Lou Reed
LOU REED: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
Copyright © 2015 by Melville House Publishing
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves; or, How I Slugged It Out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake” © 1975 by Lester Bangs.
First published in Creem, March 1975.
“Lou Reed: The Rolling Stone Interview” © 1989 by David Fricke.
First published in Rolling Stone, May 4, 1989.
“Waiting for the Man” © 1992 by Neil Gaiman.
First published in Reflex, July 28, 1992.
“Lou Reed and Paul Auster: A Converesation” © 1996 by Paul Auster.
First published in Dazed & Confused, April 1996.
“The Spin Interview: Lou Reed” © 2008 by David Marchese.
First published in Spin, 2008.
“The Final Interview” © 2013 by Farida Khelfa.
First published in Rolling Stone, November 8, 2013.
First Melville House printing: January 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lou Reed : the last interview and other conversations.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61219-478-3 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-61219-479-0 (ebook)
1. Reed, Lou–Interviews. 2. Rock musicians–United States–Interviews. I. Reed, Lou, interviewee.
ML420.R299A5 2015
782.42166092–dc23
2014044935
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS DEATH DWARVES; OR, HOW I SLUGGED IT OUT WITH LOU REED AND STAYED AWAKE
Interview by Lester Bangs
Creem
March 1975
LOU REED: THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW
Interview by David Fricke
Rolling Stone
May 4, 1989
WAITING FOR THE MAN
Interview by Neil Gaiman
Reflex
July 28, 1992
LOU REED AND PAUL AUSTER: A CONVERSATION
Dazed & Confused, New York
April 1996
THE SPIN INTERVIEW: LOU REED
Interview by David Marchese
Spin
2008
THE FINAL INTERVIEW
Interview by Farida Khelfa
Rolling Stone
November 8, 2013
About the Authors
The Last Interview Series
LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS DEATH DWARVES
OR, HOW I SLUGGED IT OUT WITH LOU REED AND STAYED AWAKE
INTERVIEW BY LESTER BANGS
CREEM
MARCH 1975
Ego? It may not be the greatest word of the twentieth century, but it’s sure the driving poison in the vitals of every popstar.
Who else but Lou Reed would get himself fat as a pig, then hire the most cretinous band of teenage cortical cavities he could find to tote around the country on an all-time death drag tour?
Who else would doze his way back over the pond in a giant secobarbital capsule and labor for months with people like Bob Ezrin, Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce to puke up Berlin, a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor that may well be the most depressed album ever made?
Who else would then poke his arm so full of vigorating vitamins that he lost all that fat overnight, then cartwheel onstage in spastic epic(ene) colitic fits when everybody expected him to bloat up and die? Who else would make this gig looking like some bizarre crossbreed of Jerry Lewis of idiot movies fame and a monkey on cantharides? Who else but Lou Reed could have survived making a public embarrassment of himself for so long that he actually managed to lasso a great rock ’n’ roll band to back up his monkeyshines?
Name me somebody who would come back from the quagmire that was Berlin to make Sally Can’t Dance, an album that broke its own ankles going out of every seasoned Reed fan’s way to make all possible concessions to commercialism on the lowest level of palatable pap, and get that crappy platter in the Top Ten?
Who else would write whole new volumes in tonsorial culture shaving his traditionally kinky locks to the skull for the simian charm; then topping even his own act by carving Iron Crosses in that mangy patch of stubble (a whim which put him in Rona Barrett’s column. “Well, they said it couldn’t be done, but somebody’s finally managed to invent a totally new hairstyle …”); then redo his dome Hitler Youth blond so he resembled a bubblegum Kenneth Anger, which is obviously one damn cool way for a popstar to look, especially if he’s been looking like sulking shit for as long as Lou had?
Who but Lou Reed could add a whole new entry to the annals of onstage tastelessness by tying off during the middle of “Heroin” and pretending to shoot up with an actual syringe which, on at least one gig, he then handed to a member of the audience as a souvenir?
What other rock artist would put up with an interview by the author of this article, read the resultant vicious vitriol-spew with approval, and then invite me back for a second round because of course he’s such a masochist he loved the hatchet in his back?
Not a living soul. that’s who.
Why is this guy, who has made a career out of terminal twitches ever since the Velvet Underground surfaced dead on arrival in 1966, still here? Well, for one thing, the Velvets emerged from under one of the many entrepreneurial wings of Andy Warhol, who has managed to accomplish more in this culture while acting (in public at least) like a total autistic null-node than almost any other figure of the sixties, Lou learned a lot from Andy, mainly about becoming a successful public personality by selling your own private quirks to an audience greedy for more and more geeks. The prime lesson he learned was that to succeed as this kind of mass-consumed nonentity you must expertly erect walls upon walls to reinforce the walls that your own quirky vulnerability has already put there.
In other words, Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is. On top of that he’s a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh. A panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn’t have the energy to commit suicide Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock and roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henry Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch.
