LET US NOW PPRAISE FAMOUS DEATH DWARVES

WANTED

LO1J REED

DEAD OR ALIVE

(What's the difference) for transforming a whole generation of young Americans into faggot junkies.

LET US NOW PPRAISE FAMOUS DEATH DWARVES

Or, How I Slugged It Out With Lou Reed & Stayed Awake

Lester Bangs

By

Ego? It may not be the greatest word of the 20th century, but it's sure the driving poison in the vitals of every popstar.

Who else but Lou Reed would get himself fat as a pig, then hire the most cretinous band of teenage cortical cavities he could find to tote around the country on an all-time death drag tour?

Who elsp would doze his way back over the pond in a giant secobarbital capsule and labor for months with people like Bob Ezrin, Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce to puke up Berlin, a gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor that may well be the most depressed album ever made?

Who else would then poke his arm so full of vigorating vitamins that he lost all that fat almost literally overnight, practically cartwheeling onstage in spastic epic(ene) colitic fits when everybody expected him to bloat up and die? Who else would make this gig looking like

some bizarre crossbreed of Jerry Lewis of idiot movies fame and a monkey on cantharides? Who else but Lou Reed could have survived making a public embarrassment of himself for so long that he actually managed to lasso a great rock "n" roll band to back up his monkeyshines?

Speed kills. I'm not a speed freak.

Name me somebody who would come back from the quagmire that was Berlin to make Sally Can't Dance, an album that broke its own ankles going out of every seasoned Reed fan's way to make all possible concessions to commercialism on the lowest level of palatable pap, and get that crappy platter in the Top Ten?

Who else would write whole new volumes in tonsorial culture: shaving his traditionally kinky locks to the literal skull for that simian charm; then topping even his own act by carving iron crosses in that mangy patch of stubble (a whim which put him in Rona Barrett's column: "Well, they said it couldn't be done, but somebody's finally managed to invent a totally new hairstyle ..who else would then redo his dome Hitler Youth blonde so he resembled a bubblegum Kenneth Anger, which is obviously one damn cool way for a popstar to look, especially if he's been looking like sulking shit for as long as Lou had?

Who but Lou Reed could add a whole new entry to the annals of onstage tastelessness by tying off during the middle of "Heroin" and pretending to shoot up with an actual syringe which, on at least one gig, he then handed to a member of the audience as a souvenir?

What other rock artist would put up with an interview by the author of this article, read the resultant vicious vitriolspew with approval, and then invite me back for a second round because of course he's such a masochist he loved the hatchet in his back?

Not a living soul, that's who.

Why is this guy surviving, who has made a career out of terminal twitches ever since the Velvet Underground surfaced dead on arrival in 1966? Well, for one thing, the Velvets emerged from under one of the many entrepreneurial wings of Andy Warhol, who has managed to accomplish more in this culture while acting (in public at least) like a total autistic null-node than almost any other figure of the 60s.. Lou learned a lot from Andy, mainly about becoming a successful public personality by selling your own private quirks to an audience greedy , for more and more geeks. The prime lesson he learned was that to succeed as this kind of mass-consumed nonentity you must expertly erect walls upon walls to reinforce the walls that your own quirky vulnerability has already put there.

In other words, Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is. On top of that he's a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of' his own flesh. A panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a 70s

generation that doesn't have the energy to commit suicide. Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock "n" roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring,

Hendrix was one of the great guitar players, but I was better.

mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch. Lou Reed is a coward and a sissy by any standard of his forebears such as Tennessee Williams and William Burroughs.

