LOU REED & the Secret Life of Plants

“Where does this put me with the punk-rockers?” Lou Reed mutters, not caring much, as he helps himself to another blini. We’re lunching at New York’s totally unreal, definitely prerevolutionary Russian Tea Room, just a cork-pop down 57th Street from Carnegie Hall. It’s like walking into Dr. Zhivago—a red and forest-green swankerie, festooned with tinsel Christmas decorations twelve months a year and a catchy line-up of second-string impressionist/fauvist/cubist paintings sold off by immigrant White Russian ndbles who fled the Bolsheviks to become New York City doormen. (“Blini”, for all you uncouth louts, is caviar pancakes with sour cream—you don’t dare ask for maple syrup.)

“The corrupting influence is the promotion people,” Lou observes, cheerfully gulping another morsel of the $16-an-ounce fish eggs. So true, since we’re gathered to honor Lou Reed Live —Take No Prisoners, his new double album on Arista. Lou looks All-American normal today in his greyand-white checked lumberjack shirt. Sure, when the waitress comes he offers me bread-and-water (just the obligatory get-acquainted jab to test my balance). Sure", when she brings me a Perrier he tells me scientists have discovered the stuff causes stomach cramps and ulcers (serves me right for paying extra for bubbles). Basically, though, he seems to be in an accomodating mood.

Perhaps this is because he’s flying to Germany the next day to cut a new album. Maybe the occasional rinse of Bloody Mary helps too. Before long,, though, he gets rolling on his current obsession, the defeat of an important Gay-Rights bill in New York.

“I have such a heavy resentment thing because of all the prejudices against me being gay,” he sighs. “How can anybody gay keep their sanity? Sometimes I feel like getting a gun out and shooting people—but there would be so many people to shoot.”

"I think women most appreciate men who ultimately don't need them."

Listen, if you had a history like Lou Reed’s you’d be anti-social too. When the Ramones sing “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment,” it’s just another 50’s sick-joke building their image. Pardon Lou Reed, though, if he forgets to laugh—he really lived it But let’s re-trace.

Born in Brooklyn, transferred to the suburbs of Freeport, Long Island, by his good Jewish parents, Lou can still recite the litany of Long Island Railroad stops. “I have found I’ve made a lot of new friends by virtue of that—it’s a whole untapped market. Even I get a kick out of it when I hear me recite those names.on record. I figure, ‘He can’t be all bad’.

“But who in their right minds would want to stay there? Well, apparently a lot of people—my sister, for instance. But I think some of our major movers are people who just couldn’t get out of the suburbs bad enough, to the point where—no matter how removed from it they are—they still think it might hit them.”

Trapped in the cogs of the good life, helpless under the law as a minor, Lou felt the pressure starting to mount. One of his oddest ambitions as a kid (noted on “Coney Island Baby”) was to be a football linebacker, not traditionally a glory position. Why?

“Because I wanted to be a fucking killer. I know I can do the clever stuff, but I wanted to be the animal . . . Like that! [Lou points across the table to his bass player, Moose, who is indeed a behemoth.] Moose is quiet because he can afford to be. If he raised his voice, people would have to listen. Who wouldn’t pay attention to a 300-pound, seven-foot ogre? [Moose grins benignly at Lou and continues chomping his blini.] People ask ‘Lou, can you control Moose so he’ll kill on command and you’ll be happy?’ Why sure, I just whistle a B-flat above hearing range. No, I was not a fan of the quarterbacks and all those guys who wanted to fake guys out. I admired the big man who just smote the other man down by whatever means.” [“Seek and destroy,” murmurs Moose softly, without looking up from his plate.]

At 17, however, Lou had the build of a water-boy, and it was during these high school years that he discovered just how powerless he was, when his parents committed him to electroshock therapy three times a week. “They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual feelings. Well, here’s an example that it didn’t work. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. I wrote ‘Kill Your Sons’ on the Sally Can’t Dance album about that. You can’t read a book because you get to page 17 and have to go right back to page one again.”

TURN TO PAGE 62

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24

When Lou first fell in love, at age 19 in college, the resentment and frustration just intensified. Getting your first piece is tough enough when you’re straight—for Lou it was also against the law. “It was just the most amazing experience. It was never consummated. I felt very bad about it because I had a girlfriend and I was always going out on the side—and subterfuge is not my hard-on . I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I wanted to fix it up and make it okay. I figured if I sat around and thought about it I could straighten it out.”

Lou didn’t finally accept and enjoy his sexuality until well into his twenties, which really burns him up these days. “Now I have things happening to me and I don’t have to think about it, but I remember that time in college sitting around trying to get myself together so I could ‘do it right’—and I resent it. It was a very big drag. From age 12 on I could have been having a ball and not even thought about this shit. What a waste of time. If the forbidden thing is love, thpn you spend most of your time playing with hate. Who needs that? I feel I was gypped.

“I dunno, maybe it works out equal for you too. Maybe your parents taught you it'was wrong to shoot in a girl’s nose, but that’s not the same. I have all that—PLUS this one other thing, trying to make yourself feel something towards women when you can’t.”

So Lou’s attitude toward women these days is based on observation more than entanglement—and it’s classic: “Being gay, I have found that so many women—deluded creatures that they are—are attracted to you because you’re not interested in them. Granted, I’m ‘Lou Reed’ and I have all this access, but even before I was ‘Lou Reed’ it happened that way. I could walk in and just because I wasn’t interested, it came across as the ultimate cool—‘Hey, he really doesn’t give a shit’. It never dawned on anybody that he doesn’t give a shit because he couldn’t.

“I think women most appreciate men who ultimately don’t need them. There’s a whole school of people—be they male or female—who wanna be disregarded. They want to change you, but if you did change they’d be horrified and drop you immediately . They’d say ‘Oh, please, I liked you better when you had no use for me.’

