Lou Reed Read online

  REED: I must say, no! I mean, I had wanted to do what you do. I wanted to be a writer. A formal writer. I was writing through college. However, in high school I made a record, and I was playing all these very funny bars on Long Island. Then I went off to college: one of the arguments for that was to stay out of the draft of the Vietnam War. And in college we just had bar bands. I was in bar bands every year I was in school, which augmented my income a lot. But we were terrible. We were unspeakable; we actually had to change our name quite often. Were you writing when you were young?

  AUSTER: I think I started writing when I was about nine or ten. So right around the time you found the guitar, I found the pen.

  REED: That’s kind of interesting!

  AUSTER: I loved it. When I got to be about fifteen, I read Crime and Punishment, and it turned me inside out. It gave me a feeling about what novels can be, and I think that experience made me determined to do it myself. I said, “This is how I am going to spend my life.” And all through high school I wrote. In fact, from that point on I wrote seriously. I mean as seriously as I write now. Much of it, for many years, was real garbage.

  REED: You should hear my first record! No, I mean the 45! [“Lever For Me” / “So Blue” by The Lades, at age fourteen]

  AUSTER: I can imagine.

  REED: You know what is funny about that? There is a Velvet Underground compilation that is out, that should be pretty good, and on it, apparently, because I haven’t listened to it, is a very, very early tape of us at the very beginning. And I’ve seen in print, people say, “It’s unbelievable. Their writing and sound is so derivative of other people.” And my response to that is, “Everybody has to start somewhere.”

  AUSTER: It’s true, and I can even go further than that. Having taught writing, for my sins …

  REED: Where?

  AUSTER: … at Princeton, back in the eighties. I did that for about five years. Now, I always felt that the most talented kids were the ones who were turning in the worst work. If I saw a twenty-year-old student able to produce something that looked like a John Cheever story, something with a certain degree of power and accomplishment, I realised there was no hope for that person, because he had already limited his horizons, he wasn’t pushing the boundaries, he wasn’t testing himself, he wasn’t trying to do something new, he was just regurgitating what he felt his elders wanted from him. And the kids who were all over the place and taking risks and blundering about, those were the ones I had hope for. You know, too much early accomplishment is not a good thing. I don’t think you develop.

  REED: I certainly didn’t suffer from it. It’s not anything I had a fear of. I made my first record at 14. It was played on the air once and nose-dived and that was the end of it. And then I was just in bar bands, and then I was writing for this awful schlockhouse that did nothing but cover records. So as far as what I was gonna do in real life for a living, I remember, it’s very funny to think back; I hadn’t thought about this for a long time, I used to look at The New York Times’s want-ad section …

  AUSTER: … as we all did …

  REED: … and I would look at that, saying to myself, “If you had to get a real job, what in the world are you qualified to do?” Which, as a liberal arts person, meant I was qualified for nothing. As far as training: for what? It didn’t exist. I would look at these ads, beginning “Salary: da-da, da-da, da-da,” but I couldn’t picture myself in a suit, going with a resume. It makes me laugh to even think about it. Applying for a job as a what? Copywriter, probably something to do with writing …

  AUSTER: … junior salesman of ladies’ shoes and accessories.

  REED: Did you think, “I’ve got to make a living, I’ve got to do something”?

  AUSTER: This was a great torment for me.

  REED: Did you ever have a real job?

  AUSTER: I’ve had hundreds of jobs.

  REED: I mean a real one.

  AUSTER: No. I never had a real job, nothing that could be qualified as a “career.” I just had odd jobs.

  REED: I was a copy-reader for two weeks. I filed; actually I had a job in high school, filing burrs off nuts that had been recently manufactured. And I remember the guy next to me was thirty years older than me saying, “You know, there is a future in this.” And I couldn’t imagine what it could be!

  AUSTER: I had a lot of blue-collar jobs as a kid. One of the most interesting jobs I ever had was working as a census-taker in Harlem for the 1970s census.

