The View from the Cheap Seats (37 page)

Well, it's something I use to keep a distance. Put it that way. But I would say it got out of control, and I've been deconstruct
ing it. Which is really kinda funny, Neil, because I can go from this leather-jacketed street guy from New York, and then I show up and the next thing I hear is “What are you talking about? This guy looks like an English professor.” It's actually hilarious.

Do they want to see you still shooting up onstage? Or in makeup? Or in shades and leather?

It depends what time they tagged into me. Some people are forever in the Velvet Underground thing, or the
Transformer
thing, or the
Rock N Roll Animal
thing—someplace around there. They'd like it to still be that. But I was only passing through.

It's “You're still doing things I gave up years ago”?

[Laughs.] That's right. It is, isn't it?

Were you surprised by the commercial success of
Magic and Loss
?

Astonished would cover it. It's very strange. In a sense it's my dream album, because everything finally came together to where the album is finally fully realized. I got it to do what I wanted it to do, but commercial thoughts never entered into it, so I'm just stunned.

In the book, the notes at the end of the songs have a certain laconic teasing quality . . .

If by “teasing” you mean I tell you a little bit and you would have liked to know a little bit more, then yeah. I thought it was just enough to let you know what was really happening and tie things together so you saw that there was a narrative. As though it was a novel except told in lyrics, and the little annotations were things that tied it together and gave you a little push onto the next one and also told you something that'd make you sit up for a minute. But I didn't want to go on too long with that. That'd be another book.

Are you ever going to write it?

I'm interested in writing a book. But not about me.

[Dings and twangs in background. People seem about ready to go onstage.]

If there's one difference between the early work and the current stuff, it's in the persona of the singer. Previously Lou Reed was off on the sidelines: “I just don't care at all,” “Makes no difference to me.” More recently there's been a willingness to be involved and affected
. . .

Yeah. I took a stance about a couple of things.

Why?

I thought I'd earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people.

In a lot of the stuff that I wrote about there's no overt moral position, but what's being described speaks for itself and I don't think it needed me to say anything about it—I don't take a superior view or any kind of elitist view toward any of these things: it's life, and that's what we're talking about.

But over the last couple of years there has been a change, in the sense that I think I am capable of taking positions that I'm not going to change my mind about.

I think I can justify my opinions. They're hard-won and heartfelt.

You're still in rock and roll after more than thirty years. Do you ever see yourself stopping?

I just love doing it. This is like a new art form. You know, the CD, where you've got up to seventy-four minutes. It's odd to me
that the last three albums all timed out at fifty-eight, fifty-nine minutes, without aiming for it.

To have, instead of fourteen or fifteen disparate songs, to have this something about one thing you can really sink your teeth into, is interesting: it might be interesting to do a two-CD set, the length of a Broadway play, I suppose.

I think on
Magic and Loss
—eventually you have to take a swing at the major themes and certainly loss and death is one of them.

They say that sex and death are all we've got to write about . . .

Those are the basic themes. There's a reason they're there, but I think every generation has to have them reinterpreted for them.

Also, while I don't understand the process in great specifics, I do understand what talent is, and what a strange thing that is, and I've been trying really hard to set up situations in which it can flourish. And that's the obligation I feel. To try to be true to the talent and make it possible for it to function.

“In dreams begin responsibilities”?

Oh sure. Absolutely. I have a dream too. And it turns out that a lot of the responsibilities involve not letting it become corrupted or compromised. Which all comes down to things you have to do in your personal life. That's why I was fascinated by talking to President Havel . . .
[Over the phone I can hear buzzers going off. It sounds like Lou ought to be onstage around now. Fifteen minutes are well up.]

. . . I had to ask him, “Why didn't you leave? You could have left. You could be teaching at Columbia—you're a famous playwright.” He said, “I live here.”

Did that reflect your attitude to New York?

It's exactly my attitude to New York. That's why I was asking— I related to it in my own small way.

You're being buzzed, Lou.

Yeah.

[He seems perfectly happy to keep them waiting. “First thing you learn . . .”]

The thing is, I have my dream too. I'm glad my wife was there when I met President Havel, because otherwise I'd just think I dreamed it.

So where do you see the future going?

I want to take the writing further. I think that an album every three years isn't enough. I'm at the point now where I think I know what I'm doing.

As a writer?

Right. The Havel piece was hard.

Good writing ought to be hard.

You have to really want it. If you don't, it's sloppy. It's actually offensive—you'd be better off driving a truck.

I got to run . . .

XII

BETWEEN THOUGHT AND
Expression
isn't a badly transcribed, pirated flimsy-covered book of the lyrics of Lou Reed. But what the hell. It'll do until one turns up.

This was originally published in
Time Out
and reprinted in
Reflex
#26, July 28, 1992.

T
he magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

AMANDA PALMER IS
an outgoing, astonishingly funny, irreverent, sometimes loud, almost unembarrassable, beautiful, chatty singer who plays piano as a percussion instrument. Jason Webley is a foot-stomping, freewheeling, gentle, aggressive houseboat dweller, who plays the guitar and the accordion. He always wears a hat and mostly has a beard.

Oddly enough, it was he who introduced me to Amanda Palmer, in e-mail, almost three years ago.

I heard Evelyn Evelyn before I knew anything about them. The song “Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn?” was on my iPod, a strange ragtime encrustation, as was a song about an elephant, called “Elephant Elephant.” The songs had crept onto my “Stuff I Really Like That I Don't Really Know What It Is” Playlist.

