Classic Albums: Lou Reed - Transformer (2001) - full transcript

It's just a little moment in time,
that's the fun of a record,

but it's just this very ephemeral thing
that happens to be captured.

You're not there any more. It's acting.

Transformer, for me,
is a total timeless album

that I'll still be playing when I'm 76.

I really wanted it to work for him

and be a memorable album
that people wouldn't forget.

Transformer hones in
on a very specific sense of identity.

And I think
David had a lot to do with shaping it

because the album is somewhat of a tribute
to the Warhol scene.

The great thing about Transformer
is that it sounds great now



because it was not made to sound like 1972.

And what he was singing about,

of course,
if my mother could've understood I,

she would have been absolutely appalled.

I don't know what people get opened up to.

I was just writing about people I knew
and where I come from.

We're sponsoring a new band.
It's called the Velvet Underground.

And we're trying...

Since I don't really believe
in painting any more,

I thought
it would be a nice way of combining,

and we have this chance
to combine music and art.

I'd written most of the stuff before
I met him with similar interests.

It was like a hand in a glove.
And he just said I was lazy.

He said,
"How many songs did you write today?"



And I said, "Five."

He said, "Why didn't you write 107?
You're so lazy. You're just lazy.

"You should be writing all the time."

And so, I really admired
and do admire him to this day.

There's no telling
where the group might have gone

had Andy not met or heard the music,
or met the group.

It seemed almost fated

that the group would be
essentially connected with Andy Warhol.

Andy was really supporting us.
He got us equipment.

And we would go to The Factory
and Andy would feed everybody.

He'd just take everybody out and he would
pay for it by doing some commercial art.

The Factory was a place where Andy

made paintings and shot films.

It was a centre
where people would gather from time to time

and exchange creative ideas,
kind of a laboratory.

Most bands of the time were either writing
songs about love or how to get a girl,

and the Velvets were like
a true newsreel footage.

And they also seemed to be
pushing the boundaries of rock

toward a place that was almost akin
to something like free jazz.

The Velvet Underground,
you could actually sit there

and actually work out the song
in about 10 minutes,

and then the lyrics were so amazing,
So you memorised them.

And you were off,
running around Britain with a guitar.

The Velvet Underground were really
the seminal band for so many musicians.

There's that old expression
that they didn't sell a lot of records,

but everyone who bought one started a band.
And in a sense, it's very true.

If that's true, I wish they'd
give me a piece of the royalties,

but I don't know if that's true.

I never cared about credibility
except from me. That's all.

We always thought we were the best,
and I still do.

When Lou left the Velvets,
he literally disappeared.

He played Max's one night in August of 1970
and he was gone the next.

Went back to Long Island,
worked for his father's firm.

He literally walked away from everything.

There'd been a real problem
with management.

I went off to lick my wounds.

My mother told me when I was in school,
she said,

"You should take typing
so you have a profession to fall back on."

At that time, it wasn't such mega news

that it would reach
Sunderland's weekly newspaper.

It was more, suddenly a record came out

that wasn't the Velvet Underground,
but it was Lou Reed.

It was not representative of his sound.

It was made in London, it's made
with all these classy British session men.

Rick Wakeman plays on it.

Here's a guy from Yes, ultimately gonna be
in Yes, playing on a Lou Reed record.

The first record was a flop,
"So go make another one."

In those days, they gave you a chance.
You could go make another one.

I think that, from what I understand,

Lou and Bowie had met and were friendly,
and certainly had many things in common.

And whoever's idea it was to put
them together, it's a brilliant idea.

David was in town, we got introduced.

I think the record label thought
he was very contemporary.

And I thought all the records that
sounded good were coming out of London.

I was petrified

that he said yes, he would like
to work with me in the producer capacity,

because I had so many ideas

and I felt so intimidated by my knowledge
of the work that he'd already done.

Even though there's sort of only
that much time between us,

it seemed like
Lou had this great legacy of work.

Lou wanted to reach the pop audience

that David was skyrocketing on at the time.

