Lou Reed

by Lou Reed

  FRICKE: In 1989, how do you relate to that Lou Reed?

  REED: I don’t look back on it. I wrote a record about it, though. I wrote a song, “Growing up in public / With your pants down.” That’s what I thought of the whole thing. And that said all that I had to say about that. Most of the major mistakes were in public, and I put them on record to boot. Lots of novelists have put it in their books. Norman Mailer’s got his Advertisements for Myself.

  FRICKE: It’s quite remarkable that considering your colorful history and notable lack of hits, you can still get your “advertisements” put out on record by a major label.

  REED: Weird, isn’t it? I don’t know why people give me record deals. I think it’s because they at least break even, and I think they’re making a few bucks while they’re at it. I’m a cult figure, but I sell some records.

  FRICKE: What about that memorable instance in 1979 when, during a show at the Bottom Line, in New York, you pointed out your record-company president, Clive Davis, in the audience and demanded, “Where’s the money, Clive”?

  REED: I was drunk, and I’ve always regretted that I did that. On the other hand, I was mad because there were supposed to be some promotional displays in the city, and I thought I was being jerked around. I responded in a way that I’m not particularly proud of. But that’s the way I was then. You pushed me, I push back. Or I waited until I could do to you what I thought you did to me. I don’t think Clive was trying to do anything to me. But I was frustrated, so I took it out on him, and I’ve always regretted that I did that.

  On the other hand, that’s Lou! [Laughs.]

  FRICKE: What would you say is the most common misconception about you?

  REED: Oh, I don’t know. I would have to hear them.

  FRICKE: For instance, that you’re difficult.

  REED: I’ll tell ya, I’m a genuinely nice guy. I really am. A real nice guy. But I think I’m temperamental. And I’m talking about me, today. I think I have a pretty good handle on it. But sometimes temperamental can be misconstrued as being difficult.

  For instance, I don’t like being interviewed. Why would anyone want to be interviewed? Anybody in their right mind? Why would you, if the position was reversed, want to sit here and have me ask questions about you? “What was it like, this failure you had when you were twenty-two, David?” Who needs it, unless you’re an egotist and you really like talking about yourself? And I don’t. Because I know myself. I think I’m a nice guy.

  I’ve certainly been really difficult in the past, in a lot of ways, or extremely temperamental. But that’s because I was beset, and I didn’t have it together. It’s a different story now. Of course, I’m older. Supposedly when you get older, you get something from all of it before, or you drop dead and that’s the end of it I think I know about certain things better than other people. And I’ll fight for it. And I don’t think that’s being difficult. I mean, it sounds tacky, but it’s like being true to your vision.

  FRICKE: How did you feel when “Dirty Blvd.” [from New York] was released as a single to radio with the words “piss” [“Give me your tired your poor I’ll piss on ’em / That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says”] and “suck” [“The TV Whores are calling the Cops out for a suck”] blipped out? It was no big deal in 1972 to hear “Walk on the Wild Side” on AM radio complete with the line “even when she was giving head.”

  REED: I did the blipping on “Dirty Blvd.” I didn’t want the promo people to feel defeated before they ever went in. I was with [mastering engineer] Bob Ludwig—Bob and I go back a long time, all the way to Metal Machine Music—and Bob said to me, “If you think they’re gonna have a problem with this, why don’t you just give ’em a choice, so promo guys don’t have to go out and bang their heads against the wall? Just put a guitar there instead of the words.” So I asked the company, “Would that make life easier for you?” “Oh, are you kidding? We didn’t want to bring it up.”

  FRICKE: Doesn’t it bother you that you of all people would have opted for such a compromise?

  REED: It would bother me if the other version didn’t exist I thought the song was representative of the album, and I wanted to make it easier for everybody. I didn’t want to get into a battle about those two words. I’ve been around way too long. I’ve made my point. People understand where I’m coming from.

  FRICKE: New York is certainly quintessential Reed. The city and its citizens have been grist for your mill since the dawn of the Velvets.

