Rock'n'Roll Heart

LESTER BANGS: “Lou Reed is my own hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly conceive of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination.”

LOU REED: “I like to think of myself as Clearasil on the face of the nation. Jim Morrison would have said that if he was smart, but he’s dead.”

LEONARD COHEN: “Lou Reed surprised me greatly because he had a book of my poems. I hadn’t been published in America and I had a very small audience even in Canada. So when Lou Reed asked me to sign ‘Flowers for Hitler,’ I thought it was an extremely friendly gesture of his. In those days, I guess he wasn’t getting very many compliments for his work, and I certainly wasn’t. So we told each other how good we were. I liked him immediately, because Nico liked him.”

PETER HOGAN: “Lou was in rougher shape than his voice. Most witnesses blamed Lou’s obviously distraught mental state on drugs, but according to Sterling Morrison, Reed was drug-free at this point; he was, however, experimenting with strange diets and sleeping hardly at all, which may well have exacerbated the paranoia. Reed told Maureen Tucker that he’d been levitating several feet above his bed while trying to get to sleep.”

LOU REED: “These nights I hardly go out at all, except down to the liquor store to buy another fifth. Sometimes I have this horrible nightmare that I’m not really what I think I am… That I’m just a completely decadent egoist… Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in my shoes?”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Having secured his meeting with Warhol, David Bowie enlisted Lisa Robinson as a coconspirator to link up with Andy’s musical protégé. Once he’d learned Lisa was friends with Lou Reed, David was ‘absolutely intrigued,’ says Robinson, who arranged for them to meet over dinner at the Ginger Man, a ‘really straight’ restaurant by Lincoln Park. Lou and David chatted; Lou was drunk and manic, David was whispering flirtatiously, and Lou’s wife, Betty, looked on adoringly.”

DAVID BOWIE: “Lou’s so damned fine. And they throw up all this mystery around him, this bloody silliness. Can’t they understand he’s just a New York cat, and that is JUST what he is. You know, it would be so nice if people would be able to see that beneath it all – we’re all easy people.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Like his recruitment of Iggy Pop, Bowie’s offer to produce ‘Transformer’ was outrageously presumptuous; it was also a tougher task than anyone could imagine, for Lou was a mess, addicted to bickering and manipulation. Many onlookers would credit arranger Mick Ronson with the bulk of the work. David, however, had the much more difficult tasks of soothing Lou’s frazzled ego, talking him out of his moods, and coping with his mind games.”

DAVID BOWIE: “People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era and I mean that catastrophically. Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost. We’re both very mixed up, paranoid people – absolute walking messes. I don’t really know what we’re doing. If we’re the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good.”

NICK KENT: “Lou Reed made his UK live debut on July 20 1972 at London’s King’s Cross Cinema and the fledgling glitterati du jour had all come out in force to feast their eyes and ears on the revered former Velvet Underground kingpin’s latest musical venture. Members of a fascinating new English act known as Roxy Music were amongst the gauchely attired attendees seated up in the balcony. The Stooges were there too, scoping out the competition with their customary snake-eyed nonchalance. Backstage I caught a glimpse of Reed before he went on. Slumped in a corner of his makeshift dressing room, his whole body was shaking uncontrollably and his facial expression was that of a man awaiting his own execution. His performance that night quickly degenerated into a fiasco. The backing band he’d hired – and christened the Tots – managed only to transform his old Velvets repertoire from edgy art rock to feckless sounding bubblegum pop. And Reed’s stage fright was so palpable his voice kept cancelling out on him because his vocal cords and neck muscles had become rigid with fear. He was also seriously overweight, a condition not helped by his choice of apparel – a rhinestone encrusted black velvet suit several sizes too small for his portly girth. After four songs, his trousers burst their seams, his zipper broke and the waistband began to slowly descend, billowing around his thighs. Iggy Pop and James Williamson – standing at the front of the stage – found this spectacle particularly amusing and began pointing at the falling strides with suitably contemptuous facial expressions.”