Lou Reed's enjoyed a solo career renaissance primarily by passing himself off as the most burnt-out reprobate around, and it wasn't all show by a long shqt. People kept expecting him to die, so perversely he came back not to haunt them, as he perhaps would like to think (although I think he'd rather have another hit record if he had to sing about it never raining in California to get it), but to clean up. In the sense of the piarketplace. A friend of mine who works in a record store in Cambridge Mass told me about the people who buy Lou Reed records: "You get like these 28 year old straight divorcee types, asking for Transformer and the Velvet

Underground . . . but the amazing thing is that suddenly there's all these 14 year olds, coming in all wide-eyed: "Hey, uh .. . do you have any Lou Reed records?" "

Right. That spooky man, booga booga. Meanwhile, his chrofiic multiple abuses of the mind and body rise and fall according to the weather. He had the shakes all the way through his fat-man tour in spite of massive valium ingestion. Blue Weaver on the recording of Berlin: "We went in and laid down all the instrumental tracks, the whole thing was done and sounded great. Then they brought Lou im He can't do it straight, he's got to go down to the bar and then have a snort of this and that, and then they'd prop him up in a chair and let him start singing. It was supposed to be great, but something went wrong somewhere."

I had a friend working as a busboy in Max's Kansas City when Lou was in transit from blubber to his present emaciation, and the guy called me up one day: "Your boy [that's what he calls him] was in again last night. . . Jesus . . .he looks like an insect... or like something that belongs in an intensive care ward . . . almost no flesh on the bones, all the flesh that's there sort of dead and sallow and hanging, his eyes are always darting all over the place, his skull is shaved and you can see the pallor under the bristles, it looks like he's got iron plates implanted in his head . . . everybody agreed that they'd never seen anything as bad as this. Plus which all the waitresses hate him because he never tips."

Lou Reed is my hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly concieve of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination.

The central heroic myth of the Sixties was the burnout. Live fast, be bad, get messy, die young. More than just "hope I die before I get old," it was a whole cool stalk we had down or tried to get. Partially it has to do with the absolute nonexistence of real, objective, straight-arrow, head-held-high, noble, achieving heroes. Myself, I always wanted to emulate the most fucked up bastard I could see, at least vicariously. As long as he did it with some sense of style. Thus Lou Reed. Getting off vicariously on various forms of deviant experience compensated somehow for the emptiness of our own drearily "normal" lives. It's like you never want to see the reality, it's too clammy watching someone shoot up junk and turn blue. It ain't like listening to the records.

That's why Lou Reed was necessary. And what may be even more important is that he had the good sense (or maybe just brain-rot, hard to tell) to realize that the whole concept of sleaze, "decadence," degeneracy was a joke, and turned himself into a clown, the Pit into a puddle. Any numbskull can be a degenerate, but not everybody realizes that even now; like Jim Morrjson, Lou realized the implicit absurdity 'of the rock "n" roll bette noir badass pose, and parodied, deglamorized it. Though that may be giving him too much credit. Most probably he had no idea what he was doing, which was half the mystique. Anyway, he made a great bozo, a sort of Eric Burdon of sleaze. The persistent conceit of Lou's recent press releases — that he's the "street poet of rock "n" roll" — just may be true in an unintended way. The street, after all, is not the most intellectual place in the world. In fact, it's littered with dopey jerkoffs and putzes of every stripe. Dunceville. Rubbery befuddlement. And Lou is the king of "em all, y'all.

Yep, the Champ was coming to town, and I was ready for battle. I guzzled Scotch by the case and chewed valiums like Jujubes. Tried to shoot speed but the quack doctor, who services every other freako and housewife on Woodward Ave., threw me out of his offices. Mostly I just listened to my Velvets records and what I could stand of Sally Can't Dance, and boned up on my insults. Word had filtered back to me that the Original Miscreant had gotten a good hoot out of the last slash job I did on him. People were speaking in hushed tones of "a lpve-hate relationship . . . it's incredibley" stammered

Dennfs Katz, Lou's manager, whose brother Steve graduated from Blood, Sweat & Tears to producing Lou Reed albums, which should give you some indication of what happened to a functioning Underground Movement in America.

Now, I'll admit that I'm flattered by the fact that onfe of my heroes has become one of my fans (several of them have, in fact; in fact, this usually coin-

All the waitresses hate him because he never tips.

cides with my conclusion that said hero is dogshit) (and please don't infer hubris from this; I'm amazed that I can get away with this shit), but I must flatly dismiss all this "love-hate" folclerol as pure hype. The promoters rigged it up. The fact is that Lou, like all heroes, is there for the beating up. They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again, just like anything else. A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own. Plus part of the whole exhilaration of admiring somebody for their artistic accomplishments is resenting "em "cause they never live up to your expectations. Plus which they all love

the abuse, they're worse than academics, so the only thing left to do is go whole hog nihilistic and tear everybody you ever respected to shreds. Fuck "em!

