More Lou Reed Berlin Talk From the New York Times

There's a lot of overlapping from the article in the previous post, but the Times guy writes better. Here are some highlights:

"Lou Reed refers to it with an understatement that borders on dismissal. 'It was just another one of my albums that didn’t sell,' he said dryly at a West Village cafe recently. But get him talking a little — and a little talk is all one can expect from Lou Reed — and it becomes clear that Berlin, his bleak, Brechtian song cycle from 1973, which he is performing in full for the first time at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn for four nights beginning tomorrow, is a treasured high point in a what has been a lifelong project of pushing at the aesthetic boundaries of rock ’n’ roll.

'It’s a great album,' he said. (He has also called it a masterpiece.) 'I admire it. It’s trying to be real, to apply novelists’ ideas and techniques into a rock format.' He mentioned William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Allen Ginsberg and Raymond Chandler as literary models.
'But it sounds so pretentious saying that.' he added.' It just sounds too B.A. in English. Which I have. So there you go.'”

Doesn't everyone have a BA in English? There's lots more, of course, so read the whole article. One thing though, a friend once asked me if there was an example of a project that an Advanced Artist did after they became Advanced that was rejected at first but then was accepted only after many years. I'd say Berlin falls into that category, though there is a lot of Overtness still in that record. Did I mention I can't wait until Friday?