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treaclefingers
I didn't expect to laugh while reading this thread

Quite right! Nothing wrong with having a laugh as well.

So let's laugh along to an "all star" tribute of Perfect Day.

Good article by Richard Williams on his blog : [thebluemoment.com]

"You might feel you’ve read enough about Lou Reed in the last couple of days (and here is my Guardian obituary), but here are a few last thoughts.

You’ll have heard a lot about how difficult it was to interview Lou successfully. Without wishing to criticise my colleagues, it always seemed to me that the journalists who had a hard time with him were the ones who felt he owed them answers to questions he had already been asked a million times. I mean, “Were you really on heroin when you wrote ‘Heroin’?” — asked 40 years after the fact — was unlikely to elicit a positive reaction.

Not to say that he was a little ray of sunshine even in the most propitious circumstances. But, like a lot of artists, he preferred contemplating the present and anticipating the future to raking over the past. He was proud of the early stuff, but you can tell just by reading the later interviews that he didn’t want to spend his life discussing it. He usually responded well to people who showed that they had taken the trouble to keep track of what he had been up to in the years since the achievements that brought him his legendary status. If an interviewer wanted to talk about Ornette Coleman (as Bob Elms did on Radio London) or Tibetan philosophy (as Mick Brown did in the Telegraph), he was likely to show genuine enthusiasm and engage in something resembling a real dialogue. (...)"


Read full article here : Lou Reed 1942-2013

MOJO 240 ----- November 2013



ROCKMAN

"The late Lou Reed's catalog of music sees great gains this week, following his death on Sunday, Oct. 27.

As Nielsen SoundScan's sales tracking week ended on Oct. 27, Billboard's new sales charts reflect less than one day since Reed's passing. (SoundScan provides data to Billboard for its music chart rankings.) Thus, we'll probably see even larger increases for his music a week from now, after a full seven days have passed following his death.

Reed's catalog of albums sold 3,000 last week -- up 607% from the less than 1,000 the week previous. Reed was also a member of the band the Velvet Underground, which sees its album sales rise to 3,000 as well -- up by 236%."

[www.billboard.com]

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Rockman

MOJO 240 ----- November 2013

Thanks for posting that. The timing of this interview makes this it an accidental, yet fitting epitaph.

ROCKMAN

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







Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-11-01 03:12 by tatters.

Thanks for that Tatters, thanks for the note on the Association in the other thread too!

I actually heard this BBC multiple-artists charity recording of Lou's 'Perfect Day' before listening to the original. It was a U.K. No.1 and is godawful, but it features Reed and at least, evidently, had his blessing. Erughh...

Heroin live 1969 video: [youtu.be]

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DandelionPowderman

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Redhotcarpet
Heroin live 1969 video: [youtu.be]

Yeah! Great isn't it? Im a fan of Lou and Velvet but never cared to listen to the live recordings. But boy was that version of Heroin great! Stunning even, one of the best live moments ever caught on tape. The intro is absolutely genius, even better than the studio intro. Fantastic.

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tatters
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

Beautiful and moving words and picture.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-11-01 20:09 by kleermaker.

Another legend is gone;
thanks for the articles and thanks,tatters,for the beautiful and moving lines you wrote

Source: RollingStone.com -By Andy Greene
November 1, 2013 11:30 AM ET


Tony Visconti Remembers Lou Reed

'Even his closest friends didn't realize he was dying,' producer says. 'But he did'


A few of days after the devastating news hit that Lou Reed died Sunday, David Bowie producer Tony Visconti got on the phone with "Rolling Stone" to share some memories of his friend. They first met during the "Transformer" sessions in 1972, and they formed a very tight friendship during the past decade or so in New York City, even attending the same tai chi class every Sunday. What follows is a very lightly edited version of his recollections.

I first heard the Velvet Underground when the debut album came out in 1967, the one with the famous banana on the cover. Like everyone of my age, I was completely floored by the sound and the lyrics. Nobody had written lyrics like that. There was no sound like that. It was underground, and the only group I knew like that was the Fugs.

10 Incredible Lou Reed Videos

The Velvet Underground just blew me away. The link-up with Andy Warhol was just phenomenal. It was too good to be true, all these things happening at once. Ironically, I never saw them in concert. That's probably because I was too poor to go to a concert. I was just a working musician living from hand to mouth

There was so much myth attached to the band. I heard if you peeled the banana off there was LSD under it. It had a lot of folklore within just weeks of release. I guess that you'd call it now a buzz band, but there was nothing like it in those days. Nobody was buzzing about any band until the Velvet Underground came around.

Lou Reed was singing about things that happened in the alternative lifestyle of America, which in those days was very prohibited. In those days, you couldn't speak openly about these matters. It wasn't long before that when I saw Lenny Bruce in a nightclub and I saw him get arrested. Lou, just a few years later, was singing about the kind of subject matter that Lenny Bruce was getting arrested for speaking about in public.

I knew exactly what he was talking about on "Waiting for the Man." Other people didn't quite know who the man was. It was obviously a drug pusher, but it wasn't common knowledge in those days. I was dabbling in heroin a bit and I was taking a lot of acid. I knew exactly what Lou was talking about. We were contemporaries in that lifestyle.

