Lou Reed by Will Hermes

Author:Will Hermes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Early that summer, Reed engaged an idea that must’ve felt like a lightning strike—a project that could’ve met his high standards for merging art and commerce, addressed his financial struggles, moved him to the center of the pop culture conversation, and reunited him with a man he loved and admired. Reed’s talks about staging Berlin with Warhol, whose multifaceted career was as successful as ever, hadn’t borne fruit. But after getting an early look at his friend’s aphoristic memoir The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), due that fall, Reed began developing ideas for a musical based on it.

Whether Reed had discussed the project with Warhol or just surprised him with a tape is unclear. But on an undated BASF C-90 cassette titled Philosophy Songs (From A to B & Back), Reed worked through a dozen song sketches, working out lyrics that reflected Warhol’s life and ideas over rudimentary acoustic guitar riffs, with traffic noise in the background, as if recording in his apartment with the window open. Some songs conjured his first-person voice, echoing familiar quips about fame, sex, and Coca-Cola. Reed touches on the presentational heroics of “drag queens” (“ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood,” as Warhol described them in Philosophy), the artist’s notion of a “put-on,” and the aestheticization of his hard lean into commerce. (“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” Warhol affirmed in the book, “making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”) Other songs took a third-person POV. There’s humor: Warhol’s dog shitting in the aisle of his local Gristedes grocery store; a high-concept Warhol doll that, when you wind it up, does nothing. Other observations are nastier—about Warhol’s cheapness, coldness, chronic skin problems, sex life—perhaps channeling Factory characters talking shit about their mentor, or possibly Reed’s own venting, at a man with whom he had a complex relationship. Tellingly, Reed offers an apology at the end of the demo, recalling the apologies he made to his ex-wife for the personal details he used in Berlin.

With a selection of Reed’s recent concert recordings on the B side, the cassette was a thorny blend of artmaking, business proposition, and the sort of mixtape one might make for a lover, to express feelings impossible to articulate in conversation. Warhol’s take on the project, or indeed, whether he ever even listened to the tape, is unclear. For his part, Reed bragged about writing it all in a day, telling a writer from Circus magazine he had two hours’ worth of music, and that Warhol wanted to do the musical with David Cassidy, with whom Reed seemed slightly obsessed at the time. Sometime later, he told his friend Mick Rock that he’d played the demos for Warhol, and they’d in fact put him off.

“He was fascinated, but horrified,” Reed said. “I think they kind of scared him. But I’m thinking of doing it as my next album.”

It didn’t work out that way, and nothing more came of the project.

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