uh good evening and a warm welcome to yet another biography event my name is Kai bird and I have the pleasure of serving as the Director of the Leon Levy Center for biography a wholly unique institution hosted by The Graduate Center of the city of City University of New York and founded by Shelby White and the Leon Levy foundation in the year 2006 seven I want to thank Shelby for her steadfast support for the biography Center it is her vision that makes this program possible please note that our
next event will take place on Tuesday March 26th with the noted critic Benjamin Taylor in conversation with Molly Haskell Taylor will be discussing his new book on will Cather this hybrid event will take place in the Skylight room on the ninth flooor but tonight I am delighted to introduce will Hermes to discuss his extraordinary new biography Lou Reed the King of New York Hermes will be in conversation with Amanda pusich will is a longtime contributing Editor to Rolling Stone and to national p
ublic radio's All Things Considered his work has also appeared in Pitchfork Spin The New York Times The Village Voice and many other Publications he is the author auth of Love Goes to buildings on fire five years in New York That Changed music forever that came out in 2011 a history of uh the New York City music scene in the 1970s will is also a uh an alumnus of Queens College part of CUNY so uh we celebrate him for being that Amanda pusich is an American Music jour jist she is a staff writer at
the New Yorker and the author of three books pink moon that came out in 2007 it still moves lost songs lost highways in the search for the next American music and do not tell any price the wild obsessive hunt for the world's rarest 78 RPM records among other Awards she won a Guggenheim fellowship and 2016 please look for all these books at bookshops dorg a site that will lead you to your local indep independent book store will will and Amanda will be in conversation for about 45 minutes or so a
nd then we will take questions from our live audience we will try to end this program after one hour again thanks to the Leon Levy foundation for funding this and all our events Amanda you now have the stage thank you uh thank you all so much for being here tonight a warm hello uh and thank you to everyone joining us on the live stream uh as well of course to the CI Graduate Center uh Shelby White the Leon Levy Foundation we're just thrilled to be here will I'm so excited to get the chance to ta
lk to you about this book will and I got um a drink before coming here and I had to really bite my tongue to sort of stop from just I I just there's sort of endless ways to engage in in what you've done and uh and to talk about Lou and to talk about the biography and to talk about your writing uh so we'll do a little bit of that tonight I'm just so thrilled you're here thank you for joining us and thank you for for coming but can I just before you get into it can I just point out might be hard f
or people to see um because of the distance that Amanda did dress for the evening um with a can you see my little Warhol banana and and and will as well we we we didn't plan this we're just we're just living this life yeah we didn't coordinate this this is just like mindes uh so I wanted to start it it's it's on qu a quite different scale I think a much different scale than biography of course uh but whenever I'm in the midst of profiling someone for the New Yorker there's always a moment where
I sort of fall in love with with my subject and then of course there's also a moment where I briefly despise them uh so the act of writing itself you know it's it's devotion it's attention it's respect that can look a lot like love and I'm curious how your relationship to Lou Reed evolved over the decade you spent working on this project it's complicated um it the motivation for the book was really love was loving this man's music loving The Velvet Underground discovering them in uh in college r
eally I discovered his solo work um as a I think I might have written as a Teenage dirt bag and queens growing up listening to the radio and hearing rock and roll animal on W wfm and wplj um but uh but I fell in love with the music um I wrote my first book love goes to buildings on fire which was about New York uh during a 5e period in uh in the 70s and Lou Reed had you know Lou Reed was kind of um he appears a couple of times but he was kind of like an absent father in a way like him and Miles
Davis were kind of like you know the the looming dads to uh so many young artists coming up at that point they laid groundwork um and uh you know the the answer to your question is just you know I I spent nearly 10 years um you know with some hiccups along the way writing this book and you spend that much time with a person and you spend that much time with the people who were his contemporaries members of his family um you know side musicians um people he went to school with and you really feel
like you're part of you know you're part of a family and families is complicated um and Reed was a complicated guy so I came into this um knowing that you know a lot of people are passionate fans some people don't like his music some people love The Velvet Underground didn't like um his solo work some people are more into his solo work it uh people had very strong feelings about him both ways so I think uh as you said about uh profile subjects like yeah you're in love you get pissed off and uh
you fall back in love again and um I will say that and this was kind of shocking to me that the music never got old music never I never got bored um and still I can you know I hear Velvet Underground songs they just seem to be everywhere all the time like cafes um movies I went to see the new Vim vendors film which is magnificent I should say it's called perfect days and yes it is named for the LED song Perfect Day which uh figures prominently in uh in the film as does Velvet Underground Music a
nd some other stuff so um yeah it was a it was a roller coaster I'm glad you bring up the kind of long complicated uh Legacy of The Velvet Underground which really sort of began after the band dissolved right I mean in a sense it's all kind of after the fact and and seems to still be evolving and growing and changing uh you know also within the decade you wrote this book I think the cultural relationship to the the kind of problematic L could be and the kind of unlikable L could be also changed
