Penn Jillette: I was a, Lou’s a very odd thing to me, because I I was a huge fan of Lou and I was literally president of the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society with a major in Lou Reed. There’s a lot of different Velvet Underground fans, some of the whole band. Some are Maureen Tucker fans. Some are Sterling Morrison fans. Some are John Cale fans. And some are Lou Reed fans. And I was the Lou Reed fan of Velvet Underground and really the president of the of the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society. So we came to New York City with my show, Penn and Teller, and we were playing off Broadway. And at that point, it was kind of this transition because for 10 years, Teller and I had been playing small theaters and we were doing very well, but no one knew it, you know? And we got to to New York City and all of a sudden it started to seem inappropriate to be president of a fan club. It just seemed like no one else I knew. You know, Malkovich was not president of a fan club, you know. He was working upstairs and he wasn’t really a president, you know, I guess briefly, he was the Donny Osmond fan club that had passed away long before. And so now it was me, president of the of the fan club. And there I was wide, just kind of stopped it. I had just gotten a complete collection of Lou Reed bootlegs, Velvet Underground bootlegs. I like this many 90 minute cassettes, you know, lined up on my shelf. And Lou had just said in an interview that if he ever met the person that he’d put out those bootlegs, he would punch him in the face. And there I was in New York City. And we became somewhat popular with with with New Yorkers. And all of a sudden we were tying Teller in the straight jacket in the audience, which is how our how our show opened, you know, be telling tuing Teller in a straight jacket to hang him over a bed of spikes. And I looked out in there. You know, in the in the full full Lou Reed drag, you know, the leather jacket and the sunglasses was sitting Lou Reed. So the first line of our show that that night was ____. And then Teller, who is the silent member of the group, went. “Oh, geez. That’s him. That is him, right?” And I went “Yes!” So that was the opening, this kind of weird, kind of Beckett-esque dialogue to kick off the comedy magic stylings of Penn and Teller. And we looked out and we both completely froze completely and utterly froze. Could not function. Just stood there, you know, with Teller’s strait-jacket hanging off him and me, they’re thinking, I know that I’ve written funny stuff for this particular part of the show. But Lou Reed’s in the house. And we had had, you know, serious stars in before. But this was the first time it was Lou Reed, you know. And after the show, Lou came up and said, this isn’t a magic show. This is rock and roll. And I, of course, being a cool New York suave man of six foot six and 20, 35 pounds, began crying, which really impressed Lou. I concealed it somewhat, but it was kinda like, hey, how are you dealing with tears just rolling down if ’cause Lou Reed’s talking to me! And Lou, Lou said, you know, we should we should we should hang out. And it took me about six months to get up the nerve to actually actually call him. And after hanging out with Lou a little bit, Lou finally said, you know, you you’ve really got to calm down if we’re going to be friends. And I would just be, you know, trying to memorize everything he said. And I had to give up my status as a fan, because when you collect everything Patti Smith said, you know, you can’t be a star without being a fans like clutch onto that cause she was having a slightly different relationship with Bob Dylan than I was having with Lou. But that that’s Patti Smith. American masters or American mistresses I guess it would be. So back to Lou. And I suddenly became no fun because I used to, like, have on cassette his answering machine tape that someone had copped. And now I had, like, you know, five minute ramblings on my answer machine about where to have dinner, you know, and where does that go in the collection. You know, this is the stuff that he said to Penn, you know. And I had these, you know, little scraps of anything he had ever said. And now he was like over my house. Writing stuff, so does that good framed? You just have too much stuff. All of a sudden, the rarity of the collection just drives you insane. And all of a sudden I had too much Lou Reed stuff. And I finally said to him, you know, I’ve I’ve read all your interviews. And you said that if you ever met the person who put out the Velvet Underground bootlegs, that you would punch them in the face. And Lou stood there stunned for a moment. I said, oh, don’t worry, I won’t hit you back. And he didn’t. And we discussed a little bit about the morality of bootlegging, which is very, very tricky because I’m very against even recording shows off cable that aren’t paid for. And the bootleg seems to be a kind of a collector’s thing. And you