Lou Reed: with his new album, the rock renegade conjures Edgar Allan Poe, literature's favorite hell-raiser, in a way your English teacher never did

Interview, March, 2003 by Greil Marcus

Lou Reed's The Raven (Sire/Reprise) began its life onstage as POEtry, a collaboration with director Robert Wilson commissioned by the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, in 2000. Now, featuring dramatic readings by the likes of Willem Defoe, Elizabeth Ashley, and Steve Buscemi; notable musical contributions by Laurie Anderson and Ornette Coleman; and songs by Reed and his band, the piece, produced by Hal Willner, has been made over into a double CD. With songs as rock 'n' roll rough as "Edgar Allan Poe" sitting alongside Reed's own rewrites of Poe's greatest hits, and with dramatizations that in moments seem like nightclub acts, the work is also a modern dream.

GREIL MARCUS: I have to tell you--I had a dream last night about this interview. In this dream we did the interview, it was good-- and after I left I realized I had never asked you a single thing about Edgar Allan Poe.

LOU REED: That's very funny.

GM: So I thought maybe I should ask you a few questions. I want to ask you about this whole idea of rewriting. Rewriting Poe.

LR: I don't know if "rewriting" is really the word.

GM: Well, there is stuff in the pieces that wasn't there before. A lot of it is obscene, a lot of it is scatological. Stuff that you can imagine Poe might have wanted to say but couldn't.

LR: Wait, wait, wait--I don't think of it as obscene, as scatological. I think it's very much in the spirit of Poe. I'm shocked that you think that.

GM: I'm using "obscene" as a generic term. If you use the word "shit" in Poe, we'd call it an obscenity. That doesn't mean it's obscene in a moral sense.

LR: One of our actors [in the play] hadn't realized that I'd rewritten "The Raven." He turned to someone else and said, "I don't think Poe said 'arrogant dickless liar.'" That's what you mean.

GM: That's what I mean. When I heard Willem Dafoe recite "arrogant dickless liar" in your version of "The Raven," I thought, This is so perfect. But did you hesitate over the notion of rewriting Poe, of putting in words that weren't already there?

LR: No. And reading him out loud makes a big difference, I discovered. I think I had a superficial understanding of, say, "The Tell-Tale Heart." I'm sure everyone says they understand "The Tell-Tale Heart," but when I did one of [producer] Hal Willner's Halloween Poe celebrations at St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn, and I read it out loud, that was the first time I understood it, and it had a big effect on me. Then I realized just how much I could relate to Poe.

GM: How do you mean you understood it? Understood it emotionally?

LR: Emotionally, what exactly happens at the end. I hadn't really understood it before. I thought I had, but I hadn't. Why does the murderer admit his guilt? Why does he do that? I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons. But there's one really great reason, and it's when Willem says, "Do you not hear it? Do you fucking mock me? Do you mock me? Do you think me an imbecile? Do you think me a fool?" It comes under the general heading in Poe: the idea of being drawn to things we know are bad for us.

GM: When I first heard the reading of "The Raven" on the CD, when it started. "Once upon a midnight dreary"--it was like listening to somebody do Hamlet's soliloquy: You've heard it so many times. Did you ever think, "We can't revise this"? "We can't make this fresh"?

LR: Not only did I think that, but the corollary thought: This is a can't-win situation. On one hand you've mauled the classic, and butchered it, and made it barbaric. Or you've put everybody to steep--and you've mauled the classic. But the other way of thinking about it was...amazing. Fun. Why have this thing with Poe and then leave "The Raven" alone? No, I wanted to touch that. I wanted to put my paw print all over everything, but [in Germany] we ran out of time. But I kept at it, and when it came to New York it was ready.

GM: I love the way Dafoe gets rid of the first line so quickly.

LR: He's a New Yorker. [laughs] He's acting it the way a New Yorker would. It's fast.

GM: Why didn't you do any of the readings on the record yourself?

LR: We thought about that. Now I've started doing it, just not on the record. I wasn't up to it at the time. I was too deep into the writing end of it. I could tell people how to read or give them an idea, but I didn't want to do it.

GM: But you do sing the songs.

LR: I did guide vocals for the songs, and Hal said, "Why do you want to replace them [with other singers]?"

GM: A couple of songs you do with a very growly vocal.

LR: "Burning Embers."

GM: It's as if your throat is encrusted with hundreds of years of rocks and moss. Why did you do it that way? It's incredibly effective.

LR: Oh, I'm so glad you liked that--and noticed. That vocal needed someone who could sing that way, at least initially. Then I did a whole bunch of not singing it like that, and Hal said, "Why are you doing it normally when you have this over here? Every time you do it this way, it sounds great--and that way is really boring." And that was it--it got into howling.