Lou Reed Interview Disaster, 1989

When A Musical Hero is A Jerk

In early winter 1989, I met with Lou Reed for a nearly two hour interview at his office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Months earlier, we were in an elevator at his label office and he was friendly as can be, volunteered that he “liked my stuff.” I said, “how about we do an interview for your next project?” He said that would be cool. But when we sat down, he was in a different mood. He made sure I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Defensive, combative, uncooperative, and not always truthful. His album New York would be released in January 1989. I liked it a lot, these noir-ish songs taken from a decade of bad news from the city’s tabloid newspapers, including mine, New York Newsday.

I use this story to teach you can still get a good story out of a bad interview. You call people who know him, who can explain him. I found a former poetry teacher, a filmmaker, a rock musician, and a famous magician, among others, to frame the picture for the reader. Still, I cut some of the fat from the story, and added footnotes to explain what was happening in the room, and some references to people and places that are now dated.

If you never met Lou Reed, know that he was a master of the dark art of bad vibrations. I needed a drink, literally: not booze, just a glass of water. Reed was so intense that I was afraid to ask for water (he got one for himself and didn’t offer me one) because I thought he might say no. When it was over, I went down to the street and burst into tears. I took a long walk to a midtown bistro, where I had a dinner date with a wonderful woman named Alvenia Bridges, Mick Jagger’s longtime aide-de-camp. She knew a little about moody rock stars. We had a fine time as I plotted my strategy to make this story work.

FIVE-year-olds take guns to school, 10-year-olds selling crack, Howard Beach,[1] Tompkins Square, Tawana[2], AIDS. Lou Reed didn't make this world, but it's becoming a world made for Lou Reed. The city whose demimonde Reed has been chronicling since the late 1960s, when his songs with the Velvet Underground brought brutal realism to rock and roll, has inspired a personal-political album: New York.

Reed perceives the record as a movie or book and suggests listening to it in one 58-minute sitting. The notion developed when he played some early versions of the material for his second guitarist, Mike Rathke.

"Eight years of Reagan, who wouldn't feel like that," Reed said during a blunt, sometimes tense[3] interview in his West End Avenue production office. "So that made it feel better, so I just kept going. It seemed like a thematic album, not a loose collection of vaguely related material."

While the topics are straight from the tabloids, New York may be Reed's most artfully controlled album.[4] He's obsessed with precise guitar tunings, clear vocals that have the same lean, muscular presence as the instrumentation, and lyrics that have been crafted to blend dramatic impact and exceedingly dry wit. The imagery is crisp and deft. "Halloween Parade" is a bittersweet look at an annual Greenwich Village rite given a tragic dimension by the AIDS epidemic, Reed contrasting the gay community's vitality and loss. “Dirty Boulevard” describes the broken mood of a city Reed is so eloquent in capturing.

Reed's concern with lyrical precision goes back to his undergraduate years at Syracuse University in the early 1960s, where he was a protege of the self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz and a student of another poet, Philip Booth.[5]

"Cubism, or whatever"

"The course Lou was in with me was an undergraduate workshop in which he was a very solid and interesting student, but in no way as exciting as he would become," Booth, now retired from teaching, recalled in a conversation from his home in Maine where he recently finished his eighth collection for Viking Press. "This was a course in basic anatomy [of poetry]. Then he went off into his own Cubism or whatever, which nonetheless has suggested to me as I've seen and heard his lyrics that he had not departed from knowing what the body of a poem was about."

Reed has also become infatuated with the technology of record-making. His office is filled with equipment no longer in production: a "mint condition" Fender vibraverb, an "exquisite" Jim Kelly amplifier[6]. He talks passionately about compression and tones, harmonizers and microphones. Reed's infatuation with technology, at least this particular afternoon, seems related to a contrasting obsession: his desire to obliterate the personality cult that has flourished around him for two decades.

Reed, 46, was extremely reticent about anything regarding his past. Reed was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Freeport, L. I., but wouldn't say when the family moved. "I don't remember," he said curtly. He does allow that "when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, the cynicism first came to me. I was never the same after that. That's really true. When they left Ebbets Field . . . to this day I'm not happy for the Dodgers going to the World Series."[7]

Even where the issues of his personal life might be relevant to the songs on "New York," Reed is elusive. One of the most passionate songs on New York is called "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim," which is directed at Jesse Jackson for the reasons many Jews had trouble with his campaign. "Besides `Hymietown,' which was bad enough, to be tied up with [Louis] Farrakhan is intolerable," Reed said. "It makes me question him totally, as much as I thought his positions were brilliant on a lot of things that I really agree with. Forget about me being Jewish - Farrakhan has some great things to say about Catholics that you might find enjoyable if you knew about it." [8]

As far as any religious schooling, background, or current identification, Reed says: "I don't answer questions like that."

