I have to get to the bottom of this Lou Reed thing.
Got the new issue of Rolling Stone yesterday and there is Lou on the cover looking super cool with a dark pair of aviator sunglasses on, no smile.
Lou Reed 1942-2013 under the picture.
It is chilling to me to see the end date posted.
Right now my life reads Joe Testa 1954- I prefer to keep it that way for a while.
The date thing seems so stark to me - an entire life summarized between two dates. There is more to a life than that.
Anyway the magazine haunted me. I was home alone and trying to chill in non-Asylum mode. But I kept looking down at the cover. I read the tribute last night and again today.
I read that Reed had a passion for contemporary, transgressive American writers such as Hubert Selby Jr. and William Burroughs.
There is a book sitting at the top of my queue titled Last Exit to Brooklyn. By Hubert Selby Jr. I just got it about a week ago. I became aware of it as I explored other pieces of my world. One thing leads to another. It is not a book that your mother ever read.
I am going to approach this subject with delicate intent because I am not claiming credit or connection.
This happens to me a lot. The books, poetry, films and music that vibrate me are often the same as the ones that interest or inspire many of the people I admire. Unbeknownst to me.
It rattles me every time I discover this because of The Voice that says "you are experiencing your interests passively", as opposed to the active way the truly creative work with their passions.
Often I find out that this guy that I dig hangs around with this other guy that I dig. I get a kick out of imagining this closed circle of original thinkers and, yes, I dream about getting a chance to hang with them to see what my brain could do in that situation.
But the circle keeps getting smaller.
Enough of that. I tried not to make that self indulgent but it came across that way anyway.
"Rock does this thing to you: You get directly to somebody, unfiltered. This person doesn't have to go to a movie theater. This person will be listening, alone, maybe at five in the morning." Lou Reed.
"Walk on the Wild Side" was Reed's only Top 20 single. His only gold album (sales of 500,000 copies) was "New York."
He was truly an outsider. An outsider listed as a major influence by a whole hell of a lot of people.
"My week beats your year". Lou Reed from the liner notes to "Metal Machine Music."
He could be easily dismissed as the guy who wrote songs about heroin, drug pushers and drag queens by "those without substance." These would be people who can only think in stereotypes, people who cannot find the humanity in anyone who does not fit their definition of existence. Shallow people.
Patti Smith about "Walk on the Wild Side" - "It takes a poet to elevate these people." Reed could be "so tough yet infinitely compassionate and open to all deviants, their fragile aspects." "He was taking these people up a notch, saying "They have an elegance you will never know - kings and queens of the street."
Lou Reed's dad was a tax accountant. That alone can screw a kid up. I was an accountant for twenty plus years. My sons are both drug abusers, saliva droolers, vicious and inconsiderate in the consistent way they beat their women and the cruel delight they take from verbally abusing their parents.
Reed was deep into the avant-garde. This was back when the avant-garde could actually exist as a living, breathing thing. Andy Warhol funded the Velvet Underground's first studio sessions. Reed and the gang hung around The Factory, Warhol's creative lair. Reed has said that "Andy made it possible for us to exist."
In 1970, when The Velvet Underground were doing OK, Reed just walked away. He walked away and took a job typing in an accounting office.
After that brief but ballsy and fascinating interlude, he began his solo career.
Laurie Anderson is an experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards. She began dating Lou Reed in 1992. They married in 2008.
She wrote a tribute to Reed in this issue. It is almost a definition of love.
Anderson: "Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be - strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together."
Laurie Anderson was with Lou Reed at the very moment of his death. Somehow, and each of us will know this truth one day, somehow he knew he was about to die.
She describes it like this: "We were at home - I'd gotten him out of the hospital a few days before - and even though he was extremely weak, he insisted on going out into the bright morning light. As meditators, we had prepared for this - how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart, and out through the head. I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life - so beautiful, painful, and dazzling - does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love."
Willie Nelson: "Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that's what makes the jukebox spin."
Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed were 10 percenters.
I don't know what I achieved here. Maybe a better understanding of who Lou Reed was. Lessons I can apply to my own life or thinking. An awareness of a great and true love that forced a little honesty into a cold world.
Lou Reed was too complex to summarize in one sitting. But I am done trying. You have had enough.
And I have gained a deeper understanding of the sense of loss that is invading my soul.
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