CHARLIE BENNETT: Thanks for tuning in to Lost in the Stacks. As promised last week, today's show is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music played in its entirety. [LOU REED, "METAL MACHINE MUSIC, PART 1"] OK, maybe not. [TELEVISION, "FRICTION"] You are listening to WREK Atlanta. WILL: Oh. CHARLIE BENNETT: You got it? All right. Hey, everybody. We're going to take a mulligan on that one. The infamous A/B button has confounded yet another board op. It's OK. We now know it'll never happen again. You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the Research Library Rock and Roll Radio Show, home of the haunted A/B button. I'm Charlie, in the studio with-- its a gaggle. Ben is back for more cookies. I've got Will on the board. I've got Matthew. We've got a guest. I've got Wendy. I've got Fred. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. FRED RASCOE: Our show today is called "How to Write a Book II-- Transformer." CHARLIE BENNETT: We found the sweet spot for a library rock and roll show. Our guest, the musician Ezra Furman, wrote a book about Lou Reed's 1972 album Transformer. WENDY HAGENMAIER: A record which at least one of us has listened to over 100 times. CHARLIE BENNETT: I won't confess if you don't make me. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Ezra's book is part of the 33 1/3 series published by Bloomsbury. These are short appreciations, critiques, or histories of individual records. FRED RASCOE: We have an interview with Ezra about how and why he wrote the book, what he learned about writing, and what he learned about his own obsession with Lou Reed. WENDY HAGENMAIER: If you want to join the conversation, the hashtag for this show is LITS415, for Lost in the Stacks, Episode 415. Feel free to tweet your thoughts, questions, or evidence of your musical obsessions with that hashtag. CHARLIE BENNETT: Our songs today are different than our normal free association. We'll play some tracks from Transformer, along with some complementary songs that connect somehow, at least in my head. FRED RASCOE: But we're going to start with a song from Ezra Furman. And we found one that works on two levels. If you have an obsession, you have a haunted head. CHARLIE BENNETT: Hey! FRED RASCOE: So let's start with "Haunted Head" by Ezra Furman, which also seems to have a little Lou Reed to it, right here on Lost in the Stacks. [EZRA FURMAN, "HAUNTED HEAD"] FRED RASCOE: "Haunted Head" by Ezra Furman, I definitely heard the Lou Reed in that. This is Lost in the Stacks. And our show today is about how Ezra Furman wrote the 33 1/3 book about Lou Reed's album, Transformer. CHARLIE BENNETT: Now, we recorded this interview in a glitchy studio after a hurricane. So you may notice a few digital artifacts creeping into the audio, some more metal machine music, if you will. I started the interview by asking Ezra if he'd always wanted to write a book. EZRA FURMAN: I used to think I'd be a fiction writer. So I used to write a lot of fiction. But I never tried anything like this. And no, I never thought that I would. Being a music writer seems like a disreputable profession to me. CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] Because you make music and they write about it, is that why? Or is there something more particular that makes it disreputable? EZRA FURMAN: Well, a big part of my experience of music writing is just deflating stuff that other people think is good. And I'm just like, ah, you want to do that? That's such a bad thing to want to do. And also, what can you say about a really great record? It's just great. It's just like, the best music, it's way more powerful to me than words can contain. And so it seems like a fool's errand to try to write about it. And in a way, I still think that that's true. I can't imagine writing about how this is the greatest thing. But in this record, I found a different register, not like I love this so much, but this is fascinating to me. And I think it's got something to teach me about who I am, where I've been and where I'm going. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, it seems like you could not have written this about a record that you really enjoyed and had no particular feelings about the personal life of the artist. Because you went into Lou Reed and tried to figure out why you loved him so much and why he repelled you in some way. EZRA FURMAN: Yeah. That's right. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is that why the book worked for you? Or what was the hook that finally you said, oh, I'm cooking, actually, I'm writing this book and it's going to work out? EZRA FURMAN: Well, I first started getting interested in what I was writing when I realized how starkly self-contradictory the record is. It's like an effort to make a likable, commercially successful hit record, but it's by a guy who, what he's known for is being unlikable and unpop and having a band with the word "underground" in its name. And he's trying to use his non-popness to go pop. And that's really, really interesting to me. And then it became more interesting when I realized that it mirrors the way that he's playing masculinity and femininity off of each other in a very similar way to that. And the contradictions are just so thorny. And then I think I didn't realize that I had a whole book's worth of stuff to say about it until I saw that I was facing some very parallel things in my life right at that time-- having put out a record that was the first record that more people were paying attention to that I've made. And