L.A. Man Read online

  What would it take to get you to even think twice about me?

  Well, we’d have to take a drive to the Mercedes dealership and buy me a new car, and then to a jewelry store to buy me a new Rolodex, and then, we’d be off to a good start.

  Really?

  [Laughing.] I’m just kidding.

  You wouldn’t settle for a guy with a big heart and a small paycheck?

  I have.

  You have, but those days are behind you.

  [Laughing.] All behind me.

  What about looks?

  I’m into exotic-looking men with an edge.

  That sort of takes me out of the picture.

  I like a man who’s in touch with his feminine side.

  I’m back in!

  And who’s not afraid to express himself and doesn’t have a caveman complex. It’s hard to find the two.

  Well, for a man, I’m all woman.

  You’re every woman and more?

  I’m so much woman.

  Do you like to dress up in drag?

  I have. Well, just with my ex-girlfriend. I’ve, like, worn her underwear and shit.

  Makeup and stuff, too?

  Well, I thought putting on her stockings and G-string was a good start [laughing]. You know, actually, she’s done me up.

  Yeah, she liked it?

  Unfortunately, I think I liked it more.

  That’s what I’m talking about, you know? Just have fun. I’ve gone out with men who are just afraid of everything and are too conservative and it’s no fun.

  I think of Carmen, the terrible beauty, terrorizing boys to men with her beauty and brashness. She told me how she used to like to go to the playground with her tight jeans on and check out the boys. What has she done to us? Or, reader, what have we done to her? Did she merely recognize early on that we’ve turned the world into a sexual food chain where she can always come out on top? Certainly, there’s no denying Carmen swam like a shark in these waters as a five-year–old prancing in that contest to her more recent stint as a dancer for the Erotic City shows at Glam Slam.

  I have a theory, reader, about what keeps us on the horizon, about what could even keep her apart from Singled Out’s hormone-charged masses with whom she needs to connect in order to assume the mantle of pop-culture phenom as deftly as her predecessor, Jenny McCarthy. It is the specter of sexual objectification that I fear has haunted Carmen since she became self-aware. You see, Jenny McCarthy chutzpah-ed her way into Playmate of the Year and nude, internet icon, and she seemed as relieved as we were when Singled Out returned her to her natural place as the somewhat dorky, tomboy, babe-next-door.

  Carmen, on the other hand, appears to come by her sex appeal more honestly. She exudes a more sophisticated sensuality that would probably work better on the big screen than on MTV’s giddy dating-game show, where it’s understood nobody’s going past second base.

  As opposed to Jenny McCarthy, you have this more sophisticated and real sensuality and sexuality, to me anyway…

  Well, thank you.

  I wonder if that will change the dynamic of Singled Out at all.

  Hmmm.

  You, you’re dark and actually sexy. She’s kind of this cartoon character. You know?

  Well, that’s probably why MTV picked me, because we really are different. I know they were looking for someone who is really different than Jenny because there’s only Jenny McCarthy. It would be ridiculous to bring someone in to be her.

  What are you going to do? You’re not going to bop guys around and kick ’em and punch ’em and stuff?

  Well, sometimes I do because there’s, like, a hundred contestants and I’m in control of all of them and the show is a really fast show. I don’t have time to say, “Here, honey. Come over here.”

  Are you going to use sex as a weapon the way Jenny used her hands and fists?

  I have thought about that. What’s going to be my weapon…?

  The plates are cleared. We are both stuffed and drowsy. The heat lamp is threatening to singe our eyelashes. Carmen ordered well. The taste of fettuccini with shrimp is still on the tip of my tongue, but, reader, I can’t for my life recall how it looked on the plate. At this point, I was deep inside the crystalline eyes of Carmen Electra.

