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I was gonna tell you how I came to write a song called "Walk on the Wild Side." I did not think of it myself. Right, that's how I got on this one. I had walked out, just when I made an album called Loaded, loaded with hits, yeah, that's right, because I saw it coming and said "OH-OH, get lost," so I walked, right, because we were gonna be very successful, and there could be money there and it's tyrannic. So I became a typist for my old man. Forty dollars a week, he says "STUPID," I said yeah, but I understood I was smart. I don't want the company, man.
I have had two jobs. Once I was a guy on Jones Beach, you know, the stick with the pin? Lasted one day. A guy threw a orange peel down near the trash, I say "you gotta be kidding, man! I got a stick with a pin in it!" So they put me in the pool area, the guy who walks around when you put your stuff, like in the fucking chair, and they say, if you leave, and don't take the stuff with you, we throw it in the water!"? That was an afternoon. I said, what do you say, "can't you read the sign?" I was one of them. Wow, that was, I WAS SHOCKED. I WAS APPALLED. I WAS TAKEN ABACK. And THEN he saw.
So, the guys who did The Threepenny Opera -- this is all true -- call me up, of all things, they say "we think you are a very literary rock and roll person, and after Ray Davies, we think you are the person that could take Nelson Algren's book Walk on the Wild Side and do like a musical thing for off-Broadway." I said, I said, "you gotta be kidding, it's about cripples in the ghetto, man, what are you, out of your mind?" They said "oh but, you know..." Very serious, intense, fortyish hippies. Grey hair, Italian, Park Avenue apartment. And I said "oh what, I'm not..." I'm a fucking typist at this point, you gotta understand, man. People saying "oh Lou you're so nice," I got forty dollars a week, you gotta be kidding! These assholes want a treatment for a book that's about cripples? I'm the best qualified person to write a book about cripples in music? Kill yourself, man! That's better than being a garage mechanic. I think. As long as I keep thinking that, you know, and what if it's true? I keep saying the genie will appear and say "Hey, schmuck! It was really groovy all the time being that garage mechanic out in Islip," and I'll say "Oh, wow, why didn't you tap me on the shoulder earlier?" "Because you wouldn't have listened." Fair enough.
So they give, they say "go buy a paperback version," they didn't even give me a version! I said "is it abridged?" "Oh, the movie with Jane Fonda, now you got it." I like to look at Jane Fonda, I don't wanna hear her. Now I don't even want to look at her. I don't like sensitive lesbian pictures. Look, I don't relate! Backwards, I don't relate! And facing front is hopeless. So I read this fucking book, and they said, "will you make a X where you think the song should go." Haha: the cripple goes to the bathroom, "aww, yeah, cripple-cripple..." I got jammed a few times, I had nothing to say to them. So then it became a challenge, so I figured, why don't I write the theme song for Walk on the Wild Side? I'll call it "Walk on the Wild Side"! Smart. So I had a great title with nothing to write about, this stupid fucking book, man, everybody says the guy is brilliant, I said he's from Chicago! Saul Bellow. Ooh.
So anyway, then they got Mahogany, that play that flopped. Diana Ross getting -- Diana Ross, by the way, is great as a person. She hasn't made a good record in a long time. Love Hangover is not. She says hello to me, which is more than you do. So anyway, I had a great title and nothing else, and then they fired me! I mean, they did it really gently, they let me down easy. They said, "Lou, man, we've got a chance to produce Mahogany off-Broadway."
I said, "oh, wow, am I crushed! Break a leg! I read that in a book. Go get 'em, man, look, advance the theatre." Haha, Bruce, you gotta believe me, man, these people exist! Till the play bombed because assholes like Robert Christgau said it was terrible, and in this case, it was, and I wouldn't go on in the first place, but there I was writing the song for these assholes. Anyway, so then, I had a great title, and I figured I will save this title for the day I decide to assault the world.
_________________ Molly Lambert wrote: The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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