“This is not a gallery,” reads a sign above the buzzer for Studio Instrument Rentals in Manhattan. The rehearsal space (and the entirety of boho-trendy Chelsea) sits in the picturesque shadow of the abandoned elevated subway tracks running along 10th Avenue. It is a sticky New York-in-July afternoon and stoop-bound residents fan themselves with coupon circulars to the distended bleeps of reversing delivery trucks.
SIR’s lobby — a loading dock repurposed with airconditioning, black paint, black leather couches and a row of posters signed by Kiss, Elvis Costello and others — is disarmingly quiet. And dark. One gets the sense that neither time nor season matters much inside the fortified walls. It is here that THE EYE has finally run Lou Reed to ground after previous assignations foundered first in England and then in Spain, and it is exactly the sort of preserved environment in which one would expect to find this simultaneously ancient and ageless founder of 1960s Warhol-chums the Velvet Underground, this drug-abusing 1970s glam icon, avantguitarist, father to a thousand snotty punk bands and voice of Satellite of Love 2004, which entered the UK charts this week at No 10.
“I’ve been getting remixes from people in the UK for years now,” says the 62-year-old Reed, who looks remarkably fit and is surprisingly chipper and friendly for a man who has said that his dream is never to talk to another journalist again. “I’ve been saying to people: ‘Wow, why don’t they put this out? This is really good!’ Medicine 8 did a thing of mine called Murder Mystery. Almost nobody knows that Velvet Underground song, let alone (enough to) do a remix of it. And it’s really great. It’s so much better than what we did.”
A pair of these remixes — Dab Hands’ trancy chartburning Satellite of Love 2004 and Alessio’s Bertallot’s Walk on the Wild Side (Italian Version) — have been affixed to NYC Man, a new greatest hits compilation that has been assembled, remastered and sequenced by the legendarily fussy Reed himself. “I wanted to make it as though it was a new album,” he says. “Certainly, from a sound point of view, it is. For me, it’s painful to hear all the other recordings, the quality of the sound.”
Reed is if nothing else a technical man. In 1998 he released a live album — Perfect Night: Live in London — because he was so happy with an acoustic guitar tone he discovered (“the sound of diamonds,” he called it). At this point in his nearly 40-year career, many of Reed’s artistic choices seem determined by an increasingly specialised set of formal problems. Fire Music, from The Raven (2003), Reed’s collaborative tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, grew from his attempt to replicate the bleating feedback of controversial Metal Machine Music (1975) without going deaf.
It is a methodical way of making music, and well suited to the career-spanning approach of NYC Man. The collection — perhaps the best single-disc encompassment of Reed’s career — emphasises the breadth of Reed’s catalogue over the familiar 1960s and 1970s classics: the Velvets’ Rock & Roll is absent, but The Blue Heart (1982) is there. It is well suited to Reed’s live performances, too. He is currently preparing for the next round — an appearance at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, followed by a short European tour. Reed and his longtime band will stop at the Carling Apollo, West London, on August 17.
“People say: ‘It’s not as electric as (the live classic Rock‘n’ Roll Animal,” Reed says, defending the rethinkings on the poorly selling Perfect Night. “Well, of course it’s not. It’s not supposed to be. I can’t remake Rock‘n’Roll Animal.”
He pauses. “I understand the impulse, though,” he adds with a rare note of apology. “I always wish Clint Eastwood would make another Dirty Harry.
“It’s always been about figuring out what a song really is about three or four years after and figuring out these really great guitar parts that we could’ve done,” he says. “We always say that the way to do that is to go out on the road with the songs for two or three years and then go back. But I also like the excitement of doing a song for the first time, and that’s what you’re hearing (on the albums).
From a singing point of view, it’s like suddenly having some distance on the lyrics and saying: ‘Whoa, I thought that was about this, but it’s really about that.’”
As he talks, he leans into the conversation with a subtle economy of movement, occasionally flipping up the right lens of his slightly tinted glasses.
With The Raven, Reed has discovered an open-throated yowl. It is a craggily urban gothic, similarly expressive in its decay to the Southern-gentleman-on-the-skids voice Bob Dylan has been employing for several years. “On the road, from all the exercising, and doing this and that, my voice opened up,” Reed explains. “Something happened. Something good: a couple of extra notes and wider. Before, I had a choice of, maybe, three notes. And now, all of a sudden, I have nine.”
It’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t be nicer to hear The Raven’s Vanishing Act sung by the tender Reed of the mournful Berlin (1973), with his rich New York vibrato in full bloom. On The Raven, the notes disintegrate quickly (albeit gorgeously) and melodic threads are obscured. It is a fine metaphor for the sprawling two-disc album itself: less one continuous concept than a prism reflecting a series of disconnected ideas.
If Reed sometimes sounds absurd snarling lyrics such as “Edgar Allan Po-oo-e/ not exactly the boy next do’,” that’s fine. He has always sounded absurd, from his between-verse grunts on Rock and Roll through to the bumbling hip-hop of The Original Wrapper (1986).
He has always been absurd, too. In the 1970s, he pretended to shoot up on stage. More recently, he has brought his t’ai chi master Ren Guang Yi on tour to demonstrate the sabre form during recitations from The Raven. It is a strange combination, really: a 19th-century American horror writer, a martial arts master, and an avant-garde cacophony (not to mention a weather-beaten rock ’n ’ roll legend). Most ardent Reed fans seem to have one or two moments like these in their pockets, when Reed’s pretensions crash gloriously into the comic. But that’s part of the appeal.
The reason Reed is revered isn’t for his willingness to act the fool, but for his unrelenting seriousness. “Door” and “Poe” is an awful rhyme, and Reed bellows it, fully committed to the lyric. The pomposity is hilarious, but — as the molten guitars and the muscular horn arrangement by the trumpeteer Steven Bernstein testify — it rocks.
Reed seems more drawn to New York’s thriving experimental jazz scene (from which he drew both Bernstein and the touring cellist Jane Scarpantoni) than to the dozens of local bands, such as the Strokes, who call him an ancestor. For now, anyway, Reed disavows his heritage. “It’s usually come and gone before anybody bothered to tell me,” he laughs. “And I don’t totally understand when people say that I’m their ancestor, anyway. It’s just two guitars, bass and drums. Basic.
“I have been in awe and in love with (free jazz pioneers) Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry since the first note I heard from them,” Reed says to those who might imitate him. “It’s influenced every cell in my body, but I’ll never play like them. But that idea is in me.”
And, now, with Reed again in the pop charts, the idea will be in many others. Reed and his assistant are off, getting their computers up to date for the tour and dealing with working visas for his musicians. On his way out the door, Reed’s publicist taps him on the shoulder.
“Lou, do you have another few minutes?” she asks hopefully. “What do you want?” Reed cracks dryly, his prickly side emerging for the first time, as he puts four decades of venom into the word: “An interview?”
NYC Man: Greatest Hits is out now on BMG