And David was consciously placing himself
within the artistic tradition of the Velvets.

I never had kids
screaming at me particularly.

They'd scream at David, not at me.

Me, they would throw
syringes and joints on the stage.

Isn't that a great line?

Having someone like Bowie
help him get that kind of attention,

get him the marquee value
of a producer's name.

Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson,
that's valuable coin.

I remember meeting him at Max's Kansas City

and then he came
round to the hotel a couple of times

and we'd sit around and talk about
the production of the Transformer album

and he'd sit and play a new song

and try and put it on a little
tape recorder or something.

With Rono and David,

there was a real

simpatico, which is certainly part of
the situation I had in the Velvets

and was miles above where I'd been
on the first Lou Reed record

where there was nothing simpatico.

So we were gonna go to London again.
This time with David and Rono.

The thing about Transformer is
that it's not like a faux Velvets record.

It was not full of old Velvets songs
that he was working his way through.

This was new stuff.
It was an entirely new project.

I couldn't be in the direction
of the Velvet Underground

'cause only the Velvet Underground
could make that sound,

and I didn't have a band.

So I was gonna be stuck
with studio musicians.

David phoned up and said,

"Have you ever heard of a band
called Velvet Underground?"

I said, "I think so."

And he said, "One of the guys, Lou Reed,
wants to do an album,

"and it's at Trident Studios. Do you
want to do it? It's three days' work."

It was really good fun.
I really enjoyed myself in the studio.

Lou Reed sat in the corner somewhere.
I can't remember ever seeing him actually.

I don't remember seeing him there at all,
but he was there somewhere,

in a gloomy corner with dark glasses on
and dressed in black.

I just ran over the songs with them.

By that,
I mean the chord structure and the melody.

Vicious is a song that has its origins
in Reed's relation with Andy Warhol.

He said, "Why don't you
write a song called Vicious?"

I said, "'Vicious'? What kind of vicious?"

He said, "Vicious, I hit you with a
flower," and I thought, "What a great idea."

The whole set-up for this was to try
and make it a lot more basic

than a lot of the Bowie things
that we'd done in the past.

And we just started off with bass drums,
two guitars,

and some of the tracks
had more overdubs than others.

This particular one, Vicious,
it was kept sparse.

And there was an effect that we tried that
I don't think was used in the mix at all,

but it's still on the multi-track.

It's a backwards echo on the...

Gives this effect.

Altogether, it becomes...

Lou was so laid back.

He'd walk into the studio and go, "Hey."

Sit down on the chair, put his guitar on...

It'd be all out of tune.

They'd be, "We're ready."
But his guitar's way out of tune.

And I'd wander off and tune it up a bit

and Lou used to look at me like,
"Yeah, okay."

He didn't really care whether it was in
tune or whether it was out of tune, really.

He just wanted to sing the song.

The thing with Rono is, I could
very rarely understand a word he said.

He had a Hull accent.
He'd have to repeat things five times.

But a really sweet guy.

A great guitar player, a really sweet guy.

I find out what the songs are about

when I do them out loud in front
of an audience, actually performing them.

And over the years, I realise
Satellite Of Love is really about jealousy.

That's what I think it's about,
but I could be wrong.

Just 'cause I wrote it,
it doesn't mean I know what it's about.

It's a wonderful song essentially
about obsession, about stalking.

And yet, it's really a beautiful ballad

that also brings out the romance
that's at the heart of the obsession.

This is somebody
who just is following someone everywhere

'cause they don't trust them,

but that lack of trust
is based in complete devotion.

It's also got that
weird little humour in it,

that whole bridge, "I've heard that you've
been out with Harry, Mark and John,"

whoever they are. Tom...

Whoever this person is,
she's out with everybody.

When I hear Satellite Of Love,

I think of all those kids standing
on the street corners of Brooklyn

when I was a mere tad

hitting notes and harmonising
and trying to sing Stormy Weather.

To me, it's the doo-wop Lou, which
is a very sweet and tender part of him.

