Lou Reed Interview

There's a nice long article about Lou Reed in the Telegraph. Here's some of it:

'To leap right from Delmore Schwarz into the world of Warhol - of all the places in the world to end up!' Reed rolls his eyes. 'I just thought, this is heaven. I'm in the perfect place at the perfect time. Here you are, you want to write music and songs and look what you've landed in the middle of. This is really, really amazing if I live through this. We went from sleeping on the floor - nothing - and then Andy took us in, which meant we got to eat fruit every night. He really liked the songs. And he was the great protector. If you have a Warhol sitting next to you saying, "Oh, don't change any of that; don't let them change that, whatever you do," that really means something. The fact that he liked it meant that it was OK for it to be that way. And, my God, if he hadn't, it would have been devastating. We would have had to leave.'

***

'I say, no [Hubert] Selby, no anybody - that's the way I see it,' Reed says. 'Because he was a straight line between two points; no f***ing around over there; no polysyllabic anything - it's just, God... if that's not rock'n'roll, what is?'So that was my idea of fun: take Twist and Shout and really put something in it. What could be more fun? But then I had to do it right, otherwise it's going to be really pretentious. Like Last Exit to Brooklyn - you do that wrong and come up with, "We wear short shorts...'' ' He sings the first lines of the juvenile 1950s pop hit, and shudders. 'The Royal Teens. Why should I even know that? That scary trivia in your head...'

Even the master can get a bit Overt some times. Everybody knows that "Short-Shorts" is awesome. Check out the lyrics.