Lou Reed on Guns & Ammo

I write a song called ‘Heroin’, you would have thought that I murdered the Pope or something

- As told to Joe Smith on March 20, 1987. 

The back story and the full, unedited interview…

Sponsored

jQuery(".ssbp-input-url,.ssbp-input-url-2").on("click", function () { jQuery(this).select();});Facebook2Twitter68

The Unedited Interview

Hear more from the Joe Smith Collection at The Library of Congress and on iTunes

Generally resistant to authority and prone to mood swings, Mr. Reed troubled his parents enough that they assented to a doctor’s recommendation for weeks of electroshock therapy at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens; in 1959, while beginning his music studies at New York University, he underwent further treatment.

New York Times obit

Freeport High School, Class of  1959

Carrying a gun

carrying a gun

The animal dies with fear in his eyes

with a gun

Don’t touch him,

don’t touch him

stay away from him, he’s got a gun

Animated Transcript

Lou Reed: You know like sometimes, you’ve got to be in a place. You’re just another guy. You can just blend in. I live out in the wilds of nowhere, out in Jersey. Even there, there’s sometimes problems. College students like journey out there and show up at 11 o’clock at night, on my porch, looking into the door not saying anything. My wife and I are sitting there; it’s really creepy.

Joe Smith: Are you …?

Lou Reed: I’ve gone out with my shotgun. This is hunting country out there. You better run.

[Music]

Joe Smith: Do you ever regret that you were never totally in the mainstream, that you were out there left wing most of the time in your career?

Lou Reed: No, I started out with that in mind. People didn’t know certain things about me, which… I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing.

[Music]

Joe Smith: What are your recollections of that Velvet Underground time? You guys were avant garde, cutting edge, new stuff. When this record came out; all of a sudden, there’s this kind of recognition?

Lou Reed: Well there wasn’t any recognition. What there was, was a lot of bad press. I got a little puzzled at how savage the reaction against us was, when we got it, especially when we performed live and left New York. Like you know, “how savage and decadentâ€, da da da da; “look at what these songs are about; ‘Venus in Furs’ is about all of this.† They didn’t even know “Venus in Furs†was a book; I didn’t write it. I just said it would be interesting to take this book and put it in a song. I just wanted to cram everything into a record that these people had ignored, which left you everything.

[Music: The Velvet Underground “Venus in Fursâ€]

Lou Reed: The other thing that killed me was stuff like this had been in novels so long, it was like nothing. I write a song called “Heroinâ€, you would have thought that I murdered the Pope or something. It should have been, “now we can get a lot of people who have talent for writing and everything into rock and roll.  We’ll all write about really adult stuff.† That was what I wanted to do, is write rock and roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn’t lose anything; it would be timeless, in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics.

[Music: The Velvet Underground “Heroinâ€]

Lou Reed: We didn’t expect to sell records. That’s not what we were doing. It would have been great. It would have taken a lot of financial pressure off us. It’s not like we had money. What we had was ambition and a goal. That’s the thing you can do when you’re really young.

Joe Smith: What was the ambition and the goal?

Lou Reed: Oh. To elevate the rock and roll song, and take it where it hadn’t been taken before. I’m saying like from my point of view and I know this sounds pretentious but I just thought the other stuff couldn’t even come up to our ankles; not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level that we were on, compared to everybody else. They were just painfully stupid and pretentious. When they did try to get in quotes: “artyâ€, it  was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by stupid, I mean like The Doors.

Joe Smith: You never felt Lennon and the Beatles… did you feel that they were in a league at all?

Lou Reed: No, I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage. If you said, “who did you like?†I liked nobody.

[Music]

Lou Reed: In the old days, the Velvet Underground, we had engineers who would walk out on us. They would say, “It’s too Lou Reed, this is terrible. You know I’m going to turn the tape machine on, you guys call me when you’re finished.†I’ve spent a lot of years since then, trying to figure out a way to be able to do what I did then, without going deaf. I actually went and had my ears tested just to make sure. The guy who was testing me was a fan, which was nice, so he took the test a little further just to assuage any doubts I might have. He said, “no, you have the average high end loss for a New Yorker.â€

Joe Smith: God, it’s true.

Lou Reed: Right; for a New Yorker. It was very funny.

[Music: Lou Reed “Perfect Dayâ€]

Lou Reed: I had a lot of problems in the studio because of my background with engineers, see. A lot of my records sound like they were recorded completely dry and no one did anything, and that in fact was what it was because they would go to touch a button and I’d go, “what are you doing, man?†I have faith in my own vision, and didn’t want them to tamper with it. I thought my thing coming out badly recorded this way, is better than if these people take my voice and try to make me sound like a 14-year-old. They thin it out. I would tell them it’s like you tell a photographer, “don’t retouch this too much.†These lines, they mean something, I’m an adult, man. Don’t thin my voice out and make it like that high shit. This is the way I sound.  You’ve got to get people to understand that because they take the nuance and character out that makes the lyric believable. It’s an important thing.

Joe was a longtime record executive and the author of Off The Record.

More

Executive Producer David Gerlach

Animator Patrick Smith

Audio Producers Amy Drozdowska

Meet our team

Music

Music

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

“Venus in Furs”

“Heroin”

“Rock and Roll”

LOU REED

“Perfect Day”

Photos

P. Tufts

Phil King

Syracuse University Archives