When I went to London and met David Bowie, he was a bigger Velvet Underground fan than I was. He was actually singing some of the Lou songs in his live sets. Lou was very influential in a sense that David covered his songs live and wrote songs that sounded a bit in that style. I was in David's live band and we were playing them.

David's biggest homage to Lou was when he found Lou. He literally searched for him and found him and made Transformer. That is so wonderful. It was one of the most wonderful things to happen to the both of them at the time. I'm only vaguely away of Lou's first solo album, before Transformer. He was hard to find, so all credit to David. I remember him talking about looking for Lou and hard it was to find him.

I first met Lou during the making of Transformer. I was in London and David was dressed as Ziggy Stardust at the time, in his daytime life as well as the shows. He was producing Transformer and he asked me to pop in the studio to meet Lou. I think at the time, when Velvet Underground came out, I was in fear of Lou. I didn't want to meet him. He was too awesome and intimidating, if his lyrics were anything to go by.

I went to Trident Studios in London where a lot of famous recordings were made. I worked with T. Rex there. David made Ziggy there. Queen made a bunch of their recordings there. I met Lou there and I think he was on heroin. He was just sitting in the corner on the floor kind of nodding off. I remember kneeling down and shaking his hand and saying "hello" and he just looked up and was all glazed over.

I wasn't surprised at all that "Walk on the Wild Side" got so big. When I heard it I thought it was a smash hit. I never heard anything like it. What was funny is that he's talking about transvestites and giving head and changing clothes on the bus, and they're playing this for kids on BBC radio. I thought it was hilarious. Like Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, we were getting away with murder. He was talking about things that were forbidden subjects. It is amazing to think about now, because many of the DJs over there are now in trouble for child pornography, but the lines about "giving head" went over their heads.

He borrowed David's sound for "Walk on the Wild Side." David is very much responsible for that and anything else that came off that album. David had the hit song mentality, which Lou never really cared about in a big way. Lou always considered himself a very serious poet, a very serious artist. I don't think that wealth was his goal, or worldwide popularity. He just wanted to do what he did. His output from that point on was extremely diverse. Like the Beatles, he kept changing styles. He experimented with a lot of forms of music that wasn't' very commercial.

I didn't see him again until the late 1980s/early 1990s. I moved back to New York from London and I started seeing Lou socially. I was still in awe of him. We had a mutual friend in Mick Rock, the photographer. Lou and Mick were always kind of seen together in those days. I'd see him occasionally and he would dismiss me and walk away.

He was very difficult to get close to. He was well known as being a curmudgeon. He just didn't take kindly to people in those days. I think he was overly protective of himself. He put the barriers up, socially. He was very hard to get close to.

20 Essential Lou Reed Tracks

But over the past 10 years, he became one of my best friends. I used to study tai chi in London, which has been a mainstay of my whole life. When I was speaking casually to David Bowie about how it was hard to find a teacher as good as the one I had in London, he said, "Why don't you speak to Lou? Lou studies tai chi." I said, "OK, that'll be interesting." Now I felt that I could confront Lou face to face.

All I had to do was mention those two words: tai chi. Lou just opened up like a flower and said, "Wow, I didn't know you were interested in that. I have a great teacher and his name is Master Ren Guang-Yi." I signed up immediately after I saw Lou's teacher. Lou started a year earlier with the same teacher.

I had seen Lou hundreds of times in the past 10 years, mainly almost every Sunday in New York City at our Sunday class. We lived only four blocks away in the West Village. I would go over to his place and practice with him. We became very close friends.

We had people from all walks of life in our class, a banker, a plumber, a construction worker, a Japanese translator . . . all these varied people from all walks of life, and Lou was just one of us. Afterward sometimes as many of 12 of us went out for brunch right after class and Lou was right there sitting in the middle of it. It was wonderful. To know him on that level was just incredible. I can't tell you how serious he was about it. He was one of the most serious people I know about studying some arcane subject like that.

It wasn't just the tai chi they do in the park. The type we study has all the weaponry and all the fighting and wrestling and all that stuff. He took it to a very, very serious high level.

Lou was very social and went out a lot. He had a lot of very close friends, like Julian Schnabel and Richard Belzer from Law and Order. They were his very serious friends, and he saw David Bowie from time to time, and myself. I went over to Lou's house quite a bit. We'd go to shows together and I'd see him quite a bit at gallery openings and the openings of Broadway shows. He didn't just stay at home and do nothing. He was very active.

I can't understand why people would move to New York and not go out. Lou was a man about town. He'd even go around town and walk his dog. In my neighborhood, we have hundreds and hundreds of pedigree dogs. Lou would be out there, too, walking by the Hudson River. He'd be walking his dog all the time. I had friends that were walking their dogs that Lou wouldn't normally talk to, but if they had a dog he'd stop and talk to them.

We all knew he was sick. He was pretty open about it. He studied tai chi mainly to keep his strength up. There are recent photos I've seen on Facebook where he looks absolutely ripped. He has musculature that would be the envy of a 30-year-old. He was fighting liver disease for the longest time. I thought when he got the transplant it would buy him another five or 10 years, that's why this is such a blow to me and everyone close to him. Even his very closest friends didn't actually know he was dying, but he did. He knew.

