All of the things that you used to believe in turned out to be true (you're guilty of reason)

“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.