‘I can’t look away from it’: Ezra Furman on Lou Reed’s ‘menacing and inviting’ Transformer

The Velvet Underground frontman’s groundbreaking second solo album turns 50 this week. Roisin O’Connor speaks with Ezra Furman about how it continues to inspire her own work, and the way it helped bring queer identities into the mainstream

Ezra Furman (left), has admitted enduring inspiration from Lou Reed’s classic 1972 album (Tilje Thilesen / Getty)

When Ezra Furman first heard Transformer, Lou Reed’s louche, bristling second album, it was as though she’d found her way out of a locked room. “Who I thought Lou Reed was [when I was] in high school became, like, ‘Oh, I’ll follow that. That’s a way to go.’” The seminal 1972 record – which celebrates its 50th anniversary today – was to become a touchstone for Furman’s own subversive work.

You can hear it in her sound. The raw crackle. The often distorted guitars. The slightly haughty vocals. Reed’s fingerprints are all over Furman’s music. And, in her own words, Transformer “had a lot to do with being publicly androgynous and queer”. Furman, who came out as a trans woman last year and is bisexual, has in the past called Reed “an ideal figure to me”. In fact, Reed’s sound and philosophy spoke to Furman so much that, in 2018, she wrote a book about Transformer, exploring the personal and enduring cultural impact of its 11 songs.

Furman is not the only one to champion Transformer; it regularly appears in lofty lists of the greatest albums of all time. The record offers a brief, tempting glimpse into a world that many of its listeners were blithely unaware of. Reed’s use of language was so obscure that a lyric about Candy Darling “giving head” in “Walk on the Wild Side” evaded the attention of censors in the UK. The characters whose stories he told had previously lived on the fringes of society; now they were right there in your living room.

“My interest in Lou Reed is [basically] the thing that made me doing music possible,” Furman tells me over a video call from her home in Boston. She was a student in college, working in the music library, when she listened to the album for the first time. “I can’t really compare it. His influence is kind of in my blood, and it’s in the blood of the art of rock’n’roll and songwriting. He changed what the genre could be.”   

The 36-year-old’s own work frequently operates in the dark, hedonistic underworld for which Reed, who died aged 71 in 2013, laid the foundations. Her 2018 record, the excellent Transangelic Exodus, brought out the vampires and the angels and the freaks for a joyride across America. Loosely conceptual, it felt like an allegory for the US’s mistreatment of minorities. That same self-loathing that Reed seemed incapable of escaping from rears its terrible head on Furman’s “Come Here Get Away From Me”, as she howls and snaps: “Honey, I got a paradox and I can’t get free/ Come here, put your hand on my knee/ And don’t touch me, get away from me.” 

Transformer was released on 8 November 1972, 14 years before Furman was born in Chicago, Illinois. Reed’s debut solo album, the self-titled Lou Reed, had been released six months before and included contributions from some of the best musicians England had to offer, including Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman and drummer Clem Cattini. The fact that it mostly comprised songs Reed first recorded with The Velvet Underground led to its weirdly “anonymous” sound, suggests journalist and friend Anthony DeCurtis in his 2017 biography Lou Reed: A Life. “As a singer, Reed had not yet discovered his post-Velvets voice,” he writes. “Amazingly for him, he sounds indistinctive.” Critics and fans at the time seemed to agree; the album had a brief moment near the bottom of the Billboard Top 200 then vanished.  

Reed found himself at an impasse, uncertain and unable to determine which path to take next. Across the Atlantic, a 25-year-old David Bowie was about to unleash his greatest work to date, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars – itself inspired in part by the Brixton-born artist’s encounter with a Reed impersonator backstage at a Velvet Underground concert in New York, in 1971. By this point, the glam rock movement had gripped the UK, producing acts such as Bowie, Marc Bolan’s T. Rex, and Roxy Music. Bowie, probably one of the few who truly loved Reed’s first solo record and a Velvet Underground fanatic, approached his hero and labelmate alongside Spiders from Mars guitarist Mick Ronson, to ask if he wanted to work with them.  

Bowie admitted to being “petrified” that Reed would agree, fearful of the pressure that would come with overseeing an album by the man he idolised. “I had so many ideas and I felt so intimidated by my knowledge of the work that he had already done,” he told American Masters in 1997. “And, even though there was only that [little] time between us, it seemed like Lou had this great legacy of work, which indeed he did have … But he just gave the whole project over to me and I really hoped I wouldn’t let him down.” 

