It's just starting to be possible to be able to do that with any critical distance," explains Bernstein, adding that the series' executive producer, Susan Lacy, thought Bob Dylan would have been a real coup for the series but he'd turned her down dozens of times. "Rock & roll as a genre is not quite old enough to really look at and say this person is a master over that one.
For 15 years, the series has been going down the list and profiling the Life magazine 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century - the iconic likes of Tennessee Williams, William Styron, Ella Fitzgerald. All of which, she says, simply confirms her theory that, in the end, rebels really do want to be accepted by the mainstream for what they do.įor a rebel, having your story chronicled on PBS' "American Masters" series must make winning a Grammy feel like an air kiss. "It was like he'd won the Grammy, not the film," recalls Bernstein. It was when she and director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders called Lou Reed from backstage with the news, and he - the leather and dark-shaded über-outsider, the bard of the seamy New York wild side who, for three decades, had been throwing lyrical rocks and rhythms at the establishment - broke down when told that the enemy had just tossed him this big bouquet. "American Masters" producer Karen Bernstein thinks the sweetest moment in the adventure that was the making of Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart (1996) was not when the film unexpectedly snagged a Grammy for Best Long Form Video. The Velvet Underground (l-r): Sterling Morrison, Mo Tucker, Lou Reed, and John Cale