Lou Reed Read online

  Lou started off with a backhanded compliment that turned into a kudoferous insult midway. “You know that I basically like you in spite of myself. Common sense leads me to believe that you’re an idiot, but somehow the epistemological things that you come out with sometimes betray the fact that you’re kind of onomatopoetic in a subterranean reptilian way.”

  “Goddam, Lou,” I enthused, “you sound just like Allen Ginsberg!”

  “You sound like his father. You should do like Peter Orlovsky and go have shock. You don’t know any more than when you started. You just kind of chase your tall.”

  Damn, beat me to the first good left hook. “That’s what I was gonna say to you! Do you ever feel like a self-parody?”

  “No. If I listened to you assholes I would. You’re comic strips.”

  “That’s okay,” I hoohawed, losing ground steadily, “I don’t mind being a comic strip. Transformer was a comic strip that transcended itself.”

  He told me to shut up, and we sat there and stared at each other like two old geezers at the spittoon.

  “Okay,” I summoned my bluster, “now let’s decide whether we’re gonna talk about me or you.”

  “You.”

  “All right. You start.”

  “Okay … ummm … who’s gonna win the pennant?”

  I don’t know shit about sports. “I saw Bowie the other night,” I said.

  “Lucky you. I think it’s very sad.”

  “He ripped off all your riffs, obviously.” I intended this as a big contention, although I really meant more than what I said. Just look in your copy of Rock Dreams and you’ll see it right there, the Myth: Lou Reed looking younger, innocent, fingering his lip wide-eyed in a Quaalude haze, as Bowie lurks behind him, pure Lugosi, eyes glittering, ready to strike.

  Lou wouldn’t go for it. “Everybody steals riffs. You steal yours. David wrote some really great songs.”

  “Aw c’mon,” I shouted at the top of my lungs, “anybody can write great songs! Sam the Sham wrote great songs! Did David ever write anything better than ‘Wooly Bully’?”

  “You ever listen to ‘The Bewlay Brothers,’ shithead?”

  “Yeah, fucker, I listened to those fuckin’ lyrics, motherfucker!”

  “Name one lyric from that song.”

  “I didn’t lis— I’ve heard it … but what I and millions of fans all over the world wanna know about Bowie is: first you, then Jagger, then Iggy. What in the hell’s he got?”

  “Jagger and Iggy?”

  “Yeah, you know he fucks everybody in the rock and roll circuit. He’s a bigger groupie than Jann Wenner!”

  Deadpan. “He’s the one who’s getting fucked.”

  “Didja fuck ’im?” All bravado. But like bullfighting on a handball court.

  “He’s fucking himself. He doesn’t know it, though.” Even. Level. Vibrating soundless hum.

  I figured I’d better change the subject. Behind Lou’s bed was a cassette deck emanating an endless stream of the kind of funky synthesizer Muzak that Herbie Hancock snores up. “Hey, Lou, why doncha turn off all that jazz shit?”

  “That’s not jazz shit, and you wouldn’t know the difference anyway.”

  “I’m telling you that—”

  “You don’t know, you’ve never listened.”

  “—that Bowie”—and here I began to sing in loud Ezio Pinza baritone—“ripped off all his shit that’s decent from you, you and Iggy!”

  “What does Iggy have to do with it?”

  “You were the originals!”

  “The original what?”

  I went on about Iggy and Bowie, and he surprised me with a totally unexpected blast at the Pop. “David tried to help the cat. David’s brilliant and Iggy is … stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he’d listened to David or me, if he’d asked questions every once in a while … I’d say, ‘Man, just make a one-five change, and I’ll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It’s so simple, but the way you’re doin’ it now you’re just making a fool out of yourself. And it’s just gonna get worse and worse.’ He’s not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and he was never any good anyway …”

  Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer (“You hit me with a flower”) and Berlin. I decided that I’d had enough of this horseshit, so I bulldozed on. “Did you shoot speed tonight before you went on?”

  He acted genuinely surprised. “Did I shoot speed? No, I didn’t. Speed kills. I’m not a speed freak.” This started out as essentially the same rap Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whisky in 1969, as he sat there in a dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the “energy in the streets of New York,” and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. All speed freaks are liars, anybody that keeps their mouth open that much can’t tell the truth all the time or they’d run out of things to say. But now he got downright clinical. “You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do—hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams …?”

  The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. “I used to shoot Obetrols, shit, man!”

  “Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols.” Lou was warming to his subject now, revving up. Closing in for the kill. Show you up, punk. “You’d be dead, you’d kill yourself. You were probably stupid and didn’t even put ’em through cotton. You could have gotten gangrene that way …”

  Then he’s pressing me again, playing dirty: “What’s an Obetrol?”

  I got mad again. “It’s in the neighborhood of Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyin’ sack of shit! This is the fourth time I’ve interviewed you and you lied every time! The first time—”

  “What’s Desoxyn?” He had just said this, in the same dead monotone, for the fifteenth time. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out.