 

ANGELA BOWIE: “My first impression of Lou was of a man honor-bound to act as fey as a human could. He was wearing heavy mascara and jet-black lipstick with matching nail polish, plus a tight little Errol Flynn-as-Robin Hood bodyshirt that must have lit up every queen for acres around him, and he looked as if he would jump higher than the Post Office Tower if you so much as whispered ‘Boo’ in his well-turned little ear. Lou’s greeting was a rather odd cross between a dead trout and a paranoid butterfly.”

SUZI RONSON: “Lou was a junkie as far as I could tell. I went over to Wimbledon and thought, ‘What a wreck these people are.’ I had a similar thing with Iggy a bit later. Went to do the Stooges’ hair and they couldn’t hold their heads up. And they smelled awful. Never had any experience with drug users. I’m young. No clue. I remember apologizing to Tony. ‘The haircuts might not be straight, they couldn’t hold their heads up.’”

DAI DAVIES: “Lou was extremely messed up, like a parody of a drug fiend. David was incredible, like a much older, mature producer, and would talk Lou down.”

KEN SCOTT: “David just understood Lou. Which no one else did, in the state he was in.”

CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: “Bowie’s holding an extended press conference at the Dorchester Hotel, held especially for the planeload of American writers flown in for the weekend. In the foyer everything is frosty, air-conditioned elegance, in slow motion after the sweltering dusty street. Down the mirrored corridors of the second floor through the door into a suitably chic room where assorted media people are eating cakes and sandwiches and drinking tea and/or scotch. Lou Reed and his band are there, all the Spiders and, curled up in a corner in a Bolan T-shirt, eye shadow, and silvered hair, is Iggy Pop. When I got there David was wearing an entirely different outfit. Before I left he’d changed into a third. David’s wife, lithe and crew-cut, is smoothing things down, getting together drinks and being assaulted by Lou’s roadie. When I arrived, he’d just bitten her in the stomach and as she’s very slim, the bite had gone direct to her abdominal muscles and everybody was falling about. Woody pours me a sumptuous Johnny Walker Black Label and peach juice. Lou Reed is talking quietly to David. He’s wearing shades and maroon fingernails. Periodically, horrified waiters enter to deliver more scotch and wine and sandwiches.”

LOU REED: “We had a lot of fun. But when David gets drunk, he thinks he’s Iggy.”

CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: “At this point, Bowie put on the rough tape of the Mott the Hoople LP. First cut was Lou and Mott’s ‘Sweet Jane.’ It sounded the best Mott I’ve heard. While it was playing, Reed entered the room. I hoped to get him to join in the conversation but he just came over and kissed David. ‘That’s it,’ he said. Exit. ‘I was hoping to get a two-way interview,’ I protested. ‘That was a two-way interview,’ Bowie smirked.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Reed and Bowie were never going to be fast friends. Rather, they would circle one another, Bowie silently weighing up the tautly wrought, sarcastic New Yorker whom he’d idolized for almost five years, Reed sharp and sharklike, taking the measure of the new kid in town. Conversation ran in short, sharp bursts, Reed machine-gunning a question or a comment, Bowie batting the answer back with as few soft words as he could muster… Somewhere along the line, the name of Iggy Pop came up in conversation. ‘Don’t talk to him,’ Reed warned. ‘He’s a junkie.’ But Bowie wasn’t listening. He’d never seen a ghost before.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Nights were when Reed was at his best. Trident Studios was set in the heart of London’s Soho, the nest of streets that make up the city’s red light district. Reed loved it, particularly in comparison to New York – according to Bowie, his favorite word for Soho was ‘quaint,’ but it wasn’t a put-down. There, in the twilight world of tramps and drunks, hookers and junkies, strip clubs and revue bars, he could wander the sewers of local society without ever having to watch his own back. ‘Transformer’ was New York seen through the skuzzy neon light of a rainy night in Soho, Times Square wrapped in a long brown raincoat.”

LOU REED: “When I first got to Wimbledon I had a hash cookie and it took me about a month to recover.”