It wasn't the transplant that killed him. He had liver cancer and they thought at the time it was only in the liver. Viruses are so, so tiny and they can hide somewhere. Just a few cells can jump from the liver into another organ. That happens a lot. They didn't detect it. It was undetected for months. He was cancer-free. That's what the blood test shown.

In the past couple of months it just came back and took over. It was too late even though he got the liver of some young person. I think the cancer just spread to other parts of his body. He went very quickly. Last week he was back in Cleveland at the hospital. They said they did all they could and there was nothing left to do. He knew then it was over. Now I realize that. He went back to his house in Long Island and decided to live out his days. Even Lou thought he'd live a little longer than he did.

I last saw him three weeks ago at a Mick Rock book signing at the CBGB place, the John Varvatos store. I wrote to Lou the night before and said, "Can you let me in?" His last e-mail to me, was, "I try." It was a joke. Instead of "I'll try" it was "I try." There was nothing wrong with his grammar, believe me. He got me in and we were very close to the front. I waved to him. I took my son Morgan with me. We arrived early and got right to the front and Lou and I waved to each other. It was the last time I saw him.

Last night at tai chi we were very choked up. The class is very, very strict. It runs a certain way. But the teacher turned to us at the beginning and said, "Can we have a moment of silence for Lou?" He got very emotional and turned to the back of the room and turned up the music that Lou made for us. He mad special tai chi music that we trained to at every sessions. The teacher turned up the music so loud that it was rattling the windows. It was a whole minute with this synthesizer drone, a very deep note that Lou made just for tai chi. The windows rattled and we're sitting there in the tai chi position, the tears welling up. When the minute was over we resumed class. It started out extremely depressing, but it got better and at the end we had an impromptu storytelling period. We shared our memories of Lou.

There were some people in the class that only knew Lou as their brother. They didn't even know he was a rock star. That's the kind of environment that he loved. Not many rock stars would be in that environment, but he was the quintessential New Yorker. He took advantage of everything. He was everywhere. Everywhere.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-11-01 20:41 by Chris Fountain.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
I'll miss you...

All my best wishes to Laurie.

From Lou's wife, his obituary:

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

Lou Reed-Sad Song from the "Berlin" Album, one of my favorite Lou Reed vinyl albums.

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runaway
Lou Reed-Sad Song from the "Berlin" Album, one of my favorite Lou Reed vinyl albums.

I don't know if you can get any better than Lou's completely monotone "sad song" during the inspirational chorus. I mean, thats Lou Reed right there in a nutshell. Thats why you've gotta love him. One of his more amazing songs that I have listened to at least 5 times in the last week.

That whole album's incredible. The Kids is masterful and genuinely makes you feel as uncomfortable as possible. I'm glad that eventually the general public caught on to its brilliance and Lou was able to see it and laugh in everyone's faces.

Here's a tribute to Lou and Laurie Reed. They're performing together circa 1996?

Lou Reed 1985 Farm Aid

Before 1993, the closest thing to a Velvet Underground reunion occurred in 1972 when Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico performed a set at La Bataclan club in Paris.

In the POP2 special below (first clip), Bataclan performance footage begins at 13:29, preceded by performance footage and interview with Soft Machine.









A highlight was Nico's performance of Femme Fatale.





The Bataclan show is unique in that not only were Velvets classics performed, but also Reed premiered new solo material such as Berlin with John Cale accompanying him.

John Cale also performed solo material he never included on albums of his own, such as Empty Bottles, a song he gave to Jennifer Warnes.





Also included was Cale's tribute to the Velvets, The Biggest, Loudest, Hairiest Group of All.

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stonehearted
Before 1993, the closest thing to a Velvet Underground reunion occurred in 1972 when Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico performed a set at La Bataclan club in Paris.

Not quite. At the final performance of Songs For Drella in New York on December 3, 1989, Reed and Cale were joined onstage by Maureen Tucker for a "Pale Blue Eyes" encore. I was there. That was the closest we got to seeing a reunited Velvet Underground perform in the United States. Lucky Parisians, however, got to see the full lineup (including Sterling Morrison) performing "Heroin" as the encore to a brief Reed-Cale set on June 15, 1990.






Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2013-11-03 04:23 by tatters.

Here's the complete Reed-Cale set (with Velvet Underground encore) from June 15, 1990.

January 8, 2013. John Cale on the roof of 56 Ludlow Street, the building where he and Sterling Morrison shared an apartment, and where the Velvet Underground recorded their first demos in July 1965.






Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-11-03 04:48 by tatters.

Reed, Cale and Tucker perform as the Velvet Underground for the final time, at the January 17, 1996 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony. The song is a tribute to Sterling Morrison, who died on August 30, 1995.






Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2013-11-03 05:12 by tatters.

Anyone know of a good place to get Lou Reed bootlegs? I was particularly looking for one of the New York performances from 2003, but anywhere that would just have a ton of stuff archived for download.