Interviews
White Light White Heat
Interview by Bill Flanagan. Published in Musician no. 126 - April 1989
Lou Reed and John Cale remember Andy Warhol
MUSICIAN: John, I'd like to get your feelings on something I asked Lou about last week – the song "I Believe," in which Lou wishes retribution on Valerie Solanis for shooting Warhol. He sings, "I believe I would have pulled the switch on her myself."
CALE: I agree with that.
REED: Point of interest is that Billy Name came up to us after the show and assured us that he had seen her death certificate in L.A.
CALE: Which we wished we had. We could have made a slide of that just to show there is some justice in the world.
REED: Right.
MUSICIAN: The shooting of Andy, the attempted assassination, is portrayed in Songs for 'Drella as a climactic moment. Afterwards, in "Nobody but You" and "Forever Changed, "you imply that it gave Andy greater self-knowledge and perhaps pulled him back from some sort of abyss. There is a counter-implication that it might have eventually caused his death. The idea of building to a violent climax from which the protagonist emerges with a greater self-knowledge is so central to theater that I wondered if you were exaggerating the effect the shooting had on Andy for dramatic effect. Was he really so transformed?
CALE: I was thinking about how shooting him did not kill him.
REED: I was thinking about how at one point I ran into him and he said that he was alive, but he thought he may have died. One of the most astonishing remarks I'd heard in a while. Along with "Why didn't you visit me, where were you?" Which was something that's bothered me over the years. But he said it more than once. They had thought he died in the hospital, he was there for eight hours and he was telling me how he ran out of veins and they had to take blood out of his hands, how the pain was so awful and he was alive now-but maybe he had died. He wasn't sure that he felt any difference.