So I was gnashing ready to pound Lou to a sniveling pulp the minute he hit town. THIS WAS IT! THE BIG DAY! THE ONLY OLD HERO, MUCH LESS ROCK MUSICIAN, LEFT WORTH DOING BATTLE WITH! William Burroughs is too old, and all Mailer wants to do is cracker barrel philosophize..Face it, pugs, Lou Reed is the only culture hero left with any balls at all, the only real Man in the American Ring! All the rest of "em are (just ask any woman) faggots and sissies. With the possible exception of Dotson Rader.

I went into the Hilton and found Lou's party in the restaurant and sat down at a table adjacent. Then I got up and walked over. He's sitting there vibing away in his black T-shirt and shades, scowling like a house whose fire has just been put out, muttering to himself as he picked desultorily at indistinct clots of food on his plate: "Goddam fucking place . . . what a shithole . . . dump ... fucking nerve . . . assholes . . ." Turned out he'd been refused entrance to Trader Vic's because of the way he was dressed, and he was fuming about it. I walk up, shake hands: "Hi Lou ... I believe you remember me!"

Dead cold fish handshake. "Unfortunately." Just sat there. Didn't move. Didn't smile. Didn't even sneer. Concrete scowl. Solid veneer, with cement behind that. My party had just finished sitting down and ordering when suddenly Lou bolted up from his table and stalked out of the room, muttering something about going to get a newspaper. By the time we finished eating and had another drink he still hadn't returned. It was getting perilously close to, uh, showtime, and his road manager Barbara Fulk was getting nervous: "Where in god's name could he have gone?" Turned out later he'd gone for a walk around the block and gotten lost. An old'song was ricocheting through my head, some faint memory of a time in 1968 when I told my nephew about this kid, who was embarrassing me by hero worshipping me because I'd turned him on to Velvet Underground albums, speed, etc. "I don't wanna be anybody's fuckin" hero," I snarled at the time.

My nephew made up a two-line song on the spot:

"Don't wanna be a hero

Just wanna be a zero."

The show was great. To hell with it. Later we're back at the hotel and Barbara is telling me that Lou is finally ready, so we wJk down the hall to the Great Man's (at least temporal) sanctum sanctorum.

There he was, sprawled out on his bed, surrounded by his cohorts, roadies and sycophants, as well as a strange somewhat female thing which had been at the table with him at dinner, which I had in fact at first mistaken for Barbara, and which I now got a closer look at.

You simultaneously wanted to look away and sort of surreptitiously gawk. At first glance I'd thought it was some big dark swarthy European woman, with long rank thick hair falling about her shoulders. Then I noticed that it had a beard, and I figured, well, cool, the bearded lady, with Lou Reed, that fits. But now I was up closer and it was almost unmistakably a guy. Except that behind its see-thru blouse, it seemed to have tits. Or something. It was beyond the bizarre, between light and shade. It was grotesque. Not only grotesque, it was abject, like something that might' have grovelingly scampered in when Lou opened the door to get the milk and papers in the morning, and just stayed around. Like a dog that you could beat or pat on the head, either way didn't matter because any kind of attention was recognition of its very existence. Purely strange, a mother lode of unholy awe. If the album Berlin was melted down in a vat and reshaped into human form, it would be this creature. It was like the physical externalization of all that fat and mung Lou must have lost when he shot all those vitamins last winter. Strange as a yeti from the cozy brown snow of the east. Later I noticed it, midway in the interview, turning the

It has to do with electricity and the cell structure.

pages of a book. But from the way it did it, it was obvious that it was not reading, it was merely turning pages, quivering uncertainty frozen incarnate. At one point I yelled at Lou, "Fuck you, I ain't gonna talk to you, I'm gonna interview her!"

