Lou Reed

by Lou Reed

  “We think the same thing of each other,” I offered. I was getting tired.

  “He’s trashy,” continued Lou, “and I think you oughta get a kick out of trash while you can.”

  “But you have been,” insisted Barbara, “for almost two hours!”

  “Well, I feel like getting some more. There’s some shit I wanna play him, against his will.” He turned back to me. “This guy George Benson invented the hollowbody electric bass with absolutely no distortion …”

  “Uh, lissen, Lou,” I said. “Barbara’s right. We gotta go too. This could go on forever.” I gathered up my stuff and started for the door. As I was going out I could hear his voice behind me, dull basso, stale bitchy badinage fluttering off into dust: “You Seattle boys are all the same … A-200 … corn flakes …”

  I never met a hero I didn’t like. But then, I never met a hero. But then, maybe I wasn’t looking for one.

  LOU REED

  THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW

  INTERVIEW BY DAVID FRICKE

  ROLLING STONE

  MAY 4, 1989

  The heckling starts in the middle of the very first song. Above the steely guitar strains of “Romeo Had Juliette,” the gritty ode to love under siege that sets the stage and the tone for Lou Reed’s urban apocalypse suite New York, some bozo up in the balcony of the Orpheum Theater in Boston keeps yelling. “This sucks! Play some rock and roll!” The bozo wants hits; Reed couldn’t care less. He is opening his two-hour-plus show tonight by presenting New York in a manner befitting its urgent content and narrative structure, as a complete song cycle, all fourteen songs in order, from start to finish.

  The bozo nearly ruins “Halloween Parade,” a bittersweet hymn for the bodies and souls lost to AIDS, with his yapping. At which point, Reed, never one to suffer fools gladly or otherwise, stops the show, takes dead aim and fires.

  “This is rock and roll. It’s my rock and roll,” Reed snaps with acidic relish. “If you don’t like my rock and roll, why don’t ya just split? Get a refund, motherfucker.” Upstairs, silence. The bozo is history.

  Nobody humbles a heckler better than Lou Reed. Of course, nobody does Lou Reed better than Lou Reed. He said so himself in 1978 on the aptly titled live album Take No Prisoners: “I do Lou Reed better than anybody.” A decade before that, he set the standard for literate street-wise verse, dark lyric humor, white avant-noise and primal rock and roll throb with the Velvet Underground, arguably the most influential American band of rock’s last quarter century.

  Reed’s disciples and descendants range in age, genre and temperament from David Bowie, Ric Ocasek and Chrissie Hynde to U2, Sonic Youth and R.E.M. Reed remains, however, unbeatable at his own game. He is also at the height of his powers. New York is his best album since the harrowing 1982 document of love and obsession The Blue Mask; it is also the closest he has truly come to recapturing the Velvets’ rarefied magic on record since their demise. On New York he dramatizes the physical and moral rotting of the Big Apple with the same corrosive wit, whiplash language and pokerfaced humanity with which he depicted drug addiction in “Heroin,” errant sexual behavior in “Walk on the Wild Side” and, in the epic “Street Hassle,” the fragility of hope and love among the ruins.

  Tonight at the Orpheum, part of a spring tour that includes a sellout week on Broadway, Reed animates the album’s characters and crises with the slow-boil indignation of his unmistakable deadpan singing and the vibrant guitar cross-talk between himself and Mike Rathke, which recalls the heady primitivism of Reed’s six-string dialogues with Sterling Morrison in the Velvets. “Dime Store Mystery,” Reed’s farewell to his friend and the Velvets’ original manager and mentor, Andy Warhol, is a deliberate, dynamic evocation of the group’s singular style of dissonant, and poignant, art song—the ominous serrated bowing of electric standup bassist Rob Wasserman, à la John Cale; Robert Medici’s ghost-dance drumming, à la Maureen Tucker; Reed’s own fireball guitar distortion; the howling feedback coda. At forty-seven, an age when many of his contemporaries are just rehearsing for retirement, Lou Reed remains true to the sonic extremes and uncompromised vision of the Velvet Underground.

