>> [Music]
>> Lou Reed: You know like sometimes, you’ve got to be in a place.
You’re just another guy. You can just blend in.
I live out in the wilds of nowhere, out in Jersey.
Even there, there’s sometimes problems.
College students like journey out there and show up at 11 o’clock at night,
on my porch, looking into the door not saying anything.
My wife and I are sitting there; it’s really creepy.
>> Joe Smith: Are you …? >> Lou Reed: I got out with my shotgun.
This is hunting country out there. You better run.
>> [Music]
>> Joe Smith: Do you ever regret that you were never totally in the mainstream,
that you were out there left wing most of the time in your career?
>> Lou Reed: No, I started out with that in mind.
People didn’t know certain things about me, which…
I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English
and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll.
I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10.
That kind of thing.
>> [Music]
>> Joe Smith: What are your recollections of that Velvet Underground time?
You guys were avant garde, cutting edge, new stuff.
When this record came out; all of a sudden, there’s this kind of recognition?
>> Lou Reed: Well there wasn’t any recognition.
What there was, was a lot of bad press. I got a little puzzled at how savage the reaction
against us was, when we got it, especially when we performed live and left New York.
Like you know, “how savage and decadent”, da da da da;
“look at what these songs are about; ‘Venus in Furs’ is about all of this.”
They didn’t even know “Venus in Furs” was a book; I didn’t write it.
I just said it would be interesting to take this book
and put it in a song. I just wanted to cram everything into a record
that these people had ignored, which left you everything.
>> [Music: The Velvet Underground “Venus in Furs”]
>> Lou Reed: The other thing that killed me was stuff like this had been in novels so long
it was like nothing. I write a song called “Heroin”,
you would have thought that I murdered the Pope or something. It should have been,
“now we can get a lot of people who have talent for writing and everything into rock and roll.”
“We’ll all write about really adult stuff.” That was what I wanted to do,
is write rock and roll that you could listen to as you got older,
and it wouldn’t lose anything; it would be timeless, in the subject matter
and the literacy of the lyrics.
>> [Music: The Velvet Underground “Heroin”]
>> Lou Reed: We didn’t expect to sell records.
That’s not what we were doing. It would have been great. It would have been great.
It would have taken a lot of financial pressure off us. It’s not like we had money.
What we had was ambition and a goal. That’s the thing you can do when you’re really young.
>> Joe Smith: What was the ambition and the goal?
>> Lou Reed: Oh. To elevate the rock and roll song
and take it where it hadn’t been taken before.
I’m saying like from my point of view and I know this sounds pretentious
but I just thought the other stuff couldn’t even come up to our ankles; not up to my kneecap,
not up to my ankles, the level that we were on, compared to everybody else.
They were just painfully stupid and pretentious. When they did try to get in quotes: “arty”,
it was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by stupid, I mean like The Doors.
>> Joe Smith: You never felt Lennon and the Beatles…
did you feel that they were in a league at all?
>> Lou Reed: No. No. I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage.
If you said, “who did you like?” I liked nobody.
>> [Music]
>> Lou Reed: In the old days, the Velvet Underground,
we had engineers who would walk out on us. They would say, “It’s too loud"
"This is terrible. You know I’m going to turn the tape machine on,"
you guys call me when you’re finished.” I’ve spent a lot of years since then,
trying to figure out a way to be able to do what I did then, without going deaf.
I actually went and had my ears tested just to make sure.
The guy who was testing me was a fan, which was nice, so he took the test a little further
just to assuage any doubts I might have.
He said, “no, you have the average high end loss for a New Yorker.”
>> Lou Reed: Right; for a New Yorker. It was very funny.
>> [Music: Lou Reed “Perfect Day”]
>> Lou Reed: I had a lot of problems in the studio because of my background with engineer, see.
A lot of my records sound like they were recorded completely dry and no one did anything,
and that in fact was what it was
because they would go to touch a button and I’d go, “what are you doing, man?”
I have faith in my own vision, and didn’t want them to tamper with it.
I thought my thing coming out badly recorded this way, is better than
if these people take my voice and try to make me sound like a 14-year-old. They thin it out.
I would tell them it’s like you tell a photographer, “don’t retouch this too much.”
These lines, they mean something, I’m an adult, man.
Don’t thin my voice out and make it like that high shit.
This is the way I sound. You’ve got to get people to understand that
because they take the nuance and character out that makes the lyric believable.
It’s an important thing.