...Finally he asked if I wanted to go to the Audio Engineering Society Convention. I said I was going anyway and would meet him in Microphones. The AES Convention is the greatest and biggest place to geek out on new equipment, and we spent a happy afternoon looking at amps and cables and shop-talking electronics. I had no idea this was meant to be a date, but when we went for coffee after that, he said, "Would you like to see a movie?" Sure. "And then after that, dinner?" OK. "And then we can take a walk?" "Um . . ." From then on we were never really apart.
-Laurie Anderson on Lou Reed, Rolling Stone November 6, 2013
No internet (of course, this was the 1980s), no cable television for us situated amongst the fields several miles outside the town proper, if we wanted to rent a movie we rented a VCR to watch it on. Sometimes when I think back to those times I sincerely wonder how I ever found out about anything. I'm old enough to be capable of a certain prematurely crotchety nostalgia about it: these days the answer to where you learned about everything is just, internet. Back then everything unusual, outside the mainstream that I got into had a specific story. Harlan Ellison? One of my brother's college roommates gave me an old, incomplete little Steve Jackson Games plastic clamshell "Car Wars" game set wherein I read, in the acknowledgements of the many "fighting car" stories that inspired the game, of Ellison's "Along the Scenic Route", which I (perhaps) improbably found in a copy of Deathbird Stories at our local library. (The local library was huge - not in a literal, physical sense but in the scale of the role it played in my life - a monumental presence in my intellectual development. I still have dreams that take place in that library, so deep and fundamental a sense of place it occupies in my mind.)
Everything: a story like that - though I surely don't remember them all.
Lou Reed? There are a couple threads here and I can't really remember which came first. I know at some point my brother, five years my elder, came home with an LP reissue of The Velvet Underground and Nico. I know I liked it, because I made a cassette copy that I brought to college and played a lot, but I'm not sure I really identified Mr. Lou Reed within that influence.
What I remember for sure was that when I was 13 or 14 I pulled a cassette issue of Street Hassle out of a bargain bin in a Mall on a family trip to Willmar, MN (pop. significantly less than 20,000 in the mid-80s), what passed for a big town where I grew up, in that they had a mall. It was the first album I ever bought for myself, which makes me sound significantly cooler than I was (or am for that matter): I was under the influence of his Honda Scooter commercial. That line, that eternal cool baseline of "Walk on the Wild Side" - I had no idea it was from Reed's biggest hit, arguably the most recognizable piece of music he ever created.
But I told myself I'd look for "Lou Reed" the next time I got into a "real" record store and ended up with... Street Hassle. I imagine I listened to it on some kind of knock-off walkman. I was an instant convert. I had no idea music could be like that: a fair window on my context at the time was that an aunt had given me an LP of Make it Big by Wham! for Christmas. Street Hassle was dirty, profane, frankly incorrect - the music was loose, driving, often verging on sloppy, absolutely nothing like the tight new wave pop mostly showing up on Friday Night Videos, the only other consistent access to new music I had besides the top 40.
The next thing I managed to get my hands on was the 1980 Compilation Rock and Roll Diary, a cheap cassette reissue that I played to death: Reed's presence in my mind expanded even bigger. A few years later I sang "Rock and Roll" on stage with a goofy college band and when I sang "her life was saved by rock and roll" I meant every word.
Another big influence in my pre-college teen life came when we got one of those big, clunky, multiplex aluminum television aerials on the house that are almost pure anachronisms these days. This added a number of channels to our broadcast spectrum, notably an intermittent (depending on the weather and other less discernible voodoo) KTCA, channel 2, the Twin Cities' public television station. We had a local PBS affiliate but its offerings were notably more conservative and less arty than channel 2.
It was this that introduced that strange beast of locally produced, full-art-mode video whose opening strains I can so easily call to mind without reference to YouTube: Alive from Off Center.
Unfortunately you can't easily see Laurie Anderson's landmark episode "What You Mean We?" (you can get a taste from an excerpt); while many of the archives of Alive have been put up on YouTube without much fanfare or controversy, this one has been blocked by Warner Music Group for, of course, copyright infringement - if you're keeping track, incidentally, this pointless obstruction (there is no universe in which people having access to that show would prevent music sales) marks the difference between a true patron of art like (now) TPT and dickless corporate fuckers like WMG.
But that's where I first saw Ms. Laurie Anderson on video, anyway - in a parallel to my history with Lou Reed, my brother also shares a connection: another LP he brought into my sphere of attention was Mr. Heartbreak. Which I likewise illegally dubbed to cassette and took to college.
Artistically there is a kinship and connection in these I can see now: art, Avant-garde and of course New York; at the time the two certainly seemed to exist on disparate poles: but I loved them both. And they had this in common, that is so important in my history, my sense of self: both exposed me to a world, a larger and beautiful world, a world full of windows into things so strange, so unknown and unprecedented. That among many others awoke in me a wanting, to see more, to dive deeper into these realms, and this has never left me to this day.
And so while it never occurred to me that these two might some day make a love match, when I heard of it, it didn't really come as any surprise. I never met either of course and I'm leery of forming personal feelings about people I've only known through media... but I harbor a long-standing fondness for both and I feel very grateful that Lou Reed was in the arms of someone he loved, who loved him, when he flew into the sun.
I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.
