This doesn’t seem like a very Lou Reed kind of place. We’re in Cleveland, Ohio – but it’s not so much the location that’s in question as the occasion. This, in 2015, is the induction ceremony of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, which has posthumously accepted Lou as a member.
Patti Smith has just presented the award to Laurie Anderson, and now Laurie begins a gracious 13 minute speech which seems to guess what we’re thinking and tells us that actually we’re wrong: Lou would have loved all this. Maybe that’s hard to square, knowing what we know about the confrontational character who appears in so many of the interviews in this magazine. Lou Reed? Among the industry backslapping?
But Anderson continues, and she would know. Lou would love to have taken his place alongside heroes of his. Artists like Otis Redding, Dion and Doc Pomus. Musicians who he never tired of checking out, like BB King. They’re not all inductees themselves, but let’s also consider the great artists that Lou played with, or championed, or was friends with! We’re talking Ornette Coleman, Metallica, Anonhi, Hal Willner…
As you’ll read in the pages of this 148-page deluxe edition, released to celebrate 60 years (almost to the day) of Lou’s mature songwriting, surprise was one of the key elements of Reed’s career. Whether it was the influential sedition of his early songwriting, his unexpected rebirth as a pop star via the intervention of David Bowie, the adversarial, unexplained soundworld of Metal Machine Music, through to Lulu, his album with Metallica and his last ambient works, his was a career to keep you on the edge of your seat.
Outside of the music there was clearly a lot going on. For all Laurie Anderson’s efforts to posthumously rehabilitate Reed as a dog lover, Tai chi master and amateur watch repairer, loving partner, family member and electronics whiz, we’re still compelled by the jaggedness of the man. The horrifying onstage schtick. The interviews that make your blood run cold. It’s rage-filled, often misanthropic and it’s complicated.
But that’s got to be part of the point. Would anyone want a Lou Reed story which wraps everything up, which has a traceable arc, of learnings and enrichment? That’s not how it ever is, and the raw, truthful version is we hope to bring you here, a presentation of what – however turbulent – we’ve learned.
And what we’re still learning. These days, Lou’s archives (his tapes, his doo wop records, college accreditations, and clippings archive; his swords, but not his hats) are in the special collections department of New York Public Library. One of the most interesting artefacts to be discovered, however, may have been one of the first, found behind Lou’s work desk.
That’s the dated tape of original compositions which their composer has had notarised to assert his copyright. The recordings are sketchy versions, played alongside John Cale, of what will over the next two years become Velvet Underground staples, then classics; songs which will draw disciples to their sonic intrigue and dark intimations.
“Words and music, Lou Reed,” says the writer before he and Cale begin another. It doesn’t seem like a very Lou Reed kind of mood, but they seem to be having a blast.
Enjoy the magazine. You can get one here.
