The Day Lou Reed Died

Sunday was just a downright bad day.

It began with me opening my morning paper to the results of the Observer/Jonathan Cape graphic short story contest. My story about an old man deciding to do something different in the face of the world’s mediocrity had been overlooked in favour of a thing about a woman having a colonic. I then discovered that Lou Reed had died. The day ended with me getting locked out of the house due to a broken lock on the back gate and my having to climb over a six foot wall. Perhaps I was thinking about the old man in my short story. Perhaps I’ve just been playing too many computer games lately. I thought it would be easy. The climbing part was. The jumping off just had a few unforeseen results such as a jarred knee, slightly sprained wrist, and my feeling like a blithering idiot. What was I thinking?

I guess I wasn’t thinking. My mind was probably on other things such as why the lock would choose to break on such a spectacularly crap day.

In addition to everything, my eyes have given out and I need to rest them. They’re suffering from the sheer exhaustion of looking at screens, both tablet and desktop. It’s been weeks of non-stop work building websites, editing video, doing Photoshop work, and then, in my downtime, doing my own work: these hasty bits of blogging and drawing strips and gag cartoons. I know the signs. I’ve been here before. I’m shot, knackered, depressed, fed up, but mainly just exhausted. My eyes need some time to recover.

Yet it’s strange how these things happen together and feel causally linked. Yesterday the papers warned that the storm of the century would land. It felt like the pathetic fallacy: when you believe the world reflects your emotions.

I had spent my day wondering about the colonic winner, wondering what I could have done differently and realising that nothing I could do would have improved my chances. I don’t mind losing to something where I can see the gap, a sense of something beyond my skills to create. It’s frustrating to lose to something which makes you feel underwhelmed. I guess it’s about shared mindsets. The world of people having colonics is so far from the world I see every day where austerity bites and alcohol give people the only reprieve from living. The things that preoccupy my mind aren’t the things that might preoccupy somebody who would care to write a story about a colonic or, I guess, anybody who would pick the colonic story as their winner. Is that really the most important thing we can talk about in the graphic form? I hate to point the finger and say ‘class’ but I wonder if these things aren’t just a middle-class bias coming out. If that’s the case, then working-class me stood no chance. It was never in my destiny to be photographed looking attractive sitting on the floor before open patio windows, looking out on a sunny garden with a handsome pedigree dog lying beside me. Whiskered and miserable in front of a Manchester canal might be closer to the truth and who the hell wants to see that?

It was amid such gloomy thoughts that I heard that Lou Reed had died.

It wasn’t unexpected but it hit me hard. With the exception of hearing the news that Eric Morecambe had died, I never weep for celebrities. This was different. I tend to be loyal in my choice of music. There are few musicians who work I dearly love and whose work I listen to constantly. Reed was one of the few. I’ve always adored the albums he made with the Velvet Underground through to his Transformer and Berlin albums of the 70s, and then New York in the 1980s. Admittedly, in recent years I’ve struggled to maintain that love. Of course, I’d heard stories about his being difficult with journalists but that seemed like a good thing to be. Being difficult with journalists is synonymous to being difficult with stupidity and who wants to give stupidity an easy ride? Stories of his being rude to fans disturbed me more because I’d always wanted to meet him. Yet I had struggled to enjoy his recent albums which seemed to be delightfully sneering towards his audience. I’d so desperately wanted his last album, ‘Lulu’, to be good. I’ve written in the past that I hoped if it was going to be a failure (as some had predicted) then it would be one of those spectacular failure that are better than most of the dross out there. I could never say that it was. Now I feel like I need to give it another listen. I don’t want to think it was his last album.

