Q&A: Lou Reed
You wrote a song on The Blue Mask called “The Day John Kennedy Died,” in which the main character is sitting in a bar watching a football game on TV when he hears the news. Where were you when you heard about the assassination?
That day is exactly like it was in the song, although I’ve run into some people who say there wasn’t a football game on that day, in which case I’ve obviously lost my mind. But I can swear that’s how I remember it. I was in the Orange Cafe, in Syracuse [New York], watching a football game on TV. All of a sudden, this rumor started. “Did you hear about Kennedy?” And everybody ran into the bar.
Kennedy’s death was a milestone in the cultural and political upheaval of the Sixties. What were your aspirations as a fledgling writer and musician at the time?
I lie about this so much, I suppose I should try to tell the truth. I was at Syracuse University. I was in the film school and the drama school. But mainly I was in the bar. That’s where I met Delmore Schwartz. It was the only bar there. You took two steps out of the school and there was the bar. I studied with him in the bar. I took classes with him, but it was mainly meeting every day for hours in the bar. Actually, it was him talking and me listening. People who know me would say, “I can’t imagine that.” But that was what it was.
At this time, Delmore would be reading Firmegans Wake out loud, which seemed to be the only way I could get through it. Delmore thought you could do worse with your life than devote it to reading James Joyce. He was very intellectual but very funny. And he hated pop music. He would start screaming at people in the bar to turn the jukebox off.
I later found out — after he died — a lot more about him than I knew when I was a kid, just what state he was in when I met him. But at the time, no matter how strange the stories or the requests or the plan, I was there. I was ready to go for him. He was incredible, even in his decline. I’d never met anybody like him. I came from this small town out on Long Island, nowhere. I mean nowhere, the most boring place on earth. The only good thing about it was you knew you were going to get out of there.
I hadn’t thought of being a songwriter yet. I wanted to write a novel; I took creative writing. At the same time, I was in rock & roll bands. It doesn’t take a great leap to say, “Gee, why don’t I put the two together?”
You founded the Velvet Underground in New York in 1965, just as the hippie movement was starting out in San Francisco. How did you and the other Velvets relate to flower power?
We were from New York City, with everything that was going on there, and we thought the whole thing was laughable. Above and beyond that, I was interested in writing the Great American Novel, and I wanted to use the rock & roll song as a vehicle for it. And life as we had seen it did not lead us to go for all this other stuff that was going on out on the West Coast.
Jeez, it was really funny. We were doing the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in New York one night, and right around the corner was Timothy Leary and some mixed-media event. He criticized us, saying, “Those people are nothing but A-heads, speed freaks. “So the people talking for Andy Warhol said, “Those people take acid. How can you listen to anything those people say?” It was that inane and ridiculous.
It was very funny — until there were a lot of casualties. Then it wasn’t funny anymore. I don’t think a lot of people realized at the time what they were playing with. That flower-power thing eventually crumbled as a result of drug casualties and the fact that it was a nice idea but not a very realistic one. What we, the Velvets, were talking about, though it seemed like a down, was just a realistic portrayal of certain kinds of things.
I might add, Rolling Stone at the time did not embrace us with open arms. I remember Ralph Gleason wrote this editorial telling how much he liked Lenny Bruce and how the trouble of being in favor of free speech was that you had to defend the likes of Lou Reed. I never forgot that. I mean, John [Cale] was here on his Leonard Bernstein scholarship; we were all from college. To be accused of something like that was so parochial.
And this was not during Reagan and the PMRC. This is supposedly flower power, freedom of speech, freedom of this and that. These guys are supposed to be so open-minded. I remember reading something about us there: “the virus from New York.” We represented everything bad and evil spreading out from New York to the West Coast. You would have thought we’d landed on Mars.
Q&A: Lou Reed, Page 1 of 2