10 years ago
We'll Miss You, Lou Reed.This is a bad day for me. I don't have any money to buy what I should buy to send Lou off in style, and I don't suppose there's any way to fix that other than a conversation that starts with the line "You know I'm good for it..."We'll miss you, Lou. I'm glad I saw you in England when you were supporting "The Raven" album, and I'm glad I got a chance to hear so much of your music through the years. I'm glad that I've still got your 3-CD anthology, "Between Thought and Expression", and I'm glad I've got the 5 disc Velvet Underground boxed set with the peel-able banana, even though the bastard is hard as hell to put back on there once you've peeled it - at least if you want it to cover the banana that is, oddly, the same color of the head of a white man's hard dick.I'm glad I've had this music in my head and in my system for just shy of 20 years, and I'm glad you made it, Lou. I'm glad 99% of the people who knew you thought of you as a king-hell asshole, and I'm glad you earned the title. Hell, I'm even glad you liked Kanye's new album even though I couldn't a shit about him one way or the other.I'm glad you had a life, Lou, and you will be missed. You will be missed by every little punk-poseur that's trying to grow up and everyone that only knows one guitar chord. I'm glad you lived to hear Nirvana cover your stuff, even if you had to get it passed to you on tape back in the '90s because it was never officially released.I'm glad you had a life, Lou. Even though the moment I read about your death ranks at the top of the list of celebrity deaths, maybe tying Hunter Thompson, but somehow stepping a step above Dee Dee and Joey and Johnny Ramone. Somehow beyond when Alex Guinness died, somehow beyond when Pat Morita started trimming Bonzais up above. Jim Carrol was a bad day too, and I suppose that, when it happens, Iggy Pop will rank right up there. Leonard Cohen will be a bad day, as will Tom Waits...and Jeff Bridges...and all the others that I sit and watch and listen to from my perch far removed from them, forever fooling myself into thinking that I somehow know them from a distance.I know most of your catalog, Lou. But even when I saw you in 2004, you still played songs I didn't recognize. You leave a fine body of work behind, a fine batch of poetry and lyrics, a lot of experimentation, and a lot of tunes that just didn't quite work out. But that was always the key with you, Lou: no one can criticize your stuff unless they compare it to your other stuff, like the musical inversion of a Hanzo Sword.I still have all these tapes I made for myself out of your CDs from when I was 14, Lou. And in the past few years, when I got a car with a tapedeck, I listened to them all again. Some of it holds up better than others, I must admit, but all of it was made, crafted by a clever man, who took 3 chords and made an entire career out of them on a level that surpasses even the Goldberg Variations, because, let's face it, some of those are crap too.It's a bad day for me, Lou. A very, sad, bad day that I've been prepping myself for for years. Even though it had been decades since you tied your arm off with a microphone wire and shot up on stage, all of us that had heard the legends knew that you were on borrowed time.And you know what, Lou? So am I.I'm glad you got to fuck beautiful women and live like a rock star and watch your music go out there and come back in some many different ways...and I can even forgive you for selling "Perfect Day" to Sony for that fucking Playstation commercial. You earned the right to be a sell-out with dignity, Lou.So, in roughly 7 hours, I'm going to go see if I can bum enough cash for a bottle of Everclear and a couple gallons of juice and a bag of ice...or maybe see if I can call in a favor off the streets and get something a little more exotic, and then I'm going to put on my all-time favorite tracks of yours - the really hard-to-handle slow cut of "Heroin" with all the brass followed by the cut of "Here Comes the Bride", both done live, followed by "Boogie Wit You"...then "A Thousand Departed Friends" gets put on loop until I can't take it anymore.Maybe I'll wake up covered in booze with the shits the next day, maybe I'll just wake-up with a splitting headache and a little deeper in debt. But, you get a send-off Lou, a better one than even Hunter did, since I'd already been puking for 6 hours when I heard he went, and couldn't really send him away any better than that.But you know what, Lou?It kind of makes it harder to say it, but it's all the more true these days, more true than ever: only poseurs die, you fuck.Old punks don't die, they just get tired and angry and weary. And you're fucking dead, Lou, so you don't count anymore.I just hope, when you hit the Pearly Gates, and got to the front of the pack, and St. Peter started going over your sins, I just hope when he got to the bottom of the list, he asked the question he was bound to...I hope he asked the question, "What the hell are you, anyway?"And I hope you told him the same thing you told everyone who ever asked you a similar question at Andy Warhol's place back in 1966:"I'm a cocksucker, honey. What the fuck are you?"