Lou Reed |
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Fri. February 14.2003 2:55 PM EST |
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Lou Reed: Dark Shadows & Tell-Tale HeartsNew York's finest blends drama and rock in his update of Edgar Allan Poe. by Jim Macnie and C. Bottomley |
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Lou Reed (Linda Zacks) |
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"All I want to do is have fun," says Lou Reed. "I'm so uncomplicated it's a joke."
Sounds like a crock, right? We all know Lou Reed to be one of rock's fiercest artists, a guy who burrows into someone's psyche every time he enters a studio
But in fact, the Lou Reed who turns up at VH1 is armed with an intriguing sense of amusement, and he explains himself in a genial, if occasionally acerbic, manner. He's excited about his new double album, The Raven, which addresses the work of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer he considers a fellow traveler. You might remember Poe from your high school English class. He's the gothic author who drank himself to death in Baltimore in 1849 after penning indelible tales of terror like "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," where a murderer is forced into confession by the relentless thumping of his victim's still-active pump. Poe's poem "The Raven" has become such a classic, Baltimore even named its football team after it. Reed's Raven had an earlier incarnation; titled POEtry, it premiered as a stage play in Germany. The album version finds a great line-up of American actors applying themselves to the maestro's word (and Reed's variations on the original texts). Willem Dafoe croaks the ominous title poem, creating a mood of genuine paranoia, and Steve Buscemi cackles through "The Cask of Amontillado," sounding utterly at ease with the ancient lingo. Amanda Plummer, Elizabeth Ashley and David Bowie add to the macabre vibe, and along the way Reed's snarling band rages with enough conviction to fully illustrate Poe's remark that "all things lovely are far away." This is the songwriter once again investigating his vicious side. Reed spoke to us about discovering the secret of "The Tell-Tale Heart," the irresistible appeal of the perverse, and the humbling act of taking on the master. VH1: The Raven is a pretty ambitious project for you - two CDs of music and spoken word... Lou Reed: It's not spoken word. Not. Spoken. Word. Not. Spoken. Word. Spoken word sounds like a biography of Winston Churchill read to you by Ian McKellan or something, okay? This is not spoken word. It is acting with sound effects with a cast of thousands. It's fun. Spoken word is like someone telling you about trigonometry. T hat's not what this is. People don't know how to refer to it. Some people say it's like an old radio play. We've got all these incredible effects. VH1: So I take it others have been deeming it spoken word as well? Reed: Oh yeah. VH1: I guess when we're talking about verse these days, we're talking poetry slam. Reed: Poetry slam - that's what it is. If you say "poetry reading" or "spoken word," people go to sleep, dive bomb. They want spoken word like they want an amputated foot. Poetry slam? Ah! People perk up. VH1: People seem afraid of poetry if you package it as anything else these days. What did you call it back in college when you went to hear a poet? Reed: I can't even remember going to college. Oh, it was called a reading. "There will be a reading of the Declaration of Independence by whoever ... whoever wrote it is showing up ... who wrote that, anyway? Have you seen that thing on Broadway? The Def Jam Poetry thing? VH1: I haven't. Reed: It's really fantastic. VH1: Is it really animated, like a slam? Reed: Oh yeah, these people are incredible. It will change your whole attitude towards poetry. When you say people are afraid of poetry, what people? What poets are you talking about? Seamus Heaney? Who are you saying is afraid? I don't get it. VH1: Seamus Heaney is an interesting example, but aside from him translating Beowulf, poets are not cracking the bestseller lists. Wasn't Poe's stuff used to lure high school kids to get interested in literature and using language? Reed: Yeah. He's taught in high school. But in high school it's hard to pay attention to anything. VH1: How did you first come across him? Reed: I first really became aware of Edgar Allan Poe 10 years ago when I did Hal Willner's annual Halloween extravaganza in St. Anne's Church in Brooklyn. Everybody acted out something from Poe, and I did "The Tell-Tale Heart." It was the first time I ever got it. VH1: When you say "got it," what was the revelation? Did it have something to do with actually speaking it out loud as opposed to reading it? Reed: It had everything to do with saying it out loud and acting it out. I suddenly understood what he was talking about and it was... well, I love great, creative things - who doesn't? I always thought I knew why the narrator says what he does at the end of "The Tell Tale Heart." When I acted it out loud, I found he says it for a much different reason. It was a revelation to suddenly understand Poe's insight, psychology, and use of language. I was enthralled. I realized why he is a master writer, why he will be around forever, why people keep referring to him. VH1: Had you been resistant to Poe's work up to that point? Reed: Not resistant, unaware. Ignorant. Nobody can read everything, and he wasn't a person I had gotten that deeply into, other than in high school and those movies. I thought I was aware of him and I wasn't; I thought I knew what he was about and I didn't. So discovering him was just like discovering coffee ice cream ... which means it was a good thing. Especially in the morning. Mmm-mmm. VH1: Do those goose-pimple moments, those "got it" moments, happen a lot for you? Writing a song, cutting a track, performing on stage - aren't they the essence of artistry? Reed: Well, that's the fun of it, yeah. We were mastering something last night and I was listening to a track from Set the Twilight Reeling called "New York City Man." I've heard it five thousand times and always been unhappy with it. Technology wouldn't let me do it any better when I first made it. But with new technology I was able to make it sound right last night. [I was saying to my partners] "This duh-duh-duh-duh part has always bothered me. It's wrong, wrong, wrong. So we moved some things around, and in an instant, there it was, the way it was supposed to be. Every molecule in my body stood at attention. It was so great. We all said "This is why we do this. It's great when it works." VH1: Do similar things happen when you're writing lyrics? Reed: Yeah. I mean, if all I did was write, that would be cool, because I definitely get it from writing. But