Today, on a Vicious Blue Planet
Katie Couric, Britney Spears, Lou Reed and Alastair Fothergill. Alastair Fothergill?
Lou Reed, who once wrote a little-known gem called “Ocean,” was the first guest on the opening installment of Musicians, a new series on Bravo hosted by journalist David Wild (Mondays, 10 p.m.). Lou was in good form: fit, interesting and, as always, draped in downtown black. Wild asked him to show the studio audience the riff to “Vicious,” and dapper Lou obliged. Then he played the opening chords of “Sweet Jane,” which turned out to be the identical riff played backward. A balding, pudgy figure nailed to an easy chair, Wild expressed amazement at how a simple riff could be so powerful, and followed up with such patchouli-scented questions as “How do you find the profound in the simple?”
“Take a lot of drugs” would have been the true answer, but I forget what Lou said. Last month I saw Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, author of the best-selling The No Spin Zone, interview a journalist who had written a new biography of the Rolling Stones. Unlike most interviewers, O’Reilly had not only read the book, he’d worked himself up into a high dudgeon about it as well. Glaring into the camera, he ticked the Stones’ sins off on his fingers like an angry dad circa 1969. “Children out of wedlock, hard-drug use, intoxication, using other people, betrayal, adultery, violence against women, on and on and on and on,” he thundered. “These are evil guys, are they not?”
It would have been fun to see O’Reilly chat with Reed about the Velvet Underground. In fact, someone should give O’Reilly a program devoted entirely to interrogating the heroes of the counterculture. I can see it now.
O’Reilly: Warhol’s dead, Nico’s dead, Sterling Morrison’s dead, you broke up the band and became a drug addict and a transvestite, you turned thousands of kids on to heroin, you only knew three chords, what do you have to say?
Reed: Uh . . .
Call it The No Sin Zone.
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