I’ve always hated phone interviews. This does nothing to cheer me up.

IX

LET’S PUT SOME cards on the table here. Where Lou Reed is concerned I lose all critical faculties. I like pretty much everything he’s ever done (except “Disco Mystic,” on the A side of The Bells). I even like Metal Machine Music, sometimes, and that’s four sides of tape hum on the kinds of frequencies that drive animals with particularly sensitive hearing to throw themselves off cliffs, and cause blind unreasoning panic in crowds.

X

IT’S SEVEN THIRTY. The phone rings and it’s Sylvia Reed. Lou’s going to have to be onstage at eight p.m. Okay? No problem.

There’s a pause.

Lou Reed’s voice is charcoal-gray, detached, dry.

XI

How did you decide which song lyrics to put in the book?

Well, I’ve always had the view that the lyric should be able to stand alone before it gets married to music. I just got a list of all the songs, and picked out the ones I thought stood alone the best. If I even had a question about it I just took it out.

The other thing was whether it contributed to a narrative form. There’s a narrative link that takes you through three decades, so they follow each other and make sense—certain themes became really apparent that you might otherwise not be so aware of.

Things like the sequence in the middle of the book, where you have a lyric for your father, your mother, your sister and your wife?

Yeah, that’s an interesting little section, which actually comes from an interesting album, which had a lot of things like that on it. I hadn’t really realized it until I started looking back.

That was Growing Up in Public?

Yeah. It certainly did apply.

That was one of the Arista albums. Are they ever going to release them as CDs?

I tell you, that’s a really good question. I don’t really have any real connection with them. In fact there’s a compilation album gonna be coming out, and we had problems trying to locate the master tapes from Arista. They’re corroding someplace in Pennsylvania . . .

I’ve been told by a secondary source that they will [be coming out] but I don’t know how seriously I can take that.

I remember how badly those albums were slagged off when they came out. But in the light of the last few albums, it’s seemed like the press has been reassessing them . . .

Aw . . . [laughs] I haven’t seen any reassessment, to tell you the truth. I just remember getting bashed for them. But what is funny is that someone will bash them, then pick one out and say “this one was the exception” and then another person will be bashing them and that won’t be their exception, a different one’ll be their exception.

I think it’s possible some things are easier to view with a little distance.

Some of those albums that people say were so bad are among my favorites.