The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  I was a Bowie fan, which meant that I had bought or borrowed Transformer when I was thirteen, and then someone handed me an acetate of Live at Max’s Kansas City and now I was a Lou Reed fan and a Velvet Underground fan. I looked for everything I could. I hunted through record shops. Lou Reed’s music was the soundtrack to my teenage years.

  When I was sixteen and had my first breakup with a girlfriend, I played Berlin over and over until my friends worried about me. Also, I walked in the rain a lot.

  I was willing to sing in a punk band in 1977 because, I decided, you didn’t have to be able to sing to sing. Lou did just fine with whatever voice he had. You just had to be willing to tell stories in song.

  Brian Eno said that only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album when it came out, but they all formed bands. That may have been true. But some of us listened to Loaded over and over and we wrote stories.

  I’d see Lou’s songs surface in the stories I read. William Gibson wrote a short story called “Burning Chrome,” which is his take on a Velvet Underground song called “Pale Blue Eyes.” Sandman, the comic that made my name, would not have happened without Lou Reed. Sandman celebrates the marginalized, the people out on the edges, and in grace notes that run through it; partly in the huger themes: Morpheus, Dream, the eponymous Sandman, has one title that means more to me than any other. He’s the Prince of Stories too, a title I stole from “I’m Set Free” (I’ve been blinded but now I can see / What in the world has happened to me? / The prince of stories who walked right by me).

  When I needed to write a Sandman story set in Hell I played Lou’s Metal Machine Music (which I’ve described as “four sides of tape hum, on the kinds of frequencies that drive animals with particularly sensitive hearing to throw themselves off cliffs and cause blind unreasoning panic in crowds”) all day for two weeks. It helped.

  The things he sang about were transgressive, always on the edge of what you could say: people pointed to the mention of oral sex in “Walk on the Wild Side,” but the easy gender changes were more important in retrospect, the casual way that Transformer took nascent gay culture and made it mainstream.

  Lou Reed’s music stayed part of my life, whatever else was happening.

  I named my daughter Holly after Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, whom I’d discovered in “Walk on the Wild Side.” When Holly was nineteen I made her a playlist of songs she had loved as a small girl, the ones she’d remembered and the ones she’d forgotten, which led to our having the Conversation. I dragged songs from her childhood over to the playlist—“Nothing Compares 2 U” and “I Don’t Like Mondays” and “These Foolish Things” and then came “Walk on the Wild Side.” “You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Lou started singing.

  Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “‘Shaved her legs and then he was a she’ . . . ? He?”

  “That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having the Conversation. “You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.”

  She grinned like a light going on. “Oh, Dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it. I’m not sure that I’d ever expected the Conversation to go quite like that.

  I interviewed Lou Reed in 1991, over the phone. He was in Germany, about to go onstage. He was interested, engaged, smart. Really smart. He’d published a collection of lyrics, with notes. They felt like a novel.

  A year or so later, I had dinner with him, with my publisher at DC Comics. Lou wanted to make Berlin into a graphic novel. He was hard work at dinner: prickly, funny, opinionated, smart and combative: you had to prove yourself. My publisher mentioned that she had been a friend of Warhol’s and faced a third degree from Lou to prove that she had actually been a real friend. Before he talked to me about comics he gave me something approaching an oral examination on 1950s EC Horror comics, and challenged me on using a phrase of his in an issue of Miracleman I’d written. I told him I’d learned more about Warhol’s voice from Lou’s lyrics in Songs for Drella than I had from all the biographies I’d read, all the Warhol diaries, and Lou seemed satisfied.

  I had passed the exam, but wasn’t interested in taking it twice and anyway, I’d been around long enough to know that the person isn’t the art. Lou Reed, Lou told me, was a persona he used to keep people at a distance. I was happy to keep my distance. I went back to being a fan, happy to celebrate the magic without the magician.

  I’m sad today. Friends of his are sending me brokenhearted e-mails. The world is darker. Lou knew about days like this, as well. “There’s a bit of magic in everything,” he told us, “and then some loss to even things out.”

  * * *

  Originally published in the October 28, 2013, issue of the Guardian. I wrote it on the train between London and Bristol, the day after I learned Lou was dead, and I borrowed from the interview/article I did in 1991. I’ve now taken most of those bits out, as that article is the next thing in this book, but some sentences might seem familiar.

  * * *

  Waiting for the Man: Lou Reed

  I

  WHEN I WAS about fourteen I found a copy of a Lou Reed lyrics book in my local bookshop. It was a cheaply bound mimeoed affair, with a stippled caricature of Lou shooting up on the flimsy cover: pirate publishing.

  I wanted it so badly, but I couldn’t afford it (and the police had just busted up a junior shoplifting ring at my school and I’d had to return the copy of Lou Reed Live that Jim Hutchins—the John Dillinger of the ninth grade—had obtained for me at a price significantly less than the record store was asking, so even that option was kind of out).

