Lou Reed's Berlin

The interview I did with Lou Reed for the Bulletin in Australia is up at their site. We talked about his live performance at the Sydney Festival of Berlin, an album that was excoriated by critics when it came out, although it has always been my favorite album of his. I saw the performance, which was directed by Julian Schnabel, in Brooklyn before it went to Sydney. Sitting in front of me were Reed's mother and sister. I was a bit nervous interviewing Reed, who is renowned for eating up journalists, but he turned out to be a lot nicer than I expected, though I did get a withering look or two when he didn't like a question.

I knew he was a fan of James Dean's so I gave him a copy of my book Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, after the interview and he spent a long time exclaiming over every picture in the book and talking about how cool James Dean was as his publicist kept tapping his watch and insisting that Reed had to go. Reed just ignored him.

You can read the interview with Lou Reed here.