"She's a he. And you ain't in* t'rv'wing'm, man." Lou seemed somewhat offended, though his tone was the same even, sullen, occasionally venally darting mutter he maintained all night.

Later I was told that this creature, whose name was Rachel but whom the people in my party referred to next day as Thing, was introduced to the concert hall people as "Lou's babysitter." Hmmm, seemingly a long way down from Betty, the blonde wife he brought on the last tour, who was rather wholesome looking as she gulped coffee and kept track of things Lou lost. Still, you never know. What's really interesting is that here's Lou Reed, the cat's gay, he's a celeb, he's traveling, he's got lots of money, it stands to reason he could have beautiful boys or whatever he wanted around him. So you gotta conclude he wanted this strange, large, frightened being that never talked and barely ever lifted its head. There was a sense of permanency, even protectiveness, about the relationship.

Me, I was drunk. I glugged about a

half quart of Johnny Walker Black while waiting for Lou to get ready to argue, and what the hell, last time Lou was in town he was drinking double Johnny Walkers while I sat there nursing my Bloody Mary, trying to think of questions while he rambled on woozily saying things like "Will Yoko leave Paul?" and "I admire Burt Reynolds a lot."

Now we were back in the fray, and he just sat there, too goddam cool even though I was almost positive he was speeding or coking his brainpan shiny. He obviously considered me a total bumpkin and I played it to the hilt, demanding more Scotch (which he refused to give me: "Enough of your drinking. Stop. You can't handle it. I don't want you to get wasted."), doing jive spade routines and hollering (to me hilariously funny) things like "Oh pardon me suh, it's furthest from my mind, I'm just lookin" for HAW HAW HAW!"

Lou started off with a backhanded compliment that turned into a kudoferous insult midway. "You know that I basically like you in spite of myself. Common sense leads me to believe that you're an idiot, but somehow the epistemological things that you come out with sometimes betrays the fact that you're kind of onomatopoetic in a subterranean reptilian way."

"Goddam, Lou," I enthused, "you sound just like Allen Ginsberg!"

"You sound like his father. You should do like Peter Orlovsky and go have shock. You don't know any more than when you started. You just kind of chase your tail."

Damn, beat me to the first good left hook. "That's what I was gonna say to you! Do you ever feel like a selfparody?"

"No. If I listened to you assholes I would. You're comic strips."

"That's okay," I hoohawed, losing ground steadily, "I don't mind being a comic strip. Transformer was a comic strip that transcended itself."

He told me to shut up, and we sat there and stared at each other like two old geezers by a spittoon.

"Okay," I summoned my bluster, "now let's decide whether we're gonna talk about me or you." .

"You."

"All right. You start."

"Okay ... ummm ... who's gonna win the pennant?"

I don't know shit about sports, can't tell the Houston Persons from the Denver Dolophines, but if there's one subject I'm up on it's glitter. I figured this old deviance buff would take the bait. "I saw Bowie the other night."

"Lucky you. I think it's very sad."

"He ripped off all your riffs, obviously." I intended this as a big contention, although I really meant more than what I said. Just look in your copy of Rock Dreams and you'll see it right there, the Myth: Lou Reed looking younger, innocent, fingering his lip wide-eyed in a Quaalude haze, as Bowie lurks behind him, pure Lugosi, eyes glittering, ready to strike.

TURN TO PAGE 72.

ALIASES OF THE ANIMAL

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 40.

Lou wouldn't go for it. "Everybody steals riffs. You steal yours. David wrote some really great songs."

"Aw c'mon," I shouted at the top of my lungs, "anybody can write great songs! Sam the Sham wrote great songs! Did David ever write anything better than "Wooly Bully"?"

"You ever listen to "The Bewlay Brothers," shithead?"

"Yeah, fucker, I listened to those fuckin'lyrics, motherfucker!"

"Name one lyric from that song."

"I didn't lis—I've heard it. . . But what I and millions of fans all over the world wanna know about Bowie, is: first you, then Jagger, then Iggy. What in the hell's he got?"

