Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [89]
“I would like to live to a ripe old age and raise watermelons in Wyoming.” Then he takes another glug and machos: “I’m outdrinking you two to one, you know.”
“Are you proud of yourself?”
“Yeah. No, not actually; it's just that a single shot of Scotch is so small that you’ve gotta nurse it like it's a child or something. I drink constantly.”
“How does it treat your nervous system?” I probed.
“It destroys it,” he beamed.
“Then how do you intend to raise your watermelons?”
“Well, my time will come. By now I’m getting tired of liquor because there's just nothing strong enough. Now if we were drinking 150 proof sake, or something like that, then I could get drunk….”
He is equally frank on the subject of drugs: “I take drugs just because in the 20th Century in a technological age living in the city there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal like a caveman. Just to bring yourself up or down, but to attain equilibrium you need to take certain drugs. They don’t getcha high even, they just getcha normal.”
Normal Lou Reed reached for a Marlboro. As he fumbled to tear a match out of the book and strike it, his hands trembled so fiercely that you wondered if he was going to be able to get that butt lit.
This interview was turning out so fabulous I knew it was now time to get our hooks right down to the nitty gritty, and talk about sex. What about the relationship of what you’re doing artistically to the gay scene in general and specific?
Wax eloquent, for once and finally, he did. Listen, kids, you may think you’ve got your identity crises and sexual lateral squeeze plays touchdown cold just because you came out in rouge ‘n’ glitter for Dave Bowie's latest show, but listen to your Papa Lou. He's gotta nother think for you punk knowitalls:
“The makeup thing is just a style thing now, like platform shoes. If people have homosexuality in them, it won’t necessarily involve makeup in the first place. You can’t fake being gay, because being gay means you’re going to have to suck cock, or get fucked. I think there's a very basic thing in a guy if he's straight where he's just going to say no: ‘I’ll act gay, I’ll do this and I’ll do that, but I can’t do that’ Just like a gay person if they wanted to act straight and everything, but if you said, ‘Okay, go ahead, go to bed with a girl,’ they’re going to have to get an erection first, and they can’t do that.
“The notion that everybody's bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say something like if in any way my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something in my life. But I don’t feel that way at all. I don’t think an album's gonna do anything. You can’t listen to a record and say, ‘Oh that really turned me onto gay life, I’m gonna be gay’ A lot of people will have one or two experiences, and that’ll be it. Things may not change one iota. It's beyond the control of a straight person to turn gay at the age he’ll probably be listening to any of this stuff or reading about it; he’ll already be determined psychologically. It's like Franco said: ‘Give me a child until he's seven and he's mine.’ By the time a kid reaches puberty they’ve been determined. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn’t men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?”
Lou Reed just may have a better perspective on this supposed upheaval in sexual roles than any of these Gore Vidals and Jill Johnstons. Dudes comin’ outa the closet in droves and finding out they’re homosexual! Ha! Only trouble is that Lou's thinking also makes him a product of the rigidly dualistic era when he grew up, a hell of a Fifties cat for somebody who helped usher in the Seventies. He thinks you’re either some blissfully “normal” heterosuburbanite weekender on your own, or otherwise you gotta be some mungstreaked depravo wretch skulking through the gutter on all fours. Listening to him talk, you can’t help wondering how much of Lou Reed's songs are about people