The early dossier on Reed includes music lessons, and a single released in 1957 called "So Blue" by a group he belonged to called the Shades. . .His father was an accountant, and his folks apparently disapproved of his music and bohemian inclinations: At their instigation, Reed reportedly underwent shock treatment at 18.

Was he well-adjusted? Jock, hood, good student? Reed never explodes, but his anger is clearly boiling over. "I can't get into it," he said, even but cranky. "I absolutely don't get into questions like that. You keep coming through different doors, but I don't get into stuff like that.[9] I feel it harms the songs. I think it's very important that people like it if the songs are really real, and I try to make them really real, but I think it hurts the stuff if you start trying to get into me personally."

Some of Reed's antipathy to personal questions may merely be a congenital crankiness. "Lou was always moody; he wasn't outgoing," said film maker Paul Morrissey, who was one of the people who integrated the Velvet Underground into Andy Warhol's multi-media circus in the mid-1960s. "He was ill at ease as a performer, and that's what his act still is - a remote, ill-at-ease person."[10]

But the Velvet Underground were crucial to the development of rock and roll because of their willingness to explore the depressing and the disturbing. Reed, former avant-garde musician John Cale (who had studied with experimental musical gurus John Cage and LaMonte Young, as well as Aaron Copland), Sterling Morrison (a native of East Meadow now teaching in Texas) and the androgynous-looking Maureen Tucker, were singing about heroin when the rest of pop was puffing on its first joint.

"Before the Velvet Underground, pop music tended to talk about love, pro-love or failed love, in idealistic terms," said Lenny Kaye, a friend of Reed's, guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, and a successful record producer with a fondness for Velvets-influenced bands. "Lou certainly is a romantic, there's a real sense of the appreciation of love in his music, but he's always dealt with it in very real terms. The Velvets were gritty, urban, part of the city streets. That's something that had almost never been heard before. Pop music tended to negate that; the Velvets took that negativity and turned it into transcendence."[11]

Reed admits to being "astonished, amazed" at the continuing influence of the Velvets. "There's a joke, you know, that we didn't sell that many records, but everybody who bought one started a band," Reed said.

Reed himself has brought echoes of the Velvets era back. The final song on the New York album, "Dime Store Mystery," is a philosophical hymn dedicated to Warhol. And after decades apart, Reed and John Cale are collaborating on "Songs for 'Drella," (a nickname for Warhol), a tribute to their former mentor which will be staged later this year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A bare-bones work-in-progress was presented recently by Reed and Cale at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn. It was clear that Reed missed Warhol, and that they hadn't spoken much before his death.

Did Reed regret that?
I don't answer questions like that. Those are like personal questions. I don't want to get into my relationship with Warhol," Reed said. Told I had seen `Songs for 'Drella,' Reed reluctantly elaborated.[12]

"Because I spend so much time writing these things, I think I say them better in the songs than I do in real life," he said. "I have all that time to choose my words carefully, and not be glib. Part of that song ["Dime Store Mystery"] is that it's really a terrible shame not to have him here to talk to now . . . I mean, there aren't that many really great people who are blinding in their brilliance, who are always astonishing to run something past for what they can give you back . . . He was certainly one of them. Delmore Schwartz was another. Giants."

Reed at first has trouble looking for a reason to explain the Velvets' lasting and ever-growing appeal. "One is the discovery that you can write songs aimed at adults," he said. "That's something I've tried to do over the years with varying degrees of success, to make [a record] like a real good book you can go back to, not just throw it away. You can imagine how many subjects there are to write about if you take that approach to a rock and roll record."

During the 1970s Reed was prolific but mercurial. Following the hit "Transformer," (1972) he followed with the gloomy but compelling song cycle "Berlin," which was followed by the formulaic mainstream pop- rock of "Sally Can't Dance" which in turn was followed by "Metal Machine Music," four sides of intentionally unlistenable noise and feedback. He also recorded "Rock and Roll Animal," whose gripping guitar-blast renditions of Reed's best songs made it one the great live albums ever made, and "Take No Prisoners," another live album that gave full play to Reed's mordant wit.

"People don't talk enough about Lou's wit," said Penn Jillette[13] of Penn and Teller, who has worked with Reed, teaching him magic tricks for an MTV program, and worshiped him as one of the world's most active members of the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society. "Like a Hitchcock movie, that's what really powers ["New York"] along, allows those images of destroyed ozone and street violence and drugs, allows you not to block it out. Like the tension in a horror movie, there's tremendous proper use of wit, like in `Sick of You': `The ozone layer has no ozone anymore/and you're gonna leave me for the guy next door.' "

In the 1980s Reed got mellower. He said he married his girlfriend Sylvia (it's his second marriage), said he quit drinking, and bought a house in New Jersey, a getaway from their Manhattan loft. If marriage and a house in the suburbs isn't enough evidence that Lou Reed has settled down, he also appeared in advertisements for a motorcycle that used music adapted from his "Walk on the Wild Side."

