They aren`t a perfect match by any stretch, but Lou Reed and John Wesley Harding connect on many levels: as songwriters, as former well-read-men-about- campus, as cigar smokers.
When we got them together in a Matteson hotel room a few weeks ago to talk about music, lyrics, censorship, touring and whatever else struck their fancy, Reed, 50, and Harding, 26, hit it off.
Both have produced work that the other admires. The themes of death and transcendence that dominate Reed`s latest album, ”Magic and Loss” (Sire), are in many ways symbolic of his career. Reed has been declared artistically
”dead” more than a few times, and acknowledges that he was drinking heavily during the 1970s, yet has re-emerged with a series of records in the last few years that rank with his groundbreaking late `60s work as leader of the Velvet Underground.
Harding (whose real name is Wes Stace) is the latest in a string of songwriters to be saddled with the ”New Dylan” albatross, and not just because his stage name pays homage to a Dylan album. Like Dylan, Harding doesn`t believe he has all the answers; his albums, such as the recent ”Why We Fight” (Sire), wrestle with moral dilemmas and revel in humanistic detail. Excerpts of their conversation follow:
Reed: Touring is hard when you got a band with you and sound people, because you`re paying `X` expenses whether you play or not. You just try to come out of it not owing anyone.
Harding: It depends whether you want to make money or not. This tour
(Harding plays at Metro next Saturday) is the first I`ve done with a band which will break even. But what I do most of the time is play solo. I make a ton of money. It`s great. Why don`t you do it?
R: Esthetically I think it could be great but I don`t know that it would be as much fun for me, because I really like the electric guitar. I could bring an electric with me, but it wouldn`t be quite the same.
H: You could make so much money.
R: Well I enjoyed the reading (a tour last year to promote his book of lyrics, ”Between Thought and Expression”), which took it a step further, with no electric guitar. But I like the idea of going out with one other guitar player, because I like the two-guitar thing. But, boy, if you cut this smaller, then you get to keep it. Some of the ways you don`t get to keep it, you start to get heavily involved in the sound, and sad to say, I think the audiences hear bad sound so often they don`t in fact recognize or care about good sound, even when somebody goes to the trouble of trying to give it to them.
H: The one piece of advice given to me by Seymour Stein (president of Sire Records, who signed both Harding and Reed) was to do everything cheap.
”If you do things cheap, it`s gonna work.” And I think that was a great piece of advice to give. . . .
R: From a label head (rolling his eyes). . . .
H: But he told me, ”You have to make it on this first album, otherwise your project will have been a failure.” And I appreciated that. They (label executives) have been very helpful to me not only in a realistic, financial sense, but also in letting me do what I`ve always wanted to do. I was always led to believe that big record companies got in the way of what you wanted to do.
R: I must say that the record label hasn`t gotten in the way of anything I`ve wanted to do. It`s hard to believe and maybe I haven`t done anything radical enough to get anybody disturbed. . . .
H: Yeah, it`s just straight top-40 stuff (laughter). . . . ”New Sensations,” if I can just be abjectly worshipful, I think is a great album. It`s the first album I have by you, and it sounds incredibly beautiful. It has ”What Becomes a Legend Most,” one of my favorite songs.
R: That was originally written because Gene Simmons of Kiss was producing a record by Wendy O. Williams, from the Plasmatics, and he wanted a song for her. He didn`t use it.
H: That`s incredible. You left it off your box set (”Between Thought and Expression”), which surprised me.
R: There were a lot of good things left off. It was excruciating.
H: You also left out the coda from (one of your greatest songs) ”Street Hassle” in the lyrics book. Why?
R: That`s not the part of the lyric I was interested in. What I really cared about was the middle section, and I thought the first section was a good set-up for that, that the third is essentially throwaway for a rock `n` roll record. In other words, it depends on the music. But the first and second part can stand on their own. That was the criteria for everything in the book: Can it stand on its own?
H: I did this book of my lyrics, but I took the lyrics and put them into stories. I thought that was the way for my lyrics to stand on their own, by filling in the gaps with punctuation and by turning them into paragraphs.
R: I didn`t rewrite mine, even though I could look at one and say,
”Well, I don`t believe that anymore,” or ”Gee, I wish I had said this.”
But I thought if I do that, this`ll never happen. It`ll just drive me crazy. If I`m gonna rewrite something I wrote 20 years ago from where I am now, it`s not fair to anything.
H: Certainly not fair to your good stuff. That`s what it`s least fair to- your songs.
R: That`s right. You know, you might see something grammatical that bothers you, that at the time you thought it was a lot of fun to be ungrammatical. I don`t know about ”ain`t.” And enough with the double negatives. The goal then was essentially the same as the goal now, which was to write lyrics that could stand on their own and that didn`t use slang that was tied to a time period.