don’t make money off it. It’s an archival thing or something. It’s a very difficult question. And and undoubtedly where we differ, Lou, is right and I am wrong. So I made peace with him by giving him a copy of some of the shows which he didn’t know he’d played and we became friends. And he’s that one of those wonderful people. Usually when you’re a fan and I’m you know, I’m still a fan. If I see something I like, I write fan letters and stuff. I still really appreciate things. But most of the time, if you really like someone’s work and you get a chance to meet them, you make a very bad trade because you trade an artistic idea for a mediocre friend or acquaintance. And that that always happens. And there are very few exceptions. And with Lou, the stakes were very, very high because Lou Reed, in my mind was, because I became a fan when I was fairly young, was idealized and very, very personal. I mean, probably the most perverse part of my love of the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed and a very important point, I think, is that I’ve never had a drug in my life. I’ve never had a sip of alcohol. I’ve never even not inhaled marijuana. I’ve never been in a room with it. I’d get away. I’ve never done any sort of recreational drugs at all. I mean, any drug I’ve ever done has been administered in the hospital. And. I was a huge Lou Reed Velvet Underground fan, and and Lou had always said in interviews that it wasn’t about the drugs. And here I was living walking proof. And I was a 15 year old kid that listened to nothing but Transformer and yet had never even had a beer, you know. And so I had this. It wasn’t about drugs. It wasn’t about the lifestyle. And because you when you become a fan at 14 or 15, the artist has a little less input. The listener creates an awful lot of the world. So I had a huge vested interest in this thing that was Lou Reed. There was a very big part of me, you know, the creation thing. So first meeting him as a friend, there’s no way he could live up to that. It would be impossible. And I wish I could say he did live up to that, but that would be wrong. That would that would not even be what either of us wanted. He became a friend and we got along very well. And it took me an embarrassing amount of time to. To just be able to say that without getting all the flutter and then it just became casual and the a wonderful thing happened. And the only person that had given me a guide to this at all was was Jesse Dylan who’s Bob Dylan’s son. And he always said to me that Bob was just his father and his friend. And then he walked on stage and he was Dylan. And that he was as big a Dylan fan as anyone else, but had nothing to do with the man that he was around in day to day life. And that happened exactly with Lou in sort of a wonderful way. I, I just gained. I didn’t lose anything. When I went to see the Velvets in London, I was literally backstage making fun of Lou. I mean, joking with Lou and making fun rudely ofLou, you know. And kidding around with everybody and having a good time and telling jokes. And just as casual as you can imagine, I walked out, you know, the stage door, and I walked up into my very good Lou Reed house seats to watch the show and looked down at the stage and the lights went down. And boom! I had Lou Reed back again, you know. I had the Lou Reed from when I was fifteen. I had the John Cale from when I was 15. The Maureen Tucker, you know. And it all came back. It all blasted over me. It all was everything I wanted. And the fact that it happened to be a friend up there playing guitar, there was some part of my brain that couldn’t access that. I could not take away that Lou Reed, that and I hope this is understandable and seem presumptuous, but the Lou Reed that we had built together, you know. Lou Reed, the artist and this fifteen year old kid, had built this Lou Reed together. And even though we were friends and kidding around that I, you know, try to make him laugh to milk comes out his nose, even though we had that kind of relationship, I still had the the Lou Reed that meant everything to me. And it was a great show. And if you saw the Velvet show it was a good…

Penn Jillette: A lot of people listening to Lou Reed sing first person believe that he’s singing first person. I didn’t have to learn that he wasn’t and I didn’t learn that from the interviews. I learned that from reading fiction. And it’s one of these things that just confuses me why Shakespeare can put words in people’s mouths and movies can put words in people’s mouth and Schwarzenegger can go out and shoot cops. And all of a sudden, if that’s done, first person in in music, all of a sudden it becomes an op ed piece. It’s it’s just nutty. And I never reacted to it that way, which is why I had to learn like this foreign culture where art is first person in Poe and we don’t believe that he actually heard this nutty heart going, but as soon as it’s first person in and I am I’m afraid for this particular