lou reed

Lou Reed passed away recently. I have no interest in being dyslogistic. I saw him once at the Highline Ballroom, tickets were over $150. He played songs off his most recent release. A girl outside the concert was trying to buy tickets off the crowd, walking down the dark alley, and murmuring, "I have $400." I think he chastised the crowd a little for talking when he wanted to begin playing, like a teacher trying to commence class with their own oration. He played "Power of the Heart"; and, it was esse. 

I owe a lot of my personal style to him: jean jackets, denim, lyricism, and an appreciation for identity as a fluid entity. I used to walk around listening to Lou Reed on a gray Zune when I was a student in New York, and when I had friends in my rooms in the co-ops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You could just drink amaretto, sit in arm chairs in the attic, talk, and listen to Lou Reed during the winter.  

There was something about Lou Reed's gravitas and song composition that appealed to me immensely, and beyond his quantification into Indie films. His best narratives are about New York street scenes, like "Dirty Blvd.," or some of the tracks where he talks about women (who could be Queens) and their pithy remarks ("Lisa Says," "Sweet Jane," etc.). He establishes his oral history and demiurge in song, writing about where he was when JFK was shot (the '60s equivalent of where you were when 9/11 happened). 

One of Lou Reed's acquaintances from his Warhol factory days compared him to Iggy Pop and said that Iggy Pop was aware of the trendy books, but it was Lou Reed who was an avid reader. The kind of topic might be nothing more than stale gossip from my parents' generation, a social milieu that ascribed homosexuality to a disease treatable with shock therapy (as Lou Reed was said to have been an analysand at the bequest of his parents), but his ballads attest to his engagement with literature. I wish I would have taken out my iPhone 3GS (my recording device of choice during undergraduate days) and gotten an interview. But, I had no gambit, no paper backing me, and no interest in hassling Lou Reed.