H: A guy came up to me in a club the other day and said, ”I was just about to get married and I heard your song `Here Comes the Groom` and I listened to it over a period of two months and I broke off my marriage. Your song really affected me and I realized what you were saying about marriage in that song.” And I said, ”Look, I just got married. I`m not saying anything negative about marriage in that song.” It`s a metaphor about the marriage of an artist to his career and audience, at the beginning of the first song of the first album I put out, and it`s cynical about that kind of marriage because it`s a difficult relationship. This was a real person: ”I broke off my marriage and I want to thank you.”
R: Was he armed? (laughter)
H: No, but that really scared me.
R: It should scare you.
H: You`ve had a lot of things in songs, that if taken at face value, they might encourage someone to do something they wouldn`t normally do. Because your songs are about lifestyles, among other things. Have you ever been scared in that way?
R: You`re asking me one of the fundamental, most important questions you can face, because it affects every word you write in public. From day one, I was faced with or had people come and say, ”I took heroin because of you.”
”My friend died taking heroin because of you.” It gets into freedom of speech. Does that mean Poe shouldn`t have written ”The Telltale Heart”
? There are people out there susceptible, and crazy, to anything and everything.
H: Sure, which is not very different from thinking there`s a little shining eye and a clock beating the whole time (in ”Telltale Heart”). Which isn`t that different from (Ice-T`s) ”Cop Killer.” The worst thing about
”Cop Killer” is that yet again you`ve got people who completely understand what irony means being judged by people who did economics at university and don`t understand irony. They understand sarcasm.
R: They don`t understand the niceties of the language. They don`t understand nuance, they don`t understand the idea of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech means that somebody can say something that you really hate and despise and you`ve gotta protect his right to do it. On the other hand, you can say something and if someone gets ticked off, they`re allowed to yell at you. And that`s OK, too. What you`re talking about is way worse than any of that. One person sitting alone, listening to your record, and they go,
”Aha!” And then go do something based on a misinterpretation of you or . . .
H: A correct interpretation of you.
R: Right, they caught you on a bad day, it`s 5 in the morning, I can`t take it anymore, let`s . . .
H: Kill a policeman.
R: And you mean it for that time. And then these people put it into action. My response to that is that if I have to worry about that, I can`t write a thing. And I also am not responsible for everybody else out there.
H: But it doesn`t stop me from being scared or frightened by that kind of thing. I mean you`ve said so many more ”out there” things than I will say because your lyrics have been . . .
R: I wouldn`t put out a song where I would say I want you to go to 53rd and Euclid Avenue at 9:30 with a submachine gun and there`s two guys I can`t stand and I want you to off them. Because I`m sure there`s someone out there who would. As far as the other things go, I cannot be concerned with that. Because if you do in fact do that then you`re completely abnegating your responsibility to yourself to do the very best you possibly can with what you`ve got.
H: When I sit down to write, if I`m gonna start second-guessing myself . . .
R: It`s hard because everybody else is gonna be second-guessing you.
H: I think of myself as a protest singer. Few people think of me as a protest singer, but that`s what I do, and I think you are, too.
R: You should have a better word for it. Because ”protest” has that
`60s tinge to it. I don`t think your stuff is protest so much as pointing things out. Is the word for that ”realism”?
H: My work isn`t as realistic as yours is. But when I got (Reed`s 1989 album) ”New York,” it did seem to me a protest album in many ways, and it also pointed out some very specific things in the tradition of Phil Ochs. Talking about Jesse Jackson, talking about . . .
R: I thought it was so important that somebody Jewish, at least in this media, respond to Jesse Jackson regarding the ”Hymie Town” remark and
(Louis) Farrakhan. I was at this arts festival in Munich recently, and they titled it ”New York Radical Musicians.” A lot of musicians were wearing little yellow stars of David that said ”Jew” on them. I thought it was very important that I should be part of that. It`s amazing the different types of people that can like you and in their own mind have a vision of you that fits the way they like to see you. Because for x, y or z album, you happen to hit a nerve with them and they agreed with you, but they`re projecting on to you. Instead of Jewish you become Irish or Italian, because they can`t tell anything necessarily from the way you look or other things that you`ve said. And it`s that projection that you`re also concerned about, when you go back to what we were talking about earlier. This projection that they`ll put on you.
(John Lennon assassin) Mark Chapman is the leader . . .
H: The big projectionist.
R: And I might add this is exactly why (J.D.) Salinger stopped writing and doesn`t see anybody. Nothing had more effect on this generation probably than ”Catcher in the Rye.” And I`m sure that`s why he sits out on that compound and won`t talk to anyone.
H: Thomas Pynchon has done that even further.
R: I mean, why would anyone in their right mind want to be famous? The celebrity is the down side. The only conceivable good thing that celebrity can do is bring in money to a benefit . . . or get you into a movie earlier.