right I I think 10 years ago we maybe had a slightly higher tolerance for certain narratives about tortured genius or or sort of certain narratives about uh toughness or or even kind of what it means to be um a New Yorker all all of that I I think was shifting kind of while you were writing and he and he is I mean complicated is really the best word to use to describe Lou uh and the question of his likability uh I'm such a massive fan of your criticism and and I I think criticism is a very diffe
rent practice than biography but you're so beautifully measured and kind of largely non-judgmental here about read the man about sort of who he was was he a good person was he something else something sort of adjacent to a good person I I'm curious how hard was it for you to kind of temporarily shut down the part of your brain that is used to making qualitative judgments about art for something with a slightly lighter touch well you know you're you're writing about about a person um you learn th
eir history you talk to people you learn their you know their their struggles and I'd never written a biography before and I never even you know I never thought I would I never necessarily aspired to write a biography on a single person because I have some ADHD and I just think that like focusing it seems to me that focusing on one person would just be you know I I need a broader canvas so my first book was really writing about an artistic community in New York or really communities and even as
a as a journalist I like writing about communities of uh of artistic Pursuit um but uh but L seemed to be a figure that was almost a zelig through through post-war New York Arts um he went to Syracuse University he studied with Delmore Schwarz one of the great New York poets kind of Proto New York scene uh writer who actually has an anthology um I think it might be his complete works um are going to be published next month so which is good timing um and then he came down to the city and somehow
instantly connects with Andy Warhol and is uh thrown into the New York V Visual Arts scene of the 60s and the um and the and the experimental film scene of the 60s and uh and of course the the music scene um and he uh you know he he contained multitudes as a person um I think and uh and I realized that this would be a book where I could write about him in context of this world of all these characters of the city really in the same way that I worked on the on the first book but um but to go back
to your question it just seemed that like the way through a person's life was to just get the facts talk to everybody you could um and believe me me everybody had an opinion family members had very strong feelings about him love hate um some of them were mixed together um he had a reputation for very often being a nasty guy like I heard that from so many people um mostly people didn't really know him that well and he definitely had a hair trigger temper um which I learned about you know maybe wh
ere that came from um and we can get into that a little later but uh but I think you spend you know enough time studying any person's life you spend enough years on the planet and you you know you have empathy for people's bad behavior hopefully um I think we're living in a time where empathy is in short supply and um thinking the best of someone or thinking that maybe their hair trigger um anger response might be about something else other than the fact that uh you know you're you bumped into t
hem in the grocery store aisle um so it was it was an exercise the whole writing of it was really an exercise and kind of um kind of giving somebody the benefit of the doubt you know but just really trying to like nail down the facts as best you could and sometimes that was tricky uh well you had Early Access to reads archive which is held at the New York Public Library uh the Performing Arts Public Library at Lincoln Center it's a real archive it's not a vanity project it's it's not necessarily
sort of pre-arranged to um cast read in a a particular light in the book you quote Reed's wife um the artist Lori Anderson saying it gives people courage to see wow Lou Reed made that thing that was horrible which I loved I'm I'm curious if there's anything you found in the archive that perhaps underscored the idea that genius is fallible genius is fallible yeah yes um yeah and I I should take a take a detour and then get back to that question just because you mentioned Lori Anderson who I have
to say is one of the she's one of the reasons why I wanted to take on this project in addition to loving Reeds music um it was also writing about her in my first book meeting her speaking to her of her profile I did for the New York Times um and really just admiring her so much as an artist and being so amazed that her and Lou connected because it was towards the end of his life they spent 20 years together but uh that was um you know he'd been through a lot of iterations of Lou Reeds um by tha
t point in the early 90s when they uh when they connected so it was you know loving his music it was you know wanting to write about the latter part of his life which I felt like hadn't really been done that well um just really hadn't been done fully um and I wanted to write about his uh his influence on the culture um which I also felt hadn't been the approach that some of the other biographers who uh wrote about him before me you know many of whom did a great job and certainly I could say almo
st all of which I read and you know Drew from I mean I think we all writers stand on the shoulders of the people who've written about our subject before and there aren't many new subjects out there um but uh to Circle back to the original question going through the archives I was so grateful that Lori made the archives public I thought that was just a brilliant move um and I had no idea that was ever going to happen when I started the book I didn't I guess I knew there were archives at a certain
point but I think I was already into the book and there was nothing to guarantee that those were ever going to be made available but they were and I spent the um the bulk of the summer or a good section of the summer of 2019 um couch surfing at uh my friend uh Matthew and Susan's apartment on the upper west side thank you Matthew and Susan I appreciate that they they they are thanked in the book because otherwise it wouldn't have happened frankly um price hotels in New York Jesus um but uh but