idea, Lou, is not the best example. The best example is, is Ice-T. The best example is the rappers. And I think that they get a little more of a problem for Lou got more of a problem, as he was earlier. And the rappers get more of a problem because I think just racism. But I even Heroin, you know, I mean, I’d even read that, Lou, you know, did heroin. But the song Heroin is not about the heroin, Lou did you know? I’m not sure he wanted to sail a clipper ship and wear a little hat. Whoever this character was doing heroin wanted to wear the little hat, but I’m not sure. I never saw Lou running around the village in a little hat. And it’s not that hard to wish. You don’t need heroin to wear a little hat. But the point is, you know, even Street Hassle, you know, when Street Hassle came out and which I’m one of those people who believes many people will tell you that the that the best work was was with the Velvet Underground. I’m one of those nuts that thinks that the best work is now. And and if I had to pick an old Lou Reed thing to love, it would be the Street Hassle trilogy. And that’s all first person, you know, and it goes from. It even changes sex and, you know, or it’s kind of third person or change changes sex. But the point of view does change. And I don’t know why that’s hard for people. I don’t know why all of a sudden the one people working in pop songs are the only people who do you know, as I said, op ed pieces in the middle of art. It just seems completely nutty. And you listen to those Velvet Underground songs. That’s the ones you mostly get blamed for. You listen to Heroin and Waiting for the Man and Sister Ray. All of that. And it seems crystal clear to me that you have someone who’s, you know, hanging out at the Factory, hanging out in New York City and paying attention and hearing snippets of speech and distorting snippets of speech and putting it together. And then, you know, doing stuff you don’t even like to talk about, like making it rhyme and making the meter work and pushing things around like that. And you have those little snippets of reality. I mean, you know that there is a Candy and, you know,q there is a Little Joe and, you know, there is a sugar plum fairy. And I guess that makes people nuts, but it’s exactly the same as when you’re watching, pick something, Independence Day, and you see a shot of the White House. That doesn’t mean you’re all of a sudden in a documentary. Yes, there is a White House, but but it doesn’t mean that flying saucers attacked. Yes, there is. Yes, there is, Little Joe. You know, there is Joe D’Allesandro doesn’t mean that everything that happened in that song happened the same way. They’re just characters and pieces and little bits. And I’ve never understood why Lou had a problem with that, why people would come along and go “Oh, I don’t…” And it’s also the preaching thing. Why do they think that anything that’s said in pop music is preaching? I mean, Heroin does not say, you know, just say no. You really shouldn’t do it and speed up on the drum. It says stuff about heroin, and I don’t think it’s saying do it or don’t do it, I don’t think that’s an issue. I I think that there are more important things than telling people to do drugs or not. Because in the first place, telling people to do drugs, you know, isn’t going to work. I had many people telling me to do drugs. I didn’t. I’ve seen many other people be told not to do drugs who did. It doesn’t seem like there’s a linear correlation. It’s just bad math. And. And so the Lou’s stuff, the most important part of Lou’s stuff was if Bob Dylan brought in, you know, surreal imagery and and then, you know, made that more pop from folk, what Lou did was bring in the short story. And if you want to look at at Lou Reed, you want to look at Dion, you know, and you want to look at all the all that that kind of stuff. I think even the girl groups, all that kind of stuff that really that pop thing that hit his ear. But then you’ve got to go, and this is this is not much digging. He’ll mention Delmore Schwartz probably in the first three minutes you interview him. That’s what it is. It’s short stories and those short story writers did the exact same thing. They would pick characters. You know, if you ever know anybody that writes short stories, you show up there, you know, all of a sudden wait a minute it’s my apartment. You know, it doesn’t mean they’re writing about you. You know, that’s the very hard thing to understand. But it should be it should be simple. It should be obvious. You have to say that this is this is a piece of art and the digging around and deciding what exactly is fiction and what exactly is real or what came from where is is not the work of a fan that’s pathological because you’re trying to make fiction into fact and you can’t do that. Once Lou, if Lou were to write a song that mentioned Penn Jillette by name, I would understand that wasn’t about Penn Jillette. I might still brag about it, but I would know I was lying.

