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  1. Sad day for rock.

    I'll get a copy of Metal Machine Music to remember Lou by.
  2. http://www.easthamptonstar.com/Obituaries/20131031/Lou-Reed



    For Lou Reed


    | October 31, 2013

    To our neighbors:

    What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.

    Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.

    Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!

    Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

    Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.[/b]


    — Laurie Anderson
    his loving wife and eternal friend
  3. Originally posted by LikeASong:http://www.easthamptonstar.com/Obituaries/20131031/Lou-Reed



    For Lou Reed


    | October 31, 2013

    To our neighbors:

    What a beautiful fall! Everything shimmering and golden and all that incredible soft light. Water surrounding us.

    Lou and I have spent a lot of time here in the past few years, and even though we’re city people this is our spiritual home.

    Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs. And we made it!

    Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.

    Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.


    — Laurie Anderson
    his loving wife and eternal friend


  4. It was my first discovery of the Velvets, when all the CBGB bands namechecked their heroes, and I went looking—and I found Loaded and 1969: The Velvet Underground Live in the 8 track cutout bins of Grandpa’s Hardware store in Cahokia Mounds, Illinois. My first Lou show was at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, in 1977, where he opened the set with 2 songs, stopped and shouted something offstage, pointed to the monitors, and did a 3rd song. Half way through that song he stopped, pointed to the monitors again, and gestured for someone stage right to join him center stage. The monitor guy walked out, Lou pointed at the monitors again--turned and clocked the guy--kicked the monitors into the orchestra pit, and stormed offstage. That was the end of the show. Ok, wow. I was 17, wide-eyed, wowed.

    For 37 years I followed him, in many ways--not the least being his influence on my own trajectory in music.

    The last time I saw Lou I complimented him on a searing version of a blues song and one of his new songs that he had just performed live here in NYC. His energy and performance had brought me to tears. He wore a beautiful leather jacket that he didn’t take off.

    He hugged me, as he now did quite often; and he didn’t let go for a very long time.

    To my favorite curmudgeon, grump, genius, icon, pal. We and I will miss you very, very much.

    Michael Stipe
  5. Transformer was my introduction to Lou Reed — by way of Mr Bowie, of course. I bought the album in late 1972 when I was thirteen years old. I immediately fell in love. It was typical teenage musical love: not understanding everything but knowing everything instinctually. Ziggy had an even ‘weirder’ friend who lived in New York and spoke-sang of things I’d never even heard of. These were times when music and sexuality were truly new, both exciting and dangerous. They were life-changing times for me and many, many others. Then along came Berlin . . . From Transformer’s dark pop art set in New York’s dirty downtown to Berlin’s tragically surreal, beautiful and ghostly hell, I thought ‘Fuck! What’s going on here?’ I was smitten. I still didn’t fully understand everything, and yet I knew.

    And it didn’t stop there. I played and played Metal Machine Music trying to comprehend the never-ending noise. Little did I know it was sowing the seeds of the ‘din glorious’ of the emerging Virgin Prunes. I worked backwards and found out about the Velvet Underground. Like so many other Seventies kids when punk forced open ‘the door’, the Velvets were (along with the Pistols, Clash and Patti Smith) the ‘instigators’. But the Velvets were also different: still are, and always will be. Even today the debut album is a timeless work of art. I think it was Brian Eno who said ‘The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band’. Then I stole the keys to help unlock ‘the door’, formed my own band, and began my own ‘growing up in public’. But Uncle Lou was always there — Coney Island Baby, Street Hassle, The Blue Mask, The Bells, Songs for Drella, Magic and Loss, Ecstasy and The Raven, to name only my favourites — all challenging, all opening ‘doors’. Lou Reed showed me and made me understand that rock ’n’ roll is art and truth and beauty and sadness and joy and anger. He did what he wanted to do, the way he wanted to do it. He wasn’t a conveyer belt rock ’n’ roll whore like most of the shite we have to put up with these days. Lou Reed was the rock ’n’ roll animal with a rock ’n’ heart. He was pure. He was cool. He was tough. He was also fragile; a poet in the true sense of the word. Lou’s songs always seemed to come from the real and the emotional. They were almost conversational. He spoke-sang to me like a friend whispering new and dark secrets in my ear that told me things I never knew about the big bad and beautiful world we all live in.