going through those archives and they are serious 200 plus boxes um for any biographer my God like not everybody has archives like that and they had been cataloged by the time I got into them um by the uh herculan um efforts of the people who run the special collections room up at uh the Lincoln Center uh Performing Arts Library the New York Public Libraries any of you can get a if you have a New York City library card you can go up there and uh jump in um the fallibility of Genius um is how gen
ius is forged right like I mean I bet you've you know discovered that with everybody you profile you know you're a pretty genius writer yourself and I I think you know what goes into what you do and that not every lot of bad drafts not a not every draft comes out good um so so yeah you you certainly saw that like some L records were not good like really just not good um but but the thing that amazed me was like going back and I had to like reacquaint myself with some of his later solo work almos
t every Al virtually every album had at least one or two examples of why this guy was just an absolute Stone Cold master of what he did um and that was you know that was really encouraging um and uh you know at the same time I you know I think that like you know genius is also the product of community um and one of the things I tried to do with this book was right about all the people he worked with surrounded himself with made art with um made love with um you know we are the product of uh of a
ll the people that you know we uh that that raise us up so um so I wanted to like kind of share the spotlight with with a lot of other folks I you write in the beginning of the book about the strange work of having to sort out the mythology the Apocrypha you know the the [ __ ] from the real story of Reed's life uh one of the first sentences in the book is a lot has been written about Lewis Allen Reed plenty of it dubious and some of that I think was Reed himself right I mean there was a aggress
ive kind of persona creation uh he himself was not always very helpful in that regard so two-part question uh first what are your favorite untrue stories about Reed uh and in the end do you think the distance between the sort of persona the creation of Lou Reed and the man himself got smaller wow that second question is a that's a snuck that one in there that's a good one um and a little bit of head scratcher but the first question um might be the first question were there stories about him that
that had been circulated and you thought or you were able to figure out like okay that was totally untr that was a rumor Lou started about himself or that was a rumor you know Danny field whoever it was started about Lou Warhol who knows there was a lot of persona creation going on in that scene yes um I like the fact that uh he gave his name once as Lewis furbank and uh you can still find it on the internet that like his real name was Lewis fer Banks um which it was not it was Lewis Reed um an
d family name Rabinowitz um and I chart how that was changed but uh it was interesting to me his sister also changed her name she I think she was born Margaret um changed her name to a Merill um after uh growing up um with a nickname bunny um and it was interesting to me that Reed in later years would often talk about uh how he um he could play this guy Lou Reed really well um and another quote I'm paraphrasing here is you know sometimes I'm 80% himm sometimes I'm 20% himm but I'm never a 100% h
im so um I you know I don't know did he like like the LED character is a badass like he was just he was a mean nasty you know drug taken wild man in a lot of ways um and he certainly was that at at times and he could be very very nasty um and he uh he was he was struggling with anxiety I think a lot you know I really tried to not be an armchair psychologist in this but um you know I I I think from talking to family members um he was you know he was dealing with anxiety and I had a moment going t
hrough the uh the archives that I think it was an aha moment for me um about just celebrities in general because I'm not sure how many Archives of famous people have files and files of fan mail like packed um and I I Must Have Spent at least two or three days just going through fan mail um and a lot of them were just like I love this song and this is great and but Lou Reed fans tend to be really passionate really intense very literate um and some of them were a little scary some of them were lik
e kind of stalkery and like it's very lovely and very human that he kept those I would have thought he set them on fire it's true I mean but and and again I don't know like did he keep them did his management company keep them I think he probably wanted them kept and maybe the stalkerish ones for legal reasons they just wanted to hold on to in case like you know they had to follow up any leads but um but those aside like that those letters made me think that like anybody in the public Spotlight
um would have reason to be kind of afraid especially somebody like Reed who would walk around the city didn't have bodyguards it's just like somebody comes up to you and says hey you know I could see like being like [ __ ] off you know is that okay do we need to believe that I'm sorry but uh but you know I could see like having a hair trigger response but um but but one other thing I'll just say which I can see why he would want to keep some of these letters because they were just multiple pages
about people's whose lives who testify about how his art really affected their lives change their lives helped them mourn like the album magic and loss like there were so many that was uh there was an album about please give give magic and loss a round of applause like that was an album about a friends of his dying and uh he um he got so many letters from people who said that really helped me through you know doc pomus I think was the the most um clear uh subject of that album but there were mu