Interviewer: I’d like you to talk to me as the…

Penn Jillette: Name for Canada. Made in the U.S. Canada Dry. Is it bottled in the U.S.? I’m listening to you. Just keep yapping away. It’s better than getting it from the government. Live by the feds. Die by the feds.

Interviewer: As former president of the Velvet Underground appreciation society, can you talk to me about this sort of…it’s impossible to really make a fact out of this, but Lou’s solo career continued after the Velvets. Did that bring interest? In a way. the Velvets almost…I could say they might have died in a way, but they didn’t because Lou kept playing those songs. Can you talk about that? Do you think there’s any sense in that that Lou’s career kept developments going and brought them to a new generation?

Penn Jillette: I don’t know who who said this, what’s become a cliche now that, you know, whatever the number is, very few people saw the Velvet Underground, but every one of them started the band. I think that’s really true. I think that what kept the Velvet Underground alive is that everything on the radio that was a knockoff of the Velvet Underground. So in some cases, the second or third generation, because, you know, generations and rock are very, very short. But the bands now, you know, you hear that stuff, it’s almost starting to be that Lenny Bruce thing is happening where you listen to the Lenny Bruce stuff and go so? You know, and you don’t realize it. It’s because at least 50 people made entire careers ripping off little snippets or ripping off is too strong, but, you know, learning from Lenny and changing that and, you know, George Carlin is brilliant in his own right, but I don’t know if you’d have George Carlin without Lenny Bruce. I’m sure George Carlin would say that. I’m not not saying bad stuff about him. And with Lou Reed, that’s really, really true. I don’t think you would have anything called alternative if the Velvet Underground. Hadn’t come along. I mean, they were there’s the there’s the folk rock. There’s the psychedelic. There’s that, you know, that hippie awful Grateful Dead meandering. There’s all that stuff going on. And then on the on the on kind of chunky, mean, leathery short story, you know, those things come together. Short story side, which is very different from like Steppenwolf in the 60s, all you have is the Velvets, you know. Out of New York City at the same time, you had The Lovin Spoonful. That’s the big competition out of New York City for that time, you know, is is The Lovin Spoonful or the Velvet Underground. So you had this one band, you know, even Hendrix, you least had Cream and all this other stuff coming out doing that. But Velvets were the one thing. So I think that the Velvets’ place and the Velvets’ memory was was set in stone because of that. Then Lou Reed went on and had a career for people who’d never heard of the Velvets. I mean, he had he had Transformer and Walk on the Wild Side. And out of that, you go back and you buy the first record, and that first record solo of Lou has some Velvet Underground ish tunes on it. Some things literally Velvet Underground written at that time. And then it goes on and you get the darker you get the short story and eventually you find a way back in. And I think that what Lou’s solo career did was stop the Velvet Underground from being a museum piece. I think if if there had not been an important solo career of of Lou and also, you know, also of John and also much later for Mo, if there had not been that, we would look back on that and kind of a musty way. But because you could go back to Loaded and hear a version of Sweet Jane as opposed to the version of Sweet Jane, I think that made it seem it kept the Velvets still going. And and when they get back together, the most amazing thing about seeing the shows in London in 93, 92, 93, 93, the most amazing thing about that was the complete and utter lack of nostalgia. And I got to tell you, I expected some. I was too young to have been at the shows. You know, they did play near my hometown in Massachusetts, but I was wouldn’t be allowed in. It was 18 and I was a little under that. So I, I, I had never seen them, but I expected there to be that feeling that you get. I mean, when you go and see a band, I’m sure it’s all you get when you go and see Crosby Stills and whatever. You get that Oh, this is where I was. This is what I was thinking. And what I found was I was hearing stuff like Venus in Furs in an arrangement that wasn’t incredibly different. I mean, it wasn’t like Dylan where you couldn’t recognize it, you know, it was Venus in furs. And this is a song that I’ve heard while certainly thousands of times that I won’t take a guess at how many. And that I certainly have images from my life of what that meant to me and things that happened and where it was. And yet there was something else I was hearing. It seemed completely, completely here and now. And I guess part of that is kind of a sad thing, because I think if I’d heard the Velvets in in 66, 67, it wouldn’t have been here and now would have been what is this? And that’s something very wonderful about that. And I think there was a certain lack of shock just because everybody had caught up. But All the stuff that you say, you know, you say stuff like all this Velvet Underground band. Here’s a band that in 30 years, people are really going to be. You don’t ever expect that to be true. You didn’t really expect Nixon to be impeached, you know? I mean, you didn’t really expect that Clinton was just a crook. You know? You didn’t really expect that we would. You say it all the time. Every party. Oh. Clinton’s just a crook. You could brought him in handcuffs. When it really happened, you kind of go wow! You know, when Richard Nixon finally said, hey, I’m out of here. You kind of webt well, I’ve been saying that for two years, but now he’s doingit. And the Velvet Underground, I probably said hundreds of times well in 30 years, the Velvet Underground. And then there it was. There it was happening. You know, I lucked out this time. And it was amazing to see a show that had that hadn’t really happened for like I was going to say thirty years, but yes, twenty years is the real number. Or twenty three. And a show that hadn’t happened in that amount of time. And to feel absolutely no nostalgia.

