LouTallica (Lou Reed & Metallica) converse with Interview Magazine

In the latest installment of their conversation series, Interview Magazine enlisted Dimitri Ehrlich to sit down with rock tandem of Lou Reed and Metallica and to talk about their heavily criticized album Lulu. Read some interesting excerpts of this entertaining dialogue below whereas the piece can be found in its entirety here.

Originally you were planning to make a record of some of your old songs though, weren’t you?

REED: We were gonna do unrecognized pearls—you know, distinguished nuggets of the past.

How did the project shift?

REED: Well, because this was completely new and hadn’t been done at all. You couldn’t compare it to anything because it hadn’t been done! And you didn’t have to listen to the other things and say, “Oh, he’s doing this, he’s doing that.” We didn’t even have to deal with that, this was fresh, right out of the ground.

You’re singing mainly from the point of view of this girl who’s got a very complicated sexual morality. What were the challenges of that?

REED: Well, she’s amoral. There’s a few ways of looking at it. You could say she’s amoral. You could say she’s cold. Or you could just say she’s having a good time, and what’s your fucking problem?

She’s kind of modern, in a way—ahead of her time.

REED: Yes. I was thinking that, as a matter of fact. But the whole play is littered with people who fall in love with her and then she doesn’t care, so she moves on, and they’re distraught and they kill themselves.

Yeah. I think I’ve met her. [all laugh]

REED: I was saying, “Is there a man amongst us who has not run into something like that?” That stuns you with the brusqueness of the adventure? I thought we had something.

It’s interesting that you’re writing a lot from her voice. You’re singing a lot from her character’s point of view.

REED: Well, I jumped into that head because I don’t want to hear my point of view particularly. It’s like, “I have to live with him at night!”

JAMES HETFIELD: It gives it a lot of dimension, too. She’s a villain, and the most beautiful thing ever, and man’s ruin.

REED: I was writing it from her point of view, but also from the point of view of the doctor who marries her, and then she’s going to bed with him and the son, and the play starts off with the guy falling over dead from the whole thing. So writing from the points of view of this woman who has just destroyed them, and then from the princess who meets her, and she’s straight but suddenly like . . . She’s never felt that way before. Welcome to the club, okay? [laughs] But that was very, very exciting, occupying the minds of these different people—and the real thing was, having done that, to be able to sing them without the verse-chorus thing in the limited vocal range that I have. So that involved playing around with the phrasing a lot, and banking on Metallica to give the substance to hold it up. Not just my electronic stuff. This was not complicated. This was, “You get it or you don’t.” And if we hadn’t, it would have been a half hour in the studio, and they would have been glad to be rid of me, and I would have gone back to my little cave in the West Village and cried myself to sleep, waving to the ships passing . . .

ULRICH: Waving to California . . .

How fast was the whole record made?

ULRICH: Lou and [music producer] Hal Willner came out to the studio on a Monday to check it out and look at some production and equipment things and all that horseshit. But they walked in and felt the vibe instantly, and we were recording within 30 minutes. By the time that the first week had gone, we were six or seven songs into it.

REED: We were at least halfway there.

ULRICH: I mean, our heads were spinning. It moved so fast. I’ve never worked like that.