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Thread: R.I.P. Lou Reed

  1. #16

    From Laurie Anderson

    Artist Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed's wife, posted a eulogy for Lou in their local paper, the East Hampton Star.

    Quote Originally Posted by East Hampton Star
    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”

  2. #17
    People obsess over celebrity couples whose sole attributes people obsess about are shallow.

    Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed both defy that stupidity and remain individuals. Possibly the most fascinating celebrity couple of them all, and they had the sense the just live their lives the way they saw best.

  3. #18

    Rolling Stone

    Rolling Stone magazine did a lot of coverage about Lou Reed's passing. There is full obit by Fricke as well as testimonials by his wife Laurie Anderson and long time friend Bono of U2.

    The following is one quote from the Fricke article.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tony Visconti
    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

  4. #19
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    I don't really know much about Lou Reed other than he did an album with Metallica that was, uh... not really one that I enjoyed.

    It's super cool that he was into martial arts and tai chi in particular, though. I didn't know that.

    RIP Lou Reed
    "If you like metal you're my friend" -- Manowar

    "I am the cosmic storms, I am the tiny worms" -- Dimmu Borgir

    <BombScare> i beat the internet
    <BombScare> the end guy is hard.

  5. #20
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    Reunion in honor of Lou

    Good to see Tai Chi so prominent in this NYT coverage.
    Lou Reed’s Complex Spirit Is Invoked at a Reunion of His Inner Circle
    By JON PARELES
    Published: December 17, 2013

    Righteous guitar noise began and ended the memorial for Lou Reed on Monday night at the Apollo Theater. It was a celebration, for an invited audience of family and friends, of what more than one speaker called his “complexity”: his kindness and his asperity, his spirituality and his earthiness, his groundbreaking music and his silent meditations.

    “He lived for beauty,” said his widow, the performance artist Laurie Anderson. “Lou knew what he was doing and what he was going for. His incredible complexity and his anger were part of his beauty.”

    Early arrivals heard Marc Ribot and Doug Wieselman, with their electric guitars cranked up, playing a dissonant, pealing, improvisational duet that eventually resolved into “When the Saints Go Marching In.” At the end, Patti Smith led a band in the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” adding more-uplifting lyrics to its tale of drugs, sex and murder, as Ms. Anderson and members of Mr. Reed’s tai chi class demonstrated graceful moves.

    Through three hours of music and remembrances, the songs Mr. Reed wrote for the Velvet Underground and through a constantly changing solo career — hard-nosed and unflinching, unguarded and tender, ferocious and delicate — were set alongside his dedication to tai chi and Buddhism and his 21 years with Ms. Anderson. “There was never a single doubt that we loved each other beyond anything else, from the time when we first met until the moment he died,” she said.

    The memorial took place 50 days after Mr. Reed’s death on Oct. 27, Ms. Anderson explained, at the end of the 49 days of what Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo, a transitional state after death.

    She also noted that the Apollo is on 125th Street, a few blocks from the corner where, in a definitive Velvet Underground song, the narrator waits in “I’m Waiting for the Man.” Mr. Reed’s longtime producer, Hal Willner, and Paul Simon cited Mr. Reed’s lifelong admiration of African-American music, from doo-wop to Ornette Coleman to Nicki Minaj.

    Ms. Anderson said that Mr. Reed wrote songs in single bursts. “He would wake up in the middle of the night and just write the song down and it was complete,” she said. “He never changed a word. He thought, ‘First thought, best thought.’ ”

    Mr. Simon sang the Velvets’ “Pale Blue Eyes,” marveling at its beauty and admitting there were lines he never understood. Emily Haines, from the Canadian band Metric, sang “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and Jenni Muldaur sang the pensive “Jesus.” Deborah Harry rocked through “White Light/White Heat.”

    Ms. Smith chose “Perfect Day” for what she called “Lou’s most poignant lyric”: “You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else, someone good.” The a cappella doo-wop group the Persuasions reworked Mr. Reed’s “Turning Time Around.” Antony Hegarty, who appeared in the stage production of Mr. Reed’s album “Berlin,” performed a slow, poignant, tremulous “Candy Says.” Julian Schnabel, who filmed “Berlin,” calmly recited the patricidal, carnage-filled “Rock Minuet.”