Satellite, that's David.

David's amazing
at background vocal parts. That...

That's okay, that's really great,

but the really great thing
is the high note at the end.

Very few people could do that.
I just loved when he did that.

It was just... What a move.

See, I think everything
is really about details

and that was the exclamation mark,
I thought,

when he goes up like that.
Very few people could do that.

Really pure and beautiful.

There he goes. Isn't that great?

It's that note.

That might have been me. My God.

I think the concept of Transformer
is very important

because, in a sense, that's what
the Warhol scene offered to people,

these odd misfits to transform
and become their inner beauty,

whatever strange and eccentric forms
that might take.

What Lou was writing from

were experiences
that went back to The Factory.

When he was sitting in The Factory and
observing this parade of people walking in

and just coming from all kinds of
strange corners of culture and society,

and watching them interact and mingle

and try and make lives for themselves
in this freak show.

In the beginning,
it was bunch of drug-type people,

and then when I went to work there, it was
my job to get rid of all of those people.

And then it was just people
that would do one day in a film with him

and they would hang on for years
and years and years.

I was a kid. I was 15 years old.
All I wanted to do was learn.

And everyone just kept on wanting
to have my body

and I went, "I don't want... I don't!

"All wanna do is learn. I wanna grow."

But nobody listens to a child.

I used to keep a notebook,
but that was just to put down good lines.

Like, people would say really funny things.

But I hadn't thought
about writing about them,

I don't know why I wrote about them.

You know, I actually, I've always thought
of it more like a story thing.

There is a book
by an author called Nelson Algren

called Walk On The Wild Side.

The book deals with the dregs of society,
as it were, the down-and-out.

And this seemed to be a connection
that Lou had made.

I read the book.
It's quite a book, to say the least.

And I was working with these guys
that wanted to make a play out of it

and they said, "There should be a song here
and maybe a song here,

"and there's gotta be a title song."
So I was writing a title song.

And then they got this offer
to go do Mahogany and they said, "See ya."

So I had a song
called Walk On The Wild Side.

So I re-wrote it and I put in everybody
from The Factory, Warhol's Factory.

My friend called me up and said,
"There's a song about you."

I said, "You're shitting me."

And then I'm in a cab

and they're going... "Holly came from..."

I'm going, "How the hell does Lou Reed know

"that I shaved my legs
and plucked my eyebrows?"

I've never met him.
I met him once at a party at The Factory.

But we didn't have intimate relations.

Candy and Jackie and Holly were...

It's funny, you think back now,

you wanna call them "transvestites"
or are they "transsexuals" now?

The vocabulary has evolved,

but they never pretended the fact
that they were men to begin with.

Especially Candy was very ladylike.

Candy and I were very close
and we used to go out on dates together,

so I never thought for a second
I was going on a date with a man.

It's one of those things.

I never met Lou.
The character that he wrote about,

he just took it from having seen the movies
that I did with them.

My starring roles were
Flesh, Trash and Heat,

the trilogy I did
with Paul Morrissey and Andy.

And so he just took it from the roles
that he saw me playing.

And because the early Factory,
the movies that they made,

whoever appeared in them
were just playing themselves.

And that wasn't the case with me.

Anyway, so he wrote a song
about that character.

I thought it was cool.

We searched and searched

and what the Sugar Plum Fairy was

was a drug dealer.

And that's what they called him,
"Sugar Plum Fairy."

That was his name,
this hustler out of San Francisco.

A friend of Andy's or somebody's.

Certainly not a friend of mine,
I didn't know him.

But with a name like that,
it was too good to leave it alone.

I mean, now you have Snoop Doggy Dogg,

but I think Sugar Plum Fairy
preceded the Dogg.

You listen to Walk On The Wild Side,
there's not much going on in that track.

You have that really great swinging,
weird waltz-time jazz bass and the sax,

but there's not a lot of guitar,

there's not a lot of music
crowding Reed's voice.

The bass is probably one of the most
famous bass lines around,

and it consists actually of two basses.

