8 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer
A walk
dark side
on the
A walka
dkidkid
In an extract from his new biography of Lou Reed, rock
writer Anthony DeCurtis reflects on the icon he knew
as a friend and delves into memorable times in the
Velvet Underground singer’s career: the making of his
1973 solo album Berlin and his first encounter with
Czech president – and fan – Václav Havel
“ P
eople always say to
me, ‘Why don’t you get
along with critics?’”
Lou Reed told me one
night in 2012. “I tell
them, ‘I get along fi ne with Anthony
DeCurtis.’ Shuts them right up.” We
were sitting in the dining room of the
Kelly Writers House at the University
of Pennsylvania , where I teach creative
writing. I’d brought Lou down to do an
interview with me in front of 50 or so
invited guests and to have dinner with
a dozen students, faculty members,
musicians, and local media luminaries.
As with so many things with Lou, it
was touch and go until the very end.
I always felt that one of the reasons
Lou and I got along well was that we
met socially before we ever met as artist
and critic. In June of 1995, I got stuck
at the airport in Cleveland, where I had
gone to cover the concert celebrating
the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame. My fl ight back to New York was
delayed for hours, and I was settling in
for the wait when I ran into a record
company friend, who introduced me to
Lou and Laurie [Anderson, musician
and Reed’s partner]. There’s nothing
like an interminable fl ight delay to
grease the gears of sociali sation.
“You reviewed New York for Rolling
Stone, right?” Reed asked, referring to
his classic 1989 album.
“Right.”
“How many stars did you give it?”
“Four.”
“Shoulda been fi ve,” he said. But he
was smiling. The ice had been broken.
So we sat and chatted in the airport
lounge. The subject of the Hall of
Fame’s list of the 500 songs that shaped
rock’n’ roll came up, and Lou asked
if Walk on the Wild Side was on it.
It was , and he seemed pleased to be
represented. Then, in a sweet gesture,
he asked if Laurie’s O Superman had
been included. It had not , but at that
moment I got a sense of how important
she was to him. He didn’t want to make
the moment all about him.
Though I subsequently interviewed
Lou a half dozen times or so, I
remember those more casual moments
with the most aff ection.
I recall talking with him at length
about Brian Wilson, whom he greatly
admired, at a party for Amnesty
International. Another time, I ran
into him outside Trattoria Dell’Arte
on 7th Avenue when he and Laurie
were heading to Carnegie Hall to seethe Cuban musicians who had been
part of the Buena Vista Social Club
phenomenon. Encountering him
around the city that way always made
me proud to be a New York native. An
artist of incalculable signifi cance, Lou
was also, as one of his song titles put it,
the ultimate NYC Man as inextricable
a part of the city as, say, the Twin
Towers.
Now he and they are gone and
the city still stands, however much
diminished.“T
hat was the bad move,”
Lou Reed said jokingly,
decades later, about
following Transformer
with Berlin. “That’s one of those
career-ending moments. They said,
‘You want to do what?’”
Lou and [producer ] Bob Ezrin
decided that Reed should write a
suite of musically and thematically
connected songs based on the
disintegrating marriage of the two
characters in Berlin. That Reed’s
own marriage to Bettye Kronstad
was falling apart would only lend the
project additional force. It would be
something like a fi lm in song form, a
“fi lm for the ear” , as RCA ’s movie-style
promotional posters for the album
described it, or a “movie without
pictures ”, in Ezrin’s terms. Those
literary and cinematic strategies also
served to distance Reed from the
visceral power of the material he was
drawing on. “Berlin was real close to
home,” he would say later.COVER STORY
Berlin: ‘One of those career-ending
moments,’ according to its creator.