BOB EZRIN: “’Berlin’ is one of the best and the most complete pieces I’ve ever done in my life, but at the same time it was a nightmare to record at times because of the coterie of strange people who kept showing up…  It was a creative crucible, like a cauldron of fire.  There was so much energy in that room.  But sometimes there was also some real strangeness, and there were a lot of drugs floating around.  And that colored the experience a lot.  I think everybody sort of pulled themselves together and made great music, but it was all the stuff after and before and in and around the making of music that was particularly difficult.”

JIM CARROLL: “I knew Lou had gone off to Europe and he was kind of out of sight. But then, he comes back to New York and he’s doing these shows at the old Academy of Music. I went to two of the shows and they were recording them for what turned out to be the ‘Rock’n’Roll Animal’ album. At the right moment the band starts going into the power chords of ‘Sweet Jane.’ And Lou just kind of struts very easily out; for the first time he’s onstage without a guitar. We see that he’s got this spiked dog collar on, short hair, and he’s in these leathers. Somebody yelled out ‘Heroin’ from the audience and the first thing he said was ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’”

DAVE THOMPSON: “The tour preserved on wax as ‘Rock‘n’Roll Animal’ remains seared into the memory of anyone who saw it, the sonic and scenic successor not only to everything Reed had ever threatened in the past, but also to all that other people had borrowed from him. Asked by journalists to sum himself up, Reed delighted in describing himself as the ‘Hamlet of Electricity.’ Six months later, at the height of his own show, Bowie was tongue-kissing a plastic stage-prop Yorick’s skull every night, as though desperate to draw some of Reed’s magic from its mouth. Reed’s show opened without him, guitarists Hunter and Wagner dueling out an overture that only slowly resolved itself into ‘Sweet Jane,’ just as Reed ambled out onto the stage for the first time, the lights picking him up as he stepped toward the microphone, a military aerobics instructor from hell on his way to the darkest S&M basement in town. Queen Bitch. He communicated to the audience with glares and stares. No matter that he disguised them beneath those omnipresent shades – you knew his eyes were pinpricks of rage.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Lou was arrested on stage in Miami for singing ‘sucking on my ding dong’ while tapping the helmets of the policemen guarding the front of the stage with his microphone. As Lou was led away by a big cop with a serious expression intoning ‘This man is going to jail,’ Lou could barely control his hysterical laughter. Later, on March 24, Reed was bitten on the bum by a fan screaming ‘LEATHER!’ at a show in Buffalo.”

LOU REED: “You have to get stoned in the city. It’s a necessity. The atmosphere is so polluted that you have to put chemicals in your body to counteract it.”

LESTER BANGS: “Who else but Lou Reed would write whole new volumes in tonsorial culture by shaving his traditionally kinky locks to the skull for the simian charm, then topping even his own act by carving Iron Crosses in that mangy patch of stubble; then redo his dome Hitler Youth blond so he resembled a bubblegum Kenneth Anger, which is obviously one damn cool way for a popstar to look, especially if he’s been looking like sulking shit for a long as Lou had?”

 

JOHN CALE: “Steady doses of amphetamine changed the muscle structure of Lou’s face so he can’t smile anymore. When he smiles, his face gets limp and sags. It looks like a weird Frankenstein grimace.”

NICK KENT: “For a start, I’ve never seen a man so utterly paralyzed, so completely devoid of life while managing to somehow keep breathing, as Reed had looked that night. He stood there looking to all the world like one of those mangy half-starved Mexican dogs (who always appear limping pathetically across the desolate stone landscape of a Sam Peckinpah movie just after the outlaw heroes have vamoosed across the border) but transformed by some hideous miscalculation of fate into human form. The hair was shaved as close to the head as possible, like Charles Manson’s when he was graced with a prison cut, and went one step further, but mutilated even way beyond that by what appeared to be large random patches of diseased albino coloring. It was only when I got closer that I noticed these areas on the sides of the head were in fact specifically shaped like Nazi iron crosses. Then there was the face which possessed not only the most uniquely grey and decayed fleshly pallor I’ve yet to witness on any human visage but also a fixed glazed look to the eyes like several hundred watts of electricity were being fired through his central nervous system. The body was skinny and emaciated almost beyond belief. God, he looked awful!”

