Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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СКАЧАТЬ for his nickname, “Drella,” composed equally of Dracula and Cinderella. He was a person of much generosity and kindness—yet he could slice a person at a glance. Warhol would try to organize other people’s emotions in the same way he drew up shopping lists. He had the unique power of playing people off one another. He could be kind, cruel, friendly, catty, humane, overriding, passionately wild for “la gloire.” And he was also all that was truly vulnerable. Warhol was painfully shy, which accounted for the group of young people he surrounded himself with. He was possessed by the people he had gathered around him, yet he was habitually exploiting, betraying, or otherwise mistreating those who were close, or seemed close to him.”

      In an essay, “From the Bandstand,” he wrote about music that year, Lou drew attention to one of the key concepts they both emphasized in their work, repetition. “Every head in America must know the last three drum choruses of ‘Dawn’ by the Four Seasons. Paradiddles. Repetition. Repetition is so fantastic … Andy Warhol’s movies are so repetitious sometimes, so so beautiful. Probably the only interesting films made in the U.S. Rock and roll films. Over and over and over. Reducing things to their final joke. Which is pretty. ‘Sally go ’round the roses / roses they won’t hurt you.’”

      “The real idea was to listen all the time,” Reed said. “He had great ideas at the drop of a hat. But so did I. The thing was, he was there. There were a couple of people who were floating around who were there who always seemed to get in touch with one another one way or another. In other words, no other band could have been able to hold it up. It would have been overwhelmed by the lights or the movies. That’s not, in fact, what happened. And that’s because what we did was very strong.”

      “You scared yourself with music,” Warhol told him. “I scared myself with paint.”

      “It was like heaven,” said Reed of his early days at the Factory. “I watched Andy; I watched Andy watching everybody. I would hear people say the most astonishing things, the craziest things, the funniest things, the saddest things. I used to write it down.”

      All the Velvets seemed equally snowed by Andy. “It was like bang!” Warhol superstar Mary Woronov recalled. “They were with Andy and Andy was with them and they backed him absolutely. They would have walked to the end of the earth for him. And that happened in one day!”

      Gretchen Berg, who often visited the Factory to interview Warhol, noticed that Reed maintained a strong position there. “Lou was very quiet. He almost never spoke to anyone, and when addressed, he would not answer,” she recalled. “He would act as if you weren’t there. I respected him. I saw that he was an artist of some kind and he had his group around him. They were always quite nice, but they always kept their distance. It was a bit snobbish. I also had the feeling that Mr. Warhol created the atmosphere of a family around him and there was a certain amount of competition. He had a lot of power with Andy on a one-on-one basis. You had the feeling that Lou was someone rather special. He was the brother who was away for many years and had to be caught when he came in. The father must now speak to Lewis, who’s just come in, because Lewis will not speak to anyone else but father. It was exactly that feeling. No one else must speak to Lou. And then Lewis would speak to father and then leave. If you came up to him, it was not as if he was rude exactly, but he would just look at you and take a puff of his cigarette. Lou was very much in the background, but he kept himself in the background. There was always something that was being created in the background. While everyone else was going through their thing and living and having all this attention, this in the background was going on very quietly and very steadily. He was like Paul Morrissey in a way.

      “There was tension between Paul and everyone. I think he felt that he must not say anything about Lou Reed because he had no power over Lou. Lou Reed came in when he liked, left when he liked.”

      In Warhol’s Factory, Reed found a laboratory for his artistic and sexual explorations, a milieu full of psychodrama providing endless fodder for his songs, and a nurturing environment through which he could bring music to the world. “Everyone was very campy,” Cale said. “There was a lot of game playing. Lou felt at home in that environment. I didn’t really.” Before the Factory, Reed had created scenarios for his songs; Warhol provided the cast and the telling details. More importantly, the Factory laid bare all the sexual fantasies and taboos that Reed had been struggling to conceal since his days on Long Island. In Warhol’s light Lou metamorphosed from a rock musician with a negative attitude and a host of complexes into a glamorous member of the Warhol entourage. The fragile, gamin Reed was equally attractive to men and women, looking on the one hand like a pretty girl with his curly brown hair and tentative smile, and exhibiting on the other hand an insouciant attitude regarding sex that presented an ambivalent challenge. Reed soon abandoned the sweaters, casual jackets, and loafers he’d worn since leaving Syracuse and took on the Factory image—Warhol-inspired black leather jacket, boots, and shades. Like Warhol, Reed masked his vulnerable side within the armor of a tough, impenetrable image.

      Warhol had often gone on the record saying that sex was too much trouble, but he was fascinated by the idea of sex, and many of his films were semipornographic in a distanced, ironic way. Reed also maintained a detached stance with regard to sex. As a friend recalled, “Lou was mostly a voyeur. In my experience he never had any sustained interest in either sex. Sex didn’t offer Lou enough—he was just really bored by it.” One budding transvestite, Jackie Curtis, tried to have sex with Lou. “He was very tall and heavily built, a big boy,” recalled a mutual friend. “He was eighteen, but he looked about fourteen. And he would come right up to Lou and say, ‘Hi, gee, how are you!’ And Lou would not respond at all. And Jackie would say, ‘Well, thank you very much.’ And then he’d come back to me and say, ‘God, what did I say?’ He was very funny. Then he would go rushing up the next time and Lou would put his head back in an aloof manner.”

      Lou was not, however, always aloof. “Lou tried to put the make on me once,” Malanga remembered. “It didn’t go anywhere. He was the aggressor and I was gentle with him but … We came back from a gig real late—we were traveling somewhere and we came back to New York really late and he called up Barbara Hodes and Barbara put the two of us up that night. And I remember Lou making advances toward me under the sheet. I think in the end we ended up just hugging each other. I kind of sent him the signal that I wasn’t interested.”

      Reed was more interested in the sexual role-playing of transvestisms and S&M. Yet this didn’t stop him from having a number of friendships with men and women. At the Factory he met Danny Fields, a young medical school dropout with whom he developed a connection that lasted over thirty years. “I first heard ‘Heroin’ and I thought it was beautiful music,” Fields recalled. “But I was terrified of Lou. I was always trying to figure out things to say to him that would be sharp. Everybody was in love with him back then. Around 1966, he was the sexiest boy in town.”

      “Lou’s relationship with Danny Field was collegial,” explained Gerard Malanga. “They were in the same business and there was a lot of history between them. Lou and I may have crashed at Danny’s one night. Danny’s pad was basically a crash pad. Thank God for Danny. We would have been homeless. We always knew he could be relied to put us up. He was living on West 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues above a coffee shop, which in those years was a very unfashionable place to live. So Danny was a pioneer. He had a floor-through loft in a two-story building. There were couches and pillows and mattresses on the floor with a few people staying there.”

      In the midst of all the ego collisions and role-playing, screaming guitars, and parties, Fields observed, “We all had this feeling about Lou—that he would bury us. He was much too smart to get sucked into the whirlpool. Others may have been too fragile, too beautiful to survive—but he knew what he was doing. I was ever so in love with Lou. Everyone was in love with him—me, Edie, Andy, everyone. I thought he was just the hottest-looking, sexiest person I ever had seen. He was a major sex object of everybody in New York in his years with the Velvet Underground. СКАЧАТЬ