    The saxophonist John Zorn represented Mr. Reed’s improvisational side with a squealing, scurrying, exultantly perpetual-motion yawp of a solo. And Philip Glass, on piano, accompanied a recitation of the Kaddish prayer.

    Maureen Tucker, the Velvet Underground’s drummer, read a message from John Cale, its keyboardist and violist, saying: “Regardless of our differences, we never really drifted too far from what initially brought us together. I guess that’s what real friendship is, and I miss my friend.”

    Mr. Willner recalled that Mr. Reed’s albums, including “Berlin” and “Metal Machine Music,” were venomously reviewed at first, only to be acclaimed later. The tai chi master Ren GuangYi gave a silent demonstration.

    Videos of Mr. Reed showed him performing as a bleached-blonde rocker, deadpanning his way through droll interviews and popping up in films. And at the end, Ms. Anderson spoke about life together as a couple. “We talked nonstop about everything conceivable for 21 years,” she said. “We talked about how to make something beautiful, what to do when you fail, and how to make something supremely ugly.”

    She added: “Almost every day we said, ‘You are the love of my life,’ or some version of that, in one of our many private and somewhat bizarre languages. We knew exactly what we had, and we were beyond grateful.”

    Mr. Reed’s last words, Ms. Anderson said, were “Take me out into the light!”
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  6. #21
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    From Violet

    There are more photos if you follow the link.
    An illuminating evening with “Lou Reed”

    Related Photo:
    Lou Reed with candles and his guitar picks
    Violet Li
    December 18, 2013

    According to Chinese culture, and Buddhist teachings -- especially Tibetan Buddhism belief -- the 49 days after a person’s death are extremely important. On the 49th day, family and friends gather to mourn and honor the passing loved one.

    Legendary musician and poet Lou Reed died of liver complication on Oct 27, 2013 at age 71 in Southampton, New York. Born to a Jewish family, he once said “my God is Rock’n’Roll” and spiritually subscribed to Tibetan Buddhism. This Hall of Fame inductee was the godfather of Punk Rock and influenced the world’s brightest musicians in the past four decades. His death was felt by musicians, artists, and common people around the world. Obituaries were read, posted, and tweeted by celebrities, and media in the U.S, European countries, Australia, China and many other countries. Famous musicians and bands like David Bowie, Pearl Jam, the Killers, Rufus Wainwright, Neil Young, and many others made tributes. Various memorials were held more than a month long. Dec. 15 was the 49th day since Lou passed away.

    Saturday Dec. 14, Manhattan was battered by snow, wind, and freezing rain. The next day, the weather calmed. I arrived at Lou’s penthouse in the West Village around 4 p.m. The foyer is double height and above the door hangs a large Chinese calligraphy “magically spiritual dragon (Shen Long)” written by a 19th Generation Chen Family Tai Chi Lineage Holder Chen Xiaowang. Lined against the long living room wall are tall shelves of books and a Tai Chi Yin/Yang emblem sculpture from his beloved Tai Chi teacher Grandmaster Ren Guangyi and a fabric knot hand crafted by Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine publisher Gigi Oh’s mother. The opposite wall has two large pictures of a Raven face. I could hear Lou cite “my soul shall not be lifted from the shadow nevermore” from The Raven (click the link here to hear Lou read The Raven http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t6Wc8ww64I).

    Passing through a narrow hallway decorated with black and white photos including his mentor Andy Warhol’s, I entered a large open area filled with sun light coming through the large window pans on two sides of the room. It is a family quarter: no luxurious furniture nor fixtures only a cozy couch, a wood dining table, and rustic wood benches those match up with the antiqued indoor window on the upper floor looking down; it is a place to cook, dine, lounge around, meditate, read poems, play music, listen to CDs and records, watch TV, and hug family dogs. In one corner, Lou’s guitars yearn to be played again. There is a large lazy chair by the window looking at the glistering Hudson River and next to it on a windowsill sat a small rave sculpture. Above the mantel are three astonishing looking black/white landscaping photos from Reed’s Romanticism photography collection.