Furman has called Lou Reed ‘an ideal figure to me’ (Adela Loconte/Shutterstock)

He didn’t, of course. Transformer was recorded with Bowie and Ronson at Trident Studios in London; Reed was delighted with Ronson’s arrangements, which contrasted radically with the lush sonics of The Velvet Underground. Transformer bursts in with “Vicious” and its pummeling riff and sharp thwacks of percussion, before that sizzling little electric twang punctures through. Yet the tenderness of a Velvet Underground track like “Sunday Morning” can be heard too, in Reed’s murmur on the intro of “Andy’s Chest”, and his hypnotic caress on “Make Up”. He sounds startlingly Bowie-like on “Satellite of Love”, emulating the Starman’s low-humming croon and elongated syllables and ornate piano arrangements. You can hear Bowie himself hitting a spectacular falsetto towards the end of the track: “He has a melodic sense that’s just well above anyone else in rock’n’roll,” Reed told Rolling Stone in 2011. “Most people could not sing some of his melodies. He can really go for a high note… There’s a part at the very end [on ‘Satellite of Love’] where his voice goes all the way up. It’s fabulous.” 

While Furman adores the album now, she initially felt disappointed by the commercial appeal of Transformer, compared to the relatable punk ethos of his previous work. “It’s disappointing to a Velvet Underground fan, in a weird way,” she says. “There’s something narcotised about it, it’s very diluted, like a pop version of The Velvet Underground. But it retains so much – it’s got him, his genius is in there, but it’s peeking through a bunch of radio-friendly stuff.” But she soon found herself growing fascinated by the pop of Transformer: “What it sounds like when someone known as an uncompromising genius actually… compromises. He put ingredients together [in a way] that I find I can’t look away from.” 

Lou Reed in 1973: ‘His influence is in my blood’, says Furman (Philippe Gras/Le Pictorium/Shutterstock)

By the time Bowie and Reed got together in the studio, the sexual revolution had well and truly made its way around the US. The Stonewall riots of 1969 brought queer culture onto the streets, while psychiatrists and authors such as Joan Garrity and Dr David Reuben were publishing books on sexual pleasure. Pornography was well and truly normalised by the cinematic release of films such as Deep Throat (1972). Reed himself, DeCurtis notes, claimed at the time to “inspire transvestite bands – they’re very cute”, he deadpanned.   

“The whole record is a mixture of menacing and inviting,” Furman points out. “It’s kind of about queer awareness coming into mainstream consciousness. The whole thing is like a ‘come hither’. That ‘hey babe’ [on ‘Walk on the Wild Side’] contains so much. It mirrors gay people confronting mainstream society and also Lou Reed the weirdo artist confronting the radio.” She finds the idea of Reed working with Bowie strange, considering the differing ways they worked with queer culture. “[Transformer] did something that neither of them could have done on their own,” she says. “Lou Reed is so no-nonsense, you know? And with Bowie, gay people are space aliens, it’s all showmanship and everyone wearing costumes.” I wonder whether this is, in part, why Reed tended to distance himself from glam rock: it “othered” queerness, while his work brought it into reality – made it tangible. “Being queer is not like being a f***ing alien,” Furman shrugs. “It’s just some real-life stuff.” 

‘Transformer’: ‘An uncompromising genius actually... compromises’ (source)

The success of “Walk on the Wild Side” – it charted at No 16 in the US and No 10 in the UK – helped bring queer lives to the forefront of the public consciousness. Reed delighted in shocking people, such as when he snuck over and kissed Bowie on the mouth while his friend was being interviewed at the Dorchester Hotel in London, in July 1972. “The waiters were horrified,” wrote NME journalist Charles Shaar Murray. Yet in many features and retrospectives on Reed, his own queerness has gone unmentioned. The louche, camp drawl he uses on “Vicious” and “Goodnight Ladies” and the reconciliation of masculine and feminine, meanwhile, was frequently contradicted by Reed’s aggressive manner in public and interviews – the growling, leather-clad man so many journalists came to fear. “The line is blurry between when he’s normalising queerness and sort of erasing it in himself,” Furman suggests. “I’m also connected to that self-erasure because I’ve spent a lot of time doing that in my life. I don’t admire it, and I don’t endorse it in myself, I just know what it’s like to want queerness to just go away, and to not get caught out of the closet.” 

When Furman wrote her book on Transformer, she was going through her own struggles. “A very Lou Reed-like refusal of everything, a denial of all labels. I wasn’t coming out as anything, I was more coming out as… not things,” she says. “And in the last couple of years I started to commit, and be OK with claiming a label.” She’s still compelled by the idea of queerness as “a continual transformation… It’s a thing that matters to me so much, saying, ‘No,’ it’s so freeing,” she says. “That’s the importance of punk, saying, ‘No, not that.’” But there’s something else that comes after, she says – and that’s what Reed taught her. It’s about embracing your identity; about “saying ‘yes’”.