  I stood and read it in the shop, typos and all. Went back for it a couple of days later, but it was gone.

  I’ve been looking for it ever since.

  II

  IN 1986, BACK when I was still a journalist, I was in the press offices of RCA, with a friend who was blagging me a copy of Mistrial. [To blag: means “to scrounge, obtain, mook.”]

  “Neil wants to interview Lou Reed,” said my friend.

  “Lou Reed? Jesus. I wouldn’t wish that on a dog,” said his press officer. “He’s hell on interviewers. Walks out on you if you say the wrong thing. He’ll probably just tell you to fuck off. Or not answer you. Or something.”

  Then they went on to talk about how a few years before a young hack had begun an interview with Meatloaf by asking him if the problem was glandular and never really got much further than that.

  III

  IT STARTED OUT as an idle comment, over a lunch with an editor. I gave up journalism for fiction three years before, and mentioned that, while nothing could tempt me back, I’d always wished that I’d interviewed Lou Reed . . .

  “Lou Reed?” said the editor in question, her ears pricking up. “Well, he’ll be in Europe next month. But we were already thinking of maybe asking Martin Amis to talk to him.”

  But I’d volunteered and Martin Amis hadn’t, and somewhere wheels were set in motion, or at least a couple of phone calls were made.

  A month later the book arrived.

  Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed. Ninety song lyrics, two poems, and two interviews—one with Václav Havel, playwright, author and president of Czechoslovakia, and the other with Hubert Selby, author of Last Exit to Brooklyn.

  Some songs had small italic notes at the bottom of the page. Occasionally they clarified; often they infuriated.

  “Kicks,” a song about how murder alleviates ennui better than sex “cause it’s the final thing to do” carried the annotation “Some of my friends were criminals,” while the note for “Home of the Brave” read, “My college roommate and friend, Lincoln, tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. He lived but lost an arm and a leg. He then tried to become a stand-up comedian. Years later he was found starved to death in his lo
cked apartment.”

  IV

  I WAS IN my local Woolworths, in the nearest dull little English town to me (which doesn’t have a real record store, just a Woolworths, which is still a real improvement over a few years back, when simply possessing a compact disc in Uckfield could have got you burned as a warlock), looking for Magic and Loss, although I didn’t seriously expect them to have it. I went through the Rs but there was just a copy of Sally Can’t Dance with a crack running down the battered plastic of the cover.

  I asked the shop assistant about it, who pointed me to the charts wall. Lou Reed’s in the UK top ten?

  I heard the sound of the Earth turning on mighty hinges, and of stars forming new constellations, but I wasn’t going to argue. Maybe now, I thought, they’ll bring out the Arista albums on CD.

  My Rock and Roll Heart LP has been unplayable for almost a decade.

  V

  THE FIRST TIME I saw Lou Reed live I was almost sixteen. He was playing at the New Victoria, a converted London theater which closed down a few months later. He kept stopping to tune his guitar. The audience kept cheering and yelling and shouting, “Heroin!”

  At one point he leaned in to the mike and told us all, “Shut the fuck up. I’m trying to get this fuckin’ tune right.”

  At the end of the gig he told us we’d been such a crummy audience we didn’t deserve an encore, and he didn’t do one.

  That, I decided, was a real rock and roll star.

  VI

  THREE WEEKS WERE spent talking to WEA, Lou’s record company. The interview’s on. The interview’s off. The interview’s maybe on. It’s going to be a phone interview. It’s not going to be a phone interview. I’m going to be flown to Stockholm. I’m going to fly to Munich.

  First thing you learn is that you’ve always got to wait.

  Somewhere in there, at Lou’s request, to prove my credentials, I handed over a pile of books and comics to Sally, the publicist at WEA. She seemed kind of impressed, so I decided not to mention that I could have been Martin Amis.

  I’d seen the video of Reed’s “What’s Good” at three a.m. on MTV while channel-hopping (European MTV is the only channel in the world worse than American MTV). Visually it was stunning: it looked kind of like Matt Mahurin’s work, only it was in color. I asked Sally who made the video, but she didn’t know.

  Days went by, and D-day was approaching fast, while we waited for word. I’m probably going to Munich. I’m almost definitely going to Munich.

  I’ve never been to Munich. I’ve never met Lou Reed.

  Friday, five thirty, I’m not going to Munich, and the interview’s off. Canceled. Kaput.

  I went to bed for the weekend.

  VII

  I WAS FIFTEEN and playing Transformer in the art room at school. My friend Marc Gregory came over, with a request. His band covered “Perfect Day,” but he’d never heard the Lou Reed original. I put it on for him. He listened for about a minute, then he turned around, puzzled, looking uncomfortable.

  “He’s singing flat.”

  “He can’t be singing flat,” I told him. “It’s his song.”

  Marc went off disgruntled, and I still believe I was right.

  VIII

  MONDAY MORNING: AFTER it was all over, the interview was suddenly on again. Maybe.