I'd not been friends long with Amanda Palmer when I asked her about the Evelyn Evelyn songs.

“They are conjoined twins,” she told me. “Jason and I met them through MySpace.”

“I thought it was you and Jason,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Conjoined twins. They have had a hard life. But they make amazing music. They have a whole album coming out. Jason and I are producing it for them.”

“Is that true?” I asked. “Only, on the songs on my iPod, it sounds like you and Jason singing together.”

Amanda Palmer said, “Funny, that.”

I HAVE BEEN
backstage at an Evelyn Evelyn concert. It starts out with Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, who are two very different people.

Then they strip down. Jason shaves and puts on a bra. They make up. They put on black wigs and they clamber into a striped costume which has room for both of them. They pull it up. They put it on.

Evelyn Evelyn whisper to each other. The left-hand Evelyn seems slightly more masculine than the right-hand Evelyn. They do not meet your eyes. They are a unit. You watch them as they move, like one person. They are reluctant to walk out onto the stage.

They play two-handed piano. One of the Neville twins plays the right hand, the other plays the left hand. The same with accordion, ukulele, guitar. They play two kazoos, for they have two mouths. Only one twin needs play the snare drum and cymbals.

They sing. They relate to each other in a way they do not relate to the audience.

Amanda Palmer sings to, and talks to, and cares about, and
interacts with, her audience. Jason Webley is famous for getting his audiences magically drunk without even using alcohol.

The twins exist only for each other—they play to each other, disagree, make up, care for each other, and whisper, always whisper.

They are aware of the audience. They respond to applause. But they are not on that stage for us.

AND PEOPLE ASK,
as I once asked, whether Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley are actually Evelyn Evelyn.

And they are not. They are something
other,
Eva and Lynn Neville, something that exists in a make-believe space inhabited by puppets and dreams. They are no more Jason and Amanda than the Haitian
Loa,
Baron Samedi, Mistress Erzulie and the rest, are really the horses that they ride. No more than Father Christmas was only ever your dad.

CYNTHIA VON BUHLER
here illustrates the life of the twins.

She brings delicacy and charm to a story that contains tragedy and darkness. Her illustrations have all the simplicity of great children's illustrations, but tell a story that could only exist because adults are foolish and confused and sometimes evil. She lets the Neville sisters and their story move beyond Amanda and Jason and their music and out into the world.

Their story is hard and strange, and they have had more than their share of bad luck and tragedy. But then, the same can be said of most of us. It is one of the secrets of being human. It's not the pain that you suffer: it's how you take the pain and move on. In the case of the Neville sisters, they make art. And so do Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, and so does Cynthia von Buhler.

This is the secret of Evelyn Evelyn. You can be them too. Start reading, and you will see through their eyes, and learn to whisper secrets to yourself in the dark.

This was the afterword to
Evelyn Evelyn: A Tragic Tale in Two Tomes,
written by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, illustrated by Cynthia von Buhler.

L
ike you, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard Amanda Palmer had been killed. I remember the way the sunlight glittered on the water, and I remember most of all that I simply did not believe it, for it seemed impossible that Amanda Palmer (so wise and mouthy and lovely, so filled with life that it had always seemed as if she had stolen the life that rightly belonged to a dozen other people) could ever have stopped moving, stopped singing, stopped breathing. That she would never laugh that laugh again, dirty and delighted and huge, was unimaginable.

The days that followed were strange days. Rumors abounded. I met a Hells Angel in a bar in Encino who swore blind that he knew the dude who had done the job, a man who claimed to have crushed in Amanda's skull with lead piping, on behalf of a crazed ex-boyfriend.

It became a national obsession.
Who Killed Amanda Palmer
bubblegum cards were traded and traded again in schoolyards across America. I still own two of them: one shows Amanda's bullet-riddled corpse dangling from a wall; the other shows her body washed up on the shore of an unidentified lake, her face blue and puffy from the water, the claws of some crustacean pushing out from between her purple lips.

I remember the candlelight vigils, and the shrines, dozens of them, in cities all over the world, spontaneous expressions of
love from people who no longer had Amanda Palmer. They lit candles and left behind telephones, scalpels, television remote controls, exotic items of underwear, plastic figurines, children's picture books, antlers, love.

“She went as she would have wanted to go,” that was what a white-faced 'Manda, one of the growing number of Amanda Palmer impersonators, told me. Much later that night, swaying and sweating, the 'Manda confided in me that he was certain that the real Amanda Palmer had been “abducted by beings from a higher vibrational plane,” and that the photographs of Amanda's death were not fakes, pasted and airbrushed in some back-alley studios, but actual photographs of the deaths of her “sister-selves,” creatures grown from Amanda Palmer's own protoplasm.

Very young children made up songs about the different ways Amanda died, killing her happily at the end of every verse, too young to understand the horror. Maybe that was how she would have wanted to go.

If you see Amanda Palmer on the street, kill her,
said the graffiti under the bridge in Boston. And beneath that somebody else wrote,
That way she'll live forever.

Neil Gaiman,

Beat and Pop Magazine,
June 1965

These are the liner notes for the album
Who Killed Amanda Palmer
by Amanda Palmer, 2008, written when we barely knew each other.

“Those of us who write fantasies for a living know that we are doing it best when we tell the truth.”