ltiple people um who that album was about so that was super nice and also people who were you know coming to terms with issues of sexuality and gender identification um and that was uh that was moving to read as well just really um if you're an artist and you're making work that touches people so deeply um on all these different levels like you got to say like yeah I'm you know there's I'm on the right track here yeah certainly um I want to talk more about all of that in a moment uh but you quot
e one of Reed's creative writing professors at Syracuse the poet Delmore Schwarz you mentioned earlier uh calling rock and roll cat gut music which as a lover of both cats and rock and roll I was offended by this but uh I was hoping I could get you to talk a little bit about schwarz's influence on Reed yeah that was big like Reed loved music but he also really wanted to be a writer he really identified as a poet um one of the one of the greatest early finds um going through archives were was act
ually going through the Syracuse University archives um and they have these Zen the uh Lonely Woman quarterly um I think there are maybe three issues mimeographed Zen can people of a certain age smell the mograph fluid smell when I say that word um is basically pre Xerox um copy format and uh he'd you know he'd do these uh do these zenes with um with other writers um and uh there was poetry there were illustrations um he was writing fiction he was writing social commentary he was writing poems u
m that was uh that was super interesting and Delmore was his creative writing teacher he read famously loathed journalists but but sort of took I think at various points in his life it seemed as though he sort of wanted to be a music critic he he wrote a he wrote a a very well-known uh Kanye West review towards the end of his life yeah yeah he reviewed yeesus for the guardian and I think it was uh in in 2010 uh and there are lines in that piece that I think are objectively bizarre but then but t
hen he'll write something like if you like sound listen to what he's giving you about Kan West and I think that that's it no well I did I did I sort of I I caught my breath a little bit um but I'm so I think you might be be the first biographer who dug up those copies of the lonely women quarterly is that right I am not sure but I probably spent more time writing about them than anybody else did if I wasn't the absolute first but it was just fascinating to me because I'm a writer so like seeing
his writing in various forms over the years I mean he did a tour diary for the New Yorker um at one point he uh he was so delighted when he finally published his first book of um of lyrics and before that he was uh he was actually ready um and he says this in a famous letter which we were talking about before to Delmore Schwarz um he thought that Delmore Schwarz was like he wrote this in an introduction to a Delmore Schwarz uh collection um Delmore was the first great man I ever met um and uh he
never stopped invoking his name as a great short story writer a great poet um and a guy who really um you know really influenced him um in a lot of ways you know maybe good and bad Delmore was was in a rough patch when he was near the end of his life in in h Syracuse and he had been um he was drinking a lot he was taking drugs he had you know committed himself uh to an institution and so was like not teaching for one semester that Lou was there and they kind of became Drinking Buddies um Lou wo
uld kind of like chaperone him to faculty parties just to kind of like make sure he'd get home um in one piece but uh but the famous quote from Reed about Delmore Schwarz and just to you know put a cap on answering the first part of your question um was um Elmore said Lou don't ever don't ever sell out because if you do I'll haunt you and I always thought like oh that's great and he said that so many times and he wrote it um in you know number of essays maybe liner notes and then there was this
live radio recording of him doing a a Vince skela song circle at the bottom line some years ago um where Vince skela asked him about that line and he kind of implied that he made it up so yeah in terms of like verifying facts about Lou Reed's life that's another that's another thing where I was kind of like in Reverse you know thinking that something was true for so long and like maybe it's not um that's a great one uh so you've said that Reed's relationship to queerness uh and kind of how queer
culture shaped both his selfhood and his output uh was one of many things that attracted him to you as a subject uh and in the book to kind of return to the idea of of Lou hating journalists uh you write about Lester bangs's very famous piece uh let us now praise famous death dwarves or how I slugged it out with Lou Reed and stayed awake uh a kind of completely insane piece of reporting from 1975 and in that piece bangs is is cruel about Rachel humph a transwoman uh who was a amus and a compani
on to read and you suggest that perhaps Reed's hatred of that peace and and the way Banks treated Rachel humph and that pieace may be sort of the origin point of his kind of lifelong combative aggressive antagonistic relationship with the Press yeah I think that was certainly part of it and he had I mean there were other things too because I think journalists can be really lazy um and maybe music journalists have a bad reputation for being lazy I know you're not lazy I interviewed Luke I'm lazy
and yeah and that's going to be my question that's my next question soon as I soon as I answer this one and I'm I'll keep it short so we can get get back to that um but uh but yeah bangs I mean we could talk about Rachel who I think was such an important figure as one of the great women in his life um and uh they were together for three years but uh this piece like Lester bangs was really really nasty um like just said such nasty things about her just disparaging and I don't know why he did it u
m because Lester bangs has you know showed himself to be a very smart and sensitive person um in a lot of other avenues but at this point he uh he he um you know he said things that that Reed just found unforgivable never spoke to him again and this was a critic that they had they had like kind of a good relationship like even even after that I remember like talking to um or reading an interview with um with a great guitarist Robert Quin who was very close friends with Lester bangs and uh he um