Reed never influenced me as a musician. I’m not musical. I can Travis pick a guitar badly, slightly less than badly when I put the hours in and remember to let my nails grow on my right hand. Yet he was one of those rare figures who inspired me to be creative and to write. He was part of a New York scene that fascinated me from far away. Reading the comments on the Rolling Stone article that broke the news, I noticed some Americans were suggesting that the Velvet Underground weren’t worthy of licking The Beatles’ shoes. From the perspective of somebody living just outside Liverpool, I thought it the other way around. Perhaps it’s just an attraction to the unknown. As much as I liked Lennon, I never really liked The Beatles, even at their experimental best. It’s the raw sound of the Velvets that excited me. I loved the dark gothic complexity of Reed’s lyrics, the bacchanalian riot of the world he experienced. His music gave me a window on the freaks and the weirdoes, the addicts and sexual misfits. In many ways, it a vision of humanity at its worst where the banality of civil order had broken down and people were left twisted into carnival shapes. It was full of difficulty and contradictions. It was bleak but truthful and vital because of that.

My most abiding memory of Lou Reed was an interview he gave to BBC2 around the time of his releasing New York. In it he talked about writing. ‘All good writing is rewriting,’ he said and that stuck with me. I repeat it as a mantra and still offer it to anybody who ever asks me for writing advice. From that moment, I have always written blisteringly quickly but I rewrite slowly. I also learned to appreciate his uncompromising attitude towards culture. Reed could be scathing and sometimes brutal but that was his appeal. His ad libs in this live version of ‘Sweet Jane’ are among my very favourite things:



‘Here’s fucking Barbara Streisand… Fuck her and the little people.’

‘I give good clerk…’

‘Are you political Lou? […] Give me an issue I’ll give you a tissue. Wipe my ass with it.’

‘Fuck Radio Ethiopia, man. I’m Radio Brooklyn.’

‘If you write as good as you talk, nobody reads you.’

It’s well to remember the misanthropy of his art, especially now. New York is full of angry songs, which is perhaps why I like it. Anger is a good emotion if channelled correctly. I feel like I need to channel it now. I learned about his death via The Guardian but immediately found that Rolling Stone were among the first to report it. That’s where I read a comment that somebody posted to say that Lou Reed hadn’t died and that it was all a hoax.

Of course, I was relieved but cursing the sick bastards who would make a joke out of something like that. Then I discovered that the hoax was actually the claim that it was a hoax.

Isn’t that grim? To know that people write hoax stories about an artist’s death? I’ve written fake stories in the past but I like to think they had a purpose and never would I write anything so callous or cruel. Satirists generally do what they do because they want a better world. These hoaxers make the world more alarming and bleak. They also have form. The website, en.mediamass.net (I won't do them the service of giving them an actual link to boost the Google rank), seems to be some deliberately constructed algorithm to harvest readers. It’s hoax but it’s not satire. It’s blackhat operations; webdesign by bad guys. The story ‘Kenneth Branagh goes “Gangnam Style”’ is the same as the story ‘Chris Elliot goes “Gangnam Style” and even ‘Lou Reed goes “Gangham Style”’.

At the height of the news breaking, it was easy to miss such detail.

This morning, I wish I could sum all this up but I’m still aching from jumping off a six foot wall onto concrete. I’m lucky I didn’t split my shins. My spirit is really shot after the disappointment of the graphic short story contest and I now have to bike through these torrential rains to post some cartoons to another contest and to buy a new lock for the gate. I feel a little bit lost knowing that my already small world has just grown a little smaller. It feels like Lou Reed was there when I set out trying to be some kind of artist. His death came on a day when I thought it about time I stopped trying to climb these perilously high walls.

I'm going crazy...

I'm having a crap day. My computer has developed a form of low level insanity by which it randomly thinks that the ALT key is pressed. Driving me crazy. I can be typing and then I’m suddenly navigating menus… It's not a problem with 'Sticky Keys' or a hardware problem (this is happening with different keyboards). I have no idea what the problem is and it's now lasted through three reboots and three hours...

In addition, today, a hot sunny day when I need the window open to breathe in this small office, the local retirement home is having a garden party with ‘entertainment’. That entertainment is a local folk singer with an amplifier and he’s driving me crazy. I’m currently sitting listening to ‘The Oakie from Muskogee’… No, it’s changed. ‘You were always on my mind… You were always on my mind.’