"Jagger and Iggy?"

"Yeah, you know he fucks everybody in the rock "n" roll circuit. He's a bigger groupie than Jann Wenner!",

Deadpan. "He's the one who's getting fucked."

"Didja fuck "im?" All bravado. But like bullfighting a handball court.

"He's fucking himself. He doesn't know it, though." Even. Level.-Vibrating soundless hum.

"He's like a straw man," I raved, "a nonentity..."

"If you had a brain you'd take a look at Angela and Tony De Fries, then think twice before you put David down. He's got him by the balls, I've seen it, he's ripping him off, I can't tell ya the situation but I'm telling ya, don't put Bowie down."

I was getting frustrated. What an uncooperative subject. "You mean you still won't say anything anti-Bowie?"

"No."

"Shit." I figured I better change the subject, seeing how there was one. Behind his bed was a cassette deck emanating an endless stream of the kind of funky synthesizer muzak that Herbie Hancock snores up. "Hey, Lou, why doncha turn off all that jazz shit?"

"That's not jazz shit, and you wouldn't know the difference anyway."

"I know all this music shit, BLAH BLAH BLAH!, and I'm telling you that—"

"You don't know, you've never listened."

"—that Bowie:" — and here I began to sing in loud Ezio Pinza baritone, except I got the syllables in the words

mixed up "cause I was drunk — " "LIKE ! FROM CATSUM JAPAN." You know that's bullshit, c'mon Lou! You know better than that! He ripped off all hisshit that's decent from you, you and iggy!"

"What does Iggy have to do with it?"

Your dancing for one thing, shithead. But I didn't say that then because I didn't think of it. Instead I fulminated: "You were the originals!"

"The original what?"

I went on about Iggy, Bryan Ferry ("Bryan Ferry. Jesus. He was cute for awhile," snorted Lou.) and Bowie, and he surprised me with a totally unexpected blast at the Pop: "David tried to help the cat because he believed there was more to Iggy than I knew right off the top. David's making a mistake somewhat similar now but David's brilliant and Iggy is .. . stupid. Very sweet but very stupid. If he'd listened to David or me, if he'd asked questions every once in awhile . .. I'd say, "Man, just make a one-five change, and I'll put it together for you. You can take all the credit. It's so sifnple, but the way you're doin" it now* you're just making a fool out of yourself. And it's just gonna get worse and worse." He's not even a good imitation of a bad Jim Morrison, and he was never any good anyway ..."

Iggy a fool. This from the man who provoked mass snickers on two continents two years running with Transformer ("You hit me with a flower") and Berlin ("And these are the boxes that she kept on the shelf/Where she kept her.. . poetry and stuff"). I decided that me and all th'e Iggy fans had had enough of this horseshit, so I bulldozed on: "Did you shoot speed tonight before you went on?"

He acted genuinely surprised. "Did I shoot speed? No, I didn't. Speed kills. I'm not a speedfreak." This started out as essentially the same rap Lou gave me one time when I went to see the Velvets at the Whjsky in 1969, as he sat there in the dressing room drinking honey from a jar and talking a mile a minute, about all the "energy in the streets of New York," and lecturing me about the evils of drugs. All speedfreaks are liars; anybody that keeps their mouth open that much can't tell the truth all the time or they'd run out of things to say. But now he got downright clinical. "You better define your terms. What kind of speed do you do, hydrochloride meth, hydrochloride amphetamine, how many milligrams .

The pharmacological lecture was in full swing, and all I could do was giggle derisively. "I used to shoot Obetrols, shit man!"

"Bullshit you used to shoot Obetrols." Lou was warming to his subject now, revving up. Closing in for the kill. Show you up, punk. "You'd be dead,

you'd kill yourself. You were probably stupid and didn't even put "em through cotton. You could have gotten gangrene that way . . ."

Then he's pressing me again, playing dirty: "What's an Obetrol?"-

I got mad again. "It's in the neighborhood of Desoxyn. You know what an Obetrol is, you lyihl sack of shit! This is the fourth time I've interviewed you and you lied every time! The first time—"

"What's Desoxyn?" He had just said this, in the same dead monotone, for the 15th time. Interrupting me every second word in the tirade above, coldly insistent, sure of himself, all the clammy^ finality of a technician who knows every inch of his lab with both eyes put out.

