Deciding Not To Interview Lou Reed

A mixtape of sorts

Maybe meeting Lou Reed isn’t really about meeting Lou Reed at all. It’s about the story you get to tell 27 years later about the time you met Lou Reed. I obviously failed to understand this in 1998, when I had the chance to interview Lou Reed, so now the only story I get to tell is the one about the time I was scheduled to interview Lou Reed for a newspaper and decided not to bother. Although I can see the plus points of a parallel reality where I am able to tell people about the afternoon Lou Reed made me cry fat authentic tears - as he had the previous journalist who interviewed him for the newspaper I was employed by - and left sooty claw marks across my cheek after lashing at me with his long New York nails, I am at peace with the choice made my former self, which also reminds me that my general tendency to turn away from supposedly prestigious opportunities life throws at me was established long ago. I seem to remember that the weighing up process had quite a bit to do with a phone conversation I’d had with one of Lou’s inner circle about the many topics I wasn’t allowed to talk to Lou about, but also involved a nice quiet Nottinghamshire meadow I’d recently found which was very pleasant to read books in and was generally dominating my thoughts at the time. In the end, it was a no-brainer: travel 400 miles to spend an hour in a hotel room with an infamously irascible rock star or spend the same period on my back, in a field full of buttercups, reading the latest Paul Auster novel?

I can still recall the cancellation high I got from the epiphany that, as much as society and my editors seemed to want me to interview Lou Reed, I could just, like, not interview Lou Reed, and carry on my life as before, without going to prison or getting excommunicated by my friend group. It was not dissimilar to the feeling of relief I experienced when, after many years, I realised that, instead of trying to squeeze equivalent levels of pleasure from listening to Lou Reed’s solo albums to those I got from listening to The Velvet Underground, the option was available to me to just stop listening to Lou Reed’s solo albums*: an option I’ve now mindfully committed to for close to half a lifetime, while failing to love The Velvet Underground a fraction less than I did when I first heard them on a cassette my mate Rich loaned me in September 1992. My favourite Velvet Underground song alternates more or less weekly but recently I’ve been particularly enjoying Temptation Inside Of Your Heart (which the Scottish band Nectarine No. 9 also did a great version of, while becoming Edinburgh’s closest answer to the Velvets, although I can’t find that online):

Temptation Inside Of Your Heart does not feature in Todd Haynes’ 2021 film about The Velvet Underground, a documentary that, while quite enjoyable and full of momentous footage of John Cale’s hair, fails to offer any revelations about the band, most notably the revelation “Lou Reed was in fact extraordinarily pleasant to be around at all times, not even remotely egomaniacal and never asked to be reimbursed on the regular occasions he bought the rest of the band ice cream!” Undoubtedly the high spots of the two hours are the delightful appearances of Jonathan Richman, chatting about his early days as a fanboy of the Velvets, who would let him hang around with them because “they knew I wouldn’t say anything”.

Do we want our rock stars to be nice when we meet them in person? In the case of Lou Reed, probably not. But I am glad to be able to say that in 1999, when I got the opportunity to interview Jonathan Richman, I didn’t turn it down, and he was every bit as lovely as you’d wish him to be. What Richman was most keen to talk about was cement, since he’d recently taken up the hobby of mixing it, free of charge, for a builder friend on his days off. I recall being moderately disappointed about this at the time - why didn’t Jonathan Richman want to talk at greater length about all his wonderful songs in the way I’d imagined him doing, in my many daydreamed rehearsals of our encounter and subsequent lifelong friendship - and additionally disappointed about the upbeat, non-analytical, two-sentence answers he gave to most of my questions, but I realise with hindsight that both these things are precisely what you want from Jonathan Richman when you meet him. “Well, that was the best interview I’ve done this year!” he told me, to my immense surprise, as he leapt up off the hotel lobby sofa in the manner of a nine-year-old who’d just heard a rumour about a freshly vacated climbing frame in the neighbourhood.

I was thinking recently about something else Richman said to me during that conversation, while he was enthusing about the Question Mark & The Mysterians song 96 Tears (an amount of tears that, to me, has always seemed curiously specific, yet somehow perfect) and complaining about the overamplification of what was then thought of as modern music. “If you went to see the loudest band in the world in 1969, which was probably The Who, you’d probably find they were quieter than the quietest band out there right now,” he told me. It struck an instant chord. For years, I’d secretly believed most gigs I went to were needlessly cranked up to moronically high levels of volume, while also half-wondering if the problem was down to some defect in my own hearing, but then, in New York, in 1996, I’d been to see the band Lilys at the Mercury Lounge, and they’d actually seemed more powerful for turning their amps down.

Anyone who’s read Villager, or ends up reading my upcoming third novel Everything Will Swallow You when it comes out later this year, will probably have cottoned on to my obsession with the impact the dust of time can have on recorded music. It’s interesting to go back to records I thought sounded totally solid in the mid-late-90s and discover they appear to have been re-recorded inside a giant, otherwise empty biscuit tin. Lilys are thankfully not an example of this, and time has sprinkled extra magic on their output, particularly the bubblegumtastic Better Can’t Make Your Life Better LP, which they were touring at the time of that unforgettable Mercury Lounge performance. During a recent DJing session prior to a gig by a friend’s band, I played their little-heard creative zenith, Baby’s A Dealer, the B-side from their Which Studies The Past 7 inch, and none of the three people who came up to the DJ booth to ask me what it was could believe it came out in 1996. Each of them guessed it was a cult 60s garage rock classic. That is to say: they all thought it sounded amazing, and kind of timeless, while rooted in a raw analogue aesthetic.