I’ve always needed peace and quiet to write. It’s something to do with hearing words in my head as I write them. It’s probably why I prefer the winter. There’s no way I can work with this keyboard problem and that music…

So, in lieu (subsequent pun intended) of the things I wanted to write out, here’s Lou Reed being witty and intelligence in this Guardian piece. He’s sounding weak but I’m amazed to see him in public after his recent liver operation. Just these few choice quotes remind me why I’d don’t mind if he’s a truculent arsehole when meeting fans and journalists.

Oh, Christ this is impossible. The folkie is now singing ‘Matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs’ and the keyboard is driving me slowly crazy.

I’m going to see if I can fix this bloody machine... Can of worms about to be opened...

Talented Eggs and Lou Reed's Kidney

Two uncomfortable truths I’ve discovered this week: that Lou Reed is apparently one gnarly old arsehole and that you can never find a woman a strong arm and calm nerves when you need one.

Picking up the newspaper from virtual stoop this morning, I noticed that last night was the finale of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’. I’ve now done my background research on Youtube and watched the highlight of the evening as an imposter leapt to the front of the stage and pelted Simon Cowell with eggs. Unfortunately, the excitement of the moment seemed to have affected the poor girl’s aim. Months of throwing lead-filled coconuts clearly didn’t pay off as she repeatedly missed her target. However, as memorable moments go it was certainly one of the better things to come out of that buzzard of a show in a very long time.

It did get me thinking about Lou Reed. In an article this week, journalists reflected on the worst interviews they’ve ever conduction and Lou Reed, it seems, has something of a legendary reputation for being truculent, rude, and downright offensive to his interviewers. I’ve also read of instances when fans have approached him in coffee shops only to receive a snarl in exchange for their good wishes.

I’ve been a big Lou Reed fan for a very long time, though I’ve also had to dodge the odd egg he’s thrown my way. His recent album, ‘Lulu’, made with Metallica was brave, experimental, and unfortunately utterly unlistenable. In fact, in discovering his music, the only egg I’ve had to dodge that had a more stinking yolk was 1975’s double album (yes, double album) ‘Metal Machine Music’. I admit I’ve not heard the whole album but I defy anybody to get through the first part without needing to self-harm.



Now that Lou Reed has a new kidney, I sincerely hope it changes his attitude towards fans and journalists who have only ever wished him well. But if it doesn’t, then we’re hardly any worse off. Reed’s last truly great album was ‘Songs for Drella’ (1990) or ‘New York’ (1989) if we’re talking pure solo efforts. Since then, he’s spent twenty years exploring strange barren roads where his audiences have been reluctant to follow. I admire his dedication to his art even if I think there’s a sadistic streak to any artist who enjoys trying to out intellectualise (or out aestheticise) their listener.

Reed’s music has always trod a thin line between musicality and atonality. He found an absolute perfect place with ‘New York’, often boasting that nothing was better than guitar, bass, and drums, only to then head back off into the avant-garde. ‘The Raven’ even had a hurdy gurdy listed in the instrument, for Christsakes! Lou Reed acoustic would, of course, be the way to go. For a man so into Tai Chi, I would have thought he would understand the concept of minimalized effort for maximum result. Experimentation can be a kind of artistic impotence – indeed, it is often used when artists feel stuck and unproductive. I don’t personally hold the line that artists or their art must be difficult to be great but I do think that sometimes it helps fill in the gaps when the talent is lacking.

It helps in the way that our friend the egg thrower showed that if you can’t sing, write, dance, or otherwise perform, then you can still be artistic if you are simply spontaneous, liberated from the rules of the form, and indistinguishable from a wild-eyed lunatic. [Since I wrote that line, I've discovered that the egg thrower is a BAFTA-nominated viola player, which makes her actions even more impressive since they express something about the frustrations of true musicians in an age dedicated to superficiality.] Had I been voting for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, the egg thrower would have got my vote [This is doubly true give the new revelation]. There was something crass about what she did but at the same time she revealed a more important truth about life than any of the bland acts that made the final. The same is true about Lou Reed, even at his difficult moments. He lives it how he sees it. I understand the vision and I think I understand the man even if I don’t think I would want to meet him.