But ,1 was cool. "It's a methedrine derivative."

The kill: "Ijt's 15 milligrams of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride with some cake paste to keep it together." Like an old green iron file slamming shut. "If you do take speed," he continued, "you're a good example of why speedfreaks have bad names. There's A-heads and there's speedfreaks ... Desoxyn's 15 milligrams of methamphetamine hydrochloride held together with cake paste, Obetrol is 15 milligrams of—"

"Hey, Lou, you got anything to drink?"

"No .... You don't know what you're doing, you haven't done any research. You make it good for the rest of us by taking the crap off the market. Plus you're poor. [I told you he'd Stop at nothing. It's this kind of thing that may well be Lou Reed's last tenuous hold on herodom. And I don't mean heroism.] And even if you weren't poor you wouldn't know what you were buying anyway. YOU wouldn't know how to weigh it, you don't know your metabolism, you don't know your sleeping quotient, you don't know when to eat and not to eat, you don't know about electricity ..."

"The main thing is money, power and ego," I~said, quoting an old Ralph J. Gleason column for some reason. I was getting a little dazed.

"No, it has to do with electricity and the' cell structure ..."

I decided to change my tack again. "Lou, we're gonna have to do it straight. Til take off rity sunglasses [ludicrously macho Silva-Thin wraparounds parodying the ones he sported on the first Velvets album, which I had been wearing all evening] if you'll take off yours." He did. I did. Focus in on shriveled body sprawled on the bed facing me with Thing behind him staring at beehives on the moon, Lou's sallow skin almost as whitish-yellow as his hair, whole face and frame so transcendently emaciated he had indeed become insectival. His eyes were rusty, like two copper coins lying in desert sands under the sun all day with telephone lines humming overhead* but he looked straight' at you. Maybe through you. Then again, maybe it was a good day for him. Last time I saw him his left eyeball kejit rollingoff to the side, and it was no parlor trick. Anyway, I was ready to ask my Big Question, the one I'd pondered over for months. ,

"Do you ever resent people for the way that you have lived out what they might think of as the dark side of their lives for them, vicariously, in your music or your life?"

He didn't seem to have the slightest idea what I was talking about; shook his head.

"Like," I pressed on, "I listen to your records: shootin" smack, shootin" speed, commiting suicide—"

"That's three per cent out of a hundred songs."

"Like with all this decadence and glitter shit — none of it would have happened if not for you, and yet I wonder if you—"

"I didn't have anything to do with it."

"Bullshit, you started it, singing about smack, drag queens, etc."

"What's decadent about that?"

"Okay,' let's define decadence. You tell me what you think is decadence."

"You. Because you used to be able to write and now you're just fulla shit. You don't keep track of music, you're not on top of what's happening, you don't know the players, or who's doin" what. It's all jive, you're getting very egocentric."

I let it pass. The true artist does not stoop to respond in kind to jibes from an old con. Besides, he was half right. Besides, I simply could not believe that he could so blithely disclaim everything that he had disseminated, no, stood for and exploited, for so many years. It was like seeing a dinosaur retreating into an ice cave.N He'd done the same thing before. Last interview he merely disclaimed association with the gay movement, which he really doesn't have anything to do with. But now, postSally Can't Dance and apparently ready to clean up as much of his act's exoskeleton as it took to hit the bigger time (But you shoot up onstage. But it's only a rock "n" roll show. This ain't Altamcmt. Or the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.), he was brushing it all away like dandruff off his black street-punk T-shirt. "I dismissed decadence when I did "The Murder Mystery." " Grand sweeping statements like this are the kind of bullshit to which this pop star is particularly prone. Like all the rest of them, I guess.

"Bullshit, man, when you did Trans-

former you were playing to pseudodecadence, to an audience that wanted to buy a reprocessed form of decadence . . . "

Barbara interrupted. "Lou . .. it's getting late."

