Lou Reed was never one for conversation but when Joe Smith sat down Reed in 1987 he found the grumpy rock star in a talkative and articulate mood.
Reed opened up about his life including a story about fans that would turn up at his house in New Jersey at 11pm and look through the window while he was watching TV. “I live out in the wilds of nowhere, out in Jersey and sometimes college students 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 was really creepy, I got out my shotgun. You better run,” he said.
Of The Velvet Underground, he says they were shunned by the critics in their early days. “There wasn’t any recognition,” he said. “What there was was a lot of bad press. I got a little puzzled about how save the reaction against us was. How ‘savage’ and ‘decadent’ and ‘look at what these songs are about’. They didn’t even know ‘Venus In Furs’ was a book. I didn’t write it. I just said “we should take this book and out it in a song”. I write a song like ‘Heroin’ and you’d think I murdered the Pope”.
Reed hated The Beatles. “I never liked The Beatles. I thought they were garbage. If you asked who I like … nobody,” he said in the interview.
Listen to the 1987 Lou Reed interview by Joe Smith
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