ATN: It's sort of what was going on in your life turned into art.

Reed: Whatever I'm around. Oh yeah. Sure. I don't want to be pretentious to call it art but I hope that it's pure and good enough and honest enough of thought and expression to be... I'm trying to make art out of it.

ATN: Very early on, there's that idea of taking poetry and wedding it to rock and roll and writing about things that hadn't traditionally been written about in rock and roll. Keeping it very simple but powerful. That's something that you've done consistently.

Reed: That was the idea from the beginning.

ATN: Yeah. It's amazing. And listening to this album, listening to the blues guitar playing on "Sex With Your Parents." To my ears, it could be a Howlin' Wolf session or something. And the rawness of the guitar on some of the other things. Sometimes I think people don't realize how hard it is to get that right.

The man, the myth, the boulliabasse.

Reed: Let me tell you, I know how hard it is to get that right. Because someone who has been trying to get it right for lo these many centuries....All the way back to the very beginning, I had my dream about what you could do with this music, with lyrics and the sound of the guitar. Keeping in mind that you're talking to a person who has been in bar bands since he's 14. But graduated honors in English. Now you cross that with someone who's reading Hubert Shelby and William Burroughs and really likes it. And some of the stuff that Delmore Schwartz did. And I was a student and friend of Delmore Schwartz. You mix that all up together and on top of that, there I land in with Andy Warhol. What an amazing boulliabasse of influences is going on there! And it stays that way from my very first record on up. Now I may have fucked up here or there. I may have fallen down or stood up or flied or this or that but it's always there for better or worse. That's why I said, if you plan them in a row, it's kind of interesting. I was astonished when I saw a magazine the other day in Spain. They had all the albums in a row. Holy Shit. Now I know someone would say, "well they ain't all good." I say, well, that ain't even the point either. There's a thread that goes through there that I think one is really fascinating including the focus. It's someone trying to focus this thing starting from the very bare bone beginning to where you get up to now where this is high intensity focus. The recording techniques I used, what I did on this, heavy duty focus. If you want to hear it, it's there, you know. And the more you want to hear, the more that is there. It seems like a simple record. There are many, many, many things going on and I don't like to tell people about it. I like them to...it's like I usually say, well, you know, it's a rock thing and if you get into the lyrics you could and if you don't want to, it's just come caterwauling going on over there. But there's all these other things going on there but it's interesting to me. Have you heard it on a good system?

ATN: I actually listened to it on a portable CD player with headphones.

Reed: That's all?

ATN: Yeah, that's the way I've been listening to it.

Reed: It's the only way you've been listening to it?

Reed, Lou, "Dirty Blvd" from New York
(45 second excerpt)

Stereo MPEG (1.16M)

Mono MPEG (582k)

Mono Sun-AU (387k)

RealAudio 28.8k

ATN: Yeah. Because I'm traveling around a lot.

Reed: Well, you're in for a real treat. I'll play it for you outside for a minute on one of my systems. We mixed over six different systems. Six. To make sure it sounded great no matter what the hell you listened over. This is not an elitist CD by any stretch.

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