  Monday evening, I was sitting in an office in central London with a sore throat, a telephone microphone and someone else’s Walkman, waiting for a possible phone call from a concert hall somewhere in Europe.

  The owner of the Walkman, a music journalist, turned up to show me how to press the record button. “Lou’s meant to be a better phone interview than he is in person, anyway. I suppose he feels that he can always hang up on you,” he told me, to cheer me up.

  I’ve always hated phone interviews. This does nothing to cheer me up.

  IX

  LET’S PUT SOME cards on the table here. Where Lou Reed is concerned I lose all critical faculties. I like pretty much everything he’s ever done (except “Disco Mystic,” on the A side of The Bells). I even like Metal Machine Music, sometimes, and that’s four sides of tape hum on the kinds of frequencies that drive animals with particularly sensitive hearing to throw themselves off cliffs, and cause blind unreasoning panic in crowds.

  X

  IT’S SEVEN THIRTY. The phone rings and it’s Sylvia Reed. Lou’s going to have to be onstage at eight p.m. Okay? No problem.

  There’s a pause.

  Lou Reed’s voice is charcoal-gray, detached, dry.

  XI

  How did you decide which song lyrics to put in the book?

  Well, I’ve always had the view that the lyric should be able to stand alone before it gets married to music. I just got a list of all the songs, and picked out the ones I thought stood alone the best. If I even had a question about it I just took it out.

  The other thing was whether it contributed to a narrative form. There’s a narrative link that takes you through three decades, so they follow each other and make sense—certain themes became really apparent that you might otherwise not be so aware of.

  Things like the sequence in the middle of the book, where you have a lyric for your father, your mother, your sister and your wife?

  Yeah, that’s an interesting little section, which actually comes from an interesting album, which had a lot of things like that on it. I hadn’t really realized it until I started looking back.

  That was Growing Up in Public?

  Yeah. It certainly did apply.

  That was one of the Arista albums. Are they ever going to release them as CDs?

  I tell you, that’s a really good question. I don’t really have any real connection with them. In fact there’s a compilation album gonna be coming out, and we had problems trying to locate the master tapes from Arista. They’re corroding someplace in Pennsylvania . . .

  I’ve been told by a secondary source that they will [be coming out] but I don’t know how seriously I can take that.

  I remember how badly those albums were slagged off when they came out. But in the light of the last few albums, it’s seemed like the press has been reassessing them . . .

  Aw . . . [laughs] I haven’t seen any reassessment, to tell you the truth. I just remember getting bashed for them. But what is funny is that someone will bash them, then pick one out and say “this one was the exception” and then another person will be bashing them and that won’t be their exception, a different one’ll be their exception.

  I think it’s possible some things are easier to view with a little distance.

  Some of those albums that people say were so bad are among my favorites.

  You’ve chosen “The Bells” as your favorite lyric . . .

  Yeah. I’ve always been very affected by it. And as I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me.

  So does the subject of the lyric change for you in retrospect?

  Sure. Later on I find out what it was really about. Lots of times I’ll think it’s about one thing and as I get a little distance from it—and by distance I mean like, say, seven or eight years—it suddenly becomes very obvious to me it was about something else entirely.

  It happens especially onstage. Periodically I do something older and I suddenly realize “God—listen to what this is about. I can’t believe that I said this in public.”

  Some of the lyrics that you’ve mentioned are really incredibly personal, and pretty accurate—so obviously so that it’s always kind of funny, over the years, people continuously asking me, “Are these things based on reality?” I thought it was so obvious that they were.

  You’ve said in the past that you started out wanting to try and bring the sensibility of the novel to the rock and roll single . . .

  That was always the idea behind it. There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can’t survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist�
�s eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too.

  Sometimes some songs take years to get right. You do it and you just know it’s not right and you can’t get it right so you leave it. I think you can only do your best with it and sometimes your best isn’t good enough. At which point you have to give it a rest. Because then you start doing really strange things to it. And when it starts going that far astray it’s time to go away from it.

  Do you notice much difference between doing the public readings, and doing the concerts?

  The guys aren’t there: there’s no band. On the other hand the humor in the lyrics is much more obvious. And some of the edge in the lyrics is also a lot more obvious . . .

  I’ve got a new album out right now and there’s a song called “Harry’s Circumcision,” which you can take in a couple of ways. And one of the ways is that it’s funny. I think I get classified in the black humor section . . . which I don’t really think is true, myself.

  Who made the video of “What’s Good”?

  Isn’t that something? Isn’t that just something? He’s so great. He’s the guy who took the cover photo . . .

  Matt Mahurin? It looked like his work. He really brought out the humor of the song’s imagery. “Mayonnaise soda,” “seeing eye chocolate” . . .

  When I got together with Matt I was so glad he was able to do it. I said, “Y’know, I’ve tried to put these really quick visual images that you can get really fast, and if we could just illustrate some of them that’d be great.” That’s what he did.