Lou Reed’s enjoyed a solo career renaissance primarily by passing himself off as the most burnt-out reprobate around; and it wasn’t all show by a long shot. People kept expecting him to die, so perversely he came back not to haunt them, as he perhaps would like to think (although I think he’d rather have another hit record even if he had to sing about it never raining in California to get it), but to clean up. In the sense of the marketplace. A friend of mine who works in a record store in Cambridge Mass told me about the people who buy Lou Reed records: “You get like these twenty-eight-year-old straight divorcée types, asking for Transformer and the Velvet Underground … but the amazing thing is that suddenly there’s all these fourteen-year-olds, coming in all wide-eyed. ‘Hey, uh … do you have any Lou Reed records?’ ”
Right. That spooky man, booga booga. Meanwhile, his chronic multiple abuses of the mind and body rise and fall according to the weather. He had the shakes all the way through his fat-man to
ur in spite of massive Valium ingestion. Blue Weaver on the recording of Berlin. “We went in and laid down all the instrumental tracks, the whole thing was done and sounded great. Then they brought Lou in. He can’t do it straight, he’s got to go down to the bar and then have a snort of this and that, and then they’d prop him up in a chair and let him start singing. It was supposed to be great, but something went wrong somewhere.”
I had a friend working as a busboy in Max’s Kansas City when Lou was in transit from blubber to his present emaciation, and the guy called me up one day: “Your boy was in again last night … Jesus, he looks like an insect … or like something that belongs in an intensive care ward … almost no flesh on the bones, all the flesh that’s there sort of dead and sallow and hanging, his eyes are always darting all over the place, his skull is shaved and you can see the pallor under the bristles, it looks like he’s got iron plates implanted in his head … Everybody agreed that they’d never seen anything as bad as this. Plus all the waitresses hate him because he never tips.”
Lou Reed is my own hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly conceive of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination.
The central heroic myth of the sixties was the burnout. Live fast, be bad, get messy, die young. More than just “hope I die before I get old,” it was a whole cool stalk we had down or tried to get. Partially it has to do with the absolute nonexistence of real, objective, straight-arrow, head-held-high, noble, achieving heroes. Myself, I always wanted to emulate the most self-destructive bastard I could see, as long as he moved with some sense of style. Thus Lou Reed. Getting off vicariously on various forms of deviant experience compensated somehow for the emptiness of our own drearily “normal” lives. It’s like you never want to see the reality, it’s too clammy watching someone shoot up junk and turn blue. It ain’t like listening to the records.
That’s why Lou Reed was necessary. And what may be even more important is that he had the good sense (or maybe just brain rot, hard to tell) to realize that the whole concept of sleaze, “decadence,” degeneracy, was a joke, and turned himself into a clown, the Pit into a puddle. Any numbskull can be a degenerate, but not everybody realizes that even now, like Jim Morrison, Lou realized the implicit absurdity of the rock and roll bête-noire badass pose and parodied, deglamorized it. Though that may be giving him too much credit. Most probably he had no idea what he was doing, which was half the mystique. Anyway he made a great bozo, a sort of Eric Burdon of sleaze. The persistent conceit of Lou’s recent press releases—that he’s the “street poet of rock and roll”—just may be true in an unintended way. The street, after all, is not the most intellectual place in the world. In fact it’s littered with dopey jerkoffs and putzes of every stripe. Dunceville Rubbery befuddlement. And Lou is king of ’em all, y’all.
Yep, the Champ was coming to town, and I was ready for battle. I guzzled Scotch by the case and chewed Valiums like Jujubes. Tried to shoot speed but the quack doctor who services every freako and housewife in Woodward Ave threw me out of his offices. Mostly I just listened to my Velvets records and what I could stand of Sally Can’t Dance, and boned up on my insults. Word had filtered back to me that the Original Miscreant had gotten a good hoot out of the last slash job I did on him. People were speaking in hushed tones of “a love-hate relationship … it’s incredible,” stammered Dennis Katz, Lou’s manager, whose brother Steve graduated from Blood, Sweat & Tears to produce Lou Reed albums, which should give you some indication of what happened to a functioning Underground Movement in America.
Now I’ll admit that I’m flattered by the fact that one of my heroes has become one of my fans (several of them have, in fact, in fact, this usually coincides with my conclusion that said hero is dogshit) (and please don’t infer hubris from this; I’m amazed that I can get away with this shit), but I must flatly dismiss all this “love-hate” folderol as pure hype. The promoters rigged it up. The fact is that Lou, like all heroes, is there for the beating up. They wouldn’t be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn’t be heroes if they weren’t miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again, just like anything else. A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own. Plus part of the whole exhilaration of admiring somebody for their artistic accomplishments is resenting ’em ’cause they never live up to your expectations. Plus which they all love the abuse, they’re worse than academics, so the only thing left to do is go whole hog nihilistic and tear everybody you ever respected to shreds. Fuck ’em!