It was with some trepidation that I recently revisited the back catalogue of Guided By Voices, to find out what the years since I’d last listened to them had shaken onto their songs: mystic confetti, industrial Midwest farm slurry, or perhaps some confusing combination of the two? During their 1993-97 heyday there was a regular comment made about this bunch of beer-sodden, old-enough-to-know-better lo-fi hedonists which went something like, “If only they could record their songs properly, they’d be a genuinely massive rock band.” But when they did finally rope in a “real producer” (Ric Ocasek of The Cars) for their 1999 album Do The Collapse, what you soon realised was that a major part of the charm of GBV was that they sounded like their songs had been hastily committed to tape in your next door-but-one-neighbour’s coal scuttle. Now the guitars resembled guitars, instead of poorly serviced sub-aqua industrial machinery, it all sounded just a tiny bit wrong.

The first time I’d heard GBV was via some speakers two rooms away from where I was sitting, which, because of the way all their songs were produced, in fact meant I felt like I was listening to them from five rooms away. I was instantly hooked on their Paul-McCartney-gets-curiously-inspired-while-waiting-for-the-emergency-services-during-an-ill-fated-potholing-trip melodies and nonsensical chopped-up lyrics, playing their Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes albums so often that they became part of my own internal architecture, and printing lists of prospective future song titles in my fanzine to try to grab the attention of their lead singer and creative powerhouse Bob Pollard.

Still kind of gutted he didn’t take Sickening Couriers, tbh

It’s the material from those two albums - and the flood of singles and EPs either side of them - which still holds up best. The slightly later stuff is, despite the American Federation Of Teachers-meets-Bachman-Turner Overdrive muscularity of I Am A Tree and Bulldog Skin, somewhat on the biscuit tinny side, and lacks the slight feeling you get, in the stream-of-consciousness of the earlier work, that you’re listening to a man whose brain is on fire in the best way possible. That said, I haven’t listened to all of it because, since the late 90s, GBV have released approximately 3678 albums, and I work for a living.

To be fair, Pollard had more on his plate as the 90s pushed on, having to field phone calls from vexing teenage fanzine editors like me who’d decided he was the messageless spokesperson our surreality-obsessed generation had been waiting for. As my zine became a religious tract on all things GBV in everything but name, my regular phone calls to the bar in Pollard’s Ohio garage conjured an increasingly vivid mental picture of the place where the band’s inner circle hung out: a disorderly yet hallowed arena, part studio, part wrestling ring, strewn with empty Budweiser and Rolling Rock bottles, where I was convinced the Generation X answer to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was being written between games of air hockey and table football. I’d heard that, in the interests of extra convenience for everyone concerned, a urinal had been nailed to the wall. Bob returned to the UK and I showed him the headline to the main story in the latest issue of the zine, ‘Sgt Pollard’s Lovely Arts Club Band’, which I was nauseatingly pleased with. He grinned like a man who’d finally realised his childhood ambition and successfully invaded Britain. At that night’s GBV gig, he introduced me to Kim Deal, whose band The Breeders had covered one of Bob’s fuzziest, finest freak anthems, Shocker In Gloomtown. I panicked and mumbled quarter of a story about someone she didn’t know, who came from an undistinguished town in south Derbyshire, then hid behind an amplifier, more cringe than man.

I would end up feeling a little bad about drifting away from Guided By Voices, although I am sure the band, for their part, coped valiantly with our gradual estrangement, and were potentially even a bit relieved by it. Nothing dramatic happened. It merely became my preference to listen to the bands I’d heard inside Guided By Voices over listening to Guided By Voices themselves: The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Amboy Dukes, Cream, The Creation, The Small Faces, Badfinger. But I played Motor Away from Alien Lanes six times last weekend, and it’s still the best song ever. Except it’s not. Because the best song ever is actually Looking At The Rose Through World-Coloured Glasses by The Split Level. Or at least, it is on the days when it’s not Unhooked Generation by Freda Payne.

When my girlfriend - one of the Guided By Voices’ three female fans - and I followed Bob and the band around on tour in 1995, 1996 and 1997 I remember straining to hear Bob talking about the records he’d picked up from secondhand shops in Sheffield and Nottingham and Leeds, and making my hasty mental notes. “Did he just say Journey To The Centre Of A Mine by The Adam Roy Dukes?” I’d wonder.

Such confusion was, of course, one of the central joys and mysteries of record hunting in the murky pre-Discogs, pre-Wikipedia era. I spent two whole years searching desperately fruitlessly for a song called One Goose by an enigmatic performer called Ella Fitzmemory after quizzing a Chicago DJ about the 11/10 banger he’d just put on the decks in an East London club, until I finally realised what I was in fact searching for was the hypnotic Mongoose by John Lennon’s one-time backing band Elephant’s Memory. They were two excellent years, though. During them, I thought a lot about Ella Fitzmemory and what might centrally define her as a person. I imagined her as a more volatile Marsha Hunt, not a placid sufferer of fools, but also someone who could get you into some seriously memorable trouble if you caught her on her one good day of the week in a bustling municipal space. Particularly if she brought her solitary goose with her. In the end, I think meeting your musical heroes is all a matter of judgement, to be taken on a case by case basis. Sometimes it can be quite pleasant. Other times it’s best to keep your distance and do everything you can to preserve what you’ve concocted in the sanctity of your own brain. After much deliberation, I decided that, given the chance, I’d shy away from the pressure cooker expectations of a day with Ella and read a book instead.

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*New York is the exception. That’s a fucking great album.