  In no hurry to leave the place, I ordered coffee and nothing else mattered. None of the other stuff that keeps us apart. I wanted to wade into that deep pool, splash in its warm waters, and then plumb its depths, because, reader, it was at this point that we finally saw Carmen stripped clean of the industry manipulation, naked before us, and it was still her eyes that captured our imagination. Ten more minutes in the lotus land of Carmen’s eyes and we would have been spinning back to Ohio, to her senior year, and we would have asked her to the senior prom and she would have said “yes” and it would have been the first great date of her life. I know it. And I think she might, too.

  So, um, you want me to come back and watch some movies with you?

  I thought you said you didn’t like me.

  I’ll do anything for you. I’ll admit it. I’m in love.

  Yeah, yeah. Like I believe that.

  I thought you said you didn’t like me.

  I said it because you said it.

  You said it first.

  Nuh-uh, you did.

  Oh, really? I didn’t say I didn’t like you.

  You said you wouldn’t date me and I said I wouldn’t date you either.

  I was kidding. You meant it.

  I was kidding, too. [Laughing.] How do you know I meant it?

  Every interview is a date and every date is an interview. It’s all cat-and-mouse disguised as seduction and charm. At this point, reader, you are probably wondering…why? Why the morning-after regrets? Why the call back ASAP from the worried publicist? Just when things started to look promising, you want to know… where did we blow it?

  Well, to be quite honest, we spoke of things not revealed here, things that in the morning light perhaps revealed as too raw, too intimate, or too prurient to attach to Carmen the commodity.

  The nervous follow-up call concerned these things, said freely, but, alas, poor reader, Carmen isn’t completely free. She’s pinned to the slide and her image is under the microscope. She has more to lose by closing the distance between us than we do. So, if things were said the night before that could bring about repercussions from the handlers, who could blame her, or them, for burning a little rubber and putting the miles back between us when the day broke.

  And you know what, reader? I say, let’s give the girl some space. Carmen has worked hard and she deserves the chance at whatever pot of gold lies at the end of this rainbow. If she loves us, she will come back. If not, she never did. But, maybe we shouldn’t count ourselves out…

  Would you ever go on another date with us…er…me, I mean?

  I would. [Laughing.] I had a good time. At least you didn’t ask me the same boring questions…

  So, dear reader, do as I have done: however hard it may be, start to see other people—but keep your eye on your call waiting. Next time the phone rings, it just might be Carmen calling.

  Lou Reed Laughs Last

  Originally published in Ray Gun, 1998

  Author’s note: A straight-up interview is a suspicious pick for a collection of profiles, but I thought I’d include this one because, well, it’s Lou Reed. It’s also a vestige of the predigital phase of my “career” when I’d had the good fortune to interview many interesting people such as Ray Charles, George Clinton, Jack Kemp, and others, but not the good sense or energy to hold onto hardcopies of those pieces over the many years and many moves.

  Reed had been a hero of mine since I was a young man. I’d long imagined meeting him and that we might even be friends (can you tell?). Some of my colleagues at RayGun, though, tried to warn me off with their f
unny and frightening tales of having suffered his wrath for one faux pas or another.

  Reed was eating a ham and cheese sandwich in a London hotel room when I reached him by phone. I can’t remember what I said to break the ice, but he started laughing and then choking. He managed to spit out “call me back” before hanging up, possibly to get a Heimlich. I figured I’d blown it, but Reed answered when I called back. From a continent and an ocean away, at least, he seemed like just the kind of person you’d want for a friend.

  Attempting to summon up Lou Reed’s place in the pop pantheon is a fool’s errand. It leaves one straining for overheated metaphors. How about we just say that ever since The Velvet Underground and Nico deconstructed rock ’n’ roll in 1967 with droning feedback, viola squeals, down tunings, odd meters, and songs about scoring, fixing, bondage, nihilism, and mortality (while the rest of rock was, at it’s most adventurous, dallying in a blues-structured, hippie daydream), Lou has been the Lewis and Clark of our rock ’n’ roll explorations. While piloting the Velvets, and, during a prolific solo career that spawned landmarks such as the glam prototype, Transformer, the unforgiving rock novel, Berlin, the tortured confessional, The Blue Mask, and the righteous social commentary of Street Hassle and New York, Lou plotted a map followed by two generations of rockers and rappers who, when they come home to roost, park it in Reed’s driveway.

