“BAD REVIEWS ALWAYS HURT HIM. ANGERED HIM.”
“LOU WAS LIKE, DYLAN CAN DO THIS IN HIS SLEEP. HE’S NOT TRYING.”
From 1985 until the singer’s death in October 2013, producer HAL WILLNER was LOU REED’s loyal cohort, sharing his obsessions, disappointments and triumphs. Now he’s the de facto guardian of his legacy. “He was the Miles Davis of rock,” he tells DANNY ECCLESTON.
Hal Willner’s first interaction With lou reed could easily have been his last. the Philadelphian polymath, who’d been the music sketch producer of saturday night live since 1981, had a pet project – an album of music by Kurt Weill performed by contemporary artists – and he was hoping to get reed involved. “Kathryn schenker, who was at a&M publicity at the time, had read an inter view where lou had said he wanted to be the rock’n’roll Brecht & Weill,” Willner recalls. “so we got in contact with him. We had this talk and he was keen to do My ship. But i had this bizarre notion that he should sing september song. and he got angry, on the phone, and then called back and said, ‘that’s a good idea. You’re a real producer.’” Willner chuckles wheezily. as reed compliments go, this is about as good as it gets, as Willner would subsequently discover producing reed albums from 2000’s Ecstasy onwards, an experience he credits with teaching him “how to listen in a way i never had before. lou was constantly asking me what i thought, down to the detail of what was the bass like on the second chorus. of course, you’d better have an answer…” if that makes reed sound like a martinet, Willner insists it would be misleading. “lou’s reputation as a hard-ass isn’t accurate,” he insists. “he really did want people to love and understand what he did. of course, he has this histor y of making records that were either ignored or hated and then 20 years later called one of the great records of all time. from The Velvet Underground, to Berlin, to Metal Machine Music. even things that were done in the last period. the album he made with Metallica got awful reviews even before it was recorded!” hadn’t reed’s experiences with the Velvets inured him to bad reviews? “like all artists who say they don’t care what anyone else thinks, he did,” reckons Willner. “Bad reviews always hurt him. angered him. and he loved it when the records were understood. But he wasn’t going to let that affect what he was going to do.” reed’s 100 per cent commitment and attention to detail, says Willner, applied to every aspect of his life (“he took buying luggage seriously! he’d ask a million questions about a bag!”) and these were standards he’d expect equally of others. from May 2008, Willner and reed hosted new York shuffle, an internet radio show for sirius that was later licensed to BBc 6Music. the pair would bring their iPods – in reed’s case loaded with music that he’d often only recently acquired and sometimes had yet to play – and let fly. “he would play a Beyoncé record and say, ‘Just listen to that!’” recalls Willner. “he was always interested in technique and sound. But i remember we played something off Bob Dylan’s Tempest record, and lou was, ‘oh this is great.’ then three minutes in it would be, ‘is the instrumentation gonna change? can we fade this out?’ lou was like, ‘of course the lyrics are amazing, but Bob can do this in his sleep. he’s not trying.’ that’s what it always came down to: are they trying?” Willner was also present for reed’s hands-on involvement in the remastering of his rca and arista albums for the box set due for release next month. it coincided with a downturn in reed’s health, not that Willner knew it at the time. “it was great that sony invited him in to oversee the work,” says Willner. “these labels don’t have to consult the artist and a lot of them don’t. lou was able to hear these records in a way that he hadn’t been able to since he made them. especially the Street Hassle album, with the binaural sound [the original 1978 recording experimented with a 360° sonic environment that aimed to recreate the experience of being in the room with the musicians] – it just blew him away. “he wanted to live so badly,” Willner continues, wistfully. “he clung to life so desperately – any opportunity he had to do something, he did it. looking back, you can see the writing on the wall. he was on his way out. But none of us accepted it because it was so infectious, his clinging to life. i’ll always treasure being in the room for him re-hearing these records. talking about the background vocal that David [Bowie] put there… or the string arrangement. i remember a lot of talk about the background vocals. or him going crazy about some Don cherry part on The Bells. endless.” Willner paints a tantalising picture of reed re-engaging, for the first and last time, with his back catalogue, enthusiastically exploring tapes of the original live performances of Songs For Drella from January 1989 or even the six to eight shows’ worth of live tapes that birthed 1978’s Take No Prisoners album. that reed considered reviving the latter’s mix of challenging songs (“i wanna be black/have natural rhythm/ shoot twenty feet of jism”) and antagonistic monologues shows how little he was interested, even at the end, in varnishing a public version of himself. “there was not one ounce of pretension in lou,” says Willner. “he was not playing a character, so if he thought of an idea he just did it. and the guy you saw on stage, that was him too. i saw him play the hard rock café in Vegas. they were doing a series of shows with people like elvis costello. and you know, there are like slot machines around the balcony and all this shit. and the artists would adjust their shows to be more Vegasfriendly – do all their hits. so here comes lou, he had this show without drums and he didn’t change it one iota. he opened with
this song Vanishing Act. And there’s still gambling and noise going on. Suddenly he stops and says, ‘We’ll come back when you’re ready.’ And they split! And this is Vegas! You can imagine what it’s like. There were mob types backstage looking like they wear wool suits with no underwear, sound like they’re talking backwards. But not only won’t Lou go back on, he demands the audience are silent and they turn the slot machines off! And he got them to do it! Then he went on and did the set and it was great.” In July this year it was Willner’s bittersweet task to curate The Bells, an all-day celebration of Reed’s music at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. A huge range of artists – from Yo La Tengo crunching through Sister Ray to Steve Buscemi intoning Walk On The Wild Side – tackled gems, many overlooked, from the catalogue. Even for a fan, friend and collaborator, it was overwhelming. “I was just like, Oh my God – I can’t believe this work!” boggles Willner. “I’m Waiting For The Man, Disco Mystic… all these songs from ever y era. Is there a consistent thread? Only that this was a very, very powerful artist. It’s all Lou and the way he looks at things. He changed music. A few times. If it wasn’t for him, rock would have been different. Because of what the Velvets did, what Transformer did, and what Metal Machine Music did. The way to understand him… and this isnot to overstate the case, is that he was the Miles Davisofrock. That’s absolutely accurate.”