coming out as queer and being like, that's part of what's interesting about this record is that I'm a queer person talking about being queer. And I don't know, I had had another band that broke up. And I was trying to reclaim my music career on different terms. And it hit me all of a sudden, I had so much in common with my hero. CHARLIE BENNETT: Within the book, it seems like you actually tried to create a high-level narrative of queer history in America that kind of matched and you interweaved your own coming-out story or your own self-realization story. Was that all there in your head when you started realizing what the record was about? Or did that turn into a research project? And did you have to take a break and learn the history fully before you could come back and write the book? EZRA FURMAN: Yeah, I learned a lot. I did a lot of reading about the gay rights movement in the 20th century. Yeah, I didn't know most of that stuff. It wasn't taught in school to me. So I did a lot of research, particularly on that, the gay rights history stuff. And I also listened to a lot of Lou Reed music that I had not heard. I had a funny relationship with research and history and stuff. Because I didn't want the book to turn out to be a pretty comprehensive history. I was only interested in facts as much as they deepened what resonates for me about the album and its context. But the more I learned the facts of the situation-- yeah, I don't know-- they were all like, wow, this is a very poignant moment for this album to arrive, in terms of where the gay rights movement was at, where Lou Reed's personal life was at. I didn't want it to feel like a historical book. I wanted to write essays. I wanted to write about what was important about the album and not what was true about it. My goal was to explore why this album resonated so deeply for me. It turned out that what is true about the album is also a lot of what's important about it. I thought that I might be writing something that actually had falsehoods in it. I don't care about the real history of this album. I'm just going to talk about its dream existence in the way it's loomed large in my art. That's not what turned out to happen, because I found the actual facts of its context very moving. CHARLIE BENNETT: Was there anybody guiding you through this process of discovering how you would write the book? Did you have an editor that you checked in with, that you said, I might do an imaginative book instead of a true book? Or was this all on your own thinking of how you were going to approach the book? EZRA FURMAN: Without getting into too much boring detail, there was an interesting thing that happened. I did have an editor. And she was like, OK, you can send me anything and I'll get back to you about it. We can talk about whatever you want. And then there was some upheaval at Bloomsbury Publishing, who published the series. And that person left. My editor left. And I didn't have a person to check in with for a while. And then I was off and running. And I think it was very helpful for me to not have somebody to be neurotic about and be like, do you think this is OK? I don't know what that should say. I'm going to change this maybe. I just think it was better to let myself write and write and write, and be like, I really don't know where this is going, how this could possibly be structured. It was better to not be waiting to hear back about what somebody thought about it, and just get a whole volume of everything I could think of to write first, and then organize it later, which is just how I did it. CHARLIE BENNETT: We'll be back with more from Ezra Furman after a music set. WILL: File this set under P61397.C5P4. [BEST COAST, "WHEN I'M WITH YOU"] [LOU REED, "PERFECT DAY"] MATTHEW: You just heard, "When I'm With You" by Best Coast. And before that was, "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed. Those were a few songs about how we make each other feel. [TELEVISION, "FRICTION"] WENDY HAGENMAIER: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "How to Write a Book II-- Transformer." Our guest is Ezra Furman, author of the 33 1/3 book on Lou Reed's album, Transformer. CHARLIE BENNETT: When you read the book, the completed version, it seems almost schematic in its construction. You lay out the importance of the record. And then you start talking about the songs interwoven with a little bit of history, until finally, at the end, there's this explicit personal story of you meeting Lou Reed himself. And it seems like you planned this all out from the beginning. And it sounds like you're saying that you went around a lot of different strategies before you found the shape of the book. EZRA FURMAN: That's true. Well, on the subject of an editor, eventually, yeah, I did get a new editor. And I had a lot of stuff by then. And the editor I ended up with was very, very helpful and made the book much better. I just want to mention my editor Michelle and shout out Michelle. The one thing I knew was going to happen at the end was I finally meet Lou Reed face to face. I had that. I'm going to have that as a climax. And what does it mean when you actually meet the person that you've mythologized? It ended up with a really nice symmetry. Because it opens with this question of, is Lou Reed authentic or is he lying about everything? Or is there even a difference between those two things with him? And then it's kind of like, at the end of it, this is what he really is like, here he is. How does that question change when you've met him face