LOU REED: “I don’t like any of my albums except ‘Metal Machine Music.’ Why? Because they’re not ‘Metal Machine Music.’”

LESTER BANGS: “One day in the summer of 1975 I awoke with a hangover and put on ‘Metal Machine Music’ immediately. I played it all day and through a party which lasted all that night, in the course of which I got shitfaced again on cognac and beer, broke about half my record collection, punched out the front screen door in my house, physically molested one of my best friend’s girlfriends of four or five years, told my friend who was a very talented poet that he couldn’t write for shit, after getting thrown out of a restaurant for spilling beer all over his lap and myself and the table and creating a ‘disturbance,’ zoomed over to another friend’s house where I physically assaulted her, repeating over and over in a curiously robotlike rant ‘I know you’ve got a bottle of Desoxyn in your dresser! Gimme, I want them, I want to take all of them at once!’ threw all the empty cognac bottles in the air as high as I could for the pleasure of watching them shatter in the street, ending up in a blackout coma stupor, which nevertheless never quite blacked me out enough to stop me from writhing on the couch, tearing at my hair and screaming at the top of my lungs, until the police came at 7 a.m. whereupon I snapped to and told them that my friends, who were now out in the street breaking bottles and yelling ‘MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE!' up at my bedroom window, had gotten a little rowdy and I would be responsible for them from here on out.”

LOU REED: “They were supposed to put out a disclaimer with ‘Metal Machine Music’: ‘Warning – No vocals. Best cut: none. Sounds like: static on a car radio.’”

LESTER BANGS: “Lou’s right. If everybody took amphetamines, all the time, everybody would understand each other. Either that or never listen or bother with the other son of a bitch, because they’d all be too busy spending three days drawing psychedelic lines around a piece of steno paper until it’s totally black, writing 80 page letters about meaningless occurrences to their mothers, or creating Metal Machine Music.”

LOU REED: “It’s the only record I know that attacks the listener. Even when it gets to the end of the last side it still won’t stop. You have to get up and remove it yourself. It’s impossible to even think when the thing is on. It destroys you. You can’t complete a thought. You can’t even comprehend what it’s doing to you. You’re literally driven to take the miserable thing off. You can’t control that record.”

LESTER BANGS: “All landlords are mealymouthed bastards who would let the ruins of Pompeii fall on your four-poster before they’d lift a finger. They deserve whatever they get, and Metal Machine Music is the all-time guaranteed lease breaker. Every tenant in America should own a copy of this album. Forearmed! Plus, when you wake up in the morning with the worst hangover of your life, Metal Machine Music is the best medicine. Because when you first arise you’re probably so fucked (i.e. still drunk) that it doesn’t even really hurt yet (not like it’s going to) so you should put this album on immediately, not only to clear all the crap out of your head, but to prepare you for what’s in store the rest of the day.”

LOU REED: “There’s also some frequencies on there that are dangerous. What I’m talking about is like in France they have a sound gun. It’s a weapon. It puts out frequencies which kill people, just like they do operations with sound. It’s a very delicate brain operation, they have surgical instruments that are sound. They’ve had this weapon since 1945. Hitler didn’t have it, the French did of all people. Maybe that’s why they play such bad rock’n’roll.”

LESTER BANGS: “I have been told that Lou’s recordings, but most specifically ‘Metal Machine Music,’ have become a kind of secret cult among teenage mental institution inmates all across the nation. I have been told further that those adolescents who have been subjected to electroshock therapy enjoy a particular affinity for ‘MMM,’ that it reportedly ‘soothes their nerves,’ and is ultimately a kind of anthem.”