  REED: Well, Faulkner had the South, Joyce had Dublin. I’ve got New York—and its environs. It’s just a big city. The reason I don’t think the album’s inhibited by topicality is because I travel around a lot. I talk to people, and it’s just the same old stories over there. Different name, same situation.

  FRICKE: But there is a difference in perspective. There’s anger and urgency in these songs. Whereas in your Velvets songs, you were more of an observer, an emotional journalist.

  REED: I don’t know if there’s any anger in there.

  FRICKE: Urgency?

  REED: That’s different from anger.

  FRICKE: But there is a feeling of an eye for an eye, being up against the wall, in songs like “There Is No Time,” “Busload of Faith” and “Hold On.”

  REED: It’s interesting, from a writing point of view, the techniques I used. The sequence is important. Because every time you’re hit with a song, you’ve been hit with a few others before it. There have been these other things whispered in your ear, setting you up for what that song’s going to talk about. In “Romeo Had Juliette,” you have the two teens. You have “Halloween Parade,” people dying of AIDS, then Pedro in the welfare hotel in “Dirty Blvd.” Then you have these two people who are fighting [“Endless Cycle”] and what if they had a kid.

  Then it’s into the ecology [“Last Great American Whale”], and suddenly you’ve got a guy talking about “Gee, maybe I oughta have a kid” [“Beginning of a Great Adventure”]. But while he’s talking about that, you’ve been loaded up with five other ones. What has been happening to the kids? What is happening to the land?

  FRICKE: In recent years you’ve performed at benefit concerts, appeared on “Sun City” and toured on behalf of Amnesty International. Did those experiences in any way inspire or influence the attitude and subject matter of New York?

  REED: There’s a lot of things to write about. I could write about the table, who sat at the table, what the table means to me. It’s a great old antique table, look at that spot over there. There’s a lot of things you can write about. But this is what came out. Plus, I’ve been privately talking about these things with a lot of people, about what is going on. And as a writer, that really drew my attention, today, now. It’s perfectly possible I’ll put out a party record next. But in my own way, I think this is a party record. Just not the kind you’re used to. It’s not a pop record. I don’t even think I’m part of rock and roll anymore. There’s a niche that’s “Lou Reed music.” And that’s over there.

  FRICKE: Let’s talk about some of your contemporaries. Bob Dylan, for example. He hung out with Warhol at the Factory quite a bit in the mid-sixties and was at the time, like you, busy transforming rock and roll songwriting.

  REED: I always go out and get the latest Dylan album. Bob Dylan can turn a phrase, man. Like his last album [Down in the Groove], his choice of songs. “Going ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street”—I’d give anything if I could have written that or that other one, “Rank Strangers to Me.” The key word there is rank.

  I can really listen to something like that. The rest of it is all pop. I have zero interest in it. But Dylan continuously knocks me out. “Brownsville Girl,” the thing he did with Sam Shepard, he said, “Even the SWAT teams around here are getting pretty corrupt.” I was on the floor. I have that same reaction to some of my own stuff. And the only other person I can think of who does that for me is Dylan.

  FRICKE: What about John Lennon? Like you, he wrote frankly in his songs about his
life and lifestyle.

  REED: He wrote a song called “Mother” that I thought was a really good song. “Jealous Guy.” I liked his stuff away from the Beatles. Just my own taste. But the kind of phrasing that knocks me out is Dylan’s. For language, Dylan kills me to this day.

  FRICKE: Bruce Springsteen.

  REED: I like him in concert. He’s a great live performer. What I really like is the little skits with Clarence and everything, these great spoken introductions.

  FRICKE: How did he come to recite those lines on “Street Hassle”?

  REED: Because if I’d done them, they’d have come out funny. And when he did it, it sounded real. He was at the same studio, the Record Plant. It wasn’t making it with me doing it. So the engineer said, “Why don’t you ask Bruce to do it? He could really do that.” So we asked Bruce to do it, and he rewrote it a little.

  FRICKE: The ending of his passage is a clever take-off on “Born to Run”—“There are tramps like us / Who were born to pay.” Was that his contribution?