  But I was cool. “It’s a Methedrine derivative.”

  The kill. “It’s fifteen milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some cake paste to keep it together.” Like an old green iron file slamming shut. “If you do take speed,” he continued, “you’re a good example of why speed freaks have bad names. There’s A-heads and there’s speed freaks … Desoxyn’s fifteen milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with cake paste, Obetrol is fifteen milligrams of—”

  “Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?”

  “No. You don’t know what you’re doing, you haven’t done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. Plus you’re poor. [I told you he’d stop at nothing. It’s this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed’s last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don’t mean heroism.] And even if you weren’t poor you wouldn’t know what you were buying anyway. You wouldn’t know how to weigh it, you don’t know your metabolism, you don’t know your sleeping quotient, you don’t know when to eat and not to eat, you don’t know about electricity …”

  “The main thing is money, power and ego,” I said, quoting an old Ralph J. Gleason column for some reason. I was getting a little dazed.

  “No, it has to do with electricity and the cell structure …”

  I decided to change my tack again. “Lou, we’re gonna have to do it straight. I’ll take off my sunglasses [ludicrously macho Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album, which I had been wearing all evening] if you’ll take off yours.” He did. I did. Focus in on the shriveled body sprawled on the bed facing me with Thing behind him staring at beehives on the moon, Lou’s sallow skin almost as whitish yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendently emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day with telephone wires humming overhead, but
he looked straight at me. Maybe through me. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kept rolling off to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I’d pondered over for months.

  “Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as a dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music or your life?”

  He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of what I was talking about, shook his head.

  “Like,” I pressed on, “I listen to your records: shootin’ smack, shootin’ speed, committing suicide—”

  “That’s three percent out of a hundred songs.”

  “Like with all this decadence and glitter shit—none of it would have happened if not for you, and yet I wonder if you—”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, et cetera.”

  “What’s decadent about that?”

  “Okay, let’s define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence.”

  “You. Because you used to be able to write and now you’re just fulla shit. You don’t keep track of music, you’re not on top of what’s happening, you don’t know the players or who’s doin’ what. It’s all jive, you’re getting very egocentric.”

  I let it pass. The true artist does not stoop to respond in kind to jibes from an old con. Besides, he was half right. But I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated, no, stood for and exploited, for so many years. It was like seeing a dinosaur retreating into an ice cave. He’d done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn’t have anything to do with. But now, post–Sally Can’t Dance and apparently ready to clean up as much of his act’s exoskeleton as it took to hit the bigger time (But you shoot up onstage. But it’s only a rock and roll show. This ain’t Altamont. Or the Exploding Plastic Inevitable), he was brushing it all away like dandruff off his black street-punk T-shirt. “I dismissed decadence when I did ‘The Murder Mystery.’ ” Grand sweeping statements like this are the kind of bullshit to which this popstar is particularly prone. Like all the rest of them, I guess.

  “Bullshit, man, when you did Transformer you were playing to pseudo-decadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence …”

  Barbara interrupted. “Lou … it’s getting late.”

  Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He was a petulant kid, up past bedtime, not exactly whiny, still insectival, but also blatantly pampered, cajoled, looked after, leashed, nursed, checked unless he chose to make a scene and possibly blow his cool. “Oh, it’s fun arguing with Lester.”

  “But you have to get up in the morning,” she insisted, “and go to Dayton.”

  “Oh,” replied Lou, hardy old buzzard, blow winds blow and all that, “I’ll live through it.” Besides, other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict! I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album.

  Jesus. If there’s one thing I hate to hear out of musicians it’s music talk. Most boring thing on the face of the earth. Especially since the only album I could think of that could conceivably be more nothing than that Herbie Hancock shit he was playing before was this Ron Wood set. Blandest of the bland. I yelled at him to shut it off—“I’ve heard that crap!”—but he was off again, into another subject that interested him, the selfish sonofabitch, and not listening to me at all.

  “This guy George Benson, years ago, he was a bass player, invented the Benson amplifier, absolutely no distortion, totally clean, totally pure sound. It’s interesting what Hancock’s doing with the Arp.”

  It was getting worse. He had been patient with me, but I was beginning to have visions of the future Lou Reed albums: stalwart Andy Newmark and Willie Weeks, who have appeared on every album made by every hasbeen popstar in the world recently, playing with Lou Reed, so the follow-up to Sally Can’t Dance sounds like a Ron Wood album like George Harrison’s Dark Horse, like all those other faceless LPs involving this floating crap game of technically impeccable hacks. And on top of that a funky Herbie Hancock Moog spider jiving around, while on top of that Lou drones his usuals in that slurred and basically arrhythmic voice. “You’re allll fucked … I can do anything I want … putdown, putdown … speed, speed, New York, New York …”

  “I hate Herbie Hancock,” I said.

  “I’ve got something here,” he said, “that is the stuff I want to do, that I meant by heavy metal. I had to wait a couple of years so I could get the equipment, now I’ve got it and it’s done. I could have sold it as electronic classical music, except the one I’ve got that I’ve finished now is heavy metal, no kidding around.”