  REED: [Laughs.]

  AUSTER: It was an extraordinary experience. I was part of a team …

  REED: … Now, how do you get a job like that?

  AUSTER: I had just graduated from college and I needed to get some work. I needed to make some money.

  REED: That’s what your degree got you!

  AUSTER: That’s right. We were part of the crack crew that went out and knocked on the doors of the people who hadn’t sent back their forms.

  REED: [Laughs loudly.] Who didn’t send back their forms! [Laughing.]

  AUSTER: But, you see, what it all …

  REED: … Did they talk to you?

  AUSTER: Absolutely. In fact, there was one old woman who must have been ninety, maybe even close to one hundred, and I realise now that she is the origin of Granny Ethel in Smoke. This thought didn’t occur to me until a few days ago.

  REED: Oh, really?

  AUSTER: I knock on the door and this nearly blind old woman lets me in. I tell her I’m from the census. She is very polite and the lights are out in the room because she can’t see much anyway. At one point she peers out at me (we were sitting on two beds on opposite sides of a narrow room), she peers out at me and says, “You know, if you want to turn on the light, go right ahead. I mean, I don’t really need it but maybe you do.” And I said, “Thank you.” So I pulled a string hanging from the ceiling. “Pop,” the light goes on and she squints back at me and looks very carefully and says, “Why. You’re not a black boy at all!” And it turned out that I was the first white person who had ever set foot in her house. We spent a long time together. Her parents had been slaves.

  REED: And she couldn’t tell by your voice?

  AUSTER: She said, “Well, I thought from your voice that you weren’t black,” but it just was inconceivable to her that a white person should have come into her apartment.

  REED: All the way up there.

  AUSTER: It was amazing. Anyway, what about it? When did you think music might be something you could do professionally?

  REED: It’s a really interesting question that you are posing. And I think in some ways I could say, “A year and a half ago.”

  AUSTER: [Laughing.] Right.

  REED: You know that I was so shaky in so many ways, that I still say, “Well, now we are really gonna get to do what we’re really gonna do. This has only been phase one.” At a certain point you realise it’s a long race. If you think of it in those terms. And we are only so far down the path with this, and there’s a lot of people clamouring for you to stop. Saying, you know … “I think rock keeps you young.”

  AUSTER: … “Enough is enough.”

  REED: … “Quit right now while we still think something of you rather than …”

  AUSTER: … Right, right.

  REED: When did you think you could make a go of it? That, for better or worse, you were …

  AUSTER: I sort of stumbled along for about ten years, writing books of poems that were published by small presses and read by about a hundred people. Writing articles and reviews …

  REED: Supporting yourself by other means.

  AUSTER: Well, translation mostly. I was translating books. A job that I grew to hate. It’s grinding, poorly paid work. But I always wanted my so-called freedom. In the end, I became a slave to my own poverty. It was a bad situation.

  REED: Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.

  AUSTER: I was trapped, and finally went into a tailspin in the late seventies. A period of real crisis. During that time I didn’t w
rite much at all. I thought I was finished. It went on for a year, and then I slowly got out of it. Some things happened; I became engaged in it again. I became hungry to do it again, and that’s when I started writing prose. Up until then I had only been publishing poems and essays.

  REED: Really? See, it’s very funny the timespan you are talking about because in the mid-to late seventies I had a terrible crisis. And that is I found out that I had some hits! I could pass for what’s called a “rock star”! Except I had no idea what I was doing! I kind of marvel at people who, at that early age, do know what they are doing. I was like a real loose cannon. And I found out, in Australia, on a tour, that every single royalty I’d ever gotten had been stolen! And that I hadn’t had taxes reported for the past five years, that I was in contempt of court, there was a warrant out, I had no money in the bank, no apartment, and I had been taken for a ride by these people! And had about fifteen dollars in my pocket!

  AUSTER: What a comforting thought.