to face? And laying it out as a track-by-track analysis, it's something that tends to be in a lot of these 33 1/3 books. There's some writing about each track. I think it's because it's a really nice way to organize all the stuff that's swirling around in your head. I tried to make each exploration of a track on the record be actually an essay that's mostly about one thing. I think the song "Make Up," that was sort of a jumping off point to write a little essay about how punk rock or Lou Reed relates to the gay rights movement or transgender people in general. Yeah, so I was thinking of it as little essays. CHARLIE BENNETT: Were the strategies for composing, for writing each of the essays or thinking about how you were going to place things, were they the same kind of strategies and skills as when you're writing a record and songs? Or did you find that it was so different that you were learning new things in the way to pull stuff out of you? EZRA FURMAN: Yeah, I found it very different from writing songs, very little in common. And I kind of feel like one thing I was very self-conscious about about the book is that I wrote it mostly in the order that it appears in the book, not completely. But I wrote most of the early parts of the book earlier than the later parts of the book. And I feel like I got better at writing as I went. And so I feel like the second half of the book is better, better written. And I was worried that people would notice that. But I feel like I learned a lot about writing while doing it. My process of writing it, it did have this in common with writing music, which is usually it would be drinking a bunch of coffee and reading something, somebody writing about rock and roll that I really was excited by. And then getting carried away and be like, I got something to say. It was just the same. Usually, that's how I make music. I'm like listening to tons of other people's music and probably drinking coffee. And I'm like, I think I'm on to something. And then I've got a bunch of energy to just pour out material. I can edit it later. CHARLIE BENNETT: Do you want to write another book? Do you feel yourself being pulled in that direction? EZRA FURMAN: I do, actually. What I know is that I love the process of writing and having this long assignment. I almost surprised myself to find that I liked having this project hanging over my head. And there's always more to do on it. And I always have it to work on, if there's a day when I don't have anything else going on. So I like the form of it. And I think I'm proud of what I did. So I do think I could write more. I just know I could write more. It's all a question of what. This was a particularly good way to write my first book. Because there was a set form to fill, which is a kind of book that there's already other kinds of this book. A 33 1/3 book is something I-- I knew what the cover of this book would look like before I had written even half of it-- actually, before I had started it, almost. I knew it would just be a little black book with trim and a picture of this album cover on the front. So it made it easier to imagine writing a book. It's hard for me to just, well, there's something that's totally not in the world. And now I'm going to make it be in the world. It's hard for me to wrap my head around it. It shouldn't be so hard to wrap my head around it because I make records. CHARLIE BENNETT: Did someone contact you and commission this book? Or was it something that you wanted to do and then you finally put in a proposal? EZRA FURMAN: Well, no. Somebody pointed out to me that there was an open call for submissions by the 33 1/3 imprint. And I was like, that's ridiculous. I can't do that. CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] EZRA FURMAN: And who would even want to just go on about why some record is the greatest record ever made? And then it just so happened I had been reading this Lou Reed biography at the time and becoming fascinated by his life. CHARLIE BENNETT: Had he just died? EZRA FURMAN: He died in 2013. I submitted this proposal in, I think, summer 2015. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK. EZRA FURMAN: But I did write a little obituary on my Tumblr page when Lou Reed died. Because I don't usually care so much about celebrity deaths, even if I was a big fan of the celebrity. But when Lou Reed died, I was like, sobbing. I was really affected by it. And I was like, why is that? And I don't know. He's just a towering figure in my life. I think, more than anybody else, Lou Reed gave me the keys to rock and roll. Something about the way he does rock and roll suggested to me that I could not only do rock and roll, but reimagine my whole life when I was a teenager and my life wasn't working for me. FRED RASCOE: Our guest today is the musician Ezra Furman, who wrote the book Lou Reed Transformer for the 33 1/3 series. We'll talk more about Lou Reed and writing on the left side of the hour. [LOU REED, "WALK ON THE WILD SIDE"] MORNA GERRARD: Hi, I'm Morna Gerrard from Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives. You're listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the one and only Research Library Rock and Roll Radio Show, which is fine. I'm an archivist. I don't make judgments. (SINGING) Holly came from Miami, F-L-A Hitchhiked her way across the USA CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "How to Write a Book II-- Transformer." So here we are in the side break of the show where one might flip the record over. So here's the perfect time to