Lou Reed - Transformer

It's just a little moment in time, that's the fun of a record,

but it's just this very ephemeral thing that happens to be captured.

You're not there any more. It's acting.

Transformer, for me, is a total timeless album

that I'll still be playing when I'm 76.

I really wanted it to work for him

and be a memorable album that people wouldn't forget.

Transformer hones in on a very specific sense of identity.

And I think David had a lot to do with shaping it

because the album is somewhat of a tribute to the Warhol scene.

The great thing about Transformer is that it sounds great now

because it was not made to sound like 1972.

And what he was singing about,

of course, if my mother could've understood I,

she would have been absolutely appalled.

I don't know what people get opened up to.

I was just writing about people I knew and where I come from.

We're sponsoring a new band. It's called the Velvet Underground.

And we're trying...

Since I don't really believe in painting any more,

I thought it would be a nice way of combining,

and we have this chance to combine music and art.

I'd written most of the stuff before I met him with similar interests.

It was like a hand in a glove. And he just said I was lazy.

He said, "How many songs did you write today?"

And I said, "Five."

He said, "Why didn't you write 107? You're so lazy. You're just lazy.

"You should be writing all the time."

And so, I really admired and do admire him to this day.

There's no telling where the group might have gone

had Andy not met or heard the music, or met the group.

It seemed almost fated

that the group would be essentially connected with Andy Warhol.

Andy was really supporting us. He got us equipment.

And we would go to The Factory and Andy would feed everybody.

He'd just take everybody out and he would pay for it by doing some commercial art.

The Factory was a place where Andy

made paintings and shot films.

It was a centre where people would gather from time to time

and exchange creative ideas, kind of a laboratory.

Most bands of the time were either writing songs about love or how to get a girl,

and the Velvets were like a true newsreel footage.

And they also seemed to be pushing the boundaries of rock

toward a place that was almost akin to something like free jazz.

The Velvet Underground, you could actually sit there

and actually work out the song in about 10 minutes,

and then the lyrics were so amazing, So you memorised them.

And you were off, running around Britain with a guitar.

The Velvet Underground were really the seminal band for so many musicians.

There's that old expression that they didn't sell a lot of records,

but everyone who bought one started a band. And in a sense, it's very true.

If that's true, I wish they'd give me a piece of the royalties,

but I don't know if that's true.

I never cared about credibility except from me. That's all.

We always thought we were the best, and I still do.

When Lou left the Velvets, he literally disappeared.

He played Max's one night in August of 1970 and he was gone the next.

Went back to Long Island, worked for his father's firm.

He literally walked away from everything.

There'd been a real problem with management.

I went off to lick my wounds.

My mother told me when I was in school, she said,

"You should take typing so you have a profession to fall back on."

At that time, it wasn't such mega news

that it would reach Sunderland's weekly newspaper.

It was more, suddenly a record came out

that wasn't the Velvet Underground, but it was Lou Reed.

It was not representative of his sound.

It was made in London, it's made with all these classy British session men.

Rick Wakeman plays on it.

Here's a guy from Yes, ultimately gonna be in Yes, playing on a Lou Reed record.

The first record was a flop, "So go make another one."

In those days, they gave you a chance. You could go make another one.

I think that, from what I understand,

Lou and Bowie had met and were friendly, and certainly had many things in common.

And whoever's idea it was to put them together, it's a brilliant idea.

David was in town, we got introduced.

I think the record label thought he was very contemporary.

And I thought all the records that sounded good were coming out of London.

I was petrified

that he said yes, he would like to work with me in the producer capacity,

because I had so many ideas

and I felt so intimidated by my knowledge of the work that he'd already done.

Even though there's sort of only that much time between us,

it seemed like Lou had this great legacy of work.

Lou wanted to reach the pop audience

that David was skyrocketing on at the time.

And David was consciously placing himself within the artistic tradition of the Velvets.

I never had kids screaming at me particularly.

They'd scream at David, not at me.

Me, they would throw syringes and joints on the stage.

Isn't that a great line?

Having someone like Bowie help him get that kind of attention,

get him the marquee value of a producer's name.

Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, that's valuable coin.

I remember meeting him at Max's Kansas City

and then he came round to the hotel a couple of times

and we'd sit around and talk about the production of the Transformer album

and he'd sit and play a new song

and try and put it on a little tape recorder or something.

