10 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer
COVER STORY
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in the living room next to a mostly
consumed bottle of Johnnie Walker
Red ,” she wrote. “It was 8.30 in the
morning and I became upset. His
drinking didn’t usually begin until at
least the afternoon.” Reed explained
that he had completed writing the
album. He handed her his notebook
with the lyrics in it, picked up a guitar,
and sang the songs he had written.
The songs on Berlin trace the
disintegration of a couple, Caroline
and Jim , through infi delity, violence,
and suicide. Caroline is portrayed
as unfaithful and promiscuous; Jim
swings from yearning for her to
icy contempt and malevolence. He
beats her and, in the song The Bed ,
describes her cutting her wrists
and her subsequent death with a
truly eerie detachment. The album
is tough going for even the most
aesthetically objective listener.
For Kronstad, listening to it was a
devastating experience. Scenes from
her marriage and other details of her
personal life are woven into the songs.
Even when treated as composites or
fi ctionali sed in other ways, they were
clearly identifi able to her and hit with
intense force. It’s hard to imagine why
Reed would have chosen to play her
those songs without any explanation,
and even harder to fathom how he
expected her to respond.
Kronstad’s mother, who had been
living in Queens, had recently died.
At fi ve years old, Kronstad had been
taken from the woman, who had
left Kronstad’s father when the girl
was three. Reed adapted that story
and wildly elaborated on it for his
Berlin song The Kids. Kronstad had
attempted to reconcile with her
mother at various points over the
years, never completely successfully,
so hearing a character based on her
mother essentially described as a
bisexual whore and drug addict in a
song written by her husband was quite
a blow.
“The other thing,” she added, “is
that he was actually writing a lot
about what was happening in our
relationship. That’s what writers do.
But who wants their marriage, as it’s
falling apart, to be put on an album for
the entire world to hear? Or who wants
the couple of times that he fucking
socked me— who wants that? But there
it was.”
Kronstad understood, of course, that
Berlin was not exclusively about her
marriage. Talking about the character
of Caroline, she noted, “I think Nico is
in there. Lou did know her and she was
German ... someone once said that the
woman in Berlin is a combination of all
the women in Lou’s life, and I think to a
certain extent that’s true.”
Despite being hurt, Kronstad
remained determined to see her
husband through the recording of the
album, which was primarily done at
Morgan Studios in London.
At the time that he wrote the title
song and even when he started work
on the album, Reed had never been
to Berlin. “I love the idea of a divided
city,” he later explained, joking that the
album could just as easily have been
titled Brooklyn, tellingly the place of his
birth. “It was purely metaphorical.”
Berlin was released in July of 1973 ,
just eight months after Transformer.
A week before the fi nal version of the
album was due to be turned in (Reed
was on vacation in Portugal at the
time), RCA told Ezrin that it would
not accept a double album. The album
was nearly an hour long, and at the
time, artists were encouraged to keep
each side of a vinyl LP at 18-20 minutes
in order to ensure sound quality. To
preserve the conceptual integrity of
Berlin, Ezrin did not want to remove
any of the album’s songs.
Consequently, he explained, “I
dropped 14 minutes of endings, solos,
interstitial material, digressions inside
songs.” Still, the album was nearly
50 minutes long, but Ezrin was not
to dissidents in Czechoslovakia
throughout the gr ey decades of
communist rule there. The movement
that brought Havel to power
had come to be called the Velvet
Revolution because of its aspirations
to nonviolence, but the pun would not
have been lost on anyone as sensitive to
language as he.
After Havel won election to the
presidency, Rolling Stone approached
Reed about going to Czechoslovakia
to interview Havel. It seemed like
a perfect story for the magazine,
which had always combined its
coverage of the music scene with
progressive political stories. Reed
had just appeared on the cover of the
magazine for the fi rst time, and Havel’s
interest in the Velvet Underground
and rock music in general had already
become part of his myth. That Reed’savailable to oversee the fi nal mastering
of Berlin. He was in the hospital. “It
was a heroin rebound,” he admitted.
