The passing of Lou Reed is an odd one. I suppose the big reason is that, by this point, we had all assumed his hard-living lifestyle would've kept him permanently embalmed. Like a Keith Richards or a Iggy Pop, here was someone who lived hard and fast and then harder still and kept on living somehow. His face looked like someone had left Lyle Lovett out in the rain and sun for too damn long.
I don't have many distinct memories of Reed's music either. I really started listening to him in my early 20s, when I'd be up until three in the morning talking on Instant Messenger and watching the Late Late Show. There was a thing I liked about him that escaped me for many years - but it was really about how simple his music was. Unlike a lot of other rock artists before him or following, the great point of Reed's material was how simple it was. At times, I'm even reminded a bit of Philip Glass - where its one idea stretched to its greatest limit, changed in the simplest ways, so its basically four minutes of a chord progression. But where Glass is brilliantly maddening, Reed was brilliantly approachable. His music (and especially his lyrics) were so much like the kind heard in art class rooms where bohemian wanna-be teenagers strummed a guitar and didn't sing a song so much as talk through it. Not quite poetry, not quite fumbling in the dark. But it was distinctly understandable: some half-way-there poet finger-banging greatness but never going the whole way.
And thats where I think the tragedy is in Reed's passing: the man was a simple storyteller. In an age where music has been castrated and cauterized by increasingly stupid pop music clap-trap - the immediacy of a guy struggling to make a song sort of work has all the vibrant workings of a story around the bonfire. Simple. Direct. You either bought it, or you didn't. Pure narration, in a way. I respect that - its the same approach Hemingway had with his readers. Except, you know, nothing about blowjobs.
Reed was the ultimate dream-come-true for all those high school rock band kids. He never made it very far in the charts Hot 100 sense but he never gave in to outside excess or pressures from trends. He was just Lou Reed. Here he is. And his talent wasn't in arrangements or big ideas; he was just a guy with some cute ideas and they were the kind you could see him scrawl on ratty cocktail napkins with ballpoint pens. His kind wouldn't last in this day and age if he was just starting out - which makes you wonder how many other people are out there like him and don't get the chances he had. After all, we don't like people who are just talent and we don't trust people if they're not interested in just taking our money.
But I listened to him a lot. I'll fault the movie Trainspotting for introducing me to my favorite song by him "Perfect Day" but there were others like "No Money Down" which is terrific and a throwback to his love of 50s rock, though it took me a long time to warm up to. "New York Telephone Conversation" with its oom-pah-pah bounce comes off as Danny Elfman finally not giving a shit after coming home to a dirty, laundry-smelling apartment after spending all night drinking mezcal in a dive bar in Hell's Kitchen.
So yeah, Lou Reed is dead. Long live Lou Reed. Ain't gonna find many more like him unless you look harder at the people struggling in high school art class with badly tuned guitars and not giving a fuck about it.
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