“You know, a lot of women get very tired of being needed: The big male comes home and cries on their shoulder, and they say ‘I don’t want that, I want you to pick me up and throw me through the window and say “Ah, fuck you”.’

“I suppose that’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m a chauvinist down to my toes. Intellectually I know about all that other stuff, but I think there’s a natural order to things, and I think people appreciate it sometimes when you just do the natural reaction. I think women admire force all the more for not having it—nobody admires strength more than a weak person. It’s axiomatic that a woman is all the more impressed that you could kill her. A straight guy might have something to learn from his gay friends, in that a woman can get turned off if you’re appreciative of her when what she really wants is to be smacked across the mouth.

“I know this is a terrible chauvinist point of view—this will be very unfavorable towards me—but I think they appreciate the male instinct, which is to just forge ahead: ‘If you’re with me, fine; if you’re not, well, goodbye’.”

Pausing only to swipe the last bit of blini from under Moose’s nose, Lou accelerates into Topic A. “I’m very disturbed about that council vote defeating the Gay Rights bill. I’d fust come out of seeing Halloween, which was a really great movie, and I ran into a gay rally in Times Square the day after the vote. This girl got up and talked about seeing a rabbi on TV who said ‘Homosexuality is an abomination’. And I realized this guy was calling me—Lou Reed—an abomination, too. This girl was beside herself, and I could really appreciate it, because these people had gone through the proper lawful means, and here’s this asshole waving the Bible. Because they didn’t pass the Gay Rights bill, if you’re gay you can’t get access to federal housing under New York State law. I can’t help but at times take it very, very, very, VERY seriously.

“Now my friend Dorothy sat down with me and. said ‘Oh, Lou, you’re being so silly. Who goes to the best parties? Who has the best jobs? We do.’ And that’s true with the people I’m running with—but it’s not true of all the slobs out there who are gay too. If a brother or a friend needed that housing, they couldn’t get it for that reason. It’s so maddening to me I become incapable of lucid thought.

“My attitude often gets to be ‘Screw you too—and I’ll screw your girlfriends just for spite.’ Which is a terrible way to do things, because it’s not like I would enjoy it. Of course, they would, it goes without saying.”

Lou downs another slug of Bloody Mary and sighs. “I just can’t tell you what a terrible effect that vote has had on me. Sometimes I go back in my own head and realize ‘Oh, these people really made you feel sad, Lou’.”

What exorcises the alienation is rock ’n’ roll. “Pock ’n’ roll is a great equalizer; it’s democratic. I love rock ’n’ roll, I honest-to-god do. I like feeling that fucking drum.”

Rock has also earned Lou his rep as the so-called “dark master of perverse delights”, of course—a tag which doesn’t particularly impress him. “I just wouldn’t want listeners to be under a false impression,” he explains. “I want them to know, if they’re liking a man, that it’s a gay one—from top to bottom.”

Take No Prisoners contains ten songs spread over four sides, at an average of nine fat minutes per slice, and six of the fen have never (officially) been released live before.

It’s one of the “livest” records you’ll ever hear, as he stream-of-consciously plays out scene after scene, the countless head-trips coming fast and furious between and throughout the songs, proving that Lou conveys more personality-per-minute than any other rock star (of course, some of it is thoroughly jive). He’s not far wrong when he claims: “I’ve got enough attitude to kill every person in New Jersey.”

My favorite is the rambling 17minute presentation of “Walk on the Wild Side”, including an involved explanation of how the song came to be written (a busted movie soundtrack deal) and an interesting rhetorical question: “How would you like to be the best qualified person to turn a book about cripples in the ghetto to music?” (You see, despite Lou’s impulsive readiness to mug as chief bizarro-faggot on cue—“I never claimed I had good taste”—there’s this human being in there, too, who’s occasionally aghast at what people project on him.) Also mixed into “Walk on the Wild Side” are descriptions of Lou’s only two nonmusical jobs, a diatribe against journalists, and a jumbled bulletin-board update on the whole Warhol gang— Andy, Candy, Little Joe who is bombing in Italy, Tiny Malice who was fired from the New Yorker for correcting Dorothy Parker’s prose and is now writing the African flower section of an encyclopedia. There’s a little wit: “What does Monique Van Vooren do—sag?” There’s a little wisdom: “Don’t put plastic in your tits.” Lou notices everything.

The album he’s currently recording in Germany with Manfred Schunke (who engineered the binaural Street Hassle) should be out in about three months. “I already wrote some of the songs with Nils Lofgren. We got together with Bob Ezrin and wrote some really good things together. It’s gonna be a big sound, with various machines making the guitar sound like a symphony. It’ll be so grand! I’m gonna produce it myself—what the hell. I know it can be done onstage, and the show will get more fantastic. I have more plans regarding video—we’re going into color. I work on that very hard.” (Ask Lou what his dream magazine would be; he replies: Gay Quad.)

So Lou Reed’s life seems pretty well cooled-out these days, thanks to a health diet of pistachio nuts and orange juice, and weekends at his new place in the wilds of New Jersey. There he shoots hoops, learns to fish on his stocked, man-made lake, and wears lumberjack shirts. “I really love it. It smells great. Even if you wanted to do something, there’s nothing there. It’s appalling how much sleep I get. You know, Andy used to say you can’t see the stars in New York City because they’re all on the ground. Well, out there the stars are in the sky.”

I wonder if his family is happy for this durable, if unorthodox career he’s fashioned for himself—now in its second decade and going stronger than ever—or if they are embarrased by it. Lou’s gaze wanders over the riches of Old Russia while he pauses to consider. Then he shrugs.

“No . . . and no. They’re just still waiting for the phase to end.” He smiles grimly. “It’s taken longer than they expected.”