  I was too drunk to be ready to hear it, but it didn’t matter because he turned on the tape again and it was—the Ron Wood album! I made him shut it off and he continued. “I could take Hendrix. Hendrix was one of the great guitar players, but I was better. But that’s only because I wanted to do a certain thing and the thing I wanted to do that blew his mind is the thing I’ve finally got done that I’ll stick on RCA when the rock and roll shit gets taken care of. Now most people can take maybe five minutes of it—”

  Sounds promising, but I was more interested in talking attitudes than music, and besides Lou has been such a bullshit liar for so long that I cut in. “I think most people think you’re dead. Because you’ve encouraged them to.” He wasn’t interested. Remembering the first night I owned Berlin (I took it to a friend’s birthday party, where every new arrival wanted to hear it, so we got to listen to its entirety about twenty-five times in one night. The party ended with a room full of total strangers making vicious verbal slashes at each other. But we had laughed at the record, so), I asked him: “When you recorded Berlin, did you think people would laugh at it?”

  Lou took his snoot and grabbed a coconut. “I couldn’t care less.”

  “You know, Lou, one thing that I kinda resent about Berlin is that you never give her point of view. It was a very selfish album. ‘I’m beating you up, bitch.’ ‘You’re dead, bitch.’ ”

  “She was making it with a dealer.”

  Hoping to pry a little autobiographical dirt (which is what a good portion of Berlin amounts to) out of Lou, I asked him about Betty, his ex-wife, and got a typically effusive answer: “She was a secretary when one was needed at the time.”

  She was a nursemaid, but then many people close to Lou seem to fall into that role. We argued a bit about the autobiographic content of his songs, and Lou asserted, predictably, that his songs were not autobiographical but existed in a zone of their own, and moreover could only be truly understood by a certain distinct elite audience. I told him that in my estimation the majority of his solo work suffered principally by its obviousness, all the subtlety left ages ago and he’s just an old ham cradling the asp; I asked him if all his songs had elite meanings to please explain to me the secret meaning of Sally’s “Animal Language,” otherwise known as the Bow Wow Song (dead dog meets cat, they try to fuck, fail, shoot up fat man’s sweat) (really a specimen of mind rot at its finest).

  “ ‘Animal Language’ isn’t obvious. Who do you think the animals are? You think it’s a cat and a dog? Who’s the dog, who’s the cat, who are the animals that are so fucked up they gotta shoot up somebody’s sweat to get off?”

  I dunno, Lou, you tell me. There are eight million stories in the Naked City … “One thing I like about you,” I interjected, “is that you’re not afraid to lower yourself. For instance, ‘New York Stars.’ I thought you were lowering yourself by splattering all these people like the Dolls and dumb little bands with your freelance spleen, but then I realized that you’ve been lowering yourself for years.”

  His riposte: “You really are an
asshole. You went past assholism into some kinda urinary tract. The next time you come up with a phrase as good as ‘curtains laced with diamonds dear for you,’ instead of all this Dee-troit bullshit, let me know.”

  “Obviously,” I said, “what you’re selling under your name now is a pasteurized decadence. In the old days you were really a badass, Lou, but now, it’s all pasteurized.”

  He told me I was jaded. “You’ve made a career out of being a degenerate,” I said, “and I think you should fess up to that. You have not primarily distinguished yourself as a musician; although you have come up with some great riffs, and I don’t know why you keep trying to play me all this high tech music crap, because basically you’re a lit. In your worst moments you could be considered like a bad imitation of Tennessee Williams.”

  “That’s like saying in your worst moments you could be considered a bad imitation of you.”

  “Don’t you ever feel like a victim of yourself?”

  “No.”

  Barbara is whispering to me. “Do you really think it’s going to get any better?”

  “Sure,” I said, and turned to Lou. “What do you think that the sense of guilt manifested in most of your songs has to do with being Jewish?”

  “I don’t know anyone Jewish.”

  Barbara starts to put the pressure on in earnest: “It’s three-thirty, Lou.”

  “Well, that’s true, it’s three-thirty. So … what? What would you like me to do, lock the door, hang my feet from the ceiling and listen to half a channel of my stereo?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Cat wants to talk,” Lou mumbled. “I think you’re wrong. Dennis said if I wanted to, I could. I said sure. Directions from the higher up. Go ahead and call him. Call him up.”

  She just grunted no. I could not believe that this man was actually asking this woman to call his manager and wake him up at three-thirty in the morning to ask whether or not he could stay up a little bit later to talk to me. And of course it didn’t really have anything to do with me. It was a cranky child, but then a large part of Lou’s mythic appeal has always been his total infantilism. Now he was ready to talk all night, even though neither one of us had been listening to the other at all. “I think it’s being made very hard on the cat, personally. I’m telling you, no, I’m interested in some of the things he has to say, even though I think he’s an idiot.”