read from the section in Ezra's book entitled "Side Break." "Lou Reed is my hero for his uncontrollable multiplicity of selves. From him, I got the message that you don't have to choose sides, you don't have to join a team, you don't have to give them a handy definition of yourself. That's also partly why, sexuality and clothing style aside, he's the perfect gay icon. Ambiguity is a major building block of queerness, and Lou Reed may be the most ambiguous rock star who ever lived. It's an inspiring F-you to a world that would have preferred to categorize and tame him." Now, this is Charlie, I should point out that I censored the standard Lou Reed quote, not Ezra. File this set under BT304.H2. [LOU REED, "HANGIN' 'ROUND"] [HOLLY GOLIGHTLY & THE BROKEOFFS, "GETTING HIGH FOR JESUS"] CHARLIE BENNETT: That was "Getting High for Jesus," because he got so low for us, by Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs And we started with "Hangin' 'Round" by Lou Reed. Those were songs about moral hazard and persistence. [TELEVISION, "FRICTION"] CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] This is Lost in the Stacks. And our show today is about Ezra Furman's process when he wrote the 33 1/3 book about Lou Reed's album, Transformer. What did you discover in the process of writing the book that was a surprise to you? EZRA FURMAN: There was a number of surprises. I think I mentioned that I was surprised by this in the book, but the story of the end of the Velvet Underground was really striking to me. Just to make the story short, The Velvet Underground had a bunch of shows in New York in the summer of 1970. And then Lou Reed just decided he was going to quit the band. And he didn't tell the band, but he had decided that tonight's their last show. And then he told them afterwards, the band's over, I'm leaving the band. And then his parents showed up at Max's Kansas City in New York and picked him up and drove him back to Long Island to his childhood bedroom. And he like, quit rock and roll and started working for his father's company as a typist. It was such an insane, insane move. And I just I couldn't believe I hadn't heard that story. Another thing I didn't know about Transformer, and I wish I had talked about it a little more now, actually, but how much like Mick Ronson of David Bowie's band, Spiders from Mars, produced that record and musically made it what it is and did all these string arrangements and played the piano parts. And, yeah, he just turned-- I had heard of Mick Ronson. I was like, oh, he's just a guitar player in David Bowie's band, right? But he was kind of a musical powerhouse. And I think he made that record good. I'm not sure how good it would have been if he hadn't been co-producing. CHARLIE BENNETT: How did your research get you to those stories that you'd never heard before? EZRA FURMAN: Great question. I read like five Lou Reed biographies. I just like kept devouring them, and then other books about The Velvet Underground. And I was going to the library and buying books and writing down-- I don't know-- keeping track of quotes and stuff. I was doing it a total amateur way. I don't know if there's a more professional way to research, but just to read and read and read and then keep a little document that's like quotes and page numbers. And then also just endless time on YouTube, mostly, watching documentaries and interviews, footage, and performances. And it's really great also to be doing research about something that you could just spend all day thinking about and listening to anyway. Because you're like, oh, I'm being productive right now when I spend four hours watching YouTube videos. CHARLIE BENNETT: [LAUGHS] EZRA FURMAN: And that was kind of fictional. I really wasted a lot of time doing that. But then three hours in, you'd find something like, oh, I'm definitely using that line. CHARLIE BENNETT: It seems like research is just like painting or other artistic processes where, really, you need a very long time to do just a few minutes of really powerful work. And you just never know where that powerful work is going to come in. EZRA FURMAN: Yeah, that's actually another thing that writing has in common with doing music. In my life, there's just tons of time that feels wasted. I'm just sitting with a musical instrument and nothing is happening. Just for hours, nothing good comes out. And then I'll play somebody else's song for a while. And then I kick the wall for 10 minutes. And it just feels like a total waste of my time. And nothing comes out of it that day, that whole day. The afternoon goes by and I didn't produce anything. But that actually is work on the next thing. In a very indirect way, you'll go back, you'll pick up that guitar again, and something you were messing with the other day suddenly clicks. Because it's been in your head and combining with other things to reach a breakthrough. So yeah, I found that happening with writing. I just had to saturate myself in reading and music and just all this stuff, take in as much of it as possible. A day spent doing that kind of feels like a waste of time because you didn't add a single sentence, anything. Then all that stuff is in your head. And suddenly the next morning, you're able to say insightful things about it. CHARLIE BENNETT: I know you said this earlier, but I want to test you again. You don't know what the next subject is that you want to apply this process to? You don't know what the next book might be, even though you feel like you want to write one? EZRA FURMAN: I have thought