  “I did what I always do,” Reed says of the songs, sound and sentiment of New York between swigs of Perrier and drags on a cigarette before sound check. “The only change has been—and I know it sounds clichéd—but if you practice something over and over and over and over, you’re supposed to get better at it.”

  The fans agree. New York is Reed’s highest-charting album since the mid-seventies heyday of Transformer (which spawned his only Top Ten single, “Walk on the Wild Side”), Rock n Roll Animal and Sally Can’t Dance. There have been a few near misses in the interim, like the user-friendly power rock of 1984’s New Sensations, but Reed insists his interest in mainstream pop success is less than zero. “I’ve become completely well adjusted to being a cult figure,” he says.

  What does bug him is the continuing furor, twenty-two years after the release of the first Velvet Underground album, over his style of writing and choice of subjects. To the young Lou Reed, fresh out of Syracuse University—where he divided his time between creative-writing courses, poetry studies with Delmore Schwartz and a series of campus bar bands—frank discussions of sex, drugs and ravaged romance were no big deal in serious literature. If pop music was indeed art (a major mid-sixties premise), scoring these discussions to electric guitars and tribal drums was the most logical thing in the world.

  “I never in a million years thought people would be outraged by what I was doing,” Reed says. “You could go to your neighborhood bookstore and get any of that.” Except Reed’s version of the Great American Novel, now more than twenty-five albums in length, has the weight of keen personal observation and, during a particularly colorful period in the seventies, autobiographical truth. (Today his worst vice is smoking—“the next to go,” he vows.)

  With New York in the Top Fifty, the tour drawing rapturous audiences and anticipation high for the November première of Songs for Drella—Reed and John Cale’s dramatic and moving requiem for Andy Warhol (recently debuted as a work-in-progress in New York)—Reed sat down with Rolling Stone for in-depth conversations in Boston and Washington, D.C., combined here with a session that took place earlier this year in New York. With his round-rimmed glasses giving him a slightly professorial air, he talked of his songwriting; his love of fifties rhythm and blues; the spiritual and artistic influence of Andy Warhol; the music and mystique of the Velvet Underground; the making, and the message, of New York.

  “It’s interesting when you’ve been around as long as I have to see these things come around,” Reed remarked near the end. “It’s like, do you want to be serious? About your own life? And if you don’t want to be serious, there’s party records, and that’s a lot of fun. But I’m interested in something else. I’m not saying it’s better than all the rest. It’s just different.

  “I have a few more words at my disposal. And I can’t ignore that.”

  FRICKE: When you recently inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you reminisced in your speech about studying geometry at home on Long Island in the fifties while grooving to R&B vocal groups like the Paragons, the Diablos and the Jesters on the radio. Most people do not associate you or your records with that kind of vintage streetcorner soul.

  REED: Well, they might not equate me, either, with someone trying to figure out solid geometry. But listen to the end of “Halloween Parade.” Jeffrey [Lesser], the engineer, did that great high falsetto. All my background vocal parts are based on that land of music.

  FRICKE: Like “And the colored girls go do da-do da-do” in “Walk on the Wild Side”?

  REED: Sure, all of it. I had my first record out when I was fourteen [the Jades’ “Leave Her for Me,” in 1957], doing those kinds of songs. Now listen to “There Is No Time” [on New York]. If you get past the sonic blast, “There Is No Time” is just a very hyped version of that.

  FRICKE: Where was the R&
B in the songs and sound of the Velvet Underground?

  REED: It was always in the band somewhere. There were two sides of the coin for me. That kind of music—R&B, doowop, rockabilly. And then Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, stuff like that. When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it Excursion on a Wobbly Rail, after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played. There was his song “Lonely Woman,” Charlie Haden’s bass on that [he hums the riff]. Extraordinary.

  At the same time there was this other song, one of my all-time favorites, called “Outcast,” by Eddie and Ernie. Like pre-Sam and Dave. Just killed me. I used to play it for the Velvet Underground and say, “Listen to this bass part, it’s astonishing.”