Penn Jillette: There was a show that ran on Broadway called Legs about Legs Diamond that was considered to be the worst musical ever done. That can’t be true. There’s Cats, but at least it was hyped as the worst musical. That was the advertising campaign they shifted it to like Showgirls when we were just kidding. That’s what we’re really we’re really doing camp. We were just before we just put out straight because that’s how how dedicated to the camp thing we were. But really, we’re Russ Meyer. We were we weren’t trying to do bound failed. We were trying to do Russ Meyer. They did this thing with Legs. And because I was playing or just finished or just started Broadway at the time was kind of in that circle, someone said we should go see legs. And they said that they had tickets and we would go and we would meet at a certain time and place to see Legs. And I said, okay. And then I got a call from Lou. I didn’t know Lou that well. We had we had had lunch a few times and chatted a little bit, and I was still kind of nervous. And Lou said, you know, do you want to come over this evening? And I went, yes, I, I have to make a phone call and could not get the person on the phone to tell them I couldn’t go to see Legs. And I just could not not show up. That’s just wrong. So I went to see Legs, having told Lou, I can’t come over tonight, Beav. I have to go. I have to go see Legs and I get home from Legs, which, incidentally, just for the record, wasn’t good. If if that shows up on American Masters, probably not the first one you want to talk to is Penn Jillette and Peter Allen’s dead, so you put that an American Masters, you’re screwed. But I went to see Legs and I got home and I called Lou, you know, it’s like, you know, midnight said I was busy this evening, couldn’t I? This will be the first time, if he watches this show, that he’ll find out that I was going to see Legs that night because I told them, you know, well my mother has liver cancer. So she got liver cancer for this two and a half hours. And then I have to tend to her. And then I’ll be back to being your friend. And I. I said, you know what was up? And Lou said, I just finished this album, New York, and I wanted to play it for you. And I said, oh, you finished recording it? And he said, no. I’ve just finished writing it, and I just want to play it for you on guitar to kind of bounce it off you. And I said, got a gun? And if I were a man, I’d be Kurt Cobain and all over the place and you just have footage on the Web that would be all you would have of me. But then, you know, year and a half later, New York came out and I was working. We were doing this nutty, you know, year and a half Penn and Teller tour all over. And so I was at a radio station being being interviewed, you know, pimping my little magic show. And the deejay said, well, you got to the dj’s always do that. What’s in the news, Robin? Well, we got a special treat for you here. And they brought out their advance copy of New York. I also had an advance copy of New York but had to be forwarded and stuff. And on the air, I listen to New York for the first time. They just said we’re gonna take a block of time and listen to New York with with Penn. And it was really stunning. And like the vindication of the Velvet Underground being 26 years ahead of their time, there was also the vindication here because this was a pure short story album and I’ve talked to Lou about where some of those short stories came, and it’s really unimportant. It’s insignificant and here because not a lot of it is first person, people caught on a little easier. It was really funny, instead of going first person. He went third person, and all of a sudden people said, oh he’s writing a short story. It’s like, you know, what do you need? You need a guidebook? And the name, New York, calling an album, New York is incredibly presumptuous. And you really had to know that you had the goods. And fortunately, when he named it, he didn’t know that one of his friends had chosen to see Legs instead of hearing it, or maybe the name would have been A Few Songs by Lou, a little more gentle. But since he didn’t know he went with New York, which is very presumptuous and probably shouldn’t be done unless you sure you have the goods. And I think Lou knew that, he had the cover, he had all this time that he hadn’t put anything out, and then came this beautiful short story album that also even in the mix said, I’m not messing around. It says right in the back where his guitar is with the other guitar is and it is played not literally live, but without the vocals, literally live in many places and with the vocals, I think literally live in two places. And it really does give a feeling of New York, but more important than that, it really does hearken back to the New York short story form. I mean, I think that’s directly