Imagine: Lou Reed of Velvet Underground calling someone else pretentious. He did! In a 1987 interview with Joe Smith that is just now seeing the light of day due to PBS's Blank on Blank series, wherein old interviews are animated and made new again.
The latest edition features Reed talking about bad press, wielding a shotgun on unsuspecting visitors to his New Jersey home, and — almost as an aside — this (somewhat unsurprising) gem: He never liked The Beatles.
As far as he was concerned, his contemporaries — The Beatles, The Doors — "couldn’t come up to our ankles, not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level we were on, compared to everyone else."
Because...
Reed says the purpose of the Velvet Underground was to elevate music and write about "adult stuff. That is what I wanted to do — write rock 'n' roll that you could listen to as you got older and it didn't lose anything, it would be timeless."
In summation: The Velvet Underground = Timeless. The Beatles =
