Body/Head: Gordon and Nace in Matador promo shot. Cool shades.
Kim Gordon, now in the duo Body/Head with Bill Nace, provided this Lou Reed tribute to Salon.
Lou was the first real antihero in rock. As a 14-year-old hearing the Velvet Underground for the first time, I acted out the lyrics to a song about heroin when I didn’t even know what it was. But I thought it was cool and I knew it was different than anything I’d heard before. Lou went about self-destruction and creation with the same exploratory innocence of a 14-year-old girl rebelling against a role she doesn’t want … won’t accept … to be a conventional boy, to be a conventional girl … With Lou’s death I feel a certain panic that the same innocence that comes with any urge to make something and get lost in it along the way has left with him, leaving the rest of us feeling way too adult.
Members of Sonic Youth and Arcade FIre play an 11 minute version of “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”
Also, below is a crazy, juvenile film made in 1987 featuring Sonic Youth called “Lou Believers.” It’s terrible, but…
This text below is on Reed’s website. Tom Sarig is Reed’s manager:
Just a couple of weeks ago Lou did a photo session intended to become a print ad for his friend Henri Seydoux’s French audio headphones company Parrot. The renowned photographer Jean Baptiste Mondino took the shots, and this was the very last shot he took. Always a tower of strength. – Tom Sarig
Patti Smith spoke about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground in an interview with the Associated Press today (October 28, 2013).
“I was so taken with their [the Velvet Underground] music. I made it my business to study him. His process completely spoke to me, the process of merging poetry with these surf rhythms, this pulsing loop. You could get into a trance listening to 12 minutes of Sister Ray.”
Smith said Reed brought “the sensibility of art and literature” to rock music. Smith and Reed often spoke about poetry, and such poets as Hart Crane or Walt Whitman or Federico Garcia Lorca.
Smith said that “Pale Blue Eyes,” a song she often performed at the beginning of her career, is a favorite, and that it reminds her of her late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith.
“I never fail to think of him and his gaze when I’m singing that or hear that song. Lou had a gift of taking very simple lines, ‘Linger on, your pale blue eyes,’ and make it so they magnify on their own. That song has always haunted me.”
At Neil Young’s Bridge School benefit concert this past Sunday night (October 27, 2013) there was an all-star performance of Lou Reed’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’.”
Jim James of My Morning Jacket led a group of musicians that included Neil Young, Elvis Costello, Jenny Lewis and others.
This fan video shows a beautiful and moving tribute to Lou Reed.
Photo of Lou Reed via The Guardian (Michael Ochs Archive).
Writer Neil Gaiman published an essay today in The Guardian about Lou Reed, and Reed’s influence on Gaiman.
Gaiman writes:
‘There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs – the lyric really can’t survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist’s eye to it, and, within the framework of rock’n’roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock’n’roll too.” That was what Lou Reed told me in 1991.
I’m a writer. I write fiction, mostly. People ask me about my influences, and they expect me to talk about other writers of fiction, so I do. And sometimes, when I can, I put Reed on the list, and nobody ever asks what he’s doing there, which is good because I don’t know how to explain why a songwriter is responsible for so much of the way I view the world.
I read the news today, oh boy. Fuck. Lou Reed dead. I can’t believe it. I know we all die, but Lou Reed? I remember as a kid listening to a used copy of the Velvets’ first album in the living room of my parents house and trying to hear all the words to “Heroin.”
I was fascinated by the Velvets long before I really understood what they were all about, and why they were so important. I have played their albums for decades, particularly the third album, The Velvet Underground, and Loaded.
Like for millions of other fans all over the world, for me this is truly a sad day.
In 1996, when I was editor and publisher of Addicted To Noise, I had the opportunity to interview Lou Reed. The interview is still online. Here’s part of the introduction, with a link to the rest of the story.
Lou Reed is dressed in black. Black leather pants. Black t-shirt. Black shoes. Electricity is, literally, crackling off him, as he stands in his elegantly cool, private sixth floor office at the back of Sister Ray Enterprises, overlooking Broadway in the Village.
“Did you hear that?” he asks, walking over to an open window and closing it.
I think he’s referring to the street sounds, but I’m wrong.
At Sister Ray, there are Lou Reed and Velvet Underground posters on the walls, as well as framed gold and platinum albums for New York. A rack holds copies of many of Reed’s older albums; boxes of the recent Velvet Underground boxed set sit on a bookcase. A photographer is setting up to shoot Reed up front. Reed’s publicist is on the phone, dealing from a couch at the back, just outside the room where Reed and I are talking. Nearby is Reed’s Internet expert, Struan Oglanby.
“I’m getting a shock every time I get up,” Reed says with a grimace, taking a seat back at his desk. “That was that snapping sound.” Then, in that classic Lou Reed monotone, “I conduct a lot of electricity. It’s really strange.”
Maybe not so strange. We are, after all, talking about Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground. Writer of such highly charged songs as “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting For The Man,” “Sweet Jane” and, of course, “Rock & Roll.” And Lisa Says.” And “Walk On The Wild Side.” And “Satellite Of Love.” And “The Blue Mask.” And “Romeo Had Juliette.” And “Dirty Blvd.” And….
The Velvet Underground’s second album, White Light/White Heat, will be released as an expanded three-disc set on December 3, 2013.
In addition to remastered stereo and mono versions of the challenging album, there will be a bunch of alternative versions of tracks including “Hey Mr. Rain,” new mixes of “Beginning to See the Light” and “Guess I’m Falling in Love,” and previously unreleased vocal and instrumental versions of “The Gift,” according to Rolling Stone.
Plus a live set recorded at the Gymnasium in New York on April 30, 1967 that includes “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Sister Ray” and “Run Run Run.”
“No one listened to it,” Lou Reed said in a statement. “But there it is, forever – the quintessence of articulate punk. And no one goes near it.”
Here’s a mono version of “Sister Ray” off White Light/White Heat.
