Sixteen years later on New York he took on Manhattan – and New York City’s other boroughs as well – in another song cycle that shifted its perspective in order to now describe and explore an outer world of public squalor and social despair. It didn’t work, but then it did for Lou on his own. Like his last album [Down in the Groove], his choice of songs. What the next move I was going to make was. He sat down and had a talk with me. To mark his passing, here's a classic – and irascible – encounter from the Guardian, first published in … What is happening to the land? .The sickness of the mother runs on through the girl/leaving her small and helpless.” There are such terrible images running through the album, like in “Xmas in February,” the song about the abandoned, unemployed Vietnam vet, “the guy on the street with the sign that reads/’Please help send this vet home’/But he is home.” But he is home! Like I could go right back in the studio and do another album, and it’s kind of a shame that you can’t do that. “It’s one of life’s little pleasures,” he told me with a laugh, adding, “it’ll last forever.” As will his words and music. How did you feel when “Dirty Blvd.” [from New York] was released as a single to radio with the words “piss” [“Give me your tired your poor I’ll piss on ’em/That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says”] and “suck” [“The TV whores are calling the cops out for a suck”] blipped out? And of course what happens here will spread. As a staff songwriter for a hack mid-Sixties label called Pickwick Records, he penned and produced a dance craze single called “The Ostrich” which featured what the author called The Ostrich Guitar: a conventional electric with all six strings tuned to the same interval. The playwright and actor Sam Shepard recently remarked “the trouble with modern rock & roll is that it’s lost its sense of humor. But in some ways it’s like a “me” from a certain time, and it’s weird because I’m over here now and I can’t do that particular thing anymore, although I still enjoy it. And what did we all once say? This is me speaking as directly as I possibly can to whoever hopefully wants to listen to it. But listen to the end of “Halloween Parade.” Jeffrey [Lesser], the engineer, did that great high falsetto. Get your Articles fix with Mojo. It’s good to have examples and standards to try to either try to live up to or surpass. Different name, same situation. .and OK, what are you doing in St. Patrick’s? I’ve made my point. Above the steely guitar strains of “Romeo Had Juliette,” the gritty ode to love under siege that sets the stage and the tone for Lou Reed’s urban apocalypse suite New York, some bozo up in the balcony of the Orpheum Theater in Boston keeps yelling. If pop music was indeed art (a major mid-Sixties premise), scoring these discussions to electric guitars and tribal drums was the most logical thing in the world. Celebrities: Latest news, pictures, exclusive interviews & features from HELLO! .and here we are. [To blag: means to scrounge, obtain, mook. And I said to him, “Oh, come on, please, you’re so parochial! So fuck it. “Jealous Guy.” I liked his stuff away from the Beatles. It’s rare to hear it all together. Almost all of the songs were done live, and we recorded them at Media Sound in New York in a tiny little room with an old Neve board. I did Honda and American Express commercials just so I can continue to make albums like New York and take the time off to write the way I really want to. That’s the salvation of it. The SPIN Interview: Lou Reed | SPIN In the wake of Lou Reed's death, do not be fooled into thinking he was a man whose genius was a result of being cool, or of simple recalcitrance. Because I always wanted it to sound like me, and that’s not so easy. Did I want to have a band? And who I’d like to take with me when I do it. Some of the lines in “Hold On,” for example, are straight out of the news, like, “They shot that old lady/ ’cause they thought she was a witness/to a crime she didn’t even see” or “A cop was shot in the head by a 10-year-old kid named Buddha in/Central Park last week.” I mean, what? Then on the other hand, the Velvet Underground could do a lot of things a lot of ways. I wrote a song, “Growing up in public/With your pants down.” That’s what I thought of the whole thing. “What was it like, this failure you had when you were 22, David?” Who needs it, unless you’re an egotist and you really like talking about yourself? We certainly know it’s bullshit now. Which I still kind of like to this day. Why would you, if the position was reversed, want to sit here and have me ask questions about you? On the anniversary of the Velvet Underground icon’s death, a rare Q&A from 1989. I can see why he or she is right, I can see why I could be seen as being wrong. They said, “Well, we didn’t know it was bullshit before. “This is rock & roll. “You gotta decide what you want to do. New York is his best album since the harrowing 1982 document of love and obsession The Blue Mask; it is also the closest he has truly come to recapturing the Velvets’ rarefied magic on record since their demise. At any point in my life if I heard someone else’s song, it might have seemed so simple, but it really wasn’t until I really knew it. In “Romeo Had Juliette,” you have the two teens. I’m reminded of the lines in your new song “Romeo Had Juliette”: “The perfume burned his eyes, holding tightly to her thighs/and something flickered for a minute and then it vanished and was gone.”Isn’t that sad? But I didn’t want my records to sound as if the voice was over here while the music seemed to be in the next room over there. Find album reviews, stream songs, credits and award information for Night Flight Interview - Lou Reed on AllMusic - 2020 Lou was perhaps the king of such interview dancing, though by the 1980s he was clean, sober, touring a lot, and willing to work his albums. About your own life? He was at the same studio, the Record Plant. It’s very depressing in some ways because I’m one of those people who are doomed to continuously see the other person’s point of view. Where do you hear the influence of the Velvet Underground today?I hear things that sometimes make me think, “Oh, that sounds like Velvets.” Or, “That sounds like me,” or Maureen. It’s just different. Because I thought that was one of the things to do if we were going to move away from that. Watch game, team & player highlights, Fantasy football videos, NFL event coverage & more Lorca was livid about the situation, and so am I. I’ve been around way too long. The bozo nearly ruins “Halloween Parade,” a bittersweet hymn for the bodies and souls lost to AIDS, with his yapping. He became one of the most prolific movie critics in the country, and for decades has written entertainment columns for The New York Observer. If you get past the sonic blast, “There Is No Time” is just a very hyped version of that. Get a refund, motherfucker.” Upstairs, silence. When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. You start looking at Brecht and Weill. In your song “Strawman” you say, “Spitting in the wind comes back at you twice as hard.”I went a long time trying to figure out whether it should be piss or spit and decided that spit was better. © Copyright 2021 Rolling Stone, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. Supposedly when you get older, you get something from all of it before, or you drop dead and that’s the end of it. Approach. ]"Neil wants to interview Lou Reed," said my friend. . But it would be a shame if that’s all they got out of the album. It is. And they only have three inspectors to check on this shit! It’s become so morbidly stylistic and sour – there’s no joy in it. So the engineer said, “Why don’t you ask Bruce to do it? How it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista, and action!. Find It At: {article-find} {/article-find} For the Track-by-Track feature, we go in-depth with an artist about each song on their new album. And I’m talking about me, today. I’m what they call a cult figure, and that’s about where it is. I was just playing off the title. “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin” Leonard Cohen had announced in his album I’m Your Man. Or that other one, “Rank Strangers to Me.” The key word there is rank. In your song “Spit It Out,” which was on your 1986 album Mistrial, you say that if there’s a rage inside you or if you get so angry that you can’t think or speak, you should “spit it out/and tell them where they can put it.” And on your new song “There Is No Time” you sing: “This is no time to Swallow Anger/This is no time to ignore hate.”Yeah, I’m furious. It’s a different story now. It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that Lou Reed (1942-2013) could sometimes be a difficult person to interview. Andy used to say he really liked it when people corrected his commercial art because he had no feelings about it one way or the other. Write a song for her. “It’s interesting when you’ve been around as long as I have to see these things come around,” Reed remarked near the end. I could write about the table, who sat at the table, what the table means to me. People understand where I’m coming from. It’s about not being able to live up to being an image of a Romeo with a Juliet. 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