Herbie Flowers started off playing
an upright with the track

and he had this very strange idea,
which David let him go along with,

where he wanted to double track it.

There was a crafty little thing
that us session musos used to get up to.

The recording rate was, I think,
12 pounds for three hours,

but if you overdubbed,
that meant put another instrument down,

you got double the money.

So he started off
playing the acoustic bass.

I put the double bass down first.

When I say first,
with the guitar and the drums.

So I then asked Ken, the engineer,
if I could go straight back down

and overdub the electric bass in tenths.

Just to give it a little bit
more atmosphere or character.

When we first started this,

the drummer was told what was wanted

and he started playing it with sticks,

and I was upstairs in the control room
and it sounded like a march.

So I just quickly dashed down
and told him to try brushes.

It stuck. Everyone liked it.
This is how it finished up.

I think that Walk On The Wild Side
by fluke got on the radio.

And it was of course, such a catchy tune.

I don't even think people really understood
what the subject matter was to a great extent,

so that the people who did understand I,
were very amused by it.

It took, I think, probably
nine or 10 months

before a disc jockey called Johnnie Walker,
he actually phoned me up and said,

"I've just heard an
album called Transformer

"and I'm picking a track
called Walk On The Wild Side

"as record of the week next week."
And I said, "But the lyrics..."

The BBC just didn't know what
"Even when she was giving head" meant.

And so it goes on the radio and
of course all these young guys are like,

"Hey, BBC missed that one!"

I never thought of having a hit.
Wild Side be a hit? You gotta be kidding.

No. But I didn't think
about anything being a hit.

Lou really walked on the wild side.

He walked it like he talked it.

And people like stories of explorers
going out into the wilderness

and bringing him back alive.

And Lou did.

He brought back these character portraits

from a world
that people were intensely interested in.

Well, let me backtrack,

William Burroughs had been there,

Allen Ginsberg had been there,
Hubert Selby had been there,

but it was unchartered territory
for song lyrics.

Except maybe in old blues writers.

Now, most pop lyrics,
you just can't read as poetry

because they're totally
connected to the music.

And if you take the music away,
it starts to sound a bit strange.

But with Lou's lyrics,

you can actually just read them out
from a page like a brilliant poem.

Andy's Chest.

"If I could be anything
in the world that flew

"I would be a bat and come
swooping after you.

"And if the last time you were here
things were a bit askew.

"Well, you know what happens after dark.

"When rattlesnakes lose their skins
and their hearts.

"And all the missionaries lose their bark.

"Oh, all the trees are calling after you
And all the venom snipers after you.

"Are all the mountains boulder after you."

One of the things
I really like about Andy's Chest,

is that it's a pretty song, but also,

it's got this undercurrent
of certainly violence.

It makes a reference
to the attempt on Warhol's life

by Valerie Solanas, who had been a member
or hanger-out at The Factory

and had developed
this feminist manifesto thing

and she just decided that Warhol had to go.

Andy was given a script
by this woman, Valerie Solanas,

and because Andy didn't really read it,
he tossed it in the pile somewhere

and then she psychologically felt

that he was controlling her life
by not returning the script

and the only way
that she could free herself psychologically

was to symbolically shoot him.

Maybe not intending to try and Kill him,

but nevertheless,
she wounded him seriously.

So it spun out of control, as it were.

I'm not gonna explain it to you.
It's what I thought about Andy being shot.

It's a love song.

"And curtains laced with diamonds
dear for you.

"And all the Roman noblemen for you.

"And kingdom's Christian soldiers
dear for you.

"And melting ice cap mountaintops for you.

"Oh, and knights in flaming silver robes
for you.

"And bats that, with a kiss
turn prince for you.

"Swoop, swoop, oh, baby, rock, rock.

"Swoop, swoop, rock, rock.

"Swoop, swoop, rock, rock."

He is a poet.

And of course he more than anybody else
is identified with one particular city.

