My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed

by Michael Heath (Compilation), Pat Thomas (Editor)

Hardcover, 304 pages
6 � 9 in.
15.24 � 22.86 cm.

During his first major sit-down with the music press in 1977, between claiming all his songs were about guilt and revenge, Elvis Costello casually remarked, "I don't really listen to Lou Reed's records, but I never miss an interview with him."

Indeed, for all his publicly expressed loathing of the press in general and music journalists in particular, during his long career as a rock artist, Lou Reed was never less than entertaining in his dealings with the Fourth Estate. In fact, one could go so far as to claim that, for Lou, the press became as much an implement of expression as singing, composing, and playing music. In a style at times very much informed by his mentor Andy Warhol, Reed could play the media like a Marshall-amped Stradivarius.

To the majority of his fans, the apotheosis of Reed's relationship with the press, and most prominently regarded to this day, was the series of combative t�te-�-t�tes between Lou and the late great music journalist Lester Bangs, published in CREEM Magazine during the 1970s.

My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed features 30+ interviews spanning his solo career, from the golden era of print rock-journalism, to the first online blogs. The compilation is one fan's humble attempt to move beyond the Bangs canon, and delve deeper into the distance and intimacy, cactus and mercury, that constituted Lou's post-Velvet Underground public media image.

This anthology will be an intimate portrait of Reed who, in addition to being notoriously prickly (to put it mildly), was also intelligent, articulate, and deeply passionate about what was important to him, both as a person and as a creative artist.



Edited and with texts by Pat Thomas
Compiled by Michael Heath
Foreword by Luc Sante
Designed by Philippe Karrer
Cover photograph by Mick Rock
Hat & Beard Press #13

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

300 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 2019

About the author

Michael Layne Heath is a longtime freelance music writer, put on the path by mags like CREEM and then the first wave of Punk fanzines, thus inspiring him to start what became Washington DC’s first zine to cover that exploding scene in 1977. More recently, he has written for ezines such as Perfect Sound Forever and Tangents UK (r.i.p.), in addition to the briefly reconvened British psychedelic/folk music magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope.

Mike has contributed liner notes to a number of CD and vinyl reissues released on Bay Area record label Water Recordings/4 Men With Beards, and has also contributed to such printed and online music magazines as popmatters.com, RECORD COLLECTOR NEWS and NEW NOISE.

He also is a published poet, with many chapbooks published by Kendra Steiner Editions of San Antonio, TX.

Reviews

[Kimley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tosh Berman and I discuss this along with the 33 1/3 book - Lou Reed's Transformer in our Book Musik podcast.

We had a lot of fun with this one as we are huge fans of the subject matter of these two books - the legendary and irascible Lou Reed. We discuss these two recent books about him: the 33 1/3 book by Ezra Furman on the canonical "Transformer" album (Lou Reed's Transformer) and this collection of Lou Reed interviews that span the early 70s up to 2007 entitled "My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed" edited by Pat Thomas and compiled by Michael Heath.

[John Spiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lou Reed had a reputation for being surly and evasive with the press, a reputation that was somewhat deserved but largely unfair. If one reads the interviews he did while in the Velvet Underground, he comes off as almost earnest and vulnerable. Those interviews are completely forgotten in favor of the blood sport confrontations between Lester Bangs and Lou Reed that cemented his reputation as "difficult". "My Week Beats Your Year" is a curated set of interviews spanning 30 years that provides some nuance to the caricatured image of Lou as sneering asshole. With the right interviewer, Lou opens up and is downright human. The "Bad Lou" tends to emerge under the full moon of insipid questions. Surprise revelation: Lou was a big fan of the Kinks' "Preservation Act One," which counts for something in my book. Fair warning, if you buy this book looking for major revelations regarding the Velvet Underground or the making of "Take a Walk on the Wild Side," you will be left wanting.

[David Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had planned to mostly skim this book but ended up reading it nearly word for word. Repetitive as any book of interviews with one subject will be, untrustworthy when Lou pledges at various points in the 1970s that now he's finally serious, exasperating when Lou does a power play on some earnest interlocutor. Also, baffling that there's no interview concerning Street Hassle. Still, the overall results are entertaining and, on those occasions when Lou drops his guard or arrives in the right mood, enlightening.

[Manuel Chavarria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lou Reed was a fascinating guy, and he was right about music journalists. One of the sick thrills of this book is wading through some of the worst prose imaginable on the part of rock magazine hacks to get to Lou Reed.