    The fireplace façade adorns Lou’s Tai Chi weapons. I secretly admired his dedication and persistence to master multiple Tai Chi bare-handed and weapons forms in the past 17 years – he practiced at least 2 to 3 hours daily, seven days a week. Click on the video at the left and you can see some of Lou Reed's awesome Tai Chi movements. Tony Visconti, a renowned record producer, fondly recalled that he and Lou spent many hours in front of the fireplace practicing Tai Chi together. Amanda Harmon praised Lou’s generosity of opening up his home for his fellow classmates to practice on the rooftop. There is a large old pen among Tai Chi weapons. I imagined that Lou used it to write some of his poignant lyrics and powerful melodies. Due to its size and shape, it looked like a weapon at the first glance. In reality, the pen can be mightier than the sword. Business Insider echoed others’ views and commented that Lou Reed helped to bring down the communism in Eastern European http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_...rn_europe.html.

    Lou’s loving wife and eternal friend, Laurie Anderson, an accomplished experimental artist and vocalist, was busy greeting guests while putting final touches on hors d’oeuvres and savories. Japanese Gyokuro tea (Jade Drew) was served in tiny ceramic cups for sipping. With little make-up, Laurie radiated with unassuming beauty and brilliance in her eyes.

    I glanced through Lou’s latest published photo album and was amazed by his diverse interests in people and nature. He preferred black and white pictures. One photo shows a woman whispering to another on a street. They could be a mother and a daughter. The picture depicts a loving relationship, very sweet. This photo book reveals another side of Lou: less sarcasm or anger as his music but full of love, harmony, and humanity. There are a few pictures he took in Tai Chi mecca Chen Village, Henan, China: a street view from inside of a taxi, tractors on a dirt road, a farmer squatting in the woods, people practicing Tai Chi on the street in a quiet morning, and time-aged paint-striped doors and windows. He included a couple of Push Hands photos taken during Master Chen Zhiqian’s workshop in New York two years ago. An interesting picture is Grandmaster Ren Guangyi’s portrait that made him sculpture like and full of energy and spirit.

    The ceremony started with a Rabbi singing psalms and reading Kaddish, then a therapist led a short meditation, a Zen monk shared a story about Lou’s formidable attitude toward death, and a Tibetan monk said prayers. At Laurie’s request, Grandmaster Ren performed his creation, the Tai Chi 21 form. Surrounded by one hundred and fifty people, Ren delivered a powerful performance in a space less than four feet by four feet. Famous pain doctor Dan Richman talked how Lou Reed shared his knowledge on Tai Chi with him. Lou’s backup singer remembered one quiet night when they were listening to music together and tears were rolling down Lou’s cheeks and he apologetically said, “I am susceptible to beauty”. His gardener appreciated him for generosity and nonjudgmental attitude. Other friends also shared personal stories of Lou.

    As hard as he fought liver cancer and the disease after a liver transplant, Lou was never afraid of death. A week prior to his passing, at his request, Laurie moved him out of the hospital and stayed at their home in Southampton. Lou spent his last days looking at trees and marveled nature’s beauty. He was too frail to stand up and practiced the Tai Chi 21 with his hands only. In the morning of Sunday Oct. 27, he asked to be moved out to the porch so he could see and feel the light. He continued with his Tai Chi movements. All of a sudden, he felt his body had dropped inside. He looked up into the sky with arms widely extended to the sides and mouth opened with joy and left the world.

    At Laurie’s recount of Lou’s last moment, an image emerged. Before the memorial started that evening, the sun was setting on the west side. From the large windows, I noticed that light clouds covered the sun softly. Unexpectedly, the sun brightened up and created an enormous view of energy and optimism along with its reflection in the river. Then it disappeared and the sky was dark.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  7. #22
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    Rip lou

    Lou did a lot of good in his life , my best to his family and friends.
    Visit the past in order to discover something new.

    [url]http://wahquekungfu.proboards100.com

  8. #23
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    Remembering Lou

    Master Ren forwarded this to us yesterday.

    REMEMBERING LOU REED THE MARTIAL ARTIST
    FIGHTLAND BLOG
    By Ren Guangyi as told to Stephan Berwick


    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 forms 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, October 31, 2013

    Lou Reed’s memorial took place 50 days after his death on Oct. 27, at the end of the 49 days of the Tibetan Buddhist transitional state after death, called Bardo. The three-hour long ceremony included his work as a solo artist and the music Lou wrote for the Velvet Underground. All of which were played alongside a greater dedication to Lou’s practice of eastern philosophy and traditional martial arts.