I suppose
the Beatles were identified with Liverpool,

but the Beatles
became very universal very quickly.

Lou is always identified with New York.

There's a very urban experience
related to Lou's work.

It would be very funny to listen
to a song of Lou's where he's talking

about flowing rivers and mountains
and trees.

Lou's work is very much tied into
a New York urban experience, as it were.

This is New York Telephone Conversation.
It's the shortest track on the album.

The other thing that makes it
different from any of the others,

is everything was recorded 16 track

and this one,
we only used seven tracks of the 16.

We had room to make it much, much bigger,
but it wasn't needed.

It's just bass, cymbals and piano
and Lou and David doing vocals

and it was all cut live.

This is Lou's solo.

Okay, David.

Together.

It's a great little social portrait

of what in retrospect
was a very small scene

gathered around the back room
of club on Park Avenue South,

and the strange characters
that found themselves,

found their sense of being.

I think people always think
that artists are singing about themselves,

that there's an element of autobiography,

even if the artist thinks
they're creating a character.

But the artist is creating a character
from what they know

and so I believe
that there is that element of personality.

People believed Lou.

And I think to carry off those songs,
Lou had to believe Lou.

I don't wanna go to an extreme and say,
"Is Shakespeare really Hamlet?

"Or is he really Macbeth? Or is he
King Lear or is he this or is he that?"

Not by any stretch of the imagination,
to compare myself,

I'm just giving a really ludicrous example
to bring it back to earth a bit.

But there's always parts of
your own experience and personality

in whatever you're writing about.

Lou is guilty of expressing

a certain area concerning
deviant sex and drugs

in such a brilliant way that it
did inflect a lot of what came after.

And it did form people's image of him.

And in a way, that's what I shot
when I shot the Transformer cover.

I was shooting that.
I wasn't really shooting the love songs.

So I only shot what he presented to me. It
was not my suggestion, the way he did it.

David's ex-wife took me out and said,
"Let's dress you. You can't wear this.

"Let's get you something."

And there I was in rhinestones. I was
glorious. I love the pictures from them.

The makeup I put on
was this stuff I found from Japan

that took all the colour out of your face.

"Cause everybody was saying,
"Pale New York,"

so I tried to make it go one step further,
no blood.

Originally, the concept for the back
of the cover was gonna be the front.

That was my friend, Ernie,
and he just put a banana down there.

If he was really like that, we all
would have been too jealous to let him...

Never would have put him on the back,
just say, "Go away.

"We don't even wanna be near you."

A lot of people would ask me
if they were both Lou Reed,

I remember at one point.

That I have heard about,
people asking me, am I the woman?

Am I the woman and the guy?
It's really funny.

What was really great was that
they could think I could be both of them.

That was really great.

My God,
I could have had a whole new career.

In certain ways, it's arguably
the definitive album of the times

although you could also argue
for Ziggy Stardust.

Or maybe those two,
Ziggy and the Transformer.

But Transformer was
the perfect reflection of that summer.

And in many ways, I have discovered
that the Transformer album cover represents

the decadent glam thing
probably more than any other image.

Glam and glitter rock in 1972 and '73,
for most kids, was about dressing up.

And it was about testing sexual identity

at an age when
you're still forming your sexual identity.

There was this whole glam thing going on,
so I just put myself in that head.

It's not like I had to
go very far to do it.

I have about 1,000 selves running around,
it's easy.

The thing about Transformer
and the best of Reed's records and songs

is that they are not didactic.

He is not telling you what is right and
what is wrong. He's telling you what is.

And he's doing it in ways
that make you think.

I listen to these songs and I can't
believe how perfect they feel today.

Perfect Day is a great example.

It was number one in England
25 years after it was written.

It's a phenomenal song.

I think it's just sublime.

Lou wrote the piece
and somebody else extended it.

It's like Shakespeare, isn't it?

If the stuff's good, you can do anything.

I think there's a whole confusion.

People talk about singers
and who's a great singer

and who's a great guitar player

and they confuse it
with some Olympian feat of singing,

of vocal acrobatics or guitarists
playing a million notes a second.

