dangerous parts of town to score drugs, and made the occasional trip or phone call home, but he began to amputate those friends with whom he had maintained contact post-Syracuse. The first to go was the stalwart Hyman. Living in Manhattan with his wife and going to law school, his former buddy had lost the ability to provide anything for Lou (save a free meal). Mishkin still fulfilled a function in that he had a big space in Brooklyn where Lou sometimes rehearsed, and a yacht called the Black Angel tethered at the 79th Street Boat Basin where they sometimes socialized, but Mishkin was maintaining contact with Lou at a price. “At that point he was putting me down more than he would have at Syracuse,” Ritchie recalled. “He was on the way to what he became.”
Parting ways is common among former schoolmates who move on to new jobs and allegiances. The amputations that struck more deeply and perhaps more definitively were made by Lou of the people who had been most influential, the ones who knew too much about him.
After a period of psychiatric rehabilitation, Lincoln Swados had re-emerged on the New York scene, living in the East Village not far from Lou. For a short time he was making a reputation for himself as a comic-strip illustrator and stand-up comedian. But soon he beat Lou hands down in the lunatic sweepstakes by stepping in front of an oncoming subway train, saying, “I am a very bad person, I am a very bad person …” Moving aside at the last minute, he survived—minus an arm and a leg. Subsequently, he became something of a fixture on the Lower East Side as a crippled street performer. Lincoln’s sister, Elizabeth, who had gone on to a distinguished career as a playwright, was apparently quite upset by the extent to which Lou, rather than opening up to Lincoln after this tragic episode, put even more distance between them. Lincoln, though, apparently had a perceptive understanding of his friend’s motives. “Lou pretends to be like us,” he told his ex-girlfriend, the journalist Gretchen Berg, “but he’s really not, he’s really someone else. He’s really a businessman who has very definite goals and knows exactly what he wants.”
Interestingly, Delmore Schwartz, who was now in the final year of his life, had drawn a similar conclusion. A Syracuse classmate of Lou’s who ran into Schwartz in Manhattan one day was astonished to discover that “he looked really bad. He had on a black raincoat which looked like it was covered with toothpaste stains. He seemed to have been drinking, maybe he was drunk. And the only thing he was interested in discussing was his dislike for everyone at Syracuse; how Lou Reed and Peter Locke were spies paid by the Rockefellers.” When Lou discovered that Schwartz was living in the dilapidated fleabag Dixie Hotel on West 48th Street, he went there to make contact, but Delmore let him have it with both barrels, screaming, “If you ever come here again, I’ll kill you!” scaring off a shaken Reed, who recalled, “He thought I’d been sent by the CIA to spy on him, and I was scared because he was big and he really would have killed me.”
The third mind in his life at Syracuse, Shelley Albin, reversed the amputation, cutting Lou out of her life when she married Ronald Corwin, who had been a big wheel on the Syracuse campus from 1963 to 1965 as the head of the local chapter of CORE, and whom Lou subsequently characterized as an “asshole airhead.” The marriage was a blow to Lou in as much as he still considered Shelley to be “his” girlfriend, even though he had neither seen nor apparently made any attempt to contact her since the summer of 1964. Still, he had not carried on a romantic relationship with anyone else. Shelley would remain a thorn in his side at least throughout the end of the 1970s, inspiring some of his most poignant, if vicious, love songs.
The only people Lou seemed incapable of amputating were his parents, who were vividly remembered by friends as a pair of never seen but constantly present just off stage ogrelike specters threatening at any moment to have Lou committed (despite the fact that he was now twenty-three years old and legally beyond their reach).
***
A month into his collaboration with Cale, one of those chance meetings that have often formed rock groups took place when Lou bumped into his friend from Syracuse, Sterling Morrison, walking in the West Village. Lou invited Sterling to Ludlow Street to play some music. By then Angus MacLise was playing drums around Lou and John. The next time Tony Conrad dropped by, he discovered that the Reed–Cale relationship had blossomed with MacLise and Morrison into what they were beginning to call a group. They had even made a first stab at a name, trying on for several months the Warlocks (which, incidentally, was the name being used at the same time on the West Coast by the proto-Grateful Dead), and were taping rehearsals. The music, heavily influenced by La Monte Young via MacLise and Cale, but equally by the doo-wop and white rock favored by Reed and Morrison, was ethereal and passionate.
Lou and Angus collaborated on an essay called “Concerning the Rumor That Red China Has Cornered the Methedrine Market and Is Busy Adding Paranoia Drops to Upset the Mental Balance of the United States,” a nutty, stoned credo of the band’s basic precepts. It read, in part, “Western music is based on death, violence and the pursuit of PROGRESS … The root of universal music is sex. Western music is as violent as Western sex … Our band is the Western equivalent to the cosmic dance of Shiva. Playing as Babylon goes up in flames.”
Their original precepts were to dedicate themselves with an almost religious fervor to their collective calling, to sacrifice being immediately successful, to be different, to hold on to a personality of their own, never to try to please anyone but themselves, and never to play the same song the same way. The group discovered and exploited musical traditions lost to their contemporaries, rejecting outright the popular conventions of the day. “We actually had a rule in the band,” Reed explained. “If anybody played a blues lick, they would be fined. Everyone was going crazy over old blues people, but they forgot about all those groups, like the Spaniels, people like that. Records like ‘Smoke from Your Cigarette,’ and ‘I Need a Sunday Kind of Love,’ the ‘Wind’ by the Chesters, ‘Later for You, Baby’ by the Solitaires. All those really ferocious records that no one seemed to listen to anymore were underneath everything we were playing. No one really knew that.”
“Our music evolved collectively,” Sterling reported. “Lou would walk in with some sort of scratchy verse and we would all develop the music. It almost always worked like that. We’d all thrash it out into something very strong. John was trying to be a serious young composer; he had no background in rock music, which was terrific, he knew no clichés. You listen to his bass lines, he didn’t know any of the usual riffs, it was totally eccentric. ‘Waiting for the Man’ was very weird. John was always exciting to work with.”
Their first complete success in terms of arrangements was “Venus in Furs.” When Cale initially added viola, grinding it against Reed’s “ostrich” guitar, illogically and without trepidation, a tingle of anticipation shot up his spine. They had, he knew, found their sound, and it was strong. Cale, who applied the mania to the sound, recalled, “It wasn’t until then that I thought we had discovered a really original, nasty style.” With the words of this song, wrote the British critic Richard Williams, “Lou Reed was to change the agenda of pop music once and for all. But it wasn’t just the words either. ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’ were given music that fitted their themes, and that didn’t sound like anything anybody had played before. Out went the blues tonality and the Afro-American rhythms, the basic components of all previous rock and roll. The prevailing sound was the grinding screech of Cale’s electric viola and Reed’s guitar feedback, while the tempo speeded up and slowed down according to the momentary requirements of the lyric.”
The chemistry of their personalities was more fragile. On one occasion, Lou played a new song he had written and John immediately started adding an improvised viola part. Sterling muttered something about its being a good viola part. Lou looked up and snapped, “Yeah, I know. I wrote the song just for that viola part. Every single note of it I knew in advance.” Although unable to outdo Lou verbally, John stuck to his guns through music. Several observers of the scene believed that John did more than that—he actually brought Lou Reed out of himself, completed him as it were. Some believe that without John Cale, the Lou Reed who became a legend would not have been born.
“It’s a fascinating relationship,” commented one friend. “That John worked with Cage and La Monte Young would be interesting enough if his career ended there, but that he met Lou and saw something in Lou despite