LOU REED: “Oh, you know, twenty minutes’ sleep and a glass of carrot juice and I’m fine. I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I take amphetamines. Any sane person would every chance they get. But I’m not in favor of legalization, because I don’t want all those idiots running around grinding their teeth at me. I only take Methedrine, which most people don’t realize is a vitamin. Vitamin M. If people don’t realize how much fun it is listening to ‘Metal Machine Music,’ let ‘em go smoke their fucking marijuana, which is just bad acid anyway, and we’ve already been through that and forgotten it. I don’t make records for fucking flower children.”

JIM JACOBS: “They stayed up all night doing really awful speed. The next day Lou was in the worst mood I had ever seen him in in my life, and that’s truly an awful thing to say. I had to dress him. I finally got all of his clothes on. His time came and I literally shoved him on stage. He could barely walk, he stumbled around and sang, and this audience just loved him. And he would not do an encore. They destroyed the theatre. They ripped the seats up and they threw everything at the stage and they even loved that!”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Lou, who played best when he felt in control of his audience, walked off stage three times when he could not get them to calm down. Finally a girl leaped on stage and charged towards him. Acting reflexively, Lou grabbed her and dragged her to the edge of the stage as security men and roadies fought to separate them. In the midst of the melee Lou, whose adrenaline was going full blast, grabbed his large Swedish roadie with one hand and lifted him off the ground. Then, screaming, ‘You’re full of shit!’ at the audience, he ordered the whole band off stage.”

LOU REED: “I put out Metal Machine Music to clear the air and get rid of all those fucking assholes who show up at the show and yell ‘Vicious’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ It was a giant fuck you.”

NICK KENT: “Lester Bangs didn’t do himself any favors in his choice of living heroes. It’s no secret that he idolized Lou Reed to the point of obsession and saw the Velvet Underground songsmith as rock music’s most visionary iconic entity. Reed was booked to play a concert in Detroit and Lester managed to set up his first actual interview with the man and invited me to accompany him to the affair to act as his cornerman. It turned out to be an ugly spectacle: two drunks railing at each other over the glass-strewn Formica table of a tacky hotel bar. Reed was – relatively – civil to me but stared a Bangs throughout their long over-inebriated conversation as though he was face to face with some mentally challenged country bumpkin who’d just escaped from the local nuthouse… Driving back to the ‘Creem’ house directly after the interview had concluded, Lester was so distraught he veered into a garage by mistake, smashed into a petrol pump and almost totaled his precious car. For three days afterward he replayed what he could remember of their meeting of minds and fretted about the contemptuous way Reed had beheld him. I told him that trying to locate anything resembling human warmth, empathy and decency in Reed’s personality was as futile an exercise as trying to get blood from a stone.”

MICK ROCK: “The photos of Lou and Nico were taken one Saturday afternoon in Lou’s suite at Blake’s, Lou’s favourite London Hotel of that time. They had not seen each other in years. She was very affectionate towards him, like an older sister, caring and indulgent. “He is a great artist,” she confided. “He was my baby brother in another life.” In this life, Lou recently confided to me, they had been lovers, not siblings.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Lou had been writing to Nico… At first, enchanted by her replies, Lou appeared to fall in love with Nico all over again. Waving one five-page scrawled letter in the faces of his friends in between tugging at a fifth of whiskey, his face enlightened by her spiritual presence, Lou explained that she was magnificent. That she was everything. That ‘Berlin’ was all about her. He adored her. Once again, Nico was a genius. As soon as he had her at his mercy, totally dependent on him, the manic Reed cavorted around Nico like a cat around a wounded mouse, taking little swipes, then sitting back studiously contemplating her reactions with that sliver of ice that is in the heart of every writer. Nico still emanated an aura of defenseless beauty that begged to be destroyed and Lou, taking his fantasies of ultimate control to the tenth degree, tortured her around the clock by withholding the drugs she needed, then allowing her a little bit before snatching the vial away at the last moment, whispering taunts. Within three days he was done with his game and the bewildered, exhausted Nico found herself locked out of the apartment with her suitcase, her candles and her cigarettes, a harmonium grimly stashed beneath one sick arm, and not a penny in her purse.”