there are other ways...I get it from photography, too. All I want to do is have fun. I mean, I'm so uncomplicated it's a joke. VH1: What makes people not necessarily know that? The public believes your artistic persona to be harsh, right? Reed: I think it's because I fucked the Pope [chuckles]. That's a really bad thing to do in public. And getting arrested all those times didn't help. Plus the 18 times in rehab, the hit-and-run thing where I ran over the eight-year-old girl - that kind of shit. You know, people get upset about that stuff. And the Pope squeals like a little girl by the way. VH1: Okay, so how did you come to turn the master's poems and stories into a musical work? Reed: The theatre director Robert Wilson wanted to do a play about Poe and he said I should write it. I told him I didn't know Poe well enough to do that. But Bob said, "You will have your soul mate. You'll see." So I dove into Poe and that's exactly what happened. I fell in love with Poe. That was four years ago. But let me make something clear. The CD is not the stage play. The stage play is something you see. The CD is something you hear, and it's for the imagination. I rewrote the stage play so that you could see it in your mind. VH1: Can art truly frighten us? Has there been music that's frightened you over the years? Reed: Music? No. But real life, sure. VH1: No one has taken that scariness of real life and put it into musical terms? Reed: I certainly try to put a little bit of that in The Raven. "Fire Music," for instance. Try turning that up. That's a real thrill. If you ever get a chance to hear it on speakers with plenty of bass, that thing will take you for a ride. But really scare you, as compared to real life? I don't know about that. I mean, does Nightmare on Elm Street scare you? Does Freddy scare you? Does Jason scare you? You tell me. VH1: Well, they're just bogeymen. But I would say something like an Ingmar Bergman film can be very scary. Reed: Bergman? That's an interesting thought, and I would have to go look at some Bergman again to think about it. With death playing chess. That's kind of ... such a wonderful image. That's an interesting point. I can't ... I don't have an answer for that. VH1: You use a lot of voices on the album, but you didn't perform any of Poe's text yourself. Why not? Reed: It would have been too much me. The more talented people you have involved in making a record, the better it gets, because they have ideas you wouldn't come up with if you were left in a room alone for a thousand years. It was a wonderful thing to experience: To hear Willem Dafoe do "The Raven," to hear Steve Buscemi and Willem do "Cask of Amontillado." Every time Buscemi says something everybody falls down. He's so funny. [Watch Clip] VH1: What's the secret of Poe's continuing appeal? Reed: Poe has this essay called "The Imp of the Perverse." It's about why are we attracted to things we know are bad for us. That's as universal a trait as exists. I don't know anyone that can't relate to that one: People who smoke, people who are overweight, people who drink, every 12-step program in the world. Everybody in everyday life knows about that, and that's what Poe is writing about. [Watch Clip] He's the father of obsessive-compulsive behavior in writing. He goes straight through the work of my favorite authors, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby. This is a guy who wrote "Murders in the Rue Morgue," the first detective story. Can you imagine doing that? My God! He predicted the big bang theory in this long poem he wrote about the universe called "Eureka." Whoa! Imagine doing all that! [Watch Clip] VH1: Were you intimidated by taking another artist's work and rewriting it or taking an idea from an idea? Reed: If I started thinking that way, I wouldn't get up in the morning. I morphed with a sacred text. I went to bed with Poe and we raised a child and we called it The Raven. Anyway, I'm the writer now and he's dead, he can't do anything about it, and there you go. It's more fun that way! VH1: Speaking of influences, "Fire Music" is an example of the extreme side you introduced with Metal Machine Music. Is it refreshing to hear that in contemporary music? Reed: Let me give you a little background here. Metal Machine Music was made 27 or 28 years ago. In the year 2000 they re-released it with a new mastering job by me and Bob Ludwig: the 25th anniversary of Metal Machine Music. It was taken off the market three weeks after it was released. But time goes by and people get more used to what you call loops and electronics and "noise" and feedback, etc., etc. Okay. A German group called Zeitkratzer gets in touch with me - they're a ten-piece orchestra. They get in touch with me. Can we play Metal Machine Music live? I said, "It's impossible. It can't be done." They said, "Let us try. We transcribed it. Let us send you a few minutes of it and you tell us." They sent me it and I played it and there it was! It was unbelievable! I said, "My God!" I said, "Okay, go do it." They said, "Will you play guitar on the fourth part of it?" And I said, "That would be awesome, to do that guitar live." So Metal Machine Music finally got performed live at the Berlin Opera House. I have videotapes of the whole thing. It's extraordinary that you can do something like that, because all those years ago it was considered a career ender. And it almost was, believe you me! VH1: The use of the dissonance on "Fire Music," the jazz on "Guilty" and even working with Bowie again - the album feels like a career retrospective. Reed: Funny, you're the second person who's said that. I hadn't realized that, but it's true - you're right. When I was talking to people, I'd say, "Well, you know on the song 'Change,' I'm trying to... in my mind I'm thinking Little Richard. I couldn't get Little Richard, but it's that kind of a vocal I went for. And "Vanishing Act" is kind of the ultimate doo-wop song, which is stuff I love. And then there's "Fire Music," my take on Metal Machine. Every kind of music I really like is pretty much in there. It's interesting you say that. VH1: One more question. In the sleeve notes you say you were asking yourself the question "Who am I." Did you come up with any answers? Reed: No. VH1: Is it utterly unanswerable? Reed: No. One of the nice things about getting older is getting to know yourself and what exactly you really are - or it could be one of the not nice things about getting older, too, I suppose. It takes time to find that out what you really mean, what you really do, what you really respond to. Some people may not like what they find, and some people just try to get better with what they've got. You're dealt a certain hand - how are you going to play it? [Watch Clip] |
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