Suddenly the tone of the whole scene changed. He was a petulant kid, up past bedtime, not exactly whiny, still insectival, but also blatantly pampered, cajoled, looked after, leashed, nursed, checked unless he chose to make a scene and possibly blow his cool. "Oh, it's fun arguing with Lester."

"But you have to get up in the morning," she insisted, "and go to Dayton."

"Oh," replied Lou, hardy old buzzard, blow winds blow and all that, "I'll live through it." Besides, other things were on his mind. He wanted to play me some records. The Artist actually wanted to submit something to me, the Critic, for my consideration and verdict!

I felt honored. So what did he wanna submit? The Ron Wood solo album.

Jesus. If there's one thing I hate to hear out of musicians it's music talk. Most boring thing on the face of the earth. Especially since the only album I could think of that could conceivably be more nothing than that Herbie Hancock shit he was playing before was this Ron Wood set. Blandest of the bland. I yelled ats him to shut it off — "I've heard that crap!" — but he was off again, into another subject that interested him, the selfish sonofabitch, and not listening to me at all.

"This guy George Benson, years ago, he was a bass player, invented the > Benson amplifier, absolutely no distortion, totally clean, totally pure sound. It's interesting what Hancock's doing with the Arp."

It was getting worse. He had bee;n patient with me, but I was beginning to have visions of future Lou Reed albums: stalwart Andy Newmark and Willie Weeks, who have appeared on every album made by every hasbeen popstar in the world recently, playing with Lou Reed, so the followup to Sally Can't Dance sounds like the Ron Wood album like George Harrison's Dark Horse like all those other faceless LPs involving this floating crap game of technically impeccable hacks. And, on top of that a funky Herbie Hancock moog spider jiving around, while on top of that Lou drones his usuals in that slurred and basically arhythmic voice: "You're allll fucked ... I can do anything I want... putdown, putdown ... speed, speed, New York, New York ..."

"I hate Herbie Hancock," I said.

"I've got something here," he said, "that is the stuff I want to do, that I meant by heavy metal. I had to wait a couple of years so I could get the equipment, now I've got it and it's done. I could have sold it as electronic classical music, except the one I've got that I've finished now is heavy metal, no kidding around."

I was too drunk to be ready to hear it, but it didn't matter because he turned on the tape again and it was — the Ron Wood album! I made him shut it off and he continued: "I could take Hendrix. Hendrix was one of the great guitar players, but I was better. But that's only because I wanted to do a certain thing and the thing I wanted to do that blew his mind is the thing I've finally got done that I'll stick on RCA when the rock "n" roll shit gets taken care of. Now most people can take maybe five minutes of it—"

Sounds promising, but I was more interested in talking attitudes than music, and besides Lou has been such a bullshit liar for so long that I cut in: "I think most people think you're dead. Because you've encouraged them to, with your first three solo albums." He wasn't " interested. Remembering the first night I owned Berlin (I took it to a friend's birthday party,' where every new arrival wanted to hear it, so we got to listen to its entirety about 25 times in one night. The party ended up with a room full of total strangers making vicious verbal slashes at each other. But we had laughed at the record,so) I asked him: "When you recorded Berlin, did you think people would laugh at it?"

Lou took his snoot and grabbed a coconut. "I couldn't care less."

"You know, Lou, one thing that I kinda resent about Berlin is that you never give her point of view. It was a very selfish album: "I'm beating you up, bitch." "You're dead, bitch." "

"She was making it with a dealer."

Hoping to pry a little autobiographical dirt (which is what a good portion of Berlin amounts to) out of Lou, I asked him about Betty, his ex-wife, and got a typically effusive answer: "She was a secretary when one was needed at the time."

She was a nursemaid, but then many people close to Lou seem to fall into that role. We argued a bit about the autobiographic content of his songs, and Lou asserted, predictably, that his songs were not autobiographical but existed in a zone of their own, and moreover could only be truly understood by a certain distinct elite audience. I told him that in my estimation the majority of his solo work suffered principally by its incredible obviousness, all the subtlety left ages ago and he's just an old ham cradling the asp; I asked him if all his songs had elite meanings to please explain to me the secret meaning of Sally's "Animal Language," otherwise known as the Bow Wow Song (dead dog meets cat, they try to fuck, fail, shoot

up faf man's sweat) (really a specimen of mind rot at its finest).

