Give Them Enough Nope

The word 'no' crops up a great deal around Lou Reed. When I first sit down at his table in the New York meatpacking district brasserie where he's attending this morning's interview promoting his new double CD, The Raven, he's standing a few feet away, telling his publicist, "No, no, no no, no, no, no", to a potential photo shoot locale elsewhere in the restaurant. A good few 'no' anecdotes emerge during the interview, too. In 1979, Arista asks him to work some more on his LP The Bells after he hands it in - he says no. He asks another record company to reissue Metal Machine Music in Surround Sound in 2000 - they say no. He brings in a bunch of saxophonists to solo on a track on The Raven: the verdict on each of them? "No, no, no, no, nope, nope. Oh well." (The solo is eventually recorded by Ornette Coleman.) Not to mention the sleeve credits on Metal Machine Music: "No Synthesizers, no Arp, no Instruments?, No Panning, No Phasing, No." (Creem's review of the record was the word "NO" printed more than 800 times.) Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore once called Metal Machine Music "the most positive negative record", and I guess Lou Reed must be the most positive negative artist - because during our conversation the word 'fun' comes up just as often as the word 'no'. Of Metal Machine Music he says, "People think I didn't really like it, that I did it to get out of a contract - Jesus. People can't figure out how you could like that. Or how you could like that and do "I'll Be Your Mirror". Or "Perfect Day", or "Satellite Of Love", or "Walk On The Wild Side". Why not? And The Raven is one huge why not, it's like the why not of all why nots."

Running for more than two hours, The Raven is Reed's longest and most sprawling work to date. He and coproducer Hal Willner have intertwined new (and two old) Reed songs, abetted by cameo vocal performances by David Bowie, Laurie Anderson and The Blind Boys Of Alabama, with poetry and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, Amanda Plummer, Elizabeth Ashley, Fisher Stevens and Kate Volk. Reed and his group provide the musical backing with help from trumpeter Steve Bernstein and many of his downtown New York, post-Lounge Lizards accomplices, such as Doug Wieselman, Paul Shapiro and Jane Scarpantoni. The man who put "I'll Be Your Mirror", a mellifluous lovesong to Nico, next to the forbidding, disembodied poetics of "The Black Angel's Death Song" on The Velvet Underground And Nico; who followed The Velvets' unforgettably assaultive White Light/White Heat with the definitively understated third LP, The Velvet Underground; the surprise glam hit Transformer with the unremittingly morose song cycle Berlin; or a deliberately mediocre hit LP, Sally Can't Dance, with the commercially suicidal, monolithic feedback opus Metal Machine Music, is certainly no stranger to outlandish juxtaposition. The Raven's first 15 minutes alone encompass "The Conqueror Worm", recited by Dafoe over a heavily processed, vertiginous single note wobbling across multiple octaves; an "Overture" with frantic reed blowing from Wieselman and a free jazzstyle rush of descending power chords; a brief musing on "Old Poe" wishing to meet his younger self set against clean, wistful guitar lines; a spoken "Prologue" with cello accompaniment; and a typical Reed rocker titled "Edgar Allan Poe". There's a new version of Transformer's "Perfect Day" sung by Antony (of The Johnsons, whose debut album appeared on David Tibet's Durtro label), which redraws the tune into a tremulous plaint, and two songs which address aging in a shockingly candid way. First, there's "Change":

"Your hair falling out/Your ass starts to sag/Your balls shrivel up in their sac." Then there's "Who Am I?": "A younger man now getting old/I have to wonder what the rest of life will hold... I wonder how much life I can take... I hate that I need air to breathe/I'd like to leave this body and be free." Compare that with Candy Darling's quandary, "I've come to hate my body/And all that it requires in this world", from the old Velvets staple, "Candy Says".
On opposite, extreme ends of the spectrum are "Balloon", a childlike miniature in the tradition of "I'm Sticking With You" sung by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and "Fire Music", a two and a half minute sonic holocaust that takes Metal Machine Music into the new century, and must be heard to be believed.

