This week marks the 10th anniversary of Lou Reed’s death.
Last week marked the 6th anniversary of Gord Downie’s death. He was a Lou Reed fan. In The Never-Ending Present, one of the final chapter epigrams is a quote from Laurie Anderson, Reed’s wife and creative partner in the last 20 years of his life: “I believe the purpose of death is the release of love.”
I love this Downie clip, and come back to it often:
This month also marks the publication of the long-anticipated new biography of Reed by Will Hermes, the writer behind one of my favourite books of all time, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever. (I interpolated the subtitle for Hearts on Fire.) I haven’t read it yet, but can’t wait.
Especially after reading this interview in Aquarium Drunkard, in which Hermes says:
“[Reed’s] interests were so wide that it really gave me license to digress, so to speak … I thought wouldn’t it be great to write a book that put all of this into a narrative arc that was readable by people who were lay fans but would still be chock full of all this super interesting detail that the superfans would appreciate. Ultimately, I wanted to write the book I wanted to read.”
SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE MY KIND OF BOOK. Because that’s the kind of book I wanted The Never-Ending Present to be. I hope it was.
Quick tangent about characters in my books: been thinking a lot about deaths and endings lately. On Sunday I saw Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew do a live interview with Tom Power, for later broadcast on Q, in which he talked candidly about the recent death of his mother, and how that and other recent losses (including Hal Willner, a friend of both Drew’s and Lou Reed’s) affected his new album, Aging (streaming Nov. 2, available physically now).
And the night before, I was at the Dream Serenade at Massey Hall, co-hosted by local hero Kevin Hearn, Lou Reed’s musical director for the last six years of his life. There, Stars played a three-song set that is likely to be their last for quite a while, as they’re going on an indefinite hiatus (no, really—I know Torquil Campbell threatens to do this all the time). Amy Millan dedicated 2010’s haunting “Dead Hearts” to Gord Downie, who was a huge Stars fan, and who played one of his final sets of his life at the 2016 Dream Serenade with his Secret Path band. Stars were even more melancholic than usual, playing “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” and, from their most recent album, “Snowy Owl,” which is one of the most devastating things they’ve ever written, and a fitting send-off if there ever was one:
Every last mile
Each exit sign
Each desperate deal that we make with time
Every lost year, every lost friend
Every cold summer that we wish would end
Are gone
I know they're really gone
So hold on
But back to Lou:
For paid subscribers only, here’s the obit I wrote in 2013.
Lou Reed died on a Sunday morning. He was 71.
He did not die shooting heroin on stage—which, during one of his many lives, he merely pretended to do on stage, albeit with a real syringe.
Instead, he was recovering from a recent liver transplant. He was doing tai chi.
One thing you can say about Lou Reed: he was never afraid to be ridiculous. Never afraid to piss off someone who loved his last record. And never, ever, afraid to defy rock’n’roll convention: by having a viola player, by orchestrating feedback, by having a female drummer, by having a monotone model sing in his band, by writing about S&M and then having a guy dance with whips in front of him on stage. By writing about the euphoria and desperation and darkness of drug use. By making the loudest rock’n’roll record ever, and then immediately making the quietest rock’n’roll record ever. By writing a sunny pop song about hating the sun.
And that was all in the first four years of his recording career, before he left the Velvet Underground and went solo. His first six albums were a series of wild left turns that confounded even his biggest fan, Lester Bangs, who couldn’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that Reed might want to do radically different things than what the likes of Bangs wanted him to.
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