in line with, you know, Delmore, Schwartz and Dorothy Parker. I think it just comes all the way through that, just telling stories about New York and it’s really wonderful. And there are. I am the kind of person who is a fan, so I can’t sit say, you know, the only music I ever listened to was Lou Reed. I listen to a lot and there’s a certain point where a good fan should become an apologist. That’s part of your job when you really have been touched by someone’s work and then something new comes out, you are supposed to invest much more time than the average person. You are supposed to be, the one that understands, even if others don’t. And you should work and you should learn because it’s good for you. It’s good to understand artistic commitment. It’s good to stretch. And there were albums of Lou’s that there if they had been the first thing I heard, I wouldn’t like. I wouldn’t have seen the depth. I wouldn’t have seen the intelligence. Wouldn’t have liked the tunes. But I committed to that. And and then grew to like them. Some of them are examples of some of my favorite albums were albums at the first listen didn’t grab me. But New York. New York is one that the first time I listened to that, if I had never heard of Lou Reed, if I had never been a Velvet Underground, that album would have knocked me into next week. It was it was an adult album, which is very rare and very hard to do. And then he was gonna even go further in that realm with Magic and Loss. And it’s really hard because rock and roll is marketed and financially done, now it used to be 14, 15 year olds, now with MTV, it’s eight and nine year olds. And if you’re listening to rap music, that is you know, that is a direct competition with the Power Rangers. It’s, you know, big guys running around, beating up other guys. That’s that’s all you want to hear when you’re eight. That’s important. That’s what you’re thinking about. That’s good. I mean, I’m not saying anything bad about that. Gangsta rap is exactly the Power Rangers, and they’re both good. Those are important are vital things for kids to be thinking about, who beats up whom and why. And that’s going to be important their whole life. It’s going to become not physical in another two or three years, but it’s still important. It’s part of our monkey brain. We have to handle that. It’s very, very good. But to be able to take a form that is essentially uninteresting. I mean, rock and roll is the most limited form of music we’ve ever had. I mean, fugue has all these rules, but they are not as strict as rock and roll. In rock and roll, you can’t bring the tempo out of this small little range. You’ve got to stay with major chords, get a seventh you know if you look, maybe, but a 7th. You know what I mean and you’ve got to play the Chuck Berry and the Howling Wolf root licks and you have to just, you know, invert them, but you still have to play them. And you’ve got to be in the box and the guitar and you’ve got nothing that you can you know, even if you do a song without the bass drum on two and four, you might not have a hit, you know what I mean? And you have to pretend to be far outstay within this very small area. And then if on top of that, you don’t want to talk, talk to either I’m very left out an alienated or I want to have sex badly or I want to beat you up if you want to get off those three subjects, which I’m not putting down. Those are important subject to kids and they should be explored constantly. And they are thanks to MTV doing a wonderful public service and also selling hair care products and some of them quite fine. If you want to deal with adult themes and the music you’ve got is this tiny little box, people have said classical people, snobs, that rock and roll has no subtlety. And that’s a good point, except that it’s exactly backwards. Rock and roll has nothing but subtlety. And because New York, you know, as as Lou once said to me, you know, when he was we were doing some music awards thing, he was going out to play Dirty Boulevard and he said these are the these are the same three chords from the first song I wrote, you know? Bach didn’t have that limitation, you know, The Art of Fugue, he uses different chords than he used early on, you know? He was able to grow that way. Lou’s not given that option. He’s he’s decided to be the rock and roll animal. He makes his living in a rock and roll, rock and roll venues. He has to stay within this little tiny box, you know, if art thrives in its limitation, it should be living in rock and roll because there’s no more limited form ever, ever. You know, even jokes have a broader a broader form than than rock and roll. And he, with New York, was able to tell these very complex, very emotional stories without breaking outside the box. You know, he doesn’t do, there’s nothing even slightly self indulgent. There’s