have possibly come up with than this nutty notion, except that the dancers give each other electroshocks?

      Although it appeared unlikely that even rock-crazed teenagers, currently dancing the twist and the frug, would go for this masochistic idea, Shupak’s partner, Terry Phillips, desperate for a hit to exonerate his claim that the wave of the future was in rock, immediately snapped that this could be the hit single they had been looking for. With his spacey head full of images of millions of kids across America stomping on each other’s head (he was ten years ahead of his time), the ersatz Andrew Oldham (the Rolling Stones’ equally young and inexperienced producer) got the rock executives out in the warehouse to agree to his proposal that they release “The Ostrich” as a single by a make-believe band called the Primitives. When the record came out, they received a call from a TV dance show, much to their surprise, requesting a performance of “The Ostrich” by “the band.” Eager to promote his project, Phillips persuaded the Pickwick people to let him put together a real band to fill the bill. He saw the pleasingly pubescent-looking Lewis as a natural for lead singer. But he was less than enthusiastic about the other musicians, who did not have the requisite look to con the teen market into spending their spare dollars on “The Ostrich.” Frantic to get the show on the road, Phillips began to search for a backup band for Lou Reed.

      From the Pickwick studio the story cuts to Terry Phillips at an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment jammed with a bunch of pasty-faced party people all yukking it up and trying to be cool despite having no idea at all about anything. Ensconced among them, highly amused and somewhat above it all, were the unlikely duo of a big-boned Welshman with a sonorous voice named John Cale and his partner and flatmate, the classic nervy-looking underground man Tony Conrad. In their early twenties and sporting hair unfashionably long for those days, Cale was a classical-music scholar, Conrad an underground filmmaker, and they were both members of one of the midsixties most avant-garde music groups in the world, La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. On the trail of female companions and good times, they had been brought to the party by the brother of the playwright Jack Gelber, who had recently written a famous play about heroin called The Connection. Spotting these reasonably attractive and slightly eccentric-looking guys with long hair, Terry Phillips immediately asked them if they were musicians. Receiving an affirmative response, he took it for granted that they played guitars (in fact Cale played an electrically amplified viola as well as several Indian instruments) and snapped, “Where’s the drummer?”

      The two underground artists, who took their work highly seriously, went along with Phillips as a kind of joke, claiming they did have a drummer so as not to jeopardize the opportunity to make some pocket money. The next day, along with their good friend Walter De Maria, who would soon emerge as one of the leading avant-garde sculptors in the world and was doing a little drumming on the side, they showed up at Pickwick studios as instructed.

      Cale, Conrad, and De Maria were highly amused by the bogus setup at Pickwick. To them, the Pickwick executives in polyester suits, who suspiciously pressed contracts into their hands, were hilarious caricatures of rock moguls. On close inspection, as Conrad recalled, the contracts stipulated that they would sign away the rights to everything they did for the rest of their lives in exchange for nothing. After brushing aside this attempt to extract an allegiance more closely resembling indentured servitude than business management, Conrad, Cale, and De Maria were introduced to Lou Reed. He assured them that it would take no time at all to learn their parts to “The Ostrich” since all the guitar strings were tuned to a single note. This information left John Cale and Tony Conrad openmouthed in astonishment since that was exactly what they had been doing at La Monte Young’s rigorous eight-hours-a-day rehearsals. They realized Lou had some kind of innate musical genius that even the salesmen at the studio had picked up on. Tony got the impression that “Lou had a close relationship with these people at Pickwick because they recognized that he was a very gifted person. He impressed everybody as having some particularly assertive personal quality.”

      Cale, Conrad, and De Maria agreed to join “The Primitives” and play shows to promote the record on the East Coast. It was primarily a camp lark, but it would also give them a glimpse into the world of commercial rock and roll, in which they were not entirely uninterested.

      And so it came about that in their first appearance together, Lou Reed and John Cale found themselves, without prior rehearsal, running onto the stage of some high school in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley following a bellowed introduction: “And here they are from New York—The Primitives!” Confronting a barrage of screaming kids, the band launched into “The Ostrich.” At the end of the song the deejay screamed, rather portentously, “These guys have really got something. I hope it’s not catching!”

      Far from being catching, “The Ostrich” died a quick death. After СКАЧАТЬ