The Cool School (54 page)

Well, I told Lou that I thought
Metal Machine Music
was a
rock ’n’ roll
album. “I think so too,” he mutters in that peculiar geriatric code
of his which passes for speech (perish conversation). “I realized at a certain point that to really do stuff like ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ right, one, it hadda be recorded right, and two, you hadda have certain machines to do it.”

“Except it misses certain things,” I said. “Like the beat, the lyrics . . .”

“That’s not true. If you had a small mind, you’d miss it, but the beat is about like—” and here he verbally mimicked a hammering heart. A
Chorus Line
of hammering hearts. “Very, very fast. And on each side there’s a harmonic buildup, whether people believe it or not I don’t really give a fuck anymore. It had to be very carefully mastered, because if it was mastered wrong it would all go down the drain because it would go into distortion. It’s using distortion but it’s not distorted.

“Whether people know it or not, there is a difference between each side, there is a reason why it’s 16:01 because I hadda keep it under seventeen. What people don’t seem to realize is that you don’t listen to it on speakers, because if you do you miss half the fun,” he says delightedly. “It should be listened to on headphones because there’s left and right but there’s no center. It’s constantly changing and sometimes one channel goes out entirely. There’s infinite ways of listening to it.

“Sometimes I lift the left channel a lot and the right a little and then jack up the left and drop the right almost entirely and it’s as though you got whacked in the head! But if you’re listening without earphones, you won’t get the effect. Each time around there’s more harmonics that are added on bass and on treble, and I went as far as you can go without making the needle hop on the record, which is why I kept it at that time. I made it 16:01 to try to get the fact across that I was trying to be as accurate as possible with the stupid thing.”

I outlined my feelings re
MetMachMus
to Lou: that as classical music it added nothing to a genre that may well be depleted. As rock ’n’ roll it’s interesting garage electronic rock ’n’ roll. As a statement it’s great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity—a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity
nevertheless, to say this is what I think of you and this is how I feel right now and if you don’t like it too bad. “Of course,” I added, “that’s also commercial suicide. Which I suppose is the reason for this phone call.”

“It was a giant fuck you, but not precisely the way you’re saying it. [The former head of Red Seal] got me curious to see how it would hold up against LaMonte, Xenakis, etc. And I think it held up well against them all, in fact is far better. But I’m not interested in anybody’s opinion except my own. When you say ‘garage music,’ well, that’s true to an untrained ear maybe, but there’s all kinds of symphonic ripoffs in there, running all through it, little pastoral parts, but they go by like—bap! in five seconds. Like Beethoven’s Third, or Mozart . . .”

“Yeah, but that’s all by accident.”

“You wanna bet? You don’t do a note-for-note symphonic thing by accident. No way.”

“Well then, how did you get those in there? With a pair of tweezers?”

“No, I had the machines do it. It’s very simple for anybody that knows what I’m talking about. Bach and Beethoven both wrote pieces that weren’t supposed to be played by people. Now people play them, and I’m sure if they were around now they’d be amazed but they’d also be playing with machines, because nobody can play that thing. But you don’t accidentally have part of
The Glass Harp
in there. You don’t accidentally have part of
Eroica.”

“Where are these?”

“Well, they keep building up. The thing is, you have to listen for it. But most people get stopped by the initial thing they hear, which is fine by me.”

“Well, the initial thing they hear is really not that extreme. It’s not so far from, say, ‘L.A. Blues’ by the Stooges. And that came out in 1970.”

“When I was in Japan they liked it. There are about seven thousand different melodies going on at one time or another, and each time around there’s more. Like harmonics increase, and melodies
increase, in a different combination again. I don’t expect anybody with no musical background to get it. I took classical piano for fifteen fucking years, theory, composition, the whole thing, and I’m getting so fucking tired of people saying, ‘Oh, it’s a rock ’n’ roll guy fucking around with electronic music.’ That’s bullshit. One of these days I’m gonna pull my degrees out and say, ‘Does that make me legitimate?’ But I don’t wanna do that because that’s horseshit too. So Neil Sedaka went to Juilliard, so what else is new? But like I told some of the ad people at RCA, they said it’s freaky. I said right, and Stravinsky’s
Firebird
is freaky.