    I’m a bit worn out this week reading, listening, thinking and talking Lou Reed — but in a good way. The teenager that looked up to this great man did eventually get to meet him, and I sorta got to know him. They say that most heroes let ya down, which is most likely very true, but Mr Reed was different.

    I first met Lou in New York city in 1989. Myself, Bono, Ali, Lou and his then-wife Sylvia Morales talked for hours over dinner about everything from music, poetry, leather trousers, the Berlin Wall and red wine to a possible collaboration involving Lou and U2. The conversation went from easy to tough to easy, like all real conversations should. It was as if we had known him for years. (The truth being, we had.) For all the influence Lou had on me, Lou had as much imapct on Bono. Lou was one of the real touchstones for both of us, and roughly two years after our meeting the proposed Lou/U2 collaboration came to fruition on the ‘Zoo TV’ tour as the monumental duet, Satellite of Love. (Satellite of Lou, more like.)

    It was a few years later when I next met Lou, this time through the great Hal Willner, producer extraordinaire, my personal ‘metal guru’ and dear friend. Hal was one of Lou’s closest friends and it was over many years through working with Hal on his various live and recording projects that I got to work with and know Lou. There were so many highlights — among them ‘Came So Far For Beauty’, Willner’s Leonard Cohen tribute in Dublin’s Point Depot in 2006 being truly magical — but foremost in my memories is my own fiftieth birthday celebration concert in Carnegie Hall, a wild and wonderful concoction of friends and villains performing all things ‘Friday’. Lou, together with Laurie Anderson and John Zorn, ended the show with a ‘white white noise white white heat’ mad-as-fuck metal machine improvisation. It was so loud and ‘out there’ that it shattered Carnegie’s chandeliers. Then there was the crazed Sweet Jane encore with a cast from everywhere. Ballymun meets Brooklyn. It still rings through my ears. As Pat McCabe described it at the time: ‘Jaysus, that was The Last Waltz in Hell.’

    It’s difficult to write or talk about someone special who has just passed away. I loved the man, not in the same way as the teenage Virgin Prune did but in a different way. This was like a long lost godfather I’d never had. As his old friend and collaborator, David Bowie, recently said: ‘He was a master’. And Jesus, the stuff I learned from that man! And as Patti Smith also recently said, so many musicians ‘owe him so much’. I always found Lou to be kind and generous in a real but tough and very wise way. He didn’t bullshit, and said it straight: ‘Gavin, all you can do is sing and write the “truth”. And if it isn’t the “truth” . . . well then make-believe it’s the “truth”. That’s all you gotta do.’

    The last words the world heard from Lou Reed were via Twitter a few hours before his death was announced. They read simply: ‘The Door’. ‘When the past makes you laugh/and you can savour the magic/that let you survive your own war/you find that fire is passion/and there’s a door up ahead not a wall [. . .] there’s a bit of magic in everything/and then some loss to even things out’ (from Magic and Loss: The Summation, 1992).

    My sincere condolences to Lou’s beautiful wife, Laurie Anderson, angel and magician.
    Lou Reed is dead. Long live Lou Reed.


    — Gavin Friday


  6. Just found this, didn't know it:

  7. As youtube says: "Bono sings final track from Gavin Friday's "Shag Tobacco" album, then intros Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson & John Zorn."




  9. By BONO



    NOVEMBER 6, 2013 12:00 PM ET


    Rolling Stone pays tribute to Lou Reed, the outsider who changed the course of rock & roll, on the cover of our new issue. In an exclusive essay for RS, Bono reflects on Reed's deadpan humor and eternal music.




    The world is noisier today, but not the kind of noise you want to turn up. The world of words is a little quiet and a good bit dumber, the world of music just not as sharp.

    Lou Reed made music out of noise. The noise of the city. Big trucks clattering over potholes; the heavy breathing of subways, the rumble in the ground; the white noise of Wall Street; the pink noise of the old Times Square. The winking neon of downtown, its massage and tattoo parlors, its bars and diners, the whores and hoardings that make up the life of the big city.

    New York City was to Lou Reed what Dublin was to James Joyce, the complete universe of his writing. He didn't need to stray out of it for material, there was more than enough there for his love and his hate songs. From Metal Machine Music to Coney Island Baby, from his work in the Velvet Underground to his work with Metallica, the city that he devoted his life to was his muse more than any other. Until Laurie Anderson came into his life 20 years ago, you could be forgiven for thinking that Lou had no other love than the noise of New York City. If he thought people could be stupid, he thought New Yorkers were the smartest of them.

