Lou Reed
Austin Convention Center, Thursday, March 13“I have a B.A. in dope, but a Ph.D. in soul,” Lou Reed told a packed room at the Austin Convention Center during his SXSW keynote address Thursday morning.
In turn, this year’s keynote was best appreciated as a piece of absurdist performance art, Reed happily suffering through a supercasual interview session with his friend and producer Hal Willner. At times, the two men joked and squabbled like characters out of Beckett. They also screened an electrifying clip of Julian Schnabel’s new film Lou Reed’s Berlin, which was ostensibly the centerpiece of their conversation. Later, the celebrated former frontman of the Velvet Underground even recited a verse from his “Rock Minuet,” a raw bit of street poetry that Schnabel filmed during the Berlin performance. “I know people always want to know how you write a song,” Reed told the crowd, “and I don’t know. I wanted to know, too, and if I could have done it, I would have had ‘Son of Wildside,’ and I’d own an island in the Caribbean or something.”
Explaining the origins of his distinctive sound, Reed said: “There was a thing – punk rock, punk soul. And it was people who couldn’t play R&B. They hadn’t grown up in the South, in Austin, listening to all those great guitar players every minute of the day. They grew up in the city, or wherever, and they didn’t have that, but they were rock people. Very pure. And that’s the kind of music I wanted to make with the Velvet Underground.”
Recalling that Berlin was initially dubbed the “worst album ever” when it was released in 1973, Reed clearly relishes the idea that Schnabel’s film might help rescue his song cycle from the slag heap. “It’s emotional music,” he said, after screening footage of his band playing “Man of Good Fortune.” “It’s one of the things I love about rock. It’s emotional, and if you can put some meaningful words to it, it’s a lot more intense.”
This article appears in March 14 • 2008.