Lou Reed once again proves that he's a bitchy old queen. (As if we needed any more evidence.) When an audience member at the Tribeca Film Festival asked Reed what he thought of Lester Bangs' claim that Berlin was "the most depressed album ever made," the humorless has-been rudely dismissed the question ("What does that have to do with anything?") and feigned ignorance ("Who is Lester Bangs?"). Bangs biographer Jim DeRogatis calls him out:
Hey, Lou: You know who Lester Bangs was. The last time I interviewed you, when you were hyping your rewriting of Poe for "The Raven," you asked me to mail you a copy of his biography, and you spoke quite warmly of him. The Catskill comedian shtick really gets old sometimes.
You know, Lester Bangs hasn't produced anything good for over 25 years, but, unlike Lou Reed, at least Bangs has a decent excuse: he's dead. Fuck Lou Reed.
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Video: Lou Reed - "Original Wrapper" (1986)
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Poor Lou. Like founding the VU and having a couple decent solo albums isn't enough of a legacy. He has always been a bitch though.
"New York" came out in 1989, so 18 years.
Love Lou's stuff but it's always fun to pick on him, so I add:
Fuck you Lou!!
Worst live show ever: Lou Reed at the State Theater in Detroit in like 1990 or 1991, touring for that stupid Magic and Loss album. And yes, this was even worse than later that year falling asleep while Crapton sat immobile on a stool for two hours.
Perhaps Lou's responses--"What does that have to do with anything?" and "Who is Lester Bangs?"--stem from instances of being annoyed in the former and not ignorance but dismissal in the case of the latter. After all, it's common knowledge that he hates the press and, for the most part, the only way to get Lou to respond properly to interview questions these days is to have them formulated by a fellow musician he likes.
Or to ask him about his nutty theories about playing guitar and guitar tech. Or about martial arts.
"I’ve concentrated on music pretty much to the exclusion of other things. And even within that to sound and tone. And I’m good for hours on that particular subject. Magnets and speakers, gears, tubes, what kind of tubes, wood, what makes a good guitar. All my stuff’s custom.
That’s what I do. I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that’s neither here not there. Essentially it’s been concentrating on this one thing. I’m not joking around when I’ve said occasionally, trying to learn how to play a D chord properly has been a very big thing for me. The exact way to get this tone, which I can now do all the time, has taken forever, it seems like forever. When I think about that for X number of years experimenting with wood and pickups, if you actually thought about it you’d say, that person’s crazy. But that’s what I do. And with him, and his background, I say, ah, I recognize that! I know what goes into that. And appreciate that."
Lou in Kung Fu magazine
I have to send out a giant fuck you to Lou Reed. Lester Bangs was without a doubt the greatest music critic to grace this mudball called Earth. Lou Reed, on the other hand, is a crabby old junkie that is borderline talentless.
Hell, the Velvet Underground are barely more pleasant than a goddamned root canal.
So, god rest Lester and to Lou, eat shit and go make another horrendous record. Lord knows the world needs more bullshit to listen to.
The cryin' shame of it all is that he really did capture lightning in a bottle with New York. It's just that so much of his stuff is spottier than a dalmatian. But for that one moment, his curmudgeonliness nailed it.
God rest Lou Reed; you're dead to us.