about next things to write about, certainly. There are things I'm obsessed with. CHARLIE BENNETT: Are you willing to share? EZRA FURMAN: Well, I've been obsessed some time now with The Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible. That's really a lifelong obsession for me. It's something I retell on the holiday of Passover every year, Exodus, the story in the Bible. And I read the Bible a lot. I think our last record has the word "exodus" in the title, of course. And in some ways, it's an expansion or response to the text of Exodus. And I kind of just think I might have something to write about Exodus and Judaism and something to do with punk rock. I think that's the connecting thread. Somehow the story of Exodus has something to say to the aesthetic and cultural movement known as punk, which is also a major part of my life and I feel constantly obsessed with. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. EZRA FURMAN: So these twin obsessions, I'm like, how could these go together? I don't know, and I want to try. CHARLIE BENNETT: If somebody had an obsession right now and they were thinking about writing a book about it, could you give them a piece of advice? Would you be able to start them off? EZRA FURMAN: I'll tell you what comes to mind is, there's being obsessed with something, and then there's having something to say about it. And they are two different things. And you have to find out if you have something to say about it. When somebody brought up, you should write a 33 1/3 book to me, I was like, yeah, I love rock and roll records. But all I have to say is I love them. I don't have something to say. And I also think I have-- I'm not pointing any out-- I think some of those 33 1/3 books bored me a little bit because they're like, listen, here's my case of why this is the greatest. And I'm like, [SIGHS] I don't know. I'd rather just listen to it. But somehow, it took a turn. Yeah, I found the thing that I did have something to say about, besides, I'm obsessed with this. I'm not sure how it began exactly, except trying to write about it. I guess the advice would be write about it and see if you can make one point. If you can make a point that's an interesting point that you haven't heard somebody say before, then if you can do that a few times, there may be a point in you writing a book about your obsession. CHARLIE BENNETT: Ezra, thank you so much for your time today. EZRA FURMAN: Thank you. This has been a pleasure. WENDY HAGENMAIER: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. Our guest today was Ezra Furman, a musician and author of the book Lou Reed Transformer. FRED RASCOE: We'll be back after a music break. [TELEVISION, "FRICTION"] WILL: File this set under PS3523.EA2B8. [MORPHINE, "THURSDAY"] [LOU REED, "WAGON WHEEL"] MATTHEW: You just head "Thursday" by Morphine. Before that was "Wagon Wheel" by Lou Reed, some songs about burdens and pleasures. [TELEVISION, "FRICTION"] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called "How to Write a Book II-- Transformer." We spoke to Ezra Furman about his book on Lou Reed's record, Transformer. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Lou Reed recorded and released that record in 1972, in collaboration with David Bowie and his musical director, Mick Ronson. FRED RASCOE: The godfather of punk, as he called himself, tried to make a pop record with one of the greatest rock stars that ever lived, the year Ziggy Stardust arrived on Earth. CHARLIE BENNETT: Ezra wrote about how the record affected him and how it lives in rock history and queer history and the history of confounding, contradictory, successful failures. And with that, let's roll the credits. [NINE INCH NAILS, "CLOSER"] WILL: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, produced by Charlie Bennett, Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. WENDY HAGANMAIER: Will was our engineer today. And the show was brought to you in part by The Collective, a library conference designed to create collaborations between next generation academic librarians, archivists, and library staff. FRED RASCOE: They're on the web at thelibrarycollective.org where you can see the program for this year's conference, and learn more about how the collective pursues its goals. That's next week, I think. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week it's coming fast. Legal counsel and a Velvet Underground box set with the actual peelable banana were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. WENDY HAGANMAIER: Special thanks to Ezra for being on the show, to Lou Reed for being Lou. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. CHARLIE BENNETT: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and plenty of other places that podcasts hang out that we have no idea where they are. FRED RASCOE: Next week on Lost in the Stacks, we'll rebroadcast our show on Flannery O'Connor and punk rock. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, time for our last song. Here is the Transformer song that I think sums up the strange collaboration between David Bowie and Lou Reed. It's a pop song about alienation, an anthemic love song about cynical jealousy. It's a sing-along, depressive episode. This is "Satellite of Love" by Lou Reed right here on Lost in the Stacks. Listen for David Bowie in that big finish. And have a great weekend, everyone. [LOU REED, "SATELLITE OF LOVE"] (SINGING) Satellite's gone up to the sky Things like that drive me out of my mind I watched it for a little while I like to watch things on TV