he uh relayed a question from Lou to Lester um wanting to know what Lester thought of his new album because he really valued Lester was a Critic who didn't pull punches so he uh his opinion meant something to him um but uh speaking of journalists in Lou Reed why don't you uh tell us Amanda did an interview with Lou Reed which is included in a great book of primary source material that I drew on called last interviews um with um all with Lou Reed it's I think it's a series of books but uh you did
it for Pitchfork right yes yes Pitchfork in 2007 I'm not letting you turn this interview around by the way will nice try we were talking earlier about how funny it is when two journalists are in conversation because this it's like who's give me one I mean come on um yes I interviewed Lou in 2007 uh for Pitchfork it was we were talking about a issue of metal Machine music which had just been staged uh in Germany there had been a whole kind of elaborate uh theatrical presentation of it and we wer
e also talking about the Hudson River Hudson River Wind meditations which was a a sort of series of compositions that had been written and recorded kind of to to um to sort of Aid or enhance his taiichi practice which he was famously very interested in toward the end of his life he was nice to me I got lucky was it in person no it was on the phone I've never been more terrified for an interview before or since um and he proper proper way to approach an interview with he was he was quite nice to
the point where I almost had that moment he was being so nice that I was like is he making fun of me like I know was like I couldn't I couldn't believe it it's even reading it back now I'm like what was going on here he kep giving me compliments he asked me if I was married he was it was I don't know I don't know which L I got I got a Lou well you were you were also talking about music that was you weren't asking him about Walk on the Wild Side no no and and I am a metal Machine music fan so I t
hank you the two of you I like I like difficult people and I like difficult records and that you know it was so for me it was a sort of Confluence of all my interest um but yes I like that record and I was very curious about it and I and I think maybe that I don't know maybe that opened something up in him I don't know or I just got it was just like the right moment on the right day I don't know yeah well it's you know I think the it it's kind of a fallacy that he hated all journalists because t
here were some journalists that he really clicked with Jonathan cot is one um who he did magnificent interviews with him uh Mikel Gilmore um writes for Rolling Stone also he had magnificent interview with him both of those were were really kind of key uh primary source texts um for me uh David Frick as well who uh conducted um uh that velvet underground kind of summit um at least a partial Summit um at the New York Public Library years before um a few years before read P pass that uh that brough
t together um well John didn't come um and Sterling had already passed but Mo was there um and uh it was uh it was it was a lovely evening so um so yeah he he recognized Excellence w i um Reed was a big fan of of Ed gr and Poe uh which is an influence you kind of parse in in the biography um and I I have been recently rereading some po myself and and po has an essay called the Imp of the perverse which is is sort of it's a great title it's a great phrase and it it sort of unpacks this notion tha
t sometimes we're just so seized by this uncontrollable desire to say the worst thing we can possibly think of and it just slowly overtakes your brain it's the scariest story Gren Poe ever wrote it just slowly overtakes your brain until you can't until suddenly you've said it and you just want to cut your own tongue out of your mouth um which brings me back to this sort of this question what what would that have to do with LED well I think once again I see the connection I think Reed himself cer
tainly afflicted by the Imp of the perverse uh that that that question of his likability you know people are complicated nobody is one thing uh but with Reed I think it's particularly interesting because the music is so tender and there's so much empathy often in the lyrics and and I think in the performance I'm just curious for him being such an erasable and and and sort of complicated subject how did you reconcile those two things that the the stunning beauty of the songs with this guy that co
uld be cruel well I think he was incredibly sensitive and he was very tender person to people who were his his Intimates and friends I mean I think one of the big surprises sometimes people will ask like oh what was the biggest surprise that you found researching the story and was talking to people who talked about how loving how tender how generous um he was and never saw the nasty side of him like literally I was just like and these weren't necessarily people who I thought were like you know t
rying to put on a good face like this was true um and they just said well you know he just didn't suffer fools or he was impatient um and you know I I that is I think he you know he he swung both ways he really could feel both um both ends of the spectrum really uh really profoundly one of the one of the people I interviewed a number of times um and sadly wanted to interview one last time but wasn't able to was his good friend Hal WI um who is a brilliant um musical mind produced uh work of L an
d um Hal would would tell me like you know Lou was so susceptible to Beauty um that when he was hearing something that he thought was really beautiful he would pull up his sleeve he'd pull up his sleeve and say look Goosebumps as a an indication that something was really moving him and uh and in fact I think how Wilner was with him um and some other folks right before he passed and I think one of his last word some of his last words were um I'm so susceptible to Beauty right now your writing abo
ut I think the final moments of his life was just I mean if I had sleeves I would pull them up and say Goosebumps it's um it's extraordinary uh the whole sort of last Koda of the book um is extraordinary in that way I uh I had a bit of writing advice from a professor when I was in college who told me the easiest way to make a character likable is to give him a dog and and I loved Lou's relationship to his little Terrier Lola Bell Lola Bell rest in peace Lola Bell um you know that to me and and y
