“An asshole without talent is just an asshole.”
My girlfriend was talking about Freddie Mercury, addressing
the legions of critics who’d dismissed him as a narcissistic creep over the
years. But she very easily could’ve been talking about Lou Reed, a man whose offensive
ego was enough to make me shake my head in disgust and replace the music
magazine on the rack in front of me at a newsstand in 1992. The paradox was so
clear, yet so baffling: this man was so unpleasant in person (at least it
seemed whilst reading these interviews; I never met him); but what happened
when he played his guitar and sang transformed the configuration of my neural
pathways. Each time. Even if I’d already heard the song a thousand times
before.
I never thought that Lou would die at 71, younger than my
own father. I never gave any thought to Lou dying at all; he was just always there, ever-present, informing everything
we said and did as we crept along our uncertain paths. You didn’t take a step
or play a note without him having a say in the whole affair, it seemed. It was
comforting knowing that no matter how fucked up everything got out there – and
Jesus, did things ever get fucked up beyond anything we imagined – we could
lock the door, turn out the lights, place the needle on the vinyl and be enveloped
by Ocean, Here She Comes Now, The Blue Mask, or Ennui, these lovely sounds sweeping
away all the ugliness, all of life’s miseries, giving us even a few precious minutes
to get our bearings and prepare for our next move.
I suppose most people can say that there are just a handful
of people who’ve touched them during their brief stay in this confounding
existence whose debt they will simply never be able to repay. But I am acutely
aware of my own such list. There are many men, that if I met, there would be no
hope of my articulating how much it meant that they’d shared themselves with
me. Or everyone else, for that matter. It all goes so far beyond a mere record
or CD on a shelf. “The
best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself,” as Lester
Bangs once wrote.
I should be happy, right? Celebrate, even? That Lou lived at
all – that he had his moment on planet earth and left us this legacy. But no,
there’s no happiness, no celebrations. Lou, it doesn’t even bug me that you didn’t
get the accolades during your lifetime that you should have; I was always much happier
having you to myself. Some day tho, if we live long enough, maybe everyone else will
understand too. For now, there's just this feeling that life is diminished a
little bit more.
Salùte.