  Simply put, he made modern rock a viable medium for addressing the uncomfortable, the difficult, the honest, the frayed nerves and despairing souls—real-life stuff the form had mostly swept under the rug or spoke of in code before Reed and the Velvet Underground put a soundtrack to the complexities of adult life. He’s been our mirror, and he didn’t just hold it up lyrically, he also found a way to capture the sound of how we felt at our most vulnerable. If Warhol made fine art pop, then, perhaps, Lou Reed made pop music fine, taking it places where the pen and the paintbrush dared to go.

  “Lou Reed brought rock ’n’ roll into the Avant-garde,” said David Bowie. “He supplied us with the streets and the landscape and we peopled it.”

  And, of course, he damn near did it in a commercial vacuum. Though he’s been anointed with Dylanesque critical acclaim, and while hundreds of better-selling bands regard Reed as a Rosetta Stone for “alternative” music, commercial success, aside from modest hits such as Transformer and New York, has largely eluded him. Not that it matters, Reed was always going for more than the big bucks, and this summer we get to see one of his masterworks, Berlin, being rereleased with royal treatment while PBS’s American Masters debuts Lou Reed: Rock And Roll Heart. Dire warnings to the contrary, when we tracked Lou down at a London hotel, he was relaxed and ready to laugh.

  ◆◆◆

  So, you know, we’re doing this interview for the Ray Gun “Pop 50” issue—our assessment of the fifty most influential people in pop culture at this time—and Andy Warhol is on the cover. I wonder if it surprises you that the influence of you and Andy and the Velvets continues to be so profoundly felt today, and may actually be reaching some sort of critical mass [A massive Warhol retrospective would come to LA, his spiritual home, just a few years later].

  Lou Reed: Umm…astonished is how I feel about it.

  Have you thought about why that may be so?

  Well, I always thought that Andy was great, fantastic!, as he would say, and I’ve always thought the Velvet Underground was really something superb, but things were ignored for so long that, speaking for myself, I’m just happy to be able to be out there playing, and I many not have an accurate reading of the way things are. Put it that way.

  How about the rerelease of Berlin? Twenty-five years later it seems like people are finally ready for it. Has that been pleasing to you?

  Well, I’m so in love with the Berlin album. I mean, I always was. I was actually just talking to a friend about it. I mean, I can’t listen to it, but I never listen to my own stuff. But that’s an album I’m particularly in love with. What we tried to do…I thought other people would maybe start doing albums like that. Then, concept albums became like the kiss of death. And in Berlin’s case, that was savaged when it came out. It came out after Transformer and was perceived by many as a real bomb.

  Now, of course, it’s perceived as one of rock’s seminal albums.

  Is that true? I mean, you know, you couldn’t even buy Berlin in the States. So that’s a very painful thing, you know what I mean?

  I did so love Berlin. And certainly, if it were a book, no one would have thought twice about it. I guess it comes down to thinking what a record should be about, could be about, and, you know, there’s lots of arguments, and the argument breaks down essentially to, you know, it’s pop music and it should make you really feel good and you dance and you play it at a party and that’s the end of it.

  With things like the Between Thought and Expression box set and the rerelease of Berlin and the American Masters documentary, does that help you step out of the shadow of Andy Warhol and the Velvets? You’ve had such a vast solo career, but it seems, sometimes, that the legacy of the Velvets is overshadowing.

  Uh, it does seem to be overshadowing [laughs]. It’s two enormous footprints.

  Do these things help put Lou Reed as an artist in his own light, rather than, say, the Velvet Underground founder, or the product of Warhol’s Factory?

  [Laughs.] Those have been things I’ve heard for years and years. Whether I can have my own spot… I don’t know.

  Having followed your solo career, there are these moments like The Blue Mask album that have had such a tremendous influence on artists and now, maybe, through the course of these box sets and the documentary, they’re starting to go beyond the artists they influence and out to an audience.