ou write about it of course in the book I think Lori Anderson in fact maybe made a film about Lola Bell after she too passed um but but I feel like I'm glad there's so many Lola Bell fans in the room Lola Bell representing tonight I think his love of that dog their Collective love of that softened him so much in my eyes really it's good advice give character a dog he's a dog I mean he had multiple dogs in his life he had the baron um in the 70s he had Seymour um in Syracuse who became the family
dog Seymour was named after um after character in uh stories by John Updike J JD Salinger thank you Salinger stories about Seymour glass thank you but uh but because Seymour was a uh a female dog um it was spelled with an e at the end his his sister told me that and I met lolab Bell who was lovely um she was playing did you interview her I didn't interview her but I was interviewing I was interviewing Lori and I was at at the the apartment and lolab Bell was uh doing music therapy I think and l
olab bell with a with a music therapist um playing a uh keyboard that was on the floor kind of like a twister board that like you would touch a key and it would make a tone and LEL was jamming took after her parents uh you mention toward the end of the book that everyone who lived in New York for a certain amount of time has a Lou Reed story and you quote Amy po saying he was like a robin in Spring he was the guy who told you you lived in New York I think a lot of people myself included have run
into him at Film Forum where he was constantly falling asleep during movies um I'm curious since the books publication doing events like this interacting with other people who knew and loved him uh have you heard many many more of these stories like you know one time I lit Lou Reed's cigarette on the Bowery or whatever it might be people must be telling you those things all the time yes they still come I get emails I I literally this morning I got a very long email from a guy in Sweden who just
shared with me some very intense personal stuff involving his you know his relationship to Lou Reed's music and I don't know what it is like I spent like nearly 10 years writing this book and I still don't know that I can say exactly why he is so beloved or that people even people who don't like him um seem to love him seem to be obsessed with him in the way that like you know maybe a you know I don't know an absent father I Ed that term before just you know he was he was nice to me he was cool
cool he didn't curse me out or even like you know he sneered at me and that was so cool because it was so LED um but uh but yeah I think we're you know New Yorkers are we're cool we don't like bother famous people like we were we were just having a drink before coming over here and we were like oh yeah that's Elvis Castello over by the pasta counter at uh at Italy um it's like yeah that hat but we didn't bother did we we I don't think so no we played it cool yeah we played it cool but I think t
hat you know but we're still there are things that you like to you know that you like to note that makes you feel like wow you know I live in New York like this is my Village um and I think that part of it was you know Lou Reed was that in a way that politicians aren't in a way that I mean it's partly why I named the book The King of New York also it was like a great David Bowie quote about him so um okay just a couple more questions for me before we turn it over to you guys um Reed's later work
I think is um is complicated contentious I me that's probably true of all of his work actually uh but but toward the latter half of his life he was making records that were kind of uniquely um strange I'm I'm a little bit of a Metallica head so I wanted to talk to you about Lulu a little bit um okay a lot uh I wanted to talk to you about Lulu the record they made together it was it was his Reed's last official release right yeah uh so in particular I wanted to ask you about the closing track wh
ich is called Junior dad which you describe correctly in the book as a Freudian mindfield of Parental failure and childhood fears delivered with a tenderness that had scant precedent in reeds work uh and a few days ago you sent me a clip of a live performance of the song on a German television show and I have to say I found it devastatingly beautiful uh I mean what do you hear on that record and in that song man that record yeah that record which what did it get like a one from Pitchfork a one o
r a zero I can't even it was yeah I mean it was one of the most famously like scathing reviews in Pitchfork I mean it's a record that in a lot of ways I I have it's it's a hard record to love um or maybe even to like sit through um but in the context of re the Ark of Reed's career it makes so much sense it was based on Frederick vein's Lulu plays um and so there is story back there and in fact there was a um the the uh there was a Berg and I think an unfinished Alban Berg Opera um Lulu and uh an
d Lou had done multiple collaborations with Robert Wilson the great uh um uh theater uh musical theater director theater director with music sometimes um and uh that was the fourth the third work that they did together um was Lulu and it was hard to get exactly a be I talked to Robert Wilson but it was hard to get a bead on what happened with Lulu but suffice to say that after the first two Wilson Productions were done in New York um Lulu did not come to New York it was only done in Europe and I
think maybe Brazil um and uh and he was supposed to do an album of greatest history with Metallica cuz they'd done a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame like anniversary show together and that was the idea and was like also a weird idea that's a completely weird idea but like a little bit less weird a little bit less weird um but then at literally at the last minute he just like said you know I want to do like I wrote all this material for Lulu um for these Lulu plays I want to use that um and make an a
lbum so the Metallica guys were like well okay you know we already in but that was my understanding um and uh they um they made this album um that was very a lot of violent imagery like it's it's true to the vetican Lulu plays Jack the Ripper is a major figure in it so there's like a lot of blood there's um there's a lot of sex um there's just a lot of like nasty violence and uh distilling that into like a loud um album of music is a it's a tough it's a tough listen but Junior dad is this beauti