nothing even slightly perverse for the sake of being perverse. You know, there’s not even the the trick Stravinsky uses to say, I’m doing a lot of dissonance here, just wake up. He doesn’t even do that. You know, he he takes the sound of the guitar instead of pushing it over here, he goes deeper into it and finds a more quintessential, and that’s very bad grammar. Forgive me. A more intense rock and roll sound. He’s going within the sound instead of outside of it, which is always the hard way, the work. And lyrically, you know, he’s still got, he’s still got the rhymes. He’s still got the rhythms. There’s no place where the meter is exceptionally interesting, like some of the stuff he was doing on Street Hassel. It stays pretty much Four-Square, you know, with the Lou thing he’s even doing less of the singing flat thing that he did on Transformer to get your attention. It’s it’s just right down there. And yet he does something that’s that’s beautiful and touching while wearing, you know, leg manacles and handcuffs and straight jacketed in this form of rock and roll. He really does that. I think it’s a it’s one of those really rare, rare pieces of art that you can play to people that don’t like the form. I mean, there’s certain Stravinsky stuff, people that hate classical music, you put on The Rite of Spring that they know it’s great, you know. People that hate jazz, there’s this certain Miles stuff, you put it on. They still like it. People that hate country Western music, yodu put on David Allen Coe, they’re paying attention. And this is one of those rare things that if you said to me, you know, I really hate rock n roll. It’s it’s it’s pimply. It panders. It’s it’s just not rich ever. And ‘course you’re right. It just happens that I’m a fan, but you’re right if you say that, I would put on New York cold with no apologies and say, OK, but this is good art. Rock n roll is no good. This is OK. That’s not true for everything Lou did. You know, I’m not I’m not going to be nutty about it, but that’s one where he he got lucky, you know. Lou can always, always, to quote the Village Voice, kinda sorta turn out to B- turn out a B, you know. He he’s that good that he can always do that out of the gate, but this is where he got those little bit of lucky on top of that. And did the and then did Magic and Loss right afterwards, which are Magic and Loss, when it came out, I’d never had anyone close to me die. And it it ripped my heart out in what it was saying about friendship and about magic and loss and addressing something very important to me, which is trying to fight off superstition. There’s something very deep within us that wants us to be religious. Wants us to be superstitious. Wants us to be racist. Wants us to steal. Wants us to rape. Wants us to kill. That’s nature. That’s natural. If you want to go back to nature, you’ve got raping, killing, stealing. What we have in the modern world is suppressing those things. What our culture does is stop violence and does a really good job at it. We also have the same level of evil. We have this feeling, this inclination towards wanting the supernatural, wanting something religious. And a lot of people, the majority actually. Ninety two percent in this country. Give in to that. And in times of trouble, give in to that even more. And then there’s the the pro science percentage, which I like to count myself among, that will not give into that no matter what. You know, if I had one wish would be to die slowly in a lot of pain to prove I won’t crowd to God. We’ll never do it. So the art that’s given to you from the atheists deals with that pro science strength against superstitious. Yes, I’m superstitious, but I hadn’t really found a work thing that explored the what some skeptics called the transcendental temptation. The the the weak times when you really want to believe in that. And it’s remarkable that Lou finds that part of his monkey brain that wants to be religious. It goes too far with it for my taste. You know, it’s not my album its his. It goes too far with it, for my taste succumbs to a little bit too much, goes a little bit too much to mythology and little bit too much to the supernatural. And then kinds of comes around. And part of it is because of how much he loved Doc Pomus, you know. And I think that Doc, who was a skeptic and who didn’t believe in that. Lou’s memory of Doc kept pulling him down. And that wonderful, wonderful tension there, which I was able to be made tearful as an observer. This year, a one of my closest friends died. No foul play, no bad living. His heart just stopped at a young age and. Was very, very, very hard. As anyone who’s lost someone they loved knows. And I would walk by the CD rack, you know, and magic and loss was just there all the time. And I have 100 C.D. Changer in my home that’s playing all the time