  FRICKE: There is that little guitar quote from Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” in “There She Goes Again,” on The Velvet Underground and Nico.

  REED: A nice little introductory thing, right? The thing is, we actually had a rule in the band for a while. If anybody played a blues lick, they would be fined. Of course, we didn’t have any money to fine anybody with. But that was because there were so many of these blues bands around, all copping on that. And while I really liked the stuff for singing, I can’t sing that. I had to find my own way. So all the arranging and stuff, those R&B kind of parts might be in the back of the mind, but it came out white. I meant what I said about Dion at the induction ceremony. There was a white guy singing that way, very obviously from New York. And I was very impressed by that.

  FRICKE: How did Andy Warhol actually “produce” the first Velvet Underground album?

  REED: By keeping people away from us, because they thought he was producing it. They didn’t sign us because of us. We were signed because of Andy. And he took all the flak. We said, “He’s the producer,” and he just sat there.

  FRICKE: Was he merely a benign presence?

  REED: We just did what we do, and he would say, “Oh, that was great.” “Oh, you should leave it that way.” “Oh, no, that’s wonderful.” I’d been around studios before, writing and recording these cutout-bin kind of records, trendy songs that sell for ninety-nine cents. But Andy absorbed all the flak. Then MGM said they wanted to bring in a real producer, Tom Wilson. So that’s how you got “Sunday Morning,” with all those overdubs—the viola in the back, Nico chanting. But he couldn’t undo what had already been done.

  FRICKE: Were any of the songs on the first Velvets album written during your previous tenure writing quickie hits to order at Pickwick Records?

  REED: Some of them. “Heroin.” I don’t remember the other ones, but I know I had “Heroin” down.

  FRICKE: Didn’t you feel a bit schizophrenic, writing trendy, prefab pop songs such as “The Ostrich” and “Cycle Annie” by day and then something like “Heroin” by night?

  REED: But Andy was doing commercial art, then he was doing his other art. He supported the show [the Exploding Plastic Inevitable] with his commercial art. Where do they think we got the money to put it on? We didn’t have inheritances or something. We were broke. Then Andy would do a TV Guide cover or something.

  So I didn’t see that as schizophrenic at all. I just had a job as a songwriter. I mean, a real hack job. They’d come in and give us a subject, and we’d write. Which I still kind of like to this day. I really love it if someone comes in and says they want a song, they give me a subject. And it’s even better if they tell me what kind of attitude they want. I can divorce myself from it completely. Andy used to say he really liked it when people corrected his commercial art because he had no feelings about it one way or the other. He didn’t feel anything, and since they did, they must be right.

  FRICKE: Would Andy give you subjects to write about?

  REED: Sure. He said, “Why don’t you write a song called ‘Vicious’?” And I said, “Well, Andy, what kind of vicious?” “Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower.” And I wrote it down, literally. Because I kept a notebook in those days. I used it for poetry, things people said. Just like in “Last Great American Whale” [on New York]—“Stick a fork in their ass, and turn them over, they’re done.” I first heard it in the Midwest; I heard John Mellencamp say it. I’d never heard the expression before. He said, “Stick a fork in my ass, turn me over, I’m done.” I wrote that one down and changed it a little.

  But I was doing that around the Factory. I went back and wrote a song, “Vicious You hit me with a flower You do it every hour / Oh baby you’re so vicious.” Then people would come up and say, “What do you mean by that?” I didn’t want to say, “Well, ask Andy.”

  Or he said, “Oh, you should write a song, so-and-so is such a femme fatale. Write a song for her. Go write a song called ‘Femme Fatale.’ ” No other reason than that. Or “Sister Ray”—when we were making the second record, he said, “Now you gotta make sure that you do the ‘sucking on my ding-dong’ song.” “Okay, Andy.” He was a lot of fun, he really was.

  FRICKE: He was perceived more as an instigator, a kind of puppeteer.

  REED: He was this catalyst, always putting jarring elements together. Which was something I wasn’t always so happy about. So when he put Nico in, we said, “Hmmm.” Because Andy said, “Oh, you’ve gotta have a chanteuse.” I said, “Oh, Andy, give us a break.” There we are, doing six sets a night at this terrible tourist trap in the Village, the audience was attacking people over the music.