So I was gnashing ready to pound Lou to a sniveling pulp the minute he hit town. THIS WAS IT! THE BIG DAY! THE ONLY OLD HERO, MUCH LESS ROCK MUSICIAN, LEFT WORTH DOING BATTLE WITH!
I went into the Hilton and found Lou’s party in the restaurant and sat down at a table adjacent. Then I got up and walked over. He’s sitting there vibing away in his black T-shirt and shades, scowling like a house whose fire has just been put out, muttering to himself as he picked desultorily at indistinct clots of food on his plate. “Goddam fucking place … what a shithole … dump … fucking nerve … assholes …” Turned out he’d been refused entrance to Trader Vic’s because of the way he was dressed, and he was fuming about it. I walk up, shake hands: “Hi, Lou … I believe you remember me.”
Dead cold fish handshake. “Unfortunately.” Just sat there. Didn’t move. Didn’t smile. Didn’t even sneer. Concrete scowl. Solid veneer, with cement behind that. My party had just finished sitting down and ordering when suddenly Lou bolted up from his table and stalked out of the room, muttering something about going to get a newspaper. By the time we finished eating and had another drink he still hadn’t returned. It was getting perilously close to, uh, showtime, and his road manager Barbara Fulk was getting nervous: “Where in god’s name could he have gone?” Turned out later he’d gone for a walk around the block and gotten lost. An old song was ricocheting through my head, some faint memory of a time in 1968 when I told my nephew about this kid who was hero-worshipping me because I’d turned him on to Velvet Underground albums, speed, etc. “I don’t wanna be anybody’s fuckin’ hero,” I snarled at the time.
My nephew made up a two-line song on the spot:
Don’t wanna be a hero.
Just wanna be a zero.
The show was great. To hell with it. Later we’re back at the hotel and Barbara is telling me that Lou is finally ready, so we walk down the hall to the Great Man’s (at least temporal) sanctum sanctorum.
There he was, sprawled out on his bed, surrounded by his cohorts, roadies and sycophants, as well as the strange somewhat female thing which had been at the table with him at dinner, which I had in fact at first mistaken for Barbara, and which I now got a closer look at.
You simultaneously wanted to look away and sort of surreptitiously gawk. At first glance I’d thought it was some big dark swarthy European woman with long rank thick hair falling to her shoulders. Then I noticed that it had a beard, and I figured, well, cool, the bearded lady, with Lou Reed that fits. But now I was up closer and it was almost unmistakably a guy. Except that behind its see-thru blouse, it seemed to have tits. Or something. It was beyond bizarre, between light and shade. It was grotesque. Not only grotesque, it was abject, like something that might have grovelingly scampered in when Lou opened the door to get the milk and papers in the morning, and just stayed around. Like a dog you could beat or pat on the head, either way it didn’t matter because any kind of attention was recognition of its very existence. Purely strange, a mother lode of unholy awe. If the album Berlin was melted down into a vat and reshaped into human form, it would be this creature. It was like the physical externalization of all that fat and mung Lou must have lost when he shot those vitamins last winter. Strange as a yeti from the cozy brown snow of the East. Later I noticed it, midway through the interview, turning the pages o
f a book. But from the way it did it, it was obvious that it was not reading, it was merely turning the pages, quivering uncertainty frozen incarnate. At one point I yelled at Lou, “Fuck you, I ain’t gonna talk to you, I’m gonna interview her!”
“She’s a he,” Lou said, “and you ain’t int’rv’wing ’m, man.” His tone was the same, even, sullen, occasionally venally darting mutter he maintained all night.
Later I was told that this creature, whose name was Rachel but the people in my party referred to next day as Thing, was introduced to the concert-hall people as “Lou’s babysitter.” Hmmm, seemingly a long way down from Betty, the blond wife he brought on the last tour, who was rather wholesome looking as she gulped coffee and kept track of things Lou lost. Still, you never know. What’s really interesting is that here’s Lou Reed, the cat’s gay, he’s a celeb, he’s traveling, he’s got lots of money, it stands to reason he could have beautiful boys or whatever he wanted around him. So you gotta conclude he wanted this strange, large, frightening being that never talked and barely ever lifted its head. There was a sense of permanency, even protectiveness, around the relationship.
Me, l was drunk. I glugged about a half-quart of Johnnie Walker Black while waiting for Lou to get ready to argue, and what the hell, last time Lou was in town he was drinking double Johnnie Walkers while I sat there nursing my Bloody Mary, trying to think of questions while he rambled on woozily saying things like “Will Yoko leave Paul?” and “I admire Burt Reynolds a lot.”
Now we were back in the fray, and he just sat there, too goddam cool even though I was almost positive he was speeding or coking his brain pan shiny. He obviously considered me a total bumpkin and I played it to the hilt, demanding more Scotch (which he refused to give me: “Enough of your drinking. Stop. You can’t handle it. I don’t want you to get wasted”), doing jive spade routines and hollering (to me hilariously funny) things like “Oh pardon me suh, it’s furthest from my mind, I’m just lookin’ for HAW HAW HAW!”