and Magic and Loss was was in there. And without ever saying this to myself. This is the first time I’ve even thought of it, a few days after Barry died, I just walked through my library where the C.D. player is just pulled out Magic and Loss and put it in so that it wouldn’t be coming up in surprising me with that feeling of calling a number that’s no longer in service. And then flying on the airplane out to here, I was, you know, I got my my Toshiba and it plays, CD’s. And so I now have a 12 pound C.D. player I can take on the airplane with an hour and a half battery life. And I put Magic and Loss in, you know. And I went in slow. You know, I waited till I had an awful lot of maintenance to do. Changing passwords and moving things from one form to another and giving everything all organized, a lot of busy work to take care of part of that and kind of put in magic and loss without telling myself I was really putting, you know. And then closed it up and. There it came on with those chords at the beginning and. What good is a disease that won’t kill you? No good. No good at all, you know. And then the ending of what’s good, life’s good and. I allowed myself to kind of slide in to first person, if you will, on the on the record and kind of feel that. And if we’re going to judge and who asked us someone’s work, we want to judge Magic and Loss from the outside. Not from someone, not from the cheap sentimentalism of someone who’s lost someone close to them. We want to do that. And we did that. I did that. And it was very good and very valid and very powerful and very intellectual. And now it’s been two and a half months since my friend died. And now I look at it from the inside and it’s. It’s a wonderful tonic because it’s an adult tonic. It’s a grown-up tonic and it allows you grief and it doesn’t give you a cheap, easy monkey brain way out. There are no angels at the end. It’s not cheesy and disingenuous like the Hallelujah Chorus. It’s it’s it’s honest and it’s real and made more powerful from the fact that Barry was another huge Velvet Underground. For other reasons, we were we were good friends. And Lou, talking about that was was really important and stunning to me that those kind of I’m 42 years old, that those kind of adult themes can also be dealt with. I mean, how how is it that someone’s career can span that when I was 14 years old, it spoke to me and I was 14 years old and I had problems like, you know, who beats up whom? And, boy, I would like to have sex. And boy, I feel left out. And that spoke to me. And now I’m 42 years old and my problems are, you know, how do I get to the airport after that stupid interview? And I’m a little hungry and my friend died. And that’s still the same the same performer still speaks to me. It’s astonishing. And we’ve had not that many people. I mean, if you want to talk about the century, maybe a hundred, you know, I mean, I guess for most famous person of the century and the one who talked to the most people, I guess Houdini is going to win. You know, you don’t look in the dictionary. It doesn’t say pull an Elvis anywhere. It doesn’t say full of Marilyn. Probably Houdini wins. But the number of people who have spoken to other people for a big hunk of time comes down to, I think, maybe double digits, maybe low triple digits. You know, all you need is the order of magnitude for a Nobel Prize. And Lou is in among there. And it’s really amazing that in the field of rock and roll, you can you can say things that still mean things to people for 30 years. And there’s other people. I mean, there’s the Rolling Stones. You’re a wonderful example of somebody that served the same function. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 year olds may be in certain rural areas up to 21. They they will always speak to that group like every 12 year old boy will always buy Stairway to Heaven. And that’s valid. And that’s really, really good. But the people that are still relevant as you get older, I mean, you’d certainly have to put Bob Dylan on that list, although I think he also fades away because the alienation is so strong. But what we learn is the personal stuff. The chances of a Venn diagram that completely maps with personal stuff is pretty low. The chance that that my Venn diagram is going to match yours. What you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, what you’re doing. But the short story form just shifting it off a little bit. Not writing anthems, rock and roll aside, not writing anthems, but but writing. But writing short stories gives you a certain kind of longevity and a certain kind of depth that’s um that’s surprising and really, really wonderful. I would like to say that when I was 14, I knew that Lou would still mean something to when I was 42. And. I would have said that, but it’s surprising that that it’s actually true.