“As far as taking it seriously, that’s an individual thing, but when people start saying ‘I have the background,’ they’re getting in a little over their head, and it’s very bad to get in over your head with me when it comes to that because . . . I never pulled a Cale and started talking about studying in a conservatory, but if I ever said what really is my background, a lot of people would have to take their thumbs out of their ass and say, ‘He’s putting us on!’ Well, don’t be too sure. I just happen to like rock ’n’ roll. But all I’m saying now is that I’m sorry about a kid shelling out that kind of bread for that kind of music when I know they wouldn’t like it. But when people start landing on me about their background versus mine, well, I didn’t go to college just to beat the draft.”

Pomp and circumstance. Fine. What about
Coney Island Baby
?

“They’re not what people think of as archetypal Lou Reed songs, but they forgot like on the first Velvets album, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror,’ ‘Femme Fatale.’ I’ve always liked that kind of stuff, and now you’re going to have a whole album full of it.”

Lou Reed, the Moonlight & You.

“Right. ‘The Many Moods of Lou Reed,’ just like Johnny Mathis, and if they don’t like it they can shove it.”

“Are you serious? Is this an album of sensitive songs of love and friendship?”

“Absolutely. What it is, it’s gonna be the kinda stuff you’d play if you were in a bar and you didn’t wanna hear about it. It’s the Brooklyn-Long Island axis at work. Like you know the Harptones’ ‘Glory of
Love,’ doo-wop, I wanted to rip that off them but not use the song, do my own.”

I observed that Lou did seem to keep rewriting himself,
Metal Machine Music
to the contrary. “Oh, I’ve been rewriting the same song for a long time. Except my bullshit is worth most people’s diamonds. And diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
Sally Cant Dance
is cheap and tedious. Had it been done right . . .”

I noted that the production was very slick. “It was produced in the slimiest way possible. I think that’s shit. I like leakage. I wish all the Dolbys were just ripped outa the studio. I’ve spent more time getting rid of all that fucking shit. I like all the old Velvets records; I don’t like Lou Reed records. I like
Berlin
and I positively LOVE
Metal Machine Music
, because that’s the idea I had years ago but I didn’t have the money or machines to do it. I wasn’t gonna put it out except that Clive [
Clive???
] had sent me over to see [appellation deleted], and [ditto, it’s Mr. ex-Red Seal again] was outasight. Because he caught all those things and said, ‘Ah, what are you doing putting in Beethoven’s
Pastoral
,’ and it blew my mind that he knew about it. Because like there’s tons of those things in there, but if you don’t know them you wouldn’t catch it. Just sit down and you can hear Beethoven right in the opening part of it. It’s down here in, like, you know, about the fifteenth harmonic. But it’s not the only one there, there’s about seventeen more going at the same time. It just depends which one you catch. And when I say Beethoven, y’know, there are other people in there. Vivaldi . . . I used pretty obvious ones. . . .”

“Sometime we’ll have to sit down,” I said, “with a tape or the record and you can point these out to me.”

“Un-uh. Why?”

“Because I’m not convinced.”

“Well, I don’t care. Why should I sit down with you and show it to you? It’s hard to do, because they occur at the same time. They overlay and depending on your mood which one you hear. I mean like you’ll have Vivaldi on top of one of the other ones and that’s on top of another one and meantime you’ve got the drone harmonic building.”

Curious image, all those old dead composers stacked atop each
other carcass on rotted postpustulant dusty carcass, in layers, strata really, prone yet aligned on a stairway to the stars right there in that old warehouse, the Harmonic Building, next door to the Brill Building. Or do I misinterpret? One must be careful when treading through the rice paddies of the avant-garde, lest a full chute of napalm come slag-screaming down your backbone. R.I.P., John Rockwell.

“There’s also some frequencies on there that are dangerous. What I’m talking about is like in France they have a sound gun. It’s a weapon. It puts out frequencies which kill people, just like they do operations with sound. It’s a very delicate brain operation, they have surgical instruments that are sound. They’ve had this weapon since 1945. Hitler didn’t have it, the French did of all people. Maybe that’s why they play such bad rock ’n’ roll.”

“They like you over there.”