“I would rather have had a nervous
breakdown. I didn’t know what
heroin was till I went to England on
this gig... we were all seriously ill. It
took me a long time to get on my feet.
I paid a heavy price. It put me out of
commission for quite a while.”
Berlin took its toll on Reed as well.
“Lou doesn’t want to talk about it
much,” Ezrin said about the album
not long after it came out. “He didn’t
even want to listen to the album. Every
time he listens to the album it gets to
him. I mean, I can see tears coming
into his eyes and everything.” Reed
himself said, “I think I’ve gone as deep
as I want to go for my own mental
health. If I got any deeper I’d wind up
disappearing.”
In later years, after the album
was acknowledged as a classic, Reed
loved to revel in the negative reviews
it had received— and, admittedly,
some of them were not only harsh
but gratuitously personal. Even
some of the positive assessments of
Berlin seemed indistinguishable from
attacks. Writing in the New Musical
Express, inveterate Reed watcher
Nick Kent declared, “Just when you
think your ex-idol has slumped into
a pitiful display of gross terminal
self-parody, Lou Reed comes back and
hits you with something like Berlin.
It’s a creation which leaves you so
aesthetically bamboozled you just have
to step down and allow him a brand-
new artistic credibility for pulling off
such a coup in the fi rst place.” Perhaps
the most scathing negative review
appeared in Rolling Stone , written by
Stephen Davis.
“Lou Reed’s Berlin,” Davis’s
review began, “is a disaster, taking
the listener into a distorted and
degenerate demimonde of paranoia,
schizophrenia, degradation, pill-
induced violence, and suicide. There
are certain records that are so patently
off ensive that one wishes to take
some kind of physical vengeance on
the artists that perpetrate them.” He
concluded that Berlin was Reed’s
“last shot at a once-promising career.
Goodbye, Lou.”
Speaking about Berlin, Reed would
articulate a rationale for his brand
of songwriting, and, indeed, for all
art that defi es accepted pieties. In
fact, his argument goes well beyond
that. It constitutes a lesson in how to
engage art— and how not to. “I don’t
think anybody is anybody else’s moral
compass,” he said. “Maybe listening to
my music is not the best idea if you live
a very constricted life.
“Or maybe it is. I’m writing
about real things. Real people. Real
characters. You have to believe what
I write about is true or you wouldn’t
pay any attention at all ... but a guide to
doing things that are wrong and right?
I mean, Othello murders Desdemona.
Is that a guide to what you can do? The
guy in Berlin beats up his girlfriend.
Is that a guide to what you can do? Is
that what you walk away with? I don’t
think so. Maybe they should sticker my
albums and say, ‘Stay away if you have
no moral compass.’”
It’s hard to imagine a more cogent
justifi cation not just of Berlin, but of
Reed’s songwriting as a whole.
Rolling Stone would eventually list
Berlin among the 500 greatest albums
of all time.I
n the mid- to late 80s, vast
political changes swept across
the Soviet Union and its
satellite countries in eastern
Europe, behind what had been
termed the i ron c urtain in the west.
Uprisings by workers and students
in Czechoslovakia toppled the
communist government there in 1989,
and by the end of that year, playwright
and activist Václav Havel had been
installed as the country’s president.
In 1990 , he was elected president inCzechoslovakia’s fi rst open elections
since the end of the second world war.
Havel was an internationally acclaimed
literary fi gure, and his activism, for
which he was jailed many times,
included support for the psychedelic
rock band the Plastic People of the
Universe , which was inspired by
the Velvet Underground and whose
long hair, bohemian lifestyle, and
outspokenness incurred the wrath
of communist leaders. Havel himself
was a fan of the Velvet Underground,
whose music he had fi rst heard
when he visited the United States for
six weeks in 1968. While exploring
Greenwich Village and the East Village
with his friend the fi lm-maker Miloš
Forman , Havel bought one of the fi rst
two Velvet Underground albums.
The Velvets’ music and Reed’s
solo work remained inspirational‘In later years, Reed loved
to revel in the negative
reviews Berlin had received’
‘Maybe listening to
my music is not the
best idea if you live a
very constricted life.
Or maybe it is’