As with so many things with Lou, it was touch and go until the very end. I always felt that one of the reasons Lou and I got along well was that we met socially before we ever met as artist and critic.
In June of , I got stuck at the airport in Cleveland, where I had gone to cover the concert celebrating the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
So we sat and chatted in the airport lounge. It was, and he seemed pleased to be represented. It had not, but at that moment I got a sense of how important she was to him. Though I subsequently interviewed Lou a half dozen times or so, I remember those more casual moments with the most affection. I recall talking with him at length about Brian Wilson, whom he greatly admired, at a party for Amnesty International. Encountering him around the city that way always made me proud to be a New York native.
An artist of incalculable significance, Lou was also, as one of his song titles put it, the ultimate NYC Man as inextricable a part of the city as, say, the Twin Towers. Lou and [producer] Bob Ezrin decided that Reed should write a suite of musically and thematically connected songs based on the disintegrating marriage of the two characters in Berlin.
Those literary and cinematic strategies also served to distance Reed from the visceral power of the material he was drawing on. They are expensive to produce, and therefore the album needs to be priced higher, which tends to diminish sales. Reed had only just established himself as a commercial artist, so this expansive concept for Berlin was by no means an easy sell to his label.
