Jake Brennan (4:03)
TikTok for business is helping owners like you reach new customers every day. Head over to get started.TikTok.com tiktokapps Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. Heads up everybody. This is not your typical Disgraceland episode where we tell the story of a musician through the true crimes they committed or that were committed to them. For this two part episode on the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed, we are doing something different to honor Lou's habit of basically lying and exaggerating his way through most interviews about his past. We examine Lou's origin story in the Velvet Underground through the crimes, criminals and transgressive behavior depicted in Lou's Velvet Underground lyrics to explore what really inspired Lou Reed, one of the greatest rock and roll characters of all time, to create some of the coolest and most influential music of all time. All right, lets get into it. The stories Lou Reed told in his Velvet Underground songs are insane. Manslaughter in the song the Gift, sadomasochism and sexual deviancy in the song Venus Infers. Drug abuse in heroin and I'm Waiting for the Man. Prostitution in the song There She Goes Again. And of course, murder in the murder mystery in the stories Lou Reed told about himself to the rock press. Those were insane too. That he once put a rifle to a man's head. That his parents forced him to undergo electroshock treatments because he was gay. That he graduated from Harvard. Not sure why I would brag about that one, but I digress. Lou Reed was once quoted as saying, I've lied so much about the past, I can't even tell myself what is true anymore. The point is, Lou Reed told tall tales, both in song and in real life. And you know what? That's fucking awesome. The best rock stars are expert stewards of their own myths. Lou Reed, like Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Kurt Cobain, mastered this skill because he studied the storytelling mastery of writers such as Raymond chandler, Hubert Selby Jr. And William S. Burroughs. Lou combined their transgressive influence with his own subversive coming of age experiences in mid-60s Manhattan as he wrote the lyrics for his band, the Velvet Underground. Make no mistake, this is not a Velvet Underground episode though. This is a Lou Reed origin story that takes place during his time in the beginning days of the Velvets, A time when Lou Reed was making his first great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Slow Drag MK1. I played you that loot because I can't afford the rights to Love is Here and now you're Gone by the Supremes. And why would I play you that specific slice of stupid the Boss at Motown Cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on March 12, 1967. And that was the day that Lou Reed's Velvet Underground released their first album and forever changed modern music. On this episode, a multitude of mid-60s Manhattan transgressions, a murder mystery, sadomasochism, drug abuse, and the tall tale of the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed. I'm Jake Brennan and this is disgrace. I was two sips into a lukewarm Maxwell House when Marsha Bronson's beauty finally revealed itself. Prior to that, the white light of trauma and the white heat of guilt, Marsha wore both like a ghost. And as such, she was nearly invisible to me. But that was then. Here in the now, the Sunday morning sunlight shone through her mother's Long island kitchen window and revealed the truth. I was unnerved. She was young, 19. But I wasn't surprised. Marsha's mother was once a beauty, too. Now she was an undiagnosed manic depressive, over prescribed on lithium, Only two more nervous breakdowns away from electroshock therapy. Marsha's father was an old army connection. Now he was a bull out at Rikers. A mean son of a bitch. And this morning, Big Bill Bronson was especially angry. His daughter's boyfriend, Waldo Jeffers, was dead. His daughter, Marsha Bronson, was accused of killing him. And if I didn't get her off, her father would put me in a box. I owed him. It was a large debt, the kind you take on at war where Jesus looks the other way and you accrue debts you can never pay off despite your better angels. I had other debts too. The kind you take on downtown where Uncle Dave passes your pony debts off to Italian roughnecks with horse cocks and crooked noses. Those guys got paid or else I needed money. Except Big Bill wasn't paying for this piece of work. Like I said, Big Bill was collecting. That meant I was hustling for him until I got his daughter off. If only Waldo could have done the same, I wouldn't be in this mess. And that was Waldo's problem. He waited for it his whole life. He never took it. So when the time came to go out and get it, Waldo wound up dead in a box. Waldo descended from Locust, Pennsylvania. He met Marsha at college in Wisconsin. When semester broke, Waldo headed back to Pa And Marcia, after a brief rendezvous with Waldo in Manhattan, returned to her off campus apartment in Wisconsin. Rather than spending the summer with her parents out on Long Island, Marsha swore to Waldo she'd be faithful. She lied. Waldo bought it. Marsha called, but only twice. She wrote too, but again only twice. The way Marcia saw it, Waldo's insecurity and imagination got the best of him. He was the jealous type. Anyone could see it and prone to nightmares. Marsha said he couldn't sleep. Said this was just the type of dumb, love struck shitheel thing Waldo would do too, but that he wouldn't have done it Alone. And if I, Reidmont Allen Lewis, Ace to my friends, Ace Lewis to my clients, if I was worth the ink on my private dick's license, then I could prove, oh, Waldo had a conspirator. Not just an accomplice, someone who put him up to it. And if I could prove that, then I could shift the blame away from Marsha and Big Bill would be satisfied. And I, well, I could get back to my ponies, make back my role and put some space between me and no Nose Nuncio. But back to Waldo. Never one to sit at the head of the class, the idea was too simple for him to come to alone and too daring for him to do on his own, without prodding. Waldo, despite mowing and edging the Edison's lawn for A$50 every other week, was broke. And there was no way he could afford a bus ticket to Wisconsin to surprise Marcia. So the idea was to mail himself there in a cardboard box, staple gunned and pack, taped, delivered to the attention of Marsha Bronson, care of the Clarence Darrow Post Office, Madison, Wisconsin, all the way from the great state of Pennsylvania. When Marsha opened the box upon delivery and Waldo emerged from inside, they'd be reunited and overtaken by love. Or so Waldo thought. The night before he arrived in a box via the US Mail, Marsha spent the better part of the evening in the back seat of a 66 Mustang, fighting off a boy named Bill's Octopus Arms. She liked them, but with that name, he couldn't help but remind her of her dad. And for her dad, she put up a fight, resisting young Bill's advances. But eventually, the daiquiris won out. Marsha gave up the fight and submitted to the caresses of sexual oblivion. This morning she didn't regret it, but she did regret her hangover. And when the package arrived with Waldo, her boyfriend, hidden inside, beaming with desperation, Marsha and her roommate Sheila struggled to open it. Inside, Waldo choked down an excited squeal. He was on his knees, perched like an obedient puppy in anticipation of a treat. Marsha, with some regret, noted the return address was from Waldo. Sheila asked Marsha why she still bothered with that schmuck. Waldo took it like a bullet to the gut. But Marcia tugged at the box's flap and it refused to open. She shuffled into the kitchen for some scissors, and those didn't work either. She remembered there were old tools in the garage. Marsha settled on the first large, capable tool she could find. An old sheet metal cutter. It was pre war, just like me and Marsha's dad. It was special vintage. Its shears stretched 8 inches. Waldo, in the box, was so excited he could hardly breathe. Marsha tried cutting into the taped edge of the box, but the sheet metal shears were too old and offered little action. And with her hangover calling the shots, Marsha stood in impatiently above the box. She raised the sheet metal cutter over her head with two hands and brought it down in one giant stabbing motion with the entire weight of her body right through the middle of the package, through the masking tape, through the cardboard, through the packing cushion, and straight to the top of Waldo Jeffers head. When they found O Waldo in that box, the sheet metal cutter was sticking straight out of his skull. The two sides of his head had split slightly, just as a watermelon would. Waldo was dead. Marsha killed him. And if I didn't prove that she didn't, I'd be dead too.
