It’s rare that I get a chance to talk to the artists whose music I steal each week, so when the opportunity arises, I seize it, no matter the consequences. Recently, word got out that I’d be featuring “Waiting for Lou,” the bootleg of Lou Reed’s performance at Konserthuset, a.k.a. the Stockholm Concert Hall, on May 14, 1974. But soon after I received a call from Reed’s manager, who said his client was interested in a “chat.”
That made me nervous, since the godfather of punk isn’t known for his sunny disposition. He was described by Legs McNeil in his and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996) as being “old, and snotty, and like someone’s cranky old drunken father” when McNeil interviewed him in the mid-’70s for the first issue of Punk magazine. And director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho), who wrote for Punk and tagged along for the interview, noted Reed’s “famous nastiness” and said the interview didn’t end well “because of Lou lashing out or getting bored or whatever…. Lou started getting so hostile. I can’t remember why. He got very mad at Legs, he just hated him.”
With that in mind, I gave Lou a call a few Saturdays ago. Here’s what he had to say …
The optimistic adage that a rising tide floats all boats is less sanguine when one contemplates the obverse. As the Great Recession of 2008 spills over to 2009 with what some are predicting is going to be far worse than what we experienced in 2008, the tools government has at its disposal to address global economic crises may not be strong enough to combat the ills that ail us. In the United States, the housing bust that affected the financial markets — and is now affecting the retail sector — has global consequences. No one knows this more than people who spend their entire careers watching, examining, analyzing and writing about economic issues.