  I don’t know. I was walking through the Village in New York with a friend and there was this guy selling albums on the street corner and there was The Blue Mask for five bucks.

  Hey, that’s a good price fourteen years later.

  Yeah. I mean, it was also, you know, out of print.

  Is that one of your favorite albums?

  Yeah, that’s another one. You know, all of them have something I like, or they certainly did at the time. I think they’ve stood up over time.

  I always say that if you have to box Mike Tyson or something, turn down all the lights and throw on the song “The Blue Mask” and turn it up to eleven and that would probably have him shaking in his boots before you even get in the ring.

  [Deadpan.] Oh, thank, you, gee. You know, we worked on a live version of “The Blue Mask,” but I think we’ve only done it once or twice. You know, it’s like, do people even know the song? For me, there’s a lot of lyrics, and that’s a real turn it up to eleven and aim for the heart. [Singing.] Tied his arms behind his back to teach him how to swim…blaaaaahhh, prrrrrrchhhhh [Reed mimicks the song’s squalling feedback and laughs]. Well, to me, that’s a stupendous song. Those kinds of lyrics make me crazy.

  The imagery is unbelievable. How does that happen? Do you just strip yourself naked emotionally and that’s where it ends up?

  I just hear it in my head and write it down. I know that doesn’t sound like much of an answer. If I understood it, then maybe I could do it twenty-four hours a day. You know, you amplify a certain portion of your head. It’s not necessarily the way all of you is…all of you is? You know what I mean? You could take an isolated spot at an isolated time, and you make a song out of that. But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t more parts to you than that. I don’t know…this is starting to sound pretentious again… It’s writing.

  Right. It’s the same process, whether you are writing fiction or songs.

  I think so. There are different painters that are doing things that are very intense when you look at it, you know? Certain things people are doing and it really gets a reaction out of you and it’s really very intense and “The Blue Mask” is very intense. You know, you do something lik
e that and, um, it is what it is…but, there’s something very exciting about doing that. Do you know what I mean? There’s another level kicking in…to records, to the music, to the lyrics, to what things are about, to what they can be about.

  That sort of progression is very felt today. Arguably, the whole “alternative” category started with the Velvet Underground. Do you ever feel like the Granddaddy of the Alternaverse?

  Oh, no [laughing]. I remember all the way back to “Godfather of Punk.” You, it’s like, is that really true? What does it mean? You know, it’s funny. I’ve been trying to write a long thing, that’s, you know, it’s fiction, and what’s funny is that the title of it was Critical Mass.

  And it feels like we’re at the critical mass of some cycle that, for all intents and purposes, your work was the catalyst for.

  Is that really true?

  Well, that’s the way the history books will be written, whether it’s true or not. As they, say, “history belongs to the victors” and you’re still standing.

  [Laughing.] That’s a good one, who said that?

  I don’t know, William Churchill, or someone of that stature…someone with gout. How did you like working with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders on the documentary?

  I liked working with Timothy. I wasn’t sure about the idea, you know? American Master. I mean, Jesus Christ. I don’t know how to get it across to you, I supposed, the ambivalence about it.

  Of being perceived that way, especially when you’re alive?

  And…actively promulgating it.

  I felt like it did a good job of going through your history without getting into idle myth making.

  Oh, yeah, for sure. No, we’re trying to stick to the work and the facts.

  Is it hard for you to accept that you deserve this type of appreciation?

  It’s, umm. [Reed chuckles self-consciously]

  Is that the Jewish guilt talking, or do we need another tape for that?

  [Laughing.] Well, you know, that one deserves another tape, a couple of hours and probably a good Cabernet to go over that. In the Jewish tradition, there’s a thing called the Kinnahhura. Have you heard of it? It’s not a prayer, but it’s more along the lines of these really good things happen and you’ve got to watch out for the evil eye because something bad happens to even it out. Do you know what I’m talking about?