What's next - kids? On the New York album, there's an especially comical song called "The Beginning of a Great Adventure" that deals with the ultimate acceptance of settling down: raising a family. "Why stop at one, I might have ten, a regular TV brood/I'd breed a little liberal army in the woods/Just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar," Reed sings.

Mention the title of the song, and Reed's ready to go back on the defensive. "Is it true?" he sneers, before the question comes. He sneers again. "Is it true? Like `Heroin,' is it true? It's so easy to say yes, of course, and that takes care of the whole thing. But it's immaterial. That's a man's song. I find it a very funny song." He discusses the esthetic function of the song within the New York album for awhile. "No, my wife's not pregnant," he said. He does ask if his interviewer has a child, then asks, in almost prosecutorial tone:

"So did you or did you not enjoy the song?"
(Yes, very much).
"Did you identify with it, was I close?"
(Yes).
"So I did strike some note with you," he said, relieved. "See, because a false step in a song like that would absolutely not only kill that song, but it kills everything that comes after it, because you won't listen to me."

His cover protected, the conversation quickly shifts back to guitar tones and tube-driven amplifiers. "I assume that since the Velvet Underground meant so many different things to so many different people, that Lou's guardedness is protection," said Lenny Kaye. "Other people who have taken as many chances as Lou had, exploring the netherworlds of the human psyche, haven't made it through. He's a survivor, and proud of it, so he's developed certain defense mechanisms to protect that survivorship."

"I really wish the record could come out anonymously and not get into the personality," Reed said. "The personality thing is kind of show-bizzy, and I don't like that element of it. I've been through all of that, and I really do despise it. It's better from my point of view just to listen to it, and get into it in a pure way. Plus I'm very serious about it."

Perhaps realizing that he may be, at this moment, a bit too serious, Reed steps back. "Then again, like Hitchcock says, it's only movies. It's only rock and roll. On the other hand, it's as good as you're gonna get, from me."

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[1] In 1986, a car with three black men from Brooklyn broke down in Howard Beach, Queens. They were chased by a gang of white youths, one with a baseball bat. They chased one of the men, Michael Griffith, who ran on to the Belt Parkway, where he was struck and killed by a car.

[2] Tawana Brawley was a black teenager from Wappingers Falls, NY, who had accused four white men of raping and brutalizing her for four days. Forensic evidence showed no signs of any attack or abuse; a Grand Jury and most observers concluded it was a self-perpetrated hoax. A Jussie Smollett thing.

[3] In the language of diplomacy, I chose the phrase "blunt, sometimes tense" to indicate my exchanges with Reed stopped just short of the declaration of war.

[4] I needed a rock critic cliché here to show my intentions were pure, that I respected Reed's musicianship.

[5] Having gotten very little from Reed worth quoting, I saw an ad for Booth's latest volume of poetry in the Sunday New York Times Book Review section. Delmore Schwartz, Reed's idol, was dead, but the publicist from Stanley Booth's publisher was delighted to hook us up by phone. I love his reference to Reed's "Cubism, or whatever."

[6] Reed went so far into oblique theories of guitar tuning that I had to dial him back by saying, "this would be really interesting if this was Guitar Technician magazine, but Newsday is more of a general audience publication, and we need to talk more about the songs, or things the mainstream reader might understand."

[7] Is there a child anywhere who does not know the story of how and when their family left the city for the suburbs?

[8] The Rev. Jesse Jackson was running a surprisingly strong campaign for president in the 1988 Democratic primaries when he was caught on an open mic referring to New York City as "Hymietown," with "Hymie" assumed to be a derogatory word for Jews. Kurt Waldheim was the Secretary General of the United Nations.

[9] Note how attuned he is to journalistic strategies. When I teach this paper in my St. John's University class, the Craft of Interviewing, I indeed suggest to try to use different doors to sneak around blockades. He busted me, although I was trying to keep the questions shaped around the personal lyrics in the songs of the new album.

[10] Paul Morrissey directed such "Warhol" films as Chelsea Girls and Trash. He didn't seem to like Lou much, either.

[11] Thank god for Lenny Kaye, both musician and rock "scribe," who could put Reed's serious attitude in a non-judgmental frame.

[12] Here, I busted Lou. My rule for interviewing is always stick with the new material as long as possible, and there was no doubt that "Dime Store Mystery" was about Warhol. Now I was playing rope-a-dope with Reed. I had seen one of those workshop performances of "Songs for 'Drella," but couldn't write about the show yet. But I knew it was a song cycle about Warhol, I had seen and heard it. Staggered by my left hook, Reed had no choice but to talk about what Warhol meant to him.

[13] Comedians and performance artists were part of my beat, and I had interviewed Penn and Teller for Newsday when they brought their show to Broadway. In that interview, Penn told me about his love for the Velvet Underground. Teller, the silent partner on stage, also spoke with great wit and charm.