ful um closer 18 minutes long um supposedly the at least a couple of the guys in the band were literally in tears because of the the issues that it brought up with involving their relationships with their dads Because it's about fathers um and you know yearning for you know uh a Father's love and attention and um the song is one that Lori Anderson also performs and has performed since Lou passed so it's a it's a song that I feel like is kind of like a continuation you know it's it's almost an af
terlife song um yeah yes absolutely uh and and well speaking of tear in the book you quote an onion headline uh that ran shortly after Reed received a liver transplant at the Cleveland Clinic which was new liver complains of difficulty working with Lou Reed which is just one of the alltime grds um who whoever wrote that Kudos and and the the whole article it's like every line is so it's so good incredibly funny um but I but the passages describe this was of of course before he actually went into
liver failure uh the passages describing his death were as I mentioned before I thought just tremendously beautiful I wept while reading them um in a very sort of deep and cleansing way and and this is a very personal question but did it make you cry oh yeah I mean this is embarrassing to say like it made me cry when I was talking to person Kevin Hearn beautiful man great musician who i' had actually met years and years earlier writing a story on a band Canadian band that he was in for Rolling
Stone um but he had become Reed's band leader near the end of his life and um spent a lot of Reed's final days with him um so yeah I teared up hearing him talk about it and I you know I I literally teared up typing it I remember where I was when I typed the the end section of the book um I was actually at at yat um up in Saratoga Springs an artists Colony that really deserves people's support because it has I would not have been able to finish this book probably would taking me another 20 years
a great place to cry a great place to cry um in the middle of woods and but it uh you know I mean I I this is I just want to digress super quickly on this um which obviously I don't do quick that well um but uh but writing a biography and you get a little of this in writing profiles you get to know people um over time over years sometimes and people trust you with their stories or they don't they're just like no I'm not going to talk to you um and you really feel like I mean it's such an honor a
nd it's like I don't want to say it's a weight but it's a responsibility I feel like ethically um and just as a human being to like just honor the people who are sharing their stories and to try to you know just present them in a way that um not only tells a story like you know Janet Malcolm talks about you know writing profiles as being like an active betrayal because you're holding the work and the storytelling Paramount um and I get that but like youve you know I just felt I just felt that re
sponsibility of honoring all the people who shared stuff with me um that was in some cases very personal this including um this first and foremost not maybe not first but um and uh it uh it's an important part of the book would not have happened without him final question uh for me and you can answer this with with a yes or a no uh having spent 10 years writing this definitive lovely um complex biography would you ever write another biography again I can't answer that yes or no I'll just have to
I don't know writing a bio it's like you get it's very it's very emotional like you really get in the weeds you know I was talking about like the sense that you're getting involved with family um you're literally getting involved with people's family extended family friends and what have you and um and read too right I mean you had a ghost in your house for 10 years in a way yes and uh it's uh it's a lot um so I uh I'm not sure I'm not sure um I'm not sure all right we won't hold you to anythin
g um questions from the audience I believe we have um a microphone set up on each side well thanks both of you um this is a small question what do you think of Berlin I uh I love songs on Berlin um I love the uh the way it was put together um as a film by Reed and Schnabel uh the album just as it was released um there were songs on it that I loved um but I didn't think that it was I didn't think that it lived up to what he'd envisioned for it and he'd envisioned it as something that he wanted to
really like put on like kind of an opera or a stage piece which is um a thread that he really followed through his entire life you know and I think we realized some things with Robert Wilson um so uh so yeah I there there are a lot of things I like about it the DVD of it is essential listening watching if you're a a Lou Reed fan um that was it was beautiful uh when it was redone um late in his life so it's a kind of equivocating answer but uh but it's it's hard to like have have a simple like a
s somebody who's a Critic and sometimes has to make snap judgments About Records um when you spend a lot of time with a person's o and uh and see how it fits into the the the whole picture um it's uh you know I value things about it that might not actually be there in the grooves um my name is raal I'm not born here so I'm not very familiar with all the cultural nuances but um going to ask a a general question you have so much material to go through and congratulations you spent 10 years um do y
ou have a theme like Dy going to the yellow brick road uh find the wizard do you have a particular theme in writing this picking certain materials because you can't put everything from what you have read and explored uh is there a a main theme in your book that tied you to all the way and secondly uh was he uh searching for something in his life and did he accomplish that at the end of it wow well you know I mean there was certainly I felt there were a lot of themes like I kind of came into this
naively thinking like oh I'm going to write a book about this musician who's really interesting and whose music I really like but you know it became about a whole lot of things about family about identity about a lot of stuff about New York City about Arts communities so those themes kept multiplying like bunnies um and uh and the second question was oh did was he successful in what he set out to accomplish um one of his one of one of the last things he said um to a friend I think it was to Jul