    We first hooked up on the Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope tour in 1986. He would talk guitar sounds with Edge, motorcycle sounds with Larry, James Joyce with me and – maybe I'm remembering this wrong – relationships with Adam. On one occasion, in perfect Lou drawl, he described how annoyed he was for agreeing to lend one of his motorcycles to his girlfriend. She had a small accident, damaging the lowrider in ways that clearly upset him. I asked him how his girlfriend was after the accident. He looked at me dryly and said, "Bono, you can replace the girlfriend."

    His deadpan humor was easily misunderstood as rudeness, and Lou delighted in that misunderstanding. For the purposes of the hotel register, his pseudonym at the time was Raymond Chandler. I asked him what he liked about the noir genius of the detective story. "Biting humor and succinctness," he replied. I asked him for an example: "'That blonde is about as beautiful as a split lip.' It doesn't get better than that." He laughed loudly.

    Lou exemplified the idea of art as the discovery of beauty in unexpected places. One of his most famous songs, "Perfect Day," is made even more perfect by being about a heroin addict walking through the park in the warm sun, completely separate from the problems that brought him his addiction. It's been sung by all manner of earnest voices, including mine and children's choirs, since it was written in 1972. It never fails to give me some kind of extra ache as they sing the last line, "You're going to reap just what you sow," oblivious of the icy chill suggested.

    Transformer was the album that turned me on when it was released in 1972. Myself and my best friend Guggi would sit for hours listening to these street stories, thinking we knew what it was to walk on the wild side. We were 12 and 13.

    Transformation is at the heart of Lou Reed's best work: people's ability or inability to transform. We know that turning pain into beauty is the mark of a great artist and we understand defiance is at the heart of romance, but we are mystified by how Lou Reed's songs are so airborne. Helium-filled metal balloons, never weighed down by their subject matter, humor always around the corner from vitriol. Magic and loss, indeed. Lou Reed was an alchemist, turning base metals into gold, heavy metal into songs as disciplined as if they came from the Brill Building – which they did, because that is the world where Lou got his start.

    Lou was born out of two influences that can't be underestimated. One: the talents of his bandmates in the Velvet Underground, who then influenced pretty much every group that had a foot in the Seventies. (Witness our own "Running to Stand Still" for red-handed proof.) U2 were beyond ourselves with delight when the Velvets re-formed to play some select dates in the early Nineties, including some with us. "Pale Blue Eyes" is perfection in pop.

    Two: the short-story writer Delmore Schwartz. Lou would return to this subject a few times with me and got me to read In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. (I did and they do.) He also got me a collection of essays, The Ego Is Always at the Wheel. (It is and I know.) I got him a collection of Seamus Heaney poems a couple of months back. Our last conversation was a simple thanks.

    The music is eternal. It will keep being made even without him. It was wonderful to see Lou reunited with Bob Ezrin on their Berlin: Live shows in 2006, and to know that his beloved neighbor Julian Schnabel was set-designing and filming. I think it was originally meant to be rock opera for stage rather than screen. Maybe that will happen now, as the world digests how serious a loss we've just sustained.

    It's too easy to think of Lou Reed as a wild creature who put songs about heroin in the pop charts, like some decadent lounge lizard from the Andy Warhol Factory. This couldn't have been further from the truth. He was thoughtful, meditative and extremely disciplined. Before the hepatitis that he caught as a drug user returned, Lou was in top physical condition. Tai chi was what he credited for his lithe physicality and clear complexion. This is how I will remember him, a still figure in the eye of a metallic hurricane, an artist pulling strange shapes out of the formless void that is pop culture, a songwriter pulling melodies out of the dissonance of what Yeats called "this filthy modern tide" and, yes, pop's truly great poker face – with so much comedy dancing around those piercing eyes. The universe is not laughing today.
  10. you see .. he's never featureless never .. whenthe circumstances demands his soul he always elevates himself from the masses .. great heart-felt words .. as expected
    once again admiring and proud of him .. once again
  11. That performance of The Last Song I'll Ever Sing is one of my favorite performances by Bono ever. A shame that never surfaced in better quality...

    Damn I'm still in disbelief he's passed. I never once thought he'd be like one of us and die. Bono's right though his music will live forever.
  12. I thought Bono's article on Lou Reed is really great. Humble, affectionate, at times touching.