With Rono and David,

there was a real

simpatico, which is certainly part of the situation I had in the Velvets

and was miles above where I'd been on the first Lou Reed record

where there was nothing simpatico.

So we were gonna go to London again. This time with David and Rono.

The thing about Transformer is that it's not like a faux Velvets record.

It was not full of old Velvets songs that he was working his way through.

This was new stuff. It was an entirely new project.

I couldn't be in the direction of the Velvet Underground

'cause only the Velvet Underground could make that sound,

and I didn't have a band.

So I was gonna be stuck with studio musicians.

David phoned up and said,

"Have you ever heard of a band called Velvet Underground?"

I said, "I think so."

And he said, "One of the guys, Lou Reed, wants to do an album,

"and it's at Trident Studios. Do you want to do it? It's three days' work."

It was really good fun. I really enjoyed myself in the studio.

Lou Reed sat in the corner somewhere. I can't remember ever seeing him actually.

I don't remember seeing him there at all, but he was there somewhere,

in a gloomy corner with dark glasses on and dressed in black.

I just ran over the songs with them.

By that, I mean the chord structure and the melody.

Vicious is a song that has its origins in Reed's relation with Andy Warhol.

He said, "Why don't you write a song called Vicious?"

I said, "'Vicious'? What kind of vicious?"

He said, "Vicious, I hit you with a flower," and I thought, "What a great idea."

The whole set-up for this was to try and make it a lot more basic

than a lot of the Bowie things that we'd done in the past.

And we just started off with bass drums, two guitars,

and some of the tracks had more overdubs than others.

This particular one, Vicious, it was kept sparse.

And there was an effect that we tried that I don't think was used in the mix at all,

but it's still on the multi-track.

It's a backwards echo on the...

Gives this effect.

Altogether, it becomes...

Lou was so laid back.

He'd walk into the studio and go, "Hey."

Sit down on the chair, put his guitar on...

It'd be all out of tune.

They'd be, "We're ready." But his guitar's way out of tune.

And I'd wander off and tune it up a bit

and Lou used to look at me like, "Yeah, okay."

He didn't really care whether it was in tune or whether it was out of tune, really.

He just wanted to sing the song.

The thing with Rono is, I could very rarely understand a word he said.

He had a Hull accent. He'd have to repeat things five times.

But a really sweet guy.

A great guitar player, a really sweet guy.

I find out what the songs are about

when I do them out loud in front of an audience, actually performing them.

And over the years, I realise Satellite Of Love is really about jealousy.

That's what I think it's about, but I could be wrong.

Just 'cause I wrote it, it doesn't mean I know what it's about.

It's a wonderful song essentially about obsession, about stalking.

And yet, it's really a beautiful ballad

that also brings out the romance that's at the heart of the obsession.

This is somebody who just is following someone everywhere

'cause they don't trust them,

but that lack of trust is based in complete devotion.

It's also got that weird little humour in it,

that whole bridge, "I've heard that you've been out with Harry, Mark and John,"

whoever they are. Tom...

Whoever this person is, she's out with everybody.

When I hear Satellite Of Love,

I think of all those kids standing on the street corners of Brooklyn

when I was a mere tad

hitting notes and harmonising and trying to sing Stormy Weather.

To me, it's the doo-wop Lou, which is a very sweet and tender part of him.

Satellite, that's David.

David's amazing at background vocal parts. That...

That's okay, that's really great,

but the really great thing is the high note at the end.

Very few people could do that. I just loved when he did that.

It was just... What a move.

See, I think everything is really about details

and that was the exclamation mark, I thought,

when he goes up like that. Very few people could do that.

Really pure and beautiful.

There he goes. Isn't that great?

It's that note.

That might have been me. My God.

I think the concept of Transformer is very important

because, in a sense, that's what the Warhol scene offered to people,

these odd misfits to transform and become their inner beauty,

whatever strange and eccentric forms that might take.

What Lou was writing from

were experiences that went back to The Factory.

When he was sitting in The Factory and observing this parade of people walking in

and just coming from all kinds of strange corners of culture and society,

and watching them interact and mingle

and try and make lives for themselves in this freak show.

In the beginning, it was bunch of drug-type people,

and then when I went to work there, it was my job to get rid of all of those people.

And then it was just people that would do one day in a film with him

and they would hang on for years and years and years.

I was a kid. I was 15 years old. All I wanted to do was learn.

And everyone just kept on wanting to have my body