JOHN CALE: “Unfortunately, all Lou seemed to be able to do when Nico was around him was torture her. He did the same thing with me. Around the time of ‘Slow Dazzle,’ Lou would wave little packets of coke in my face and then leave the room.”

NICO: “New York is so desperate. You have to be desperate to go there at all. Lou asked me and… Lou isn’t my friend though. Because he wouldn’t share his drugs with me. He was taking Octagell, which is the strongest form of speed. You know of it? It makes your teeth clench together. Also I had to leave his house because he was beating his girlfriend.”

DAVE THOMPSON: “Reed was acidic and acerbic, merciless and mean; even his friends admitted there were days when they didn’t want to hang with him. He had a steady stream of companions, whose omnipresence left his entourage feeling even more unnerved than he did, not because of what they said and did, but because anybody who could spend that much time with Reed had to have the psyche of a cybernaut and skin as thick as the planet’s crust.”

LEGS MCNEIL: “I couldn’t imagine Lou fucking anybody. He was like too hip for sex. Like, ‘That’s stupid! If you do that, you’re an asshole!’ I mean that says it all. What’s great about that quote is that you can take that out and apply it to everything with Lou and it works. ‘If you do that you’re stupid and an asshole. If you believe that you’re a stupid kid!’ It really sounded like somebody’s drunken father.”

LOU REED: “It was in a late night club in Greenwich Village. I had been up for days as usual, and everything was at that super real, glowing stage. I walked in and there was this amazing person, this incredible head kind of vibrating out of it all. Rachel was wearing this amazing makeup and dress, and was absolutely in a different world to anyone in the place. Eventually I spoke and she came home with me. I rapped for hours and hours while Rachel just sat there looking at me, saying nothing. At the time I was living with a girl, a crazy blonde lady, and I kind of wanted us all three to live together, but somehow it was too heavy for her. Rachel just stayed on and the girl moved out. Rachel was completely disinterested in who I was and what I did. Nothing could impress her. He’d hardly heard my music and didn’t like it all that much when he did.”

JOHN CALE: “A limousine pulled up one night. Lou stepped out and came downstairs in the preamble to scoring for himself and Rachel, his constant companion, a long-limbed, long-haired transvestite, who quietly confided in her silky voice that the following day Lou was going to take her shopping for a walking suit. The genteel performance contrasted greatly with the way Lou described her later, as an out-and-out animal.”

ANGELA BOWIE: “It can’t have been easy on Lou when he and Rachel broke up and, as I heard it, she/he quit drinking and drugging, went straight and married a nice girl from his/her hometown.”

LOU REED: “I keep on wondering what Bowie is going to do when he stops ripping me off. He’s a very nasty person, actually.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Lou and David had met only occasionally since MainMan days, but an air of excitement bubbled around Lou and his band in April of 1979 when they heard David would be showing up at Lou’s Hammersmith Odeon date. The show was a mess. Seeing David sitting on an amplifier case at the side of the stage, Lou started screaming at his musicians and switched the set around – but once he made it through to the last number, Lou was ebullient, overjoyed to see his friend. The dishes were on the table at the Chelsea Rendezvous when the infamous spat broke out. Lou asked David if David would produce his next album. ‘Yes,’ David agreed, ‘if you clean up your act.’”

ALLAN JONES: “Lou Reed’s just played a famously cantankerous show at the Hammersmith Odeon, half the audience walking out when he announces he’s not going to play ‘Heroin,’ which he does as soon as they’re off the premises, the set ending with a 45-minute version of ‘You Keep Me Hanging On,’ sung by his bass player and played at excruciating volume. My ears are still ringing on the way out, when I get word that Lou wants to see me backstage for a drink. When I get there, Lou’s already split with Bowie, for dinner at the Chelsea Rendezvous in South Kensington. Lou’s left an invitation for me to join them there. Dinner with Lou and The Thin White Duke? I’m off to South Ken like a shot. This is what I find at the Rendezvous: Lou and David in a huddle at the head of their table. Lou’s got his arm around David’s shoulder. David is smiling. Lou’s laughing, slapping at the table. I’m called over by Lou. Bowie looks up at me. ‘Allan,’ he says, extending a hand. ‘David,’ I say, taking it. ‘Nice to see you,’ says David. ‘How are you?’ His charm is overwhelming. ‘ALLAN!’ roars Lou. ‘Lou,’ I reply, less raucously. Lou grabs my hand, nearly breaking my finger. He yanks me across the table. I almost end up in Bowie’s lap. I have an elbow in the remains of Lou’s dinner.”

