Look at Lou Reed’s career this way. While I loved Songs For Lulu nobody else did and if you take away that album his last masterpiece was at the turn of the century, 2000’s Ecstasy. The man was a great no doubt, and Ed Huerta is right when he claims you have to go back as far as Lennon (actually probably Harrison) for such an outpouring of grief.
But for fuck’s sake, it is Lou Reed: he was a nasty piece of work with fans and rock writers alike, an obnoxious arrogant asshole who, in the few times I met him, found to be unbearable.
And why shouldn’t he be, right? He was a dick but the man who put a needle right through the heart of the hippie movement and invented alternative rock had every right in the world to be the tough, unsentimental bastard artist he was. I’ve been hearing story after story about what a good guy he was but I’ve heard around a million more about what a dick he was.
Incidentally, let’s hear it for Helen Bach for going on the record as to hating the whiny sing speakers music. As much as we got from Lou, his influence has proven horrendous on popular music. Is it Lou to blame to for the drug taking transformer riddled glam self-satisfaction of the mid-1970s. Remember Peter Laughner in Creem? I’m gonna quote the entire first two paragraph of the review but before I do let me ask you this: does this make Lou Reed fucking St. Francis Of Assisi or would he want to be, as Lou races Laughner to his grave one thought sticks: why care?:
” This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn’t go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.) I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record. I came on to my sister-in-law “C’mon over and gimme head while I’m passed out.” I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution…I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums (and three vitamin B complexes, so I must’ve figured to wake up, or at least at the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water…
“Watch out for Charlie’s girl…
She’ll turn ya in…doncha know…
Ya gotta watch out for Charlie’s girl...”
Who is gonna give Lou that kinda send off? Who can? There is no Bangs or Laughner to write it and everybody else is too fucking professional to stick it in Reed’s corpse, though they should.
It’s insane, how can the least sentimental musician in the history of the world end up saddled to sentimentality, to this fake morose mass mutual masturbation send off. Cmon, doesn’t Reed deserved to be put into a real perspective, shouldn’t he be kicked now he can’t kick back?
I was a huge Lou Reed fan, I still am, and I was in Manny’s once and Lou was sitting on an amplifier strumming a guitar and I went up and here is the entire conversation, now remember he didn’t know me at all at the time, didn’t know I was a writer:
Me: “Hi Lou, I just wanted to say that I am a huge fan…”
Lou: “Go away”.
I slinked out and maybe three blocks away I thought of turning back and telling him to go fuck himself but it would’ve been too pathetic. And no, it didn’t change my opinion about his music one way or another, but look at death like this:
1. Everybody dies.
2. And you can’t cry for every death.
3. Since Lou had nothing left to offer me
4. What the fuck am I crying for?
It feels fake, I know it isn’t and I realize people are really grieving but it feels like they’ve got it wrong and Helen has it right. I hate sentimentality, I hate pathos, I prefer the messy hardness of tough emotions.