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 …
More than 25 years ago, Steven Spielberg and a talented group of puppeteers and craftsman worked painstakingly for months to create 