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Chapter Four

The Pickwick Period

WITH PICKWICK INTERNATIONAL: 1964–65

The Pickwick experience was the first plateau of Lou’s maturation as a musician. It gave him a point of departure that I think was critical to his becoming what he became.

Donald Schupak

Instead of going into New York like the majority of the other bright English-literature graduates coming down from Syracuse University, Lou retreated to the comfort and safety of his parents’ home. In the summer of 1964, he turned his full attention toward evading the draft. He knew he’d have to put on a good show at the draft hearing to convince the army officials he was sick, crazy, or both. He chose both.

Providentially, he was aided in his cause by a real illness that struck a few days after he got home to Freeport. Feeling feverish and exhausted, he was diagnosed as having a bad case of hepatitis, which he later claimed to have acquired in a shooting gallery by sharing a needle with a mashed-faced Negro named Jaw. Upon receiving this news, Lou immediately placed an expensive long-distance phone call to Shelley, warning her that she too might have acquired the disease during their recent rapprochement. Then he set about lining up medical evidence sufficient to stave off his recruitment into the army.

According to Lou, he managed to pull off his feat in a record ten minutes by walking into his local draft board chewing on his favorite downer, a 750-milligram Placidyl, a large green pill prescribed for its hypnotic, calming effects and to induce sleep. The effects of the pill come on within fifteen minutes to an hour and may be greatly enhanced when combined with alcohol, barbiturates, and or other central nervous system depressants. Although Placidyl was available over the counter through the 1960s, due to its potential to cause severe, often suicidal depression, as well as drug dependence, it is now available in America by prescription only. “I said I wanted a gun and would shoot anyone or anything in front of me,” Reed recalled. If this smart-aleck claim didn’t do the trick, the yellow pall cast over his visage by the incipient hepatitis did. “I was pronounced mentally unfit and given a classification that meant I’d only be called up if we went to war with China. It was the one thing my shock treatments were good for.”

It was the summer of 1964. His father offered him a job in his tax accountancy business, which he insisted Lou take over and inherit upon his retirement. Lou did not fancy sitting behind a desk peering at a calculator. He told Sidney that he should give his business to Elizabeth (aged sixteen) because she had a better head for such things. Instead, Lou put together a band and hacked his way through the summer playing local shows, which included, as often as possible, gay bars. Resenting his family’s earlier embrace of electroshock treatments and their current disapproval of his lifestyle, Lou set about stinging them with rejection. As he would sing in one of his catalogs of contempt, “Families,” that families who dwell in the suburbs often reduce each other to tears.

However, the battle was not over. Summer fun was one thing allowed the indolent rich graduates on the island, but come fall, every one of them was expected to take up a calling. Hyman was already in law school. Lou’s parents presumed their son would also buckle down to some kind of acceptable career.

How wrong they were! In a move calculated to upset both Delmore Schwartz and his parents, Lou took a job writing made-to-order pop songs for a cheap recording company called Pickwick International and, in their eyes, threw away an expensive education.

The agent of this first step on Lou’s path to becoming a songwriter was none other than Lou’s old friend from Syracuse, the manager of LA and the Eldorados, Don Schupak. “I introduced Lou to a guy who I had developed a partnership with back here in the city, Terry Phillips,” Schupak recalled. Phillips, who had roomed with the record-producing genius Phil Spector in the early 1960s, had convinced Pickwick to venture into the rock business. “They were taught the notion of rock and roll by Terry Phillips and me,” Schupak continued. “They eventually became Musicland, and the people we had to convince to start this studio at the cost of eighty dollars have made tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in the rock-and-roll business since then.”

Reed was hired on Schupak’s recommendation. “Pickwick started Lou’s career,” Donald recalled. “It taught him the discipline of showing up. It put him into the industry.”