  REED: No, that was mine. It had been written with him in mind, but he wasn’t there. I was just playing off the title.

  FRICKE: As someone who was part of the Warhol celebrity circus at its height, what do you think of the “celebutante” party scene in New York now?

  REED: I’m not familiar with it. I don’t go to clubs, I don’t go to concerts. See, after being with Andy, if I never went to another one of those things, it would be too soon. And I still feel that way. I don’t go to the China Club, I don’t go to M.K., I don’t go to the Tunnel. I get cards from all these places, but I don’t go. Not interested. I’m kind of dull, huh?

  FRICKE: Is there any pop music out there now that interests you at all?

  REED: I haven’t heard enough. I don’t listen to the radio. I don’t know what’s out there. I know my wife, Sylvia, is really mad about the Waterboys. So we listen a lot to the Waterboys. But of course, I’m really interested in the lyrics. There are few and far between, someone who can really do that.

  FRICKE: After you got out of college, did you ever seriously pursue writing—that is, poetry or prose, as opposed to songwriting?

  REED: I won a poetry award. While I was at the Factory, Gerard Malanga [a Warhol associate and Velvets biographer] submitted one of my poems to a little magazine. I was getting published in these little magazines. Eugene McCarthy gave me the award, something like “one of the five best new poets in a small literary magazine.” I was actually mad at Gerard for submitting it, because I hated the poem. I didn’t care if someone else thought it was good. I knew it was terrible. I thought my song lyric was way better than that particular poem.

  FRICKE: You’ve always contended that your records are your version of the Great American Novel.

  REED: Yeah, when you play it all in a row. If you have the patience to follow it.

  FRICKE: Do you think your “novel” would have made it as poetry or prose, rather than rock and roll?

  REED: It wouldn’t have had a drum. It wouldn’t have had guitars. So you wouldn’t have gotten that physicality from it. That’s kind of what I like about it.

  FRICKE: Ironically, given the country’s increasingly conservative disposition, your work seems more drastic, more potent, than it did ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago.

  REED: I think the cover-up of Kennedy’s assassination, then the pardoning of Nixon finished it for a lot of people. They said, “Well, we didn’t know it was bullshit before. We certainly know it’s bullshit now. So fuck it. Every man for himself.” No one gives a shit. They know they’re getting fucked. No time to take care of anything else.

  FRICKE: But New York is very much your way of saying you do give a shit.

  REED: It is. It’s also about the use of language. That’s why I say maybe we shouldn’t think of me making rock and roll records. I’m in this for the long haul. I feel I’ve just started to get a grip on it, what I can do with it, what I want to do with it. And who I’d like to take with me when I do it.

  It’s really easy, in a sense, because the people who like it will go with me. And the people who don’t will say I’m full of shit. And more power to them. They don’t want me, and I’m not interested in them, either. That’s okay. [Smiles.] I have no problem with that.

  WAITING FOR THE MAN

  INTERVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN

  REFLEX

  JULY 28, 1992

  I.

  When I was about fourteen I found a copy of a Lou Reed lyrics book in my local book shop. It was a cheaply bound mimeoed affair, with a stippled caricature of Lou shooting up on the flimsy cover: pirate publishing.

  I wanted it so badly, but I couldn’t afford it (and the police had just busted up a junior shoplifting ring at my school and I’d had to return the copy of Lou Reed Live that Jim Hutchins—the John Dillinger of the ninth grade—had obtained for me at significantly less than the record store was asking for, so even that option was kind of out).

  I stood and read it in the shop, typos and all. Went back for it a couple of days later, but it was gone.

  I’ve been looking for it ever since.

  II.

  In 1986, back when I was still a journalist, I was in the press offices of RCA, with a friend who was blagging me a copy of Mistrial. [To blag: to scrounge, obtain, mook.]

  “Neil wants to interview Lou Reed,” said my friend.

  “Lou Reed? Jesus. I wouldn’t wish that on a dog,” said his press officer. “He’s hell on interviewers. Walks out on you if you say the wrong thing. He’ll probably just tell you to fuck off. Or not answer you. Or something.”