ian Schnabel was I think he might have said this to a number of people was I don't want to be erased because people said that he really felt that his work by and large people didn't really get it that it you know and he just didn't want to be erased which I just found so touching and it's just like he was not erased he is not erased he left behind body of work that I think people are going to be listening to and getting a lot out of for a for a very very very long time it's such a beautiful Mome
nt In the book when you quote um Julian Schnabel say saying that um Iggy Pop said something similar to me too that it was that feeling that the I think it's easy now because these records are are Canon right I mean they're widely considered massively significant influential albums but at the time they were ripped apart you know and and they were not received well and they didn't sell well and there was the sense that they were creative failures uh and and I think for artists like this who are wi
ldly ambitious and do care it was hurtful yeah and if you and if you like somebody's work if you admire somebody's work if you see their work like is of such great consequence and they're beating themselves up I mean it goes back to what Lori Anderson said about like oh somebody like Lou Reed can make crappy stuff and you know isn't that amazing but it makes me think that when I'm beating myself up about something that like I didn't do right or I should have written this or what have you um it's
just like yeah that's just a natural part of creating anything you know if you're not dealing with self-doubt you're probably doing it wrong I don't know I think that's fair um I think we can maybe squeeze in two more questions hey um question about blue and his um the '90s for him he seemed to have gotten a second wind is it in relation to his like alcohol Lo giving up alcohol did he ever comment on that in any part about how his relationship with drugs and alcohol like affected his second pha
se or his Resurgence of the 90s well he didn't get clean um I mean he got clean in the80s is clean-ish um in the 80s and uh in the '90s I honestly I mean there were a lot of things happening in the 90s I mean he he reconnected with John kale and uh he um he he ended his first marriage and met Lori Anderson and um there was a a creative um blossoming I think that coincided with his relationship with her and it saw him going going into all these different creative Avenues the Robert Wilson collabo
rations um the uh the the how Wilner projects um and uh photography he pursued um some pretty interesting photography work so uh he was a guy who um you know he was a great artist but he did his best work I think working with other people and so when he was able to connect and not kind of lock horns with other people he created really strong work like I think songs for drella was really strong and the New York album that wasn't 90s but it was late 80s um that was his collaboration with the guita
rist Mike rathy and Fernando Saunders that was you know really magnificent and uh um you know I think the uh the The Works that he did with Robert Wilson were really uh underappreciated some of his greatest latterday song writing came out of those so you know he had a lot of stages thank you thank you right I one more question thank you very much um it's safe to say that the lyrics in The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed U uh are quite cryptic across the board but there are a handful of songs tha
t are particularly uh notoriously inscrutable uh you could point to the Black Angels Death Song and murder mystery in particular and I believe that Lou Reed at least said for sure that uh the lyrics to Black Angel's Death Song were just them playing around with words it was not meant to be uh read more deeply so on one hand you could see that as an extension of their sonic experimentation but the other hand uh he can really be full of beans at times and those lyrics and those two songs really se
em meaningful to me so I wonder do you take him at face value for any comments he's made like that and should that stop someone from seeking deeper meaning anyway I don't know you want to take that one Amanda no I would not take his dismissiveness at face value I think he was dismissive of metal Machine music too I think he used to circul at that that rumor that was like I just wanted to get out of my record contract I don't think that was true at all in fact I think later on he he said that was
not true uh no I I wouldn't take it at face value but who cares what I think what do you think well I care what you think I think everybody cares what you think um and really we're both critics right so it's like if you learn anything is that the artist is not the only Arbiter of what a piece of art does and most artists sometimes they're the worst are sometimes they're the worst you know they're they they make stuff they put it out there and we feel whatever it triggers we make meaning from it
um which may or may not have anything to do with what they um yeah intentional fallacy I know there are some English professors in the room who could probably speak to that um but uh but yeah I you know I think that um you know he you know partly it was Maybe self-doubt cover your ass um you know say something is crappy um just in case maybe it is but if it isn't but uh but you know there's also like a little bit of you know and I wrote about um Lamont young in the sense too that like these gre
at artistic Geniuses uh many of which came from New York had a little bit of like New York [ __ ] artist you know kind of hustle about them you know like there's a little wink going on so you know I think maybe that's rolled up in there too you know certainly yes but but I think you know it's yours now it's ours now right and and I think that's we get to hold it thank you thank you and thank everybody for coming thank you guys all so much um thank you again to Shelby White and the Leon Levy foun
dation and thank you to will Hermes the best there is the best to do it thank you and special special thanks to the Leon Levy Center who sponsored this and [Applause] much
Comments