ALLAN JONES: “I go. Lou turns back to David. They get their heads down, the old pals’ act well underway. Lou orders Irish coffee. Lou and David raise their glasses in a toast. ‘To friends.’ It’s a touching scene. They resume their original places, resume their conversation. Five minutes later, the place is in an uproar. Fists are flying. Most of them are Lou’s and they’re being aimed at Bowie. David ducks, tries to protect himself. Lou is on his feet, screaming furiously at Bowie, still lashing out. ‘Don’t you EVER say that to me!’ he bellows hysterically. ‘Don’t you EVER fucking say that to me!’ About nine people pile on Lou, wrestle him away from Bowie. There’s an arm around his throat. He continues to spit insults at Bowie, who sits at the table staring impassively, clearly hoping Lou will go away. Lou shrugs off his minders. There’s a terrible silence. People are watching, open-mouthed. Lou sits down next to Bowie. They embrace. There’s a huge sigh of relief. Lou and David kiss and make up.”

ALLAN JONES: “The next thing I know, Lou is dragging Bowie across the table by his shirt and smacking him in the face. The place explodes in chaos again. Whatever David had said to precipitate the first frank exchange of conflicting opinions, he’s obviously rather foolishly repeated. ‘I told you NEVER to say that,’ Lou screeches, batting David about the top of his head. David cowers. Lou gets in a few more solid punches before he’s hauled off the whimpering Bowie. The silence that follows is ghastly. Lou is escorted out by an especially burly minder, who frogmarches him to the exit, a restraining arm around his shoulders. Lou’s face is set in a demented scowl. He doesn’t look back.”

PAUL TRYNKA: “Lou slapped David across the face, hard, once on each cheek, screaming, ‘Don’t you ever say that to me! Never say that to me!’ Lou’s manager wrestled him away, and for a few minutes peace reigned until suddenly Lou slapped David again. This time David’s bodyguards pulled them apart, and within seconds, Lou and his party were bundled out of the restaurant.”

NICO: “How ironic. The whole reason David wanted to work with Lou in the first place, and Iggy as well, was because he hadn’t cleaned up his act. Now he was telling him to do it. No wonder Lou hit him. I would have done the same thing.”

DENISE MOURGES: “I had the biggest crush on Lou. For years I had the biggest crush on him. One night at Max’s, somehow Lou and I got thrown together and he was like, you know, ‘Do you want to come home with me?’ And I was like, ‘Yeeeesss!!!’ I was so excited. So we went back to his place. He lived nearby. It was within walking distance of Max’s. We got there and I’m like, Here I am with Lou. He had lots of comic books in the apartment. And he sat there and started reading comic books and kept on reading comic books. And kept on reading comic books. And I was getting so frustrated. Here I am, my big shot with Lou, and all he could do was read comic books. And I didn’t realize that he was on speed. He was just speed reading. I soon after excused myself and left, because my idea of a fun time was not watching him read comic books.”

TOM PLOTKIN: “Know why I love Lou? His sheer perversity. Around the time “Take No Prisoners” came out, ‘78-‘79 he showed up on the late-Sunday nite WPLJ FM call-in show (hosted always by a visiting rocker) “Radio Radio.” Wanna know what he did on live radio for 3 pre-dawn hours? He only took calls from pinball fanatics, and only talked about specific pinball machines, their makes and models, which arcades they were housed in, etc. He hung up on anybody calling about music; by the first hour, every pinball fanatic in NY was calling in, to talk serious pinball arcana with Lou, who sounded like he knew more about the subject than any human being alive. This went on for 3 or 4 hours.”