  Then they went on to talk about how a few years before a young hack had begun an interview with Meatloaf by asking if it the problem was glandular and never really got much further than that.

  III.

  It started out as an idle comment, over a lunch with an editor. I gave up journalism for fiction three years before, and mentioned that, while nothing could tempt me back, I’d always wished that I’d interviewed Lou Reed …

  “Lou Reed?” said the editor in question, her ears pricking up. “Well, he’ll be in Europe next month. But we were already thinking of maybe asking Martin Amis to talk to him.”

  But I’d volunteered and Martin Amis hadn’t, and somewhere wheels were set in motion, or at least a couple of phone calls were made.

  A month later the book arrived.

  Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. Ninety song lyrics, two poems, and two interviews—one with Vaclav Havel, playwright, author and President of Czechoslovakia, and the other with Hubert Selby, author of Last Exit to Brooklyn.

  Some songs had small italic notes at the bottom of the page. Occasionally they clarified; often they infuriated.

  “Kicks,” a song about how murder alleviates ennui better than sex “ ’cause it’s the final thing to do” carried the annotation “Some of my friends were criminals,” while the note for “Home of the Brave” read, “My college roommate and friend, Lincoln, tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. He lived but lost an arm and a leg. He then tried to become a standup comedian. Years later he was found starved to death in his locked apartment.”

  IV.

  I was in my local Woolworths, in the nearest dull little English town to me (which doesn’t have a real record store, just a Woolworths, which is still a real improvement over a few years back, when simply possessing a compact disk could have got you burned as a warlock), looking for Magic and Loss, although I didn’t seriously expect them to have it. I went through the Rs but there was just a copy of Sally Can’t Dance with a crack running down the battered plastic of the cover.

  I asked the shop assistant about it, who pointed me to the charts wall. Lou Reed’s in the UK top ten?

  I heard the sound of the Earth turning on mighty hinges, and of stars forming new constellations, but I wasn’t going to argue. Maybe now, I thought, they’ll bring out the Arista albums on CD.

  My Rock and Roll Hea
rt’s been unplayable for almost a decade.

  V.

  The first time I saw Lou Reed live I was almost sixteen. He was playing at the New Victoria, a converted London theatre which closed down a few months later. He kept stopping to tune his guitar. The audience kept cheering and yelling and shouting “Heroin!”

  At one point he leaned in to the mike and told us all to “Shut the fuck up. I’m trying to get this fuckin’ toon right.”

  At the end of the gig he told us we’d been such a crummy audience we didn’t deserve an encore, and he didn’t do one.

  That, I decided, was a real rock and roll star.

  VI.

  Three weeks were spent talking to WEA, Lou’s record company. The interview’s on. The interview’s off. The interview’s maybe on. It’s going to be a phone interview. It’s not going to be a phone interview. I’m going to be flown to Stockholm. I’m going to fly to Munich.

  First thing you learn is that you’ve always got to wait.

  Somewhere in there, at Lou’s request, to prove my credentials, I handed over a pile of books and comics to Sally, the publicist at WEA. She seemed kind of impressed, so I decided not to mention that I could have been Martin Amis.

  I’d seen the video of Reed’s “What’s Good” at 3:00 a.m. on MTV while channel-hopping (European MTV is the only channel in the world worse than American MTV). Visually it was stunning: it looked kind of like Matt Mahurin’s work, only it was in colour. I asked Sally who made the video, but she didn’t know.

  Days went by, and D-day was approaching fast, while we waited for word. I’m probably going to Munich. I’m almost definitely going to Munich.

  I’ve never been to Munich. I’ve never met Lou Reed.

  Friday, 5:30, I’m not going to Munich, and the interview’s off. Canceled. Kaput.

  I went to bed for the weekend.

  VII.

  I was fifteen and playing Transformer in the art room at school. My friend Marc Gregory came over, with a request. His band covered ‘Perfect Day,’ but he’d never heard the Lou Reed original. I put it on for him. He listened for about a minute, then he turned around, puzzled, looking uncomfortable.