Journalist: What motivated you to write about Lou Reed?
Walter Lezcano: There is something obsessive about artists. Lou Reed was one of my obsessions from a very young age. I would tell you that since my entry into rock. I entered Lou Reed with “Transformer, it was a good week because I bought that record and” Horses “, by Patti Smith. In 2000 I bought” Through fire “, all its lyrics. There I was able to get much more into it. which meant the work with the word that he did and that I translated very precariously with school dictionaries. I began to understand Lou’s aesthetic operation. That added to the aura in his projection as a rocker. There were two elements in him: he was Like a kind of street map with a library. The person who knows where to buy good drugs and where to buy good books is always interesting. There was something that came together there, in Lou’s figure.
Q .: How does the cult artist coexist with the rock star in Lou?
W.L.: The cult figure is like the continuity of The Velvet Underground. Thanks to Transformer you can get through a period with some success until the late 70’s. Until the album “New York”, he could not regain that kind of gaze of a certain public that extended from the people who followed him. This question of cult figure gave him the possibility of being much freer. With the almanac on our side, we can understand that rare records like “Metal Machine Music” are transitional records; those records where musicians search until they finally decide on something.
Q .: Well, Rolling Stone called the record “Berlin” the end of Lou’s career.
W.L.: There is also the famous Gray Marcus review saying “what the fuck is this?” for a Bob Dylan record. There is something there that allows us to glimpse in what way the critic is always the investigator or detective of a crime that he never finishes solving, and it is only many years later that he finally understands the meaning of a work. People like Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Bowie are often misinterpreted for their present and revalued much later. “Berlin” was presented 30 years later, because at the time it generated a lot of rejection. That’s also a demonstration of why I was obsessed with Lou. There is an impressive resistance that already exceeded the framework of the rock genre: the camperita, drugs, playing the guitar, but rock as a culture to generate antibodies against the horror of society and the world.
Why do we listen to Lou Reed.
Q .: In the book you start by saying that Lou Reed refused to participate in a tribute to the victims of 9/11. Why did you choose this anecdote?
W.L.: On the one hand, it showed Lou Reed’s work ethic; in the face of tragedy, the only thing left is to flee forward, towards beauty; towards the kind of particular beauty that Lou Reed always sought. On the other hand, because the rocker, according to Lou Reed, is the one who opposes himself and fights against the dominant power. At that time, the dominant power was to surrender to that planetary event that implied the end of the 20th century and the beginning of a new era of terrorism. He, with that rejection of the regrets that existed, shows how he understood rock culture: to keep going no matter what. There is no barrier of any kind to hold back a rocker. In that sense it is a vital experience to listen to Lou Reed and understand these events.
Q .: Reed graduated from college, but he also received electroshock therapy. He was an academic with a marginal history.
W.L.: And I add one more element: in the 70s, with the hits of “Transformer” and “Sally Can’t Dance” in tow, I went to the most infectious slums of New York, that circuit that surrounded the CBGB, to look for trans prostitutes and “cool”. With that he got material to continue writing. He even had Silvia, his trans partner. A rock star hanging out with a trans girl was an absolute anomaly. They are admirable decisions. In the late 1980s, when he was already married to Laurie Anderson, he renounced a bit of that sexual explorer past. That also makes him a fucking, complex guy. It has many layers of meaning that resist a single label.
Q .: Even in times when glam was emerging and there were bands like the New York Dolls that were cross-dressing?
W.L.: I was always interested in the credibility of the movements that moved me within rock. I had the chance to talk to people who lived in New York in the 70s and they told me that in reality punk and glam were very minority. You didn’t go to the greengrocer and the greengrocer was wearing studs and a fuchsia wig. The mythological desire of rock documentaries to generate these myths makes us lose sight of the fact that people like Lou Reed, no matter how successful they were, were absolutely rejected by society. You had to have very tough skin to keep going. Salvador Benesdra has a very beautiful phrase that says “the secret of life is to reach the end”; I think it’s one of Lou’s searches.
Q .: In the book you give an important place to Delmore Schwartz, Lou Reed’s literary mentor. How much did you contribute to your work?
W.L.: There is some exploration of a world that was unknown to Lou, which were the great works of literature. Thanks to Schwartz, he was able to better understand what the true complexity was and why they were great works. Why Shakespeare, Allen Ginsberg; have theoretical elements of perception and build an intuition about what a high literary material means as opposed to a precarious one. There you can understand how a song that is made with a very exquisite minimalism like “Heroína” can achieve a transcendence in time. That’s thanks to the literary teachings of Delmore Schwartz. It always struck me that not so much attention was paid to that. The songwriter that is Lou Reed came with almost his entire arsenal to the Velvet. When Andy Warhol shows him the songs, Andy tells him “these songs sing them as they are written”, with the bad words and all, something that was kind of revolutionary. All that he brought him with Delmore Schwartz, who was also a drunk, a guy who was given a job almost out of pity, so as not to die on the street. There you also understand a little about Lou’s life journey and the type of conjugation of various elements that he had. That kind of wide battlefield makes Lou Reed a mind that works outside of the ordinary.
P .: It was not an improvised one.
W.L.: He was a fucking prepared guy. He knew who Ornette Coleman was and who Bob Dylan was. He also liked Doo-Wop, which in the US was considered the fattest thing in 1950s pop. That was Lou Reed, a romantic guy who never smiled.
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Q .: What does this book leave you?
W.L.: There is something that made me fall in love with the text “Roberto Arlt, myself”, by Óscar Masotta, where he says that writing about Arlt he discovered things about himself. Piglia said that literary criticism is one of the forms of autobiography. Writing about Lou Reed is also trying to understand why you like Lou Reed; what are the elements of yours that are put there when a song makes you discover part of the human experience that you would not have been able to explore otherwise. I’m talking about beautiful things like “Satellite of love” or horrible things like fucking your parents (there is a song called that). There is something there about the possibility of approaching parts of your life that make you a little uncomfortable about yourself; parts you don’t know. There is a part of wanting to escape and always running into your own problems.
Q .: An exercise in self-knowledge?
W.L.: But the word is not that, because that brings it a little closer to self-help. It’s a bit more disturbing than that. Self-knowledge seems comfortable, what I say is “why do I like someone who went against their parents because their parents gave them electroshock to make the homosexual” pass “. It’s like that phrase you say you think you are looking at the abyss, but the abyss is also looking at you. With that type of universes, artists that are the size of the universe, you get into very large zones of disturbance, which have to do with looking at yourself in the mirror and not understanding what you are looking at.
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