“The only one they liked was ‘Heroin,’ that’s because it’s the center of it. But anyway, if you check out the rules of the FCC, there’s certain frequencies that it’s illegal to put on a record. The masterer can’t put them on, and they won’t, and you can’t record it. But I got those frequencies on this record. I tested the thing out at shows during intermission. We played it very softly to see what would happen. Which was exactly what I thought would happen: fights, a lot of irritation,” he began to laugh, “it was fabulous, I loved it. People getting very uptight and not knowing why, because we played it very low.”

He rambled on for a while after that, mostly about his former manager, Dennis Katz, from whom Lou recently departed rather acrimoniously. (“I’ve got that kike by the balls,” said Lou, who is Jewish himself. “If you ever wondered why they have noses like pigs, now you know. Just like the operators in this hotel—they’re niggers, whattaya expect?”) Finally we rang off. The highlight for me of this particular conversation with Lou was having JoAnn, a seventeen-year-old friend who positively idolizes the old fraud, listen in for the first ten minutes and ask later: “Lester, why was Lou so
boring
?”

“It’s not his fault,” I said. “It’s just he’s like Instant Douse. Like having B.O. or something.”

She understood, and I got ready to write my article, when not
two days later the phone rang, hot wires straight from RCA-NYC to these plains, it was my faverave publicitous agent, and after we spoke briefly of John Denver he said, “I’ve got somebody here that wants to talk to you.”

Sure enough. And in fine fettle too. “I’m not gonna apologize to anybody for
Metal Machine Music
,” the New Old Lou snarled, “And I don’t think any disclaimer shoulda been put on the cover. Just because some kid paid $7.98 for it, I don’t care if they pay $59.98 or $75 for it, they should be
grateful
I put that fucking thing out, and if they don’t like it they can go eat ratshit. I make records for me. Same goes for this new album. I listened to those songs last night, and they’re fucking great songs.”

“You mean you changed the lineup, and we can expect more sleaze and vituperation?”

“Yeah. The new song titles are ‘Kicks,’ ‘Dirt,’ ‘Glory of Love,’ ‘I Wanna Be Black,’ ‘Leave Me Alone (Street Hasslin’),’ and ‘Nowhere at All.” Fuck this Dennis Katz bullshit of ‘Oh yeah, sorry kids, the next album’ll be songs you’ll like.’”

“What about all that stuff you said yesterday, then?”

“Oh, you know, twenty minutes’ sleep and a glass of carrot juice and I’m fine. I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I take amphetamines. Any sane person would every chance they get. But I’m not in favor of legalization, because I don’t want all those idiots running around grinding their teeth at me. I only take Methedrine, which most people don’t realize is a vitamin. Vitamin M. If people don’t realize how much fun it is listening to
Metal Machine Music,
let ’em go smoke their fucking marijuana, which is just bad acid anyway, and we’ve already been through that and forgotten it. I don’t make records for fucking flower children.”

I was beginning to feel like Johnny Carson. “Speaking of fucking, Lou—do you ever fuck to
Metal Machine Music
?”

“I never fuck. I haven’t had it up in so long I can’t remember when the last time was.”

“But listen, I was cruising in my car with
Metal Machine Music
blaring the other day, when this beautiful girl crossing at a light smiled and winked at me!” (A true story.)

He cackled. “Are you sure it was a girl?”

Well, yeah, reasonably as you can be these days. And I’m also reasonably sure about some other things having to do with this whole sequence of alleged events. The way I see it,
Metal Machine Music
is the logical follow-up to
Sally Can’t Dance
, rather than any kind of divergence. Depersonalization in action: first you make an album that you did not produce (though you got half-credit), played guitar on only one track, used for material either old shit outa your bottom drawers or dreck you coulda scribbled in the cab on the way to the sessions, and do all but a couple of the vocals in one take. The only way you can possibly remove yourself more from what you are purveying after that is to walk into a room, switch on some tape recorders, push some buttons, adjust some mikes, let the static fly, and cut it off an hour later. And the reason for all this is that it simply hurts to feel, anything, so the more distance the better. Also indicative of an artist with total contempt for his audience (and thus, by all the laws of symbiosis
and
parasitism, himself). Note that if we can believe Lou when he says he doesn’t like any of his solo albums except
Berlin
and
Metal Machine Music
, he is beginning to let his audience in on the nature of his relationship to them, which is, to put it mildly, slightly askew. Every time he does something
he
really likes or cares about, it bombs; every time he slings out some cheap trough of chintz dimestore decadence, the little scads eat it up. And never the twain shall meet.