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illinoisentertainer.com june 2020
06•2020
Lou Reed
First, let me preface this with a little disclaimer. Call me a misanthrope, but — in all my 40-plus years of rock
journalism — I have never really been a sharer, outside of my stories. I see no use for social media; I don’t
care what your opinion of my work happens to be; this is not a dialogue. Enjoy what I’ve written about
Musician X, Y, or Z, then line the parrot cage with my words tomorrow. Harsh, I know. But I sincerely believe
that the less people know about you, the better, and my hard-learned life’s motto is “Everybody has an agenda,”
and it rarely includes you. Get used to it. That being said, and given this surreal Poe-like “Masque of
the Red Death” situation in which we all find ourselves, I thought it might be time to share a little. Namely,
what literature has meant to me ever since I started reading H.P. Lovecraft in grade school, and the curious
role it came to play in my career — where I brought a hand-picked favorite book as a gift to almost every
artist I have interviewed. A fact that — since I don’t divulge too much — few folks ever knew.
Now I don’t want to be The Kids in the Hall flying pig here, grabbing attention with a whiny ‘Hey, hey,
hey — look at MEEE!’ That’s not what this is. But I did regularly find myself in the unique situation of having
one-on-one, face-to-face conversations with celebrities, armed only with an often-oblique line of questioning
that I came up with myself, a genuine enthusiasm for their work, and a good idea of what I thought
they might like to read. Underscoring this was my belief that writers always take, take, take from their sub-
jects, so why not try to give back in some small way? Raised in the Midwest, I learned two prime directives
— why give up on the heavy metal you loved the day before when punk rock came along? And when you
stumble across a great piece of art, why Bogart that joint? Share it with as many potential fans as you can.
That’s why I started doing this in the first place. First 1977 interview: Nazareth. Second: The Ramones, as
I recall. And it just kept going — and getting more and more fascinating — from there.
There are a few megawatt personalities that I initially couldn’t figure out, gift-wise, so I improvised. For
instance, the first time I sat down with David Bowie, I had no idea which novels he had or hadn’t read, so
I brought him a bug-eyed Margaret Keane print and corresponding T-shirt. And his face lit up. “What. Is.
THIS?” He inquired, unfamiliar with her kitschy work. And we started by talking about our mutual respect
for French film director Jean Cocteau and his dumbfounding 1947 masterpiece Beauty and the Beast. Then
he related an incredible story of Tony Scott — the director he had worked with on the vampire flick The
Hunger — and how he had hit a brick wall when trying to film Catherine Deneuve’s billowing bedroom
curtains shot. How could he do it to full effect? Bowie recommended the method Cocteau used for Josette
Day’s hall-floating scene, but Scott had never seen it. So the rocker rented a London movie theater one
night, pre-video, to screen the black and white classic for just the two of them. Popcorn included. Scott
immediately grasped the technique and employed it well. But before our hour was up, the Thin White
Duke had recommended one book that he deemed as all-important — Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a
Mask. It was then out of print in the States, but I finally tracked down a copy in London a year later. It felt
like I’d won some sort of Frank Buck trophy — I took these tips that seriously. It was an incredible honor
to get such information firsthand.
My initial mid-‘80s chat with Lou Reed was only a ‘phoner,’ and I’d just moved to San Francisco and
was beginning to frequent City Lights and other hip bookstore haunts. During the talk, he casually mentioned
Delmore Schwartz, and I stopped him. “Who’s that?” I asked. (Another Midwest thing — never try
to bluff your way through any historical reference to art; It never hurts just to come clean and admit that
you don’t know what in the fuck they’re talking about.) And — instead of sighing in frustration or simply
hanging up — he took the time to explain, in-depth, who the man was and what he had meant to him in
college. I went to City Lights the next day and bought as many of his titles as I could. Years later, when
Reed and I finally met in person in L.A. to discuss his New York album, I brought him a pile of books that
I had fallen in love with — including French surrealist Joris-Karl Huysmans’ La Bas and A Rebours — and
I told him how much his kindness had meant to me, along with the way that he had delivered it without
a note of condescension. I asked him why he did that, and he replied — simply, wisely, as only Lou Reed
could, while chewing a stalk of celery — “I could tell that you were actually curious.” I never forgot that.
