Lou Reed: A New York State of Mind

The playwright and actor Sam Shepard recently remarked “the trouble with modern rock & roll is that it’s lost its sense of humor. It’s become so morbidly stylistic and sour – there’s no joy in it. And I think it’s disastrous that a genuine sense of humor has been smothered.” And he added: “Take all those imitators of Lou Reed, for example: if they went back and listened to his early stuff, they’d see he had a whole different feel. . .plus he was a helluva writer. He could really write a lyric. He’s been ripped off left, right, and center.”
Why the word “was”? [Laughing] But that’s nice of Sam.

Do you think you’ve been ripped off?
No, not for a second. I mean, everybody’s heard everybody else, so many people are playing on the same sources. But it is sometimes kind of weird: I’ll hear a group, and they’ll be good, and I’m listening to them and realize that they sound like me. 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. But why wouldn’t they want to do that, there’s a lot to be said for that approach to things. I just wish that they would imitate it more and really get into the words, but you’ve got to know how to use them to do it.

Someone once said that a masterpiece’s function is to create the energy for other people to create other masterpieces.
I’ll settle for that. It’s good to have examples and standards to try to either try to live up to or surpass. And in my life there have been some really important things that once someone bothered to tell or show me or give me an example of made things very clear and simple. 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. Or to take another example: If you want to drink a bottle of club soda out of a cup, pick up the bottle and don’t lift it over here and pour it over there but rather pour it over the cup. And something simple like that can be applicable to, say, an esthetic or a life. You say: Oh, right! And then you do it that way from that point on.

I remember a friend once offered me some very simple but wonderful advice, namely that you should never smoke while you urinate and that you should come when you’re called.
[Laughing] Well, this plumber out where I live said to me, “Don’t believe anything you hear and half of what you see.” He was serious – you know, small-town wisdom. And of course then there are other pieces of advice like “Don’t shit where you sleep.”

Or don’t spit in the wind. 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. That’s one of life’s little things that you learn – you don’t spit in the wind. You also don’t get a mace gun and use it in the wind. So you can take this on all the different levels.

In your beautiful song “Coney Island Baby” you say that although the city is “something like a circus or a sewer,” one can still look up to see the “princess on the hill” and that the “glory of love just might come through.” But on New York one doesn’t sense the possibility of salvation, and some people might take it to be extremely nihilistic.

But it would be a shame if that’s all they got out of the album. I think that people should be getting together and do something about the situation I’m describing. That’s the salvation of it. Look at what’s going on and then do something about it. Besides, don’t people realize that the album’s also funny, “leavened with humor”? [Laughing]

I really had to laugh at some of the lines in “Last Great American Whale” such as, “Some say they saw him at the Great Lakes/Some say they saw him off the coast of Florida/My mother said she saw him in Chinatown/But you can’t always trust your mother.” You know, Oedipus might have felt exactly the same way about his mother!
[Laughing] That’s hilarious! And I think that some of the worst comments in the songs on New York are also hilariously funny at the same time. 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? And things like that are kind of funny in a very depressing way. We’re so dulled to this. Take for instance the building that collapsed the other day in Manhattan. The builders who were there, unlicensed with no permit, noticed a crack in the foundation as they were digging. So what do these large minds do? They dig a trench and then they put cinder blocks there, and the building collapses and I think it kills the owner of the building and a poor girl is caught under it. And they only have three inspectors to check on this shit! Isn’t this hilarious at the same time that it’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard?

You don’t have to make anything up. In “Sick of You” I say: “I was up in the morning with the TV blarin’/brush my teeth sittin’ watchin’ the news/All the beaches were closed the ocean was a Red Sea/but there was no one there to part in two/There was no fresh salad because/there’s hypos in the cabbage/Staten Island disappeared at noon/And they say the Midwest is in great distress/and NASA blew up the moon/The ozone layer has no ozone anymore/and you’re gonna leave me for the guy next door.”