It's been nearly 16 months since Lou Reed died, and all the Noel Gallagher interviews in the world can't quite fill the cranky hole in our hearts. Thankfully, the inventive PBS series Blank on Blank—which spruces up classic and unique interviews with artistic legends by pairing it with animation—has uncovered a lost Reed interview from 1987, and lovingly brought it to life. Watch below as Reed espouses on loving shotguns and hating The Beatles.
The two best parts of the 1987 interview with music executive Joe Smith (besides the bit about scarring college students with his shotgun out in the wilds of Jersey): Reed talking about the reactions to "Heroin."
The other thing that killed me was stuff like this had been in novels so long, it was like nothing. I write a song called “Heroin”, you would have thought that I murdered the Pope or something. It should have been, “now we can get a lot of people who have talent for writing and everything into rock and roll. We’ll all write about really adult stuff.” That was what I wanted to do, is write rock and roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn’t lose anything; it would be timeless, in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics.
And the difference between what The Velvet Underground were trying to do compared to its contemporaries.
Joe Smith: What was the ambition and the goal?
Lou Reed: Oh. To elevate the rock and roll song, and take it where it hadn’t been taken before. I’m saying like from my point of view and I know this sounds pretentious but I just thought the other stuff couldn’t even come up to our ankles; not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level that we were on, compared to everybody else. They were just painfully stupid and pretentious. When they did try to get in quotes: “arty”, it was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by stupid, I mean like The Doors.
Joe Smith: You never felt Lennon and the Beatles… did you feel that they were in a league at all?
Lou Reed: No, I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage. If you said, “who did you like?” I liked nobody.
Lou Reed truly was the Kanye West of his generation.