  REED: Talk about a crisis! That got me involved in a lawsuit that lasted about ten or so years! So I always had this threat over me that I could lose this lawsuit and they would put a lien on me for everything.

  AUSTER: But that was an external crisis. I mean, you didn’t doubt yourself as someone who wanted to keep doing what you are doing, if you could.

  REED: Which is what I chose to do. But it certainly made me doubt my intelligence. How could you get yourself into something like this?

  AUSTER: So you made some bad mistakes.

  REED: Beyond belief! But so many people that I know have variations on the same awful story. Did you run into any problems like that?

  AUSTER: You see, you have to understand, as a writer there is no money involved. All I was interested in was paying the rent and putting food on the table. That’s all I’ve ever aspired to. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve had any cushion at all. So I’ve spent most of my life living on the edge. It’s not a good way to live and yet, if you believe in what you’re doing, and you feel you have to do it, what choice do you have? You don’t have a choice.

  REED: You are right! Because when you think about some of the advice you are given, like: “Fall back on a real job with security.” What security? These people are being fired left and right, and seniority are the first people to go!

  AUSTER: I also see what people look like at my age who have been working in corporate America for the last twenty-five years. They look ten to fifteen years older than I do.

  REED: Easily! I think rock keeps you young.

  AUSTER: I think writing keeps you young. Any art keeps people fresh, because you never retire. You just do it until you croak.

  REED: You are also not having your blood and juices crushed by a job that doesn’t let you express any of it! If that’s the thing that gives you air!

  AUSTER: So the price you pay for your freedom is struggle. But it’s funny; when I was broke, say fifteen years ago, when Siri and I first started living together, we were getting by on pennies. But we were desperately happy and everything was fine, we were both doing good work, and she would lie in bed at night and start worrying about how we were going to pay the rent. But I was always very optimistic, just like Mr. Micawber; I’d say, “Don’t worry. Something will turn up. Everything is going to be all right.” I was oozing optimism all the time. Now that we have a cushion, that money is coming in …

  REED: [Laughs loudly.]

  AUSTER: … she feels much relieved and happy, and spends money with a certain gusto, and I’m more than pleased for her to get whatever she wants. I’m the one who’s anxious now. I keep thinking, “Things are going well, but just wait. I know it, some stone is going to fall out of the sky and hit me on the head …”

  REED: That’s what I may have been suffering from after the induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Things are going so well that if you dare enjoy this stuff something very terrible will happen to you. But I was talking to a friend of mine, Patti Smith, because one of the guys in the group had died, sad to say, and she said—and I thought this is a great way of looking at things—“Because the other person can’t be there, you owe it to them to enjoy yourself twice as much.”

  AUSTER: Good advice!

  REED: And then she added a little addendum to it. “And that is really hard!” But I thought of that and I tried to take it to heart. You can’t waste that moment, it’s so easy to cover yourself up.

  AUSTER: Let me put it this way. We are at a certain age now; we have as much behind us, probably more, than we have ahead of us …

  REED: … At least halfway down the line …

  AUSTER: … So many people that we’ve loved and cared about are not here any more, but you carry them around inside you. The older you get, the more your life becomes a quiet conversation with the dead. I find that very sad and at the same time very comforting. You know, the older you get, the more of a spiritual being you become. You are living with ghosts and they have a lot to tell you. And if you listen carefully you can learn a lot.

  REED: Well, I find myself re-examining things that were said … It’s a favourite theme in writing … Always that: “Say something now: if you wait too long, something happens and you might not get a chance to say it at all.” And it turns out to really be true. I had an incident. A friend of mine thought he had heard one of the Velvet Underground had died and he thought for some reason it was me, and I found this incredible message on my machine and I called him up, and he said: “You’re okay!” I said: “Yeah!”

  AUSTER: Resurrected!

  REED: Yeah! It was very, very, touching for me.