I comment to Reed on the album's range. "Yeah, you put 'em next to each other, it's like, whoah, who did that?" he replies. "At the time it didn't seem like that because it seemed logical. X happens so you do Y, but that gets blocked so you go over here, something lucky happens and this opens up, ah! OK, you're in there, but later on if you look at the whole thing... you know what I'm saying? Holy shit. Wow. Even a few months ago there were still some little tiny decisions to make, putting a track code next to a speech, separating it from a song so you could isolate it, little things like that when you're going over it yet again for the two billionth time. Willner's a lot better at that than I am, 'cause he remembers things and I don't. We were saying, 'My God, how did this even get done, look at all of this', because Willner had to put together the credits. It did take a seriously long time in serious ways... so many different areas."

But there doesn't appear to be any grand scheme in structuring the whole shebang. ""The Bed" [originally from 1973's Berlin] was kind of this perfect lead-in with "House Of Usher"," Reed counters, "with houses and flames and all of this... the "Balloon" song always ended act one [The Raven began life as a theatrical piece]. Why? I don't know. I mean I can't give you a logical reason for it, it's just that it did, and it always did, it was always supposed to be there. Having the McGarrigles do it, that's Willner, that's a Willner idea, those amazing harmonies they did, those kind of things, that's where they all come from. Instinct. Or because I like it that way. I mean, I could think of reasons - I used to in interviews - but it's all after the fact, make-believe reasons: 'Oh yeah, we did that because actually there is a balloon mentioned in [Poe's tale] "The Cask Of Amontillado", we're referring back to it' - no there isn't [laughs]. It was because of rhythm, really. It was time to have a little relief from some of the other things that had preceded it."

Hal Willner had previously organised Closed On Account Of Rabies, a 1997 double CD of Edgar Allan Poe's work interpreted by the likes of Iggy Pop, Diamanda Galas, Christopher Walken, Marianne Faithful, Gabriel Byrne and Dr John, and he also worked on Reed's Ecstasy in 2000. Reed has always cited Poe as an influence, not only on himself but on two of his other literary heroes, Hubert Selby Jr and William S Burroughs. Indeed, Poe's macabre corpus seems to linger over much of Reed's work: the eerie vocal approximations of hospital machinery in White Light/White Heat's "Lady Godiva's Operation" (echoed in many of The Raven's sound effects) and the "long dead and gone" woman in "I Heard Her Call My Name" (à la "Annabel Lee" or "The Raven"'s Lenore), to the mutterings of madness, castles, the night tide and "the curse that haunts our family" in the Loaded outtake "Ocean", to The Blue Mask's paranoid lament "Waves Of Fear", to Magic & Loss's tale of selfinflicted disfigurement, "Harry's Circumcision".

The Raven album originated in collaboration with theatre director Robert Wilson as a two act play, POEtry, that began performances in Europe in 2000. The CD was adapted and massively overhauled to the point where, as Reed explains, "We needed a copy of the script. Now that would seem simple enough, right, but it had to be rewritten and rewritten and rewritten for the CD - specifically to be heard, not to be seen. Things were then moved around with Logic [editing software], so now the script isn't the same anymore: that's got to be moved too. But we weren't worrying about that - who cared about that, because it had been done. They said it, it's on tape, and now we're over here. Now here's the final version, where's the script? It's in the box over there, they saved it, and that is where the script is, and the cues... Is it in order? No, it's not in order, so what do you do? Willner tried to put it in some kind of an order. At some point, if there really is a need to see that text, someone's going to have to transcribe that whole thing and go over it again. Things were rewritten to be an audio experience. In the original play you'd see something happening, it didn't have to be explained or someone comment on it, it was right there in front of you, here that's not true. So you would hear things happen, which really is more fun because your imagination comes up with some amazing things, and we were having a lot of fun. Willner has a huge collection of sound effects from old radio shows, things like this, not to mention all the sound effects libraries they have now, CD-ROMs and CDs, plus what we made ourselves, electronically and combining things or using some of my favourite machines linked together, because we wanted our own effects, really, including door knocks, thunder, whirlwind effects. Willner actually had a whirlwind effect - 'Get away from the window, there's a whirlwind!' [Laughs] I love this kind of stuff. It's not like an old radio show: this is way more 3D, the imaging, where things are placed, that is a lot of fun. Things sneaking up behind you - someone's going to appear here, what is it? Or it will just be a sound that's suggestive of an emotion more than anything, then boom, it's gone, there's another one, and it's moving."