Music: Reed's long walk on the wild side By Richard Wolfson
Lou Reed's driver has just been held for an hour by traffic police for allegedly driving through a stop sign. She's adamant that she didn't do it. "They should have better things to do than that right now," says Reed. "Three cops for one woman with a stop sign. What is wrong with these guys? No wonder people hate them." He turns to Nina: "If you'd had a gun you could have just shot them!" He's kidding - I hope.
We head downtown from Reed's meeting at the Carnegie Hall to his rehearsal studio in the East Village, and I ask him about his involvement over the years with multimedia. "I've been so lucky," he says, "to have worked with someone like Andy Warhol. He was a genius in my humble opinion." His relationship with Warhol changed the course of history. It began when the artist managed the Velvet Undergound in the mid-1960s. The Velvets, who became the world's most influential rock group, fused Reed's dark exploratory songs with avant-garde classical influences from John Cale's viola, Moe Tucker's tribal drums, and Sterling Morrison's spiky guitar. Warhol projected his films on to the group, sparking off the first - and to this day probably most exciting and provocative - union of rock music with live visuals.
"I was in heaven. It was so exciting and so much fun. New ideas, new everything all the time. Andy could really get it done, he was so smart. Everything he touched was magic. I can't imagine the luck of getting involved with him. We were nobodies - you couldn't be any less of anything than the Velvets were at the time. It was way too sophisticated for the pop music of those days, and that's why it took X number of years for people to tune into it." It's extraordinary how Reed, so often portrayed as egotistical and paranoid, is still so obviously caught up with Warhol, in spite of a breakdown in their friendship in the years before the artist's death. It is an obsession, and maybe a love, that he and John Cale worked through in their wonderfully elegiac album, Songs for Drella. A conflation of Dracula and Cinderella, Drella was their nickname for Warhol.
"I miss Andy. You know, to go from Warhol to the rest of them is like suddenly dealing with talking squirrels. I mean, somehow they learnt how to type! Everything you see around you is Warhol, still. Everybody in black, the silkscreens, those colours, you see it in ads now all the time. It's unbelievable. It's such a shame I don't have him to bounce off of anymore." Reed himself is perhaps as responsible as Warhol for shaking things up in the art world. Songs about heroin, sadomasochism and sexual ambiguity were all but unknown before he took these subjects by the horns. The lyrics were given the most elegantly simple platform; often just two chords, E to A on a guitar. They oscillate back and forth in many of the classic songs, including "Walk on the Wild Side", "Street Hassle", and "Waiting for the Man". "I love those chords, they're like the heartbeat chords. Who knows, maybe there's something really magical about them. Any idiot can play them - you don't need a degree to play those chords!"
Reed's songs often play games with identity. "Walk on the Wild Side" describes the real life personnel from Warhol's Factory days, and "Street Hassle" is an unbearably affecting 10-minute miniature song cycle about drug culture.
How much is observation, how much is him, and how much is he acting out a role? "That could be asked of every writer. You should ask Burroughs, or Ginsberg, or any of these guys. At one point did Burroughs become El Hombre - how did that happen? How much of it is true, how much of it isn't, how much of it is stuff that happens to other people and you were just standing there and saw it, and said 'I did that'.
"Some of my stuff is so real it's a miracle I'm even sitting here - that's why I laugh most mornings."
In the modern era Reed has found an inspired visual collaborator in Robert Wilson, the visionary experimental theatre director who was responsible for Philip Glass's breakthrough opera, Einstein on the Beach. Reed is upset that Time Rocker and POEtry, his theatre pieces with Wilson, haven't made it to the UK. "Wilson is crazy about lights the way I am about sound, and lights are expensive and it takes days to set them up. So people say 'we can't afford it', or 'who cares about the lights?', so there you go."
Reed is not entirely trapped by the glories of the past; throughout the conversation he has been eyeballing my mini disc recorder, and waxes lyrical about the wonders of the new technology. "I've always been in love with great engineering," he says. "In guitars and amps and computers and any of this stuff. There's a guy in Manhattan who builds these amazing guitars, Telecasters with 100-year-old wood, and there's another lunatic for that sound, a guy in Virginia, who makes these great guitar pickups. You can play it against the fanciest shit in the world and it will kill it. But people go to sleep when I talk about this stuff. What they really want to know is how big is my dick, and did I fuck a goat last year!"
Such speculation is rather beside the point these days, as Reed is in a happy long-term relationship with performance artist Laurie Anderson. Reed is surprisingly downbeat about the trajectory of his career. "Andy said I was lazy. I try not to be lazy," he says perfunctorily. What about the dozens of albums he's made, the classic songs, the artistic triumphs? "All that's really a big nothing. I should have done five times that. Magic ideas, the kind that just stop you in your tracks, they don't happen too often. When I hear those I really pay attention."
Is it hard making new work with the legacy of the Velvet Underground on his back? "There's nothing on my back," he says. "I don't give a flying fuck about that, and I never have. I just want to have fun."
As we step out of the car, he tells me about his dedication to T'ai Chi, perhaps an antidote to all the years of abuse he subjected himself to. "I've done T'ai Chi for 20 years, two hours a day. I did it from 8.30 to 10.30 this morning. And now I must rehearse. Lazy, lazy!" he insists as he saunters into the rehearsal room. He's been slightly irascible, intense, provocative, doubting, contrary, volatile, engaged, and a little bit scary, but strangely enough lazy doesn't spring to mind at all.
Lou Reed plays the following dates on his tour: May 7, Brighton Dome Tel 01273 709 709 www.brighton-dome.org.uk May 8, Warwick Arts Centre Tel 0247 652 4524 www.warwickartscentre.co.uk May 9 Manchester Bridgewater Hall Tel 0161 907 9000 www.bridgewater-hall.co.uk May 28 Barbican Hall, London EC2 Tel 020 7638 8891 www.barbican.org.uk He plays on 'Later with Jools Holland' on BBC2 at 11.35pm on May 16