ANGELA BOWIE: “The last time I saw Lou, in New York, we had dinner together one night. I ate well, but he didn’t eat a bite, and I watched with growing concern as he swung through his changes and then went thataway: from real pleasure to see me, to a venomous but more or less rational attack on David, to a state of bugged-out, all-inclusive paranoia which struck me as truly insane.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Lou's distinct following of the most fucked-up people in each country gave him a higher profile than he might otherwise have enjoyed.”

LOU REED: “We called the live album ‘Take No Prisoners’ because we were doing a quite phenomenal booking in a tiny hotel in Quebec. All of a sudden this drunk guy sitting alone at the front shouts ‘Lou, take no pris’ners, Lou!’ and then he took his head and smashed it as hard as he could to the drumbeat. We saw him doing it and we were taking bets that that man would never move again. But he got up and bam bam bam on the table! And that was only halfway through. What was gonna be the encore? He might cut his arm off!”

PATTI SMITH: “It is true pain when you are up there and can’t connect. Like the veins plugged and the steam ain’t flowing and people are watching and you break down on your knees so desperate to bust the spleen to feel and roll in the white coils of the brain. And who beyond the performer is the most hungry for poetry in any form but the children, the new masses and Lou Reed KNEW it — never played down back then — cause he knew that youth can eat the truth. Like it’s all “I’ve Had It” by the Bell Notes only a whole higher ground. Another land of a thousand sensations in a land we try to leave when we age. Oh I see my friends they say ‘man I gotta simmer down, it’s too much pain but Jesus let me rock back like Peter Pan.’ I’d rather die than not take it out on the line one more time. Another risk is bliss.”

PATTI SMITH: “And I love the way Lou talks like a warm nigger or slow bastard from Philly. That THING that reeks of old records like golden oldies. A chord so direct it eel fucks you in the heart. I write Smith Corona electric resting on a huge speaker pulsing “Heroin.” It makes my fingers vibrate. Anything electric is worth it. We are the true children of Frankenstein, we were raised on electricity. On the late show the way the white light strobed his body over and over like sex and speed and all the flash it takes to make a man. “Heroin” moving on and in like a sob.”

PATTI SMITH: “And it’s all past. Lou just doesn’t shoot anymore. And I don’t know if he’s dead center like he was in Texas 69. I don’t know where he is at all. It doesn’t matter. Music like this, so black and white, so 8 millimeter should have been wrapped in the perfect photograph — a Mapplethorpe still life: syringe and shades and black muscle tee. And if Lou don’t remember how it felt to shell it out, you will not soon forget how it feels to hear. When the music’s over and you turn out the light it’s like … coming down from a dream.”

LOU REED: “I’m not in competition with anyone, least of all myself. All I want to do is communicate a certain explosive fun, rock’n’roll quality that I’ve liked since I was nine years old, and I want the listener to hear what I heard, the thing that makes me think it’s so great.”

ANDY WARHOL: “Lou invited us over to his place. When we were going in the kids around were whispering, ‘There’s Lou Reed.’ He tells them, ‘Go kill yourself.’ Isn’t that great?”

LESTER BANGS: “Lou Reed’s enjoyed a solo career renaissance primarily by passing himself off as the most burnt out reprobate around; and it wasn’t all show by a long shot… The central heroic myth of the sixties was the burnout. Live fast, be bad, get messy, die young… Myself, I always wanted to emulate the most self-destructive bastard I could see, as long as he moved with some sense of style.”

LOU REED: “Life, as I had come to know it, had made me nervous.  I’ve probably had more of a chance to make an asshole out of myself than most people, and I realize that.  But then not everybody gets a chance to live out their nightmares for the vicarious pleasures of the public.”

LOU REED: “Nobody has ever been able to put their finger on me, because I’m not really here. At least not the way they think I am. It’s all in their heads. What I’m into is mindlessness. I just empty myself out, so what people see is just a projection of their own needs. I don’t do or say anything.”