The grand, British-sounding Pickwick International consisted, in fact, of a squat cinder-block warehouse in Long Island City, across the river from Manhattan. The whole operation was run out of this warehouse full of cheap, slapdash records, with a small basement recording studio in a converted storeroom containing, as Schupak, who also worked there as a “record executive,” recalled, “a shitty old spinet piano and a Roberts tape recorder.” Lou, who received $25 a week for his endeavors—and no rights to any of his material—made the twenty-five-minute commute from Freeport to Long Island City every day. Once there, he would find himself locked into the tiny studio with three collaborators: the pasty-faced Phillips, whose pencil mustache, slicked-back hair, and polyester suits evinced his weird distance from life, and two other songwriters, Jerry Vance (alias Jerry Pellegrino) and Jimmie Sims (Jim Smith). While Schupak tried to figure out what he was supposed to be doing, Phillips took it upon himself to direct the fledgling rock arm of the Pickwick label.

Pickwick specialized in producing bargain-basement rip-off albums for a naive mass audience. For example, something like Bobby Darin Sings the Blues featured Darin crooning on exactly one song, squeezed in amidst ten other sung by Jack Borgheimer; the album of ten hot-rod songs by the Roughnecks sported a cover (minus Lou) of four gallivanting lads who looked, at a distance, suspiciously like the Beatles, but were in fact a bunch of pasty-faced session musicians wearing wigs. In other words, the album would say it featured four groups but it wouldn’t really be four groups, it would just be various permutations of the writers, and they would sell them at supermarkets for ninety-nine cents or a dollar. In retrospect, observed Phil Milstein, one of Lou’s most informed and appreciative critics and the founder in 1978 of the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society, “in many ways this is the craziest part of the entire crazy story. No work Lou has done is so trivial, so prefabricated, so tossed off, as what he did at Pickwick.”

The Roughnecks’ song “You’re Driving Me Insane” opened with a tuneless buzz of guitars and then applied the unschooled, scratchy sound of the Kinks to some riffs refined from Chuck Berry. Over the dense, muddy instrumental came the lyrics—half-spoken, half-forced—droned-out words that were supported by the eerie abandon of a rabble of party goers in the background: “The way you rattle your brain / You know you’re driving me insane.” Another contribution by another fake group, the Beachnuts’ “Cycle Annie,” with lyrics by Lou, mixed the surf sound with the first hints of the Velvet Underground. The song allowed Reed to assert himself lyrically with a tale of “a real tough chick” who “just didn’t come any meaner.” Filled with Reedian characters and his playful love of three-chord rock and roll, “Cycle Annie” would have fitted just as well on Loaded.

Lou and his fellow songwriters wrote as fast as they could. Although the setup lacked the glamour of the rock-and-roll lifestyle, it had redeeming educational value. “There were four of us literally locked in a room writing songs,” Reed recounted. “We just churned out songs, that’s all. They would say, ‘Write ten California songs, ten Detroit songs,’ then we’d go down into the studio for an hour or two and cut three or four albums really quickly, which came in handy later because I knew my way around a studio, not well enough but I could work really fast. While I was doing that, I was doing my own stuff and trying to get by, but the material I was doing, people wouldn’t go near me with it at the time. I mean, we wrote ‘Johnny Can’t Surf No More’ and ‘Let the Wedding Bells Ring’ and ‘Hot Rod Song.’ I didn’t see it as schizophrenic at all. I just had a job as a songwriter. I mean, a real hack job. They’d come in and give me a subject, and we’d write.

“I really liked doing it, it was really fun, but I wasn’t doing the stuff I wanted to do. I was just hoping I could somehow get an in, which, in fact, worked out. It’s just worked out in an odd way. But, at least it was something to do with music.”

Naturally, Lou told friends that he hated working at Pickwick and expressed endless bitterness over Phillips’s failure to see any merit in Reed’s own compositions. “I’d say, why don’t we record these?” remembered Reed. “And they’d say ‘No, we can’t record stuff like that.’” (One can only wonder how Johnny Don’t Shoot No More, Ten Drug Songs would have gone over in that halcyon era.) But the truth is that the detached observer in Lou was making out like a bandit in this situation. In fact, he should have been paying them for the very useful education in how to use a recording studio and work with helpful collaborators for whom he would in time come to realize a strong need. Never was he more prolific than during his Pickwick days. Over the course of a few months Reed and his three collaborators published at least fifteen songs. The five months he spent at Pickwick from September 1964 to February 1965 provided the best on-the-job training he could possibly have had for a career in rock and roll.