But that's got nothing to do with
it really. It's the same in painting.

Somebody could paint
the back garden scene absolutely perfectly,

and somebody could come along
and do two brush strokes.

And to me
the more refined your songwriting gets,

the less brush strokes you're using.

It's a fantasy, Perfect Day.

The whole thing's about

not just, "You're gonna reap what you sow,"
which is cliché, but the line before it,

"I thought I was somebody good."
I liked that idea.

When you start to understand
songs like Perfect Day,

and the feeling that comes from that song,

which is steeped in some drug-crazed,

scary, dark feeling,
with this beautiful melody going on.

I think he was one of the writers

that taught me things
about light and shade and darkness.

And taking all of that music
that turned into, sort of, Disneyland,

and defusing it and making it into
Blackland meets Disneyland or whatever.

So you always have
this weird feeling in the music

that could go really scary now
or it could suddenly become all right.

Every song I've ever written in my life,
I've tried to write emotionally.

And all the songs are geared
to try to cause an emotion,

and they're always about conflict.

Lou used to say some funny things.

I can't remember
quite what he used to say to me, but...

Some things like,
"Can you make it a little bit more grey?"

Then to me, it was like,
"What the hell is talking about?"

I guess he was just trying to explain
things in a more artistic way or something.

That was going over my head a bit.

Isn't that beautiful?

Boy, Ronson's good.

Isn't that amazing just like that?

See, I think sometimes
with a really good arrangement and parts,

you don't need a vocal.

He always said that he made records
when he was in the Velvets

and later on, his idea of a record

was something in which
he was talking directly to you.

You were in one room
sitting across from each other

and he was singing directly to you

and you hear that
in the character of his voice.

Everybody can talk about
tracks on Transformer

and you go, "Vicious, Perfect Day,

"Walk On The Wild Side, Make Up,
Andy's Chest,"

but Goodnight Ladies is just, I think,
the best song on the album.

It's just this fantastic number

which sounds like a load of guys
clowning about.

I don't whose idea was,
"Let's bring in an oompah band,"

which is not what they it in London,
whatever you call it.

And David went and got one,
or someone went and got one.

And this is what they sounded like.

This one features Herbie playing tuba.

I think the last track that was recorded
was Goodnight Ladies.

And by then, we're running out of steam
and it felt like,

"Here's a song and
it's got a steady lilt to it."

And I thought, "Maybe
it should just have...

"Can I use tuba on it
and can I phone up a trumpet?"

I have a dixieland band.

Don't forget the absurd mixture of people.

The music was always going to be
a bit off the wall

and no way would it have ever been
a copy of the Velvet Underground

because Lou wouldn't have wanted that.

I'd never heard of them
and it just seemed a good idea at the time.

And then you think of the imagery.

There's David Bowie on the production desk
with Mick Ronson.

These rock gods.

And there's this bunch of wily, old
session musicians with a brass band

doing this bizarre song,
which I just think is absolutely fantastic.

And then you listen to the lyrics

and it is about a guy who's lost in love
again and it's the forlornness of that.

And that's Lou Reed. It's a Lou Reed song.

People wanted to hear Transformer.
They wanted to hear Walk On The Wild Side.

And because there was enough of them,
it became a hit.

One of the most unlikely hits of that year,
or probably any other year.

The amount of time
that went from Lou's darkest nights

to suddenly him being the star
that he could never be in the Velvets

was less than a year.

It's really quite extraordinary
when you think about it.

Transformer was just a massive album.

I actually think it's a brilliant album,
but I'm not too sure

that Lou thinks it's particularly
his favourite album or whatever.

I think part of him felt, to a degree,

that maybe there was psychologically
a little compromise with Transformer.

But he's wrong. It's a brilliant album.

And the fact
that it was commercially successful, well,

he just got lucky with that.

It's just an album.

They're just songs.

You do an album
and then you have the rest of your life.

You guys were pure pleasure, I must say.