Transformer by Victor Bockris

Author:Victor Bockris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

Lou with Rachel, his muse from Metal Machine Music through Take No Prisoners and the subject of Coney Island Baby, 1975. (Gerard Malanga)

However, Lou’s sexual preferences had become important to his fans. Reed’s roadies were constantly asked if their leader was bi. “Bi? The fucker’s quad!” one joked in a bon mot that bounced around the rock world.

One observer believed some of his more outrageous behavior was a deliberate ploy to boost his hard-edge image. Commented Hickey, “He was careful to observe all the feedback the ‘Lou Reed persona’ got in the press. He read an enormous amount of magazines. He knew he was carrying the weight of his image of the Velvet Underground; he knew Lou Reed had to be Lou Reed. If Lou Reed is supposed to take drugs and have a weird sex life—well, then, it has to be.”

When Sally Can’t Dance was released in August 1974, it got a lot of press. “Lou is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people,” wrote Robert Christgau in the Voice. “I mean, what else are we to make of this grotesque hodgepodge of soul horns, flash guitar, deadpan song-speech, and indifferent rhymes? I don’t know, and Lou probably doesn’t either—even as he shits on us, he can’t staunch his own cleverness. So the hodgepodge produces juxtapositions that are funny and interesting, the title tune is as deadly accurate as it is simply mean-spirited, and ‘Billy’ is simply moving, indifferent rhymes and all. B +.”

“‘Billy’ is unusual even for unusual Lou,” wrote Paul Williams in the SoHo Weekly News. “It’s a ballad about an old school friend and what became of him—and, by extension, about what became of Lou as well. It works. This album, with ‘Kill Your Sons’ and ‘Billy,’ is among other things an acknowledgement of Lou’s middle-class Long Island roots.”

In an open letter in Hit Parader, Richard Robinson revealed an unlooked-for empathy, calling Katz’s production “admirable” and telling Lou that it was “the closest thing you’ve been to being heard in some time.” But Robinson regretted Sally’s lack of depth, energy, and rock-and-roll craziness, which had him virtually unable to distinguish one track from another.

As if to mock everything Lou stood for, Sally Can’t Dance became Reed’s biggest-selling album internationally and stayed on the charts for fourteen weeks, becoming the only American Top Ten LP of his career.

With Sally’s success, Lou became even more disillusioned with the charade his career had become, exhibiting a new level of raw self-loathing. During interviews at the time, Reed either went into Warholian catatonia or degenerated into verbal war. Lou’s cynicism reached its zenith when he said to Danny Fields in Gig magazine, “This is fantastic—the worse I am, the more it sells. If I wasn’t on the record at all next time around, it would probably go to number one.”

After the album came out, Lou denigrated it, the musicians, and the producer. However, as Katz pointed out, Lou would work with some of them for years. According to Lou, “Sally Can’t Dance wasn’t a parody, that was what was happening.

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