" "Animal Language" isn't obvious. Who do you think the animals are? You think it's a dog and a cat? Who's the dog, who's the cat, who are the animals that are so fucked up they gotta shoot up somebody's sweat to get off?"

I dunno, Lou, you tell me. There are eight million stories in the Naked City ... "One thing I like about you," I interjected, "is that you're not afraid to lower yourself. For instance, "New York Stars." I told Dennis I thought you were lowering yourself by splattering all these people like the Dolls and dumb little bands with your freelance spleen, but then I realized that you've been lowering yourself for years."

His riposte: "You really are an asshole. You went past assholism into some kinda urinary tract. The next time you come up with a phrase as good as "curtains laced with diamonds dear for you," instead of all this Dee-troit bullshit, let me know."

"Obviously," I said,'"what you're selling under your name now is pasteurized decadence. In the old days you were really a badass Lou, but now it's all pasteurized."

He told me that I was jaded and chided me for not being able to get into "a very" nice song" like "Billy." Speaking of which, I replied, "Wouldn't you say that in "Billy" when you say "His nerves were shot but not me," that's a slight exaggeration or distortion there?" The yQu're-dead-bitch syndrome.

"No."

"Well, you're a liar then. You've made a career out of being a degenerate, and I think you should fess up to that. You have not primarily distinguished yourself as a jnusician, although you have come up with some great riffs, and I don't know why you keep trying to play me all this; high-tech music crap, because basically you're a lit. In your worst moments you could be considered like a bad imitation of Tennessee Williams."

"That's like saying in your worst moments you could be considered a bad imitation of you."

"Don't you ever feel like a victim of yourself?"

"No."

Barbara is whispering to me: "Do you really think it's going to get any better?"

"Sure," I said, and turned to Lou. "What do you think that the sense of guilt manifested in most of your songs has to do with being Jewish?"

"I don't know anyone Jewish."

Barbara starts to put the pressure on in earnest: "It's 3:30, Lou."

"Well, that's true, it's 3:30. So ... what? What would you like me to do, lock the door, hang my feet from the ceiling and listen to half a channel of my stereo?"

"Yes," she said.

"Cat wants to talk." Lou mumbled. "I think you're wrong. Dennis said if I wanted to, I could. 1 said sure. Directions from the higher up. Go ahead and call him. Call him up."

She just grunted no. I could not believe that this man was actually asking this woman to call his manager and wake him up at 3:30 in the morning to ask whether or not he could stay up a little bit later to talk to me. And of course it didn't really have anything to do with me. It was a cranky child, but then a large part of Lou's mythic appeal has always been his total infantilism. Barbara, incidentally, was the same employee who had to cart Lou's Spotchcomatose body off to his room at the end of ,his last visit here. Now he was ready' to talk all night, even though neither one of us had been listening to the other at all: "I think it's being made very hard on the cat, personally. I'm telling you, no. I'm interested in some of the things he has to say, even though 1 think he's an idiot."

"We think the same thing of each other," I offered. I was getting tired.

"He's trashy," continued Lou, "and l think you oughta get a kick out of trash while you can."

"But you have been, " insisted Barbara, "for almost two hours!"

"Well, I feel like getting some more. There's some shit I wanna play him, against his will." He turned back to me. "This guy George Benson, invented the hollowbody electric bass with absolutely no distortion . .

"Uh, lissen, Lou," I said. "Barbara's right. We gotta go too. This could go on forever.". I gathered up my stuff and started for the door. As 1 was going out I could hear his voice behind me, dull basso, stale bitchy bandinage fluttering off into dust: "You Seattle boys are all the same ... A-200 ... cornflakes ..."

1 never met a hero I didn't like. But then, 1 never met a hero. But then, maybe I wasn't looking for one. w