  FRICKE: Warhol and the Velvets parted ways in 1967. Did he lose interest in the band?

  REED: No. Andy passes through things, but so do we. He sat down and had a talk with me. “You gotta decide what you want to do. Do you want to keep just playing museums from now on and the art festivals? Or do you want to start moving into other areas? Lou, don’t you think you should think about it?” So I thought about it, and I fired him. Because I thought that was one of the things to do if we were going to move away from that.

  FRICKE: What was Andy’s reaction to that?

  REED: He was furious. I’d never seen Andy angry, but I did that day. He was really mad. Called me a rat. That was the worst thing he could think of.

  FRICKE: How do you look back on the Velvets now? Do you think, after only five years and four albums, that the band left behind a lot of unfinished business?

  REED: John [Cale] says that it broke up before we’d accomplished what we should have accomplished. I think he’s right in a way. My records are my version of it. John’s records are his version of it. The drumming of Maureen Tucker is something that can’t be replaced by anyone. And then, of course, Loaded didn’t have Maureen on it, and that’s a lot of people’s favorite Velvet Underground record. So we can’t get too lost in the mystique of the Velvet Underground.

  FRICKE: Yet that mystique is more pervasive now than it ever was before. Where do you hear the influence of the Velvet Underground today?

  REED: I hear things that sometimes make me think, “Oh, that sounds like Velvets.” Or, “That sounds like me,” or Maureen. It’s rare to hear it all together. Then on the other hand, the Velvet Underground could do a lot of things a lot of ways. They could be very dissonant, very pretty. And they were all two-, three-chord songs. My albums are all two-, three-chord songs. I know for a young band, if they need some material, my stuff is kind of good for them, because it doesn’t have a lot of chords. It’s all right there. Maybe that’s why people like it, because it’s so simple.

  FRICKE: After leaving the Velvet Underground in 1970, you worked for your father for a while.

  REED: As a typist. He had this company, he was like president of it. He really wanted me to be in the family business. But that was a real impossibility. But when I left the Velvet Underground, I just packed up. I’d had it. So I was a typist for two years. My mother always told me in high school, “You should take typing. It gives you something to fall back on.” She was right.

  FRICKE: There is an old Lou Reed press bio issued by RCA that has handwritten comments by you. And for that period imme
diately following the Velvets, you put down “exile and great pondering.” Pondering what?

  REED: What the next move I was going to make was. Did I want to do it myself? Did I want to have a band? Did I just want to do songwriting, not even get onstage? I’m the last person in the world I’d have thought should be on a stage. Some people really like having a spotlight on them. I don’t. What I like is the song and performing it. Doing it for people—who like it.

  I want out of the rock and roll thing. I really do. It’s a little late now. But I don’t enjoy that end of it. Yet there I am, up onstage, performing my stuff. Certainly part of the reason originally was because no one else would. And I still think that to some extent. I do me really well.

  FRICKE: With the success of “Walk on the Wild Side” and the subsequent renewed interest in the Velvets, you became best known as the man who dared to put great social taboos in song—drug addiction, sexual deviance …

  REED: It was only taboo on records. Let’s keep that in mind. Movies, plays, books, it’s all in there. You read Ginsberg, you read Burroughs, you read Hubert Selby Jr. If you want to have this stuff taken on a level that’s worth considering, you can’t compare yourself to the other stuff that’s on record. You start looking at Brecht and Weill.

  FRICKE: Did you feel pressured, though, to keep writing so-called Lou Reed songs?

  REED: For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

  FRICKE: But during the seventies you didn’t just write about extremes in art and lifestyle. You also lived them.

  REED: Real-life zigzagging. Yeah, why not? It’s taken me a while. Maybe I’m a late bloomer. Put it this way. I’m not harsh on myself for any of that. If anything, I have an understanding and sympathy for the situation. What I’m devoted to now is never letting those situations happen ever again. I would just walk away.