  AUSTER: Well, a moment of true feeling. You understood how he felt and …

  REED: … I certainly did! But when did you … you were saying that you were getting by on almost nothing and now things are better, and in some ways it makes you even more nervous. But did you ever think, for instance, “Maybe I should do something, a one-shot commercial thing that would really bring in some money and then I could take a breath”?

  AUSTER: During that bad crisis period, I actually did two or three crazy things. Money schemes. I was desperate to try to make a quick killing, to get the coffers full again. I spent a lot of time inventing a game, you know, a card game …

  REED: Jesus! I did the same thing! I swear to you …

  AUSTER: … And I spent months of my time on it. It was actually a good game. I went to all kinds of companies, the Toy Fair here in New York in February …

  REED: You went further than I did. It was a board game. Mine was called Rock ’n’ Roll. And it was like a Monopoly board. The object was to get into the Top Ten.

  AUSTER: [Laughs.]

  REED: But things would happen. You roll the dice, you move it ahead and it would say: You just got a recording contract. Advance. Then you advance, then you throw something, maybe pick up “Chance.” And it says: Your bass player OD’d or go to rehab or go back. Your record company drops you!

  AUSTER: Mine was a baseball game, with cards …

  REED: … Don’t you think it’s remarkable that one of the things that occurred to both of us was “make a game”!

  AUSTER: A solution for people who don’t want to work! Make a quick, incisive killing.

  REED: But it’s the kind of thing that people who live on their imagination do, their idea of doing something that might make some money. We’ll take what’s serious and we’ll make it a game!

  AUSTER: That’s right.

  REED: Look at this, I am talking about a game called Rock ’n’ Roll, where all of these terrible things keep subverting what you are trying to do! Ah, it’s so funny! Was the game rejected?

  AUSTER: Yeah, it was rejected. It almost worked, but it didn’t quite. And then I wrote a detective novel under another name. I mean, it’s perfectly decent, I’m not ashamed of it, but it was done strictly for money. But the problem was, willing as I was to prostitute myself, nobody would have me.

  REED: [Laughs loudly.]


  AUSTER: I ultimately made nine hundred dollars publishing that book. Nine hundred dollars! I wanted to sell myself! I was ready. And it didn’t work.

  REED: Someone once said to me about one of my albums, “This is real prostitution. Don’t you feel you are selling yourself?” And I hadn’t even thought about it! And I said, “As a matter of fact, I would have if I could have! You know, but no one would have me.” There are fans of mine, other musicians who say to me, “How could you let someone re-record your song?” Now, one can’t stop them, but above and beyond that, I’d say, “What do you mean?” And they’d say, “It’s a degrading thing!”

  AUSTER: It’s actually a compliment.

  REED: [Laughs loudly.] Yeah!

  AUSTER: It really is. If someone wants to do something with something you’ve done, it’s an honour.

  REED: I’m just wondering whether you get anything like this where they don’t want anything you do, for instance, to be made into a movie. Or have a synopsis made of it, or have it changed or altered for another format.

  AUSTER: No, it’s different. It’s altogether different. Most people make compromises at one time or another, but not everyone. Think of Harvey Keitel. I mention his name because we both know him. Harvey told me not long ago that he turned down a movie offer of three million dollars. He said, “I just couldn’t see myself doing it. I hated the part, I hated the movie and I couldn’t do it.” And he obviously could have used the money. That’s what I like about him so much.

  REED: He could have made Blue in the Face with that!

  AUSTER: Are you kidding? He could have made two Blue in the Faces. He’s one of the few well-known actors who hasn’t sold out. It’s not as though every movie he’s in is good. But he thinks it might be good, and he goes into it with a truly good spirit. And I respect him a lot for those kinds of decisions.

  REED: Would you like to mention, by the way, the miracle of Blue in the Face and Smoke and how they came about?

  AUSTER: Smoke started from that little Christmas story that was commissioned by The New York Times.

  REED: I remember reading it in the Times and loving it then!