Dirty Blvd. by Aidan Levy

Author:Aidan Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

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This anticommercial coup recontextualized Lou as the mercurial, audacious figure he always was, but it also scandalized his already failing marriage. If the album was intended to expel the inner demons that led Lou to lash out at Bettye—The Exorcist would be released only months later—it was a disaster, and Bettye decided to push forward with the divorce. She flew to Santo Domingo to obtain a twenty-four-hour divorce, an expedient route to separating that only required one party to attend the hearing. But when she returned, Lou tried to win her back.

“He seemed to take it seriously—‘I lost her over this, so if I want to keep her, I’m going to have to not do that anymore,’” Bettye says. “I thought about it for a while, maybe a couple days or a week, then I decided we’d try it again. I thought he’d really gotten it.”

With Bettye back in the picture, the Berlin tour started gearing up, but in light of the album’s commercial failure, Dennis Katz wasn’t sure what direction to pursue that would placate RCA and keep Lou’s head above water. So he turned to his brother. “Berlin was a bomb, and Lou and my brother asked my opinion,” recalls Steve Katz. “So I just said, ‘What I would do is I think Lou ought to take all of those Velvet Underground songs and release them in a different context—a great band, maybe more of a heavy rocking quintet. And go on the road and record a live show.” Katz assumed correctly that combining Lou’s newfound rock star status with his older material could result in wider exposure for his avant-garde past. “They said, ‘Good idea! Why don’t you produce it?’ So I said, ‘What, are you kidding? That’d be great.’”

Steve Katz and Bob Ezrin assembled a band of consummate technicians who could support Lou even at his most inebriated state—Detroit-bred dueling guitar duo Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, Columbia A&R man and keyboardist Ray Colcord, who had discovered Aerosmith, Indian-Canadian bassist Prakash John, and Finnish drummer Pentti Glan of Bush, whom Ezrin knew from the Toronto scene. Then Dennis Katz called Howard Stein, the promoter behind the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, and booked Lou tentatively for a date in December when they planned on recording his follow-up album, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal.

From the label’s perspective, Lou faced tremendous pressure to produce a hit after plunging into the commercial sand trap of the avant-garde, and a live album that would recast old chestnuts presented the most laid-back route back to the green. “Rock ’n’ Roll Animal was the perfect thing to happen after Berlin,” says Steve Katz. “I love Berlin. It’s not something I whistle in the shower, but it’s a beautiful record. Ezrin’s a genius. But he also had a nervous breakdown afterwards. Lou was like catching a cold. You spend too much time with Lou, you’re gonna get a nervous breakdown.”

Like a method actor re-creating the affective memory of the moments

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