Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [88]
Besides which on another level it's none of my business anyway, except insofar as he chose to make it so. If he is somewhat in retreat, it can be justified on all the levels above and several more I’m sure, besides which who isn’t in retreat these days? His kind takes a lot more courage than most, and as an artist he is so far removed from any kind of burnout that he can’t even be called, like I said earlier and like all the Neil Youngs and Lou Reeds who made it from the late Sixties to this point relatively intact, a survivor. More like a natural resource. The difference, finally, is that, to use an example by one of his favorite writers, he’ll never give us his version of Macbeth. He would rather be the Grand Canyon.
The Village Voice, October 1, 1980
Deaf-Mute
in a Telephone Booth:
A Perfect Day
with Lou Reed
You walk into the dining room of the Holiday Inn filled with expectation at finally getting to meet one of the musical and psychological frontiersmen of our time, Lou Reed, who with his group the Velvet Underground was singing about drag queens and heroin at least five years before such obsessions reached the mass level. Who began a comeback as a solo artist last summer in England, and under the wing of David Bowie produced Transformer, a classic of mondo bendo rock. Who then, having come out of the closet at last, returned to his New York home and ushered in 1973 by getting married to an actress cum cocktail waitress named Betty (stage name Krista) Kronstadt.
On top of all that, both Transformer and the single from it are enormous hits. Lou Reed is not only a legend: he's a star. In one of the interviews he did last summer, Lou said: “I can create a vibe without saying anything, just by being in the room.”
He was right. You sit yourself down, and sure enough you become aware pretty fast that there's this vaguely unpleasant fat man sitting over there with a table full of people including his blonde bride. Pretty soon he comes over to join you and the tic becomes focused too sharply for comfort. It's not just that Lou Reed doesn’t look like a rock ‘n’ roll star anymore. His face has a nursing home pallor, and the fat girdles his sides. He drinks double Johnny Walker Blacks all afternoon, his hands shake constantly and when he lifts his glass to drink he has to bend his head as though he couldn’t possibly get it to his mouth otherwise. As he gets drunker, his left eyeball begins to slide out of sync.
In spite of all this, however, he manages to live up to his reputation for making interviewers uncomfortable. He fixes you with that rusty bugeye, he creaks and croaks and lies in your face and you’re helpless. He lies about his music and his album covers (“That was me in drag on the back of Transformer.”). Most of all, he lies about himself. But he qualifies it by saying, “I don’t especially tell the truth most of the time anyway.”
He's pretty cool about most of it, though, so you can’t really get too mad at him about that. Like Nick Kent, who is there for the New Musical Express, is right in the middle of asking him a question, when Lou interrupts: “Aren’t you hot with that scarf on?”
“No,” wheezes Nick nonplussedly, “I’ve got a cold.”
“Try Vicks VapoRub,” Mad Ave libs Lou. “I came down with a very bad cold in Boston, and it works. You’ve gotta lie there for two or three days with that gop on your chest and a towel or something, and every once in a while somebody has to have the nerve to reach into the bowl of that shit and rub it in. Like I remember,” he free-associates, “when everybody was taking acid and we discovered Dippity-Do, and everybody said, ‘It's just like a cunt, it's fantastic!’ And we all ran into the bathroom and started fingering the Dippity-Do jar.”
Everything is yoks to this bibulous bozo; he really makes a point of havin’ some fun! Although it does disturb his friends and fans to see him in such failing health. But he can find a joke even there. At one point