From The Vaults E01: Lou Reed

Welcome to From The Vaults! To help celebrate our 40th anniversary on the FM band, we’ve gone through years of archived interviews and cleaned them up for broadcast. Each episode can be found here at cfmu.ca and will be broadcast as part of The Throwdown, Thursdays at 2 pm.

On most occasions the interviewers will share their thoughts and memories with you. That’s not the case with this interview. Thousands of people have volunteered for CFMU over the years, and some of them – especially from the pre-internet days – have lost touch. All we know about this interview is that it was done over the telephone, in 1976, by a woman whose name we believe to be Rita Stuzki.

We do know plenty about the interviewee, of course. Lou Reed was born Lewis Allan Reed on March 2, 1942. The American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer became legendary as a solo artist and founding member of the Velvet Underground. He died in 2013 at the age of 71.

Reed was notoriously prickly when it came to interviews; stories abound in which he was rude to, and dismissive of, various members of the media. Something about Rita’s laid back interview style, however, kept Reed on the line (in fact, we’re not even sure how long the interview lasted – the remaining archival audio begins some time after the interview started, and ends some time before the interview ended). Reed was fresh from recording and releasing 1976’s Rock and Roll Heart, and he shares his thoughts on various elements of his music and career. Photo Courtesy: Danny Norton