Because curiosity is what it’s always been about. I can’t imagine ever looking around at the world without
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Butch Walker
M
ega-producer and solo artist Butch Walker fully understands the dire
scope of our current coronavirus pandemic, which is forcing folks all over
the world to shelter in claustrophobic place while the worst passes. But
— truth be told — he’s noticed no tangible difference in his day to day Malibu activities,
he swears. “I’m at my studio right now, which is just me and isolation, which
is how I work most of the time anyway, and I’m commuting back and forth to our
home on the beach,” he says. “We also have a little farm in Tennessee, but we’re
here in California because my kid goes to school here, and he’s doing online school
right now and the classes are in real time. And it is cool, but it does keep us stuck
in one place, whereas we’d like to be in an RV traveling back to the South.” Instead,
the 50-year-old has spent much of his new concept album American Love Story on a
journey back to Georgia, where he grew up, lyrically dealing with the prejudices,
bigotry, and uninformed populace he encountered — make that SURVIVED —
there. It’s his most ambitious undertaking to date.
The disc opens with “The Singer,” and the repeated rhetorical question “Are we
having a conversation?” Yes, apparently we are, as the diverse songs — influenced
by everything from The Beach Boys to Pablo Cruise — veer from perspective to perspective
(the chiming “Gridlock,” a funky “Fuck It,” a bongo-furious “Out in the
Open,” a surf-frothed “Torn in the U.S.A.,” and the gentle closer “Forgot to Say I
Love You.” Walker explains the storyline thusly: “There are several characters, and
it runs the gamut. You’ve got a narrator, a musician who’s on the stage who is narrating
the situation. Then you’ve got a white guy who’s a middle-aged, homophobic,
racist bigot, but who’s also misunderstood as he’s unpacked a lot of his own
daddy issues growing up in a house full of hate. Then you’ve got a gay guy that this
guy used to torment and beat the shit of back in high school. Then, in a twist of fate
one night, that very gay guy — now an adult — saves the other guy’s life in a car
accident, so that guy now owes his like to everything he grew up hating. Then
you’ve got a woman who’s this free-spirited California hippie party girl that
becomes the love interest for this guy that’s changing, then they have a son together,
and that kid comes out as gay. Then dad really has to deal with his karmic shift
in life. The characters are all loosely based on people in my life, including myself.”
IE: Do you guys have any pets out there with you?
BUTCH WALKER: We have a French bulldog. And sadly, our German shepherd
passed away unexpectedly last weekend, so it’s a fresh wound. And it’s a bummer.
But we’re getting through it. It’s been tough, tough on my kid because he grew up
with that guy, it’s his guardian angel.. He was only eight, but it was tumors, cancer,
and it was pretty brutal and sudden, having to put him Photo by Ed Spinelli
down. But let’s talk about something more uplifting!
IE: You once said that you proudly pushed The Donnas into recording their first
minor-chord anthem, “Revolver.” Do you hear something in an artist’s music that
they don’t?
BW: That happens a lot. But you’ve just gotta go into it hearing the end of the song
before you even start at the beginning. That means that you have to have the foresight
and the vision in your head for what it’s going to sound like in the end.
Because it doesn’t always sound like the final result right when you start. A case in
point — when you’re building a song from scratch with an artist, and it’s not a full
band situation, where you CAN hear what the end result’s going to sound like —
when you’re sitting in the room with just a singer who’s a songwriter, with a song
on guitar — then you’ve got to be in sync with whatever they have in their head.
You’ve got to be in sync with that, or you’ve got to create the vision yourself and
tell them, “Okay, trust me on this — I’m gonna lay down this little drumbeat and
you’re gonna play along and sing to it. And you’ve got to trust me that the end
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