feel like the center has come to you? That’s truly a critic’s kind of question. I have absolutely no idea about anything.

Is that really true, though? Do you think
your music has been something of a guide
for people to learn about behavior they might
not otherwise encounter?
[Reed stares and remains silent]

Is there a moral aspect to a song like
“Heroin”?
I don’t know what to think about something
like that. I don’t think anybody is anybody else’s
moral compass. Maybe listening to my music is
not the best idea if you live a very constricted life.
Or maybe it is. I’m writing about real things.
Real people. Real characters. You have to believe
what I write about is true or you wouldn’t pay
any attention at all. Sometimes it’s me, or a
composite of me and other people. Sometimes
it’s not me at all.

Clockwise from top: Bowie checks Lou’s breath as Mick looks on, 1973; shiny, shiny in 1975; with Laurie Anderson, 1997

Does that confuse people?
You know, I wanted to be an actor. That was my
real goal. But I wasn’t any good at it, so I wrote
my own material and acted through that. That’s
my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the
songs. But I present it to you like: This is how
it is. Simple. But a guide to doing things that
are wrong and right? I mean, Othello murders
Desdemona. Is that a guide to what you can do?
The guy in Berlin beats up his girlfriend. Is that a
guide to what you can do? Is that what you walk
away with? I don’t think so. Maybe they should
sticker my albums and say, “Stay away if you have
no moral compass.”

Let’s talk about the earliest days. In the early
’60s, you started out in what was essentially
a bar band, right?
It was a bar band. A really bad bar band. My first
regular gig was factory songwriting for [budget
label] Pickwick Records. It was real cheap, hack
stuff. Whatever was popular, I’d write an imita-
tion. Ten racing songs. Ten surfing songs. Some
of them weren’t bad. Kids find this stuff now and
then sell it online. Go figure.

“Someone will say, ‘Have you heard
that so-and-so sounds like you?’
Why? Because they sing out of key?”

with long hair to be a make-believe rock group and play a song I wrote called “The Ostrich.” Cale was one of them.

Given that you cut your teeth writing to order
and playing covers, was it difficult to develop
your own songwriting style?
That happened when I was in college [at Syracuse]
and starting to write the stuff that ended up on
the first Velvet Underground record. That was me
trying to write myself. I don’t remember if it was
the first song I wrote, but “Heroin” was the first
one where I remember saying, “I’ll leave that one
alone.” This is 1963, ’64.

Did you meet Andy Warhol soon after? That was a little later. I first met Andy when he came down to hear the Velvet Underground when we were playing on West Third Street in New York at a place called the Café Bizarre.

No. Did it hurt or help that you guys developed apart from a scene of bands? The Velvet Underground was part of Andy’s group, and Andy wasn’t part of anything. I suppose you could say he was part of Pop Art, but he was really off on his own thing. I don’t know what things would’ve been like if he hadn’t been there to support us.

How important was Warhol’s support? To have Andy Warhol say you’re on the right track…it meant a lot to me that he liked the material. It was everything.

Did the confidence you got from Warhol help
you decide to go solo?
I’ve never been superconfident about anything.
The work is never as good as it could be.

Syracuse is where you met [Velvet Under-
ground guitarist] Sterling Morrison?
Yeah, Sterling was up there. Then we moved to
New York. I met [VU multi-instrumentalist John]
Cale in New York when Pickwick needed people

It’s easy to think of New York as this great
incubator of bands. But that wasn’t the case
for the Velvet Underground, was it?
Is this going to be all about the Velvet
Underground now?

How does an unconfident person put out
Metal Machine Music?
I’ve thought a lot about that question. If some-
thing of mine ever got popular, maybe I could’ve
stuck with that. But that was never the point. I
had other goals.