    During the last decades of his life, the American rock ’n’ roll legend studied directly under Master Ren Guang-Yi, a champion of Chen Tai Chi. He took to it right away and was so influenced by the martial art that he even released an album in 2008 that he wrote specifically for listening while training tai chi, called Hudson River Wind Meditations.

    We spoke with Master Ren Guangyi about Lou’s passing, and talked about his love and promotion of gentle martial art.



    Master Ren: Lou Reed’s previous long-time publicist, Bill Bentley, commemorated him by aptly describing him as a “Rock ’n’ Roll Warrior.” For me, his beloved teacher, I would also describe him as a “Taiji Warrior” who represented the highest ideals of martial arts.

    Lou energized and inspired us with his enduring love of Taijiquan—to which he credited for the health and vitality he displayed for years. To that, Lou worked consistently to spread the powerful message of Taiji, a martial art that gave him so much joy and well-being, that he truly wanted the whole world to experience what Taiji gave him. With Ren Guangyi by his side, he exposed parts of the world never before privy to authentic Chen style Taiji with over 150 live performances globally, featuring master Ren performing Taiji live while Lou's band played music. From this extraordinarily prescient work, Lou promoted Taiji in unprecedented venues, including a performance on The Late Show with David Letterman, a concert at the Winter Olympics closing ceremony in Turin, Italy, and a pioneering display and instruction of Taiji at the Sydney Opera House. With press appearances, personal testimonies, a pilgrimage to Taiji's birthplace, Chenjiagou, Lou spread the message of the wonders of marital arts to millions.



    I am grateful for his sharing, blessing, and sheer love for an art understood best by those in the know. With his decades-long commitment to Chinese martial arts and his final ten years devouring Chen Taijiquan like only a warrior can, he was a knight errant for Taijiquan of the highest order who was also a real martial arts tough guy with genuine Taiji skill.

    I was also privileged to see when Lou carried his classical Chinese weapons with him. I recall a verse of his that described himself as flying with a sword strapped to his back. This is exactly how I will remember him. As brothers in arms in martial arts, I always had his back when he was here and will continue to do so. We will never let anyone forget his legacy of creativity, courage, inspiration, and warmth embodied by his incredible, enduring passion for Taijiquan.



    Special thanks to Journalist Louie Wang-Holborn
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  9. #24
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    Lou Reed's Archives

    "his life as a musician, composer, poet, writer, photographer, and tai-chi student." Good to see Tai Chi still figures prominently in Lou's legacy. He would have liked that for sure.

    Lou Reed's Archives Acquired By New York Public Library For The Performing Arts
    3/2/2017 by Billboard Staff


    Waring Abbott/Getty Images
    Lou Reed photographed at the Cafe Figaro in New York City in 1982.

    The audio and video collection includes over 600 hours of original demos; studio recordings; live recordings; and interviews from 1965 to 2013.

    Lou Reed's archives will remain in the city that he chronicled so vividly and grittily -- the city that he called home: New York.

    On Thursday (March 2), what would have been the rocker's 75th birthday, his widow, the avant garde musician and artist Laurie Anderson, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts announced that the library is acquiring Reed's complete archives.

    "What better place to have this than in the heart of the city he loved the best?" said Anderson, who described assembling Reed's archive as "one of the most intense experiences of my life."

    Reed, who died from liver disease on Oct. 27, 2013, at the age of 71, left behind an archive that measures approximately 300 linear feet of paper records, electronic records, and photographs, as well as approximately 3,600 audio and 1,300 video recordings. The collection documents his life as a musician, composer, poet, writer, photographer, and tai-chi student. Musically, it spans a career that began with his 1958 Freeport High School band, The Shades; his job as a staff songwriter for the budget music label, Pickwick Records, and his rise to prominence through The Velvet Underground and subsequent solo career, to his final performances in 2013.

    Independent archivist Don Fleming (who also works on the Alan Lomax, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey collections at various institutions) oversaw the acquisition and worked with Reed’s two archivists, Jason Stern and Jim Cass, to create a detailed catalog of the extensive materials, most of which were in storage for decades.

    The collection documents collaborations, friendships, and relationships with Anderson, poet Delmore Schwartz, artist Andy Warhol, his fellow Velvet Underground bandmates John Cale, Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison as well as his ex-wife and manager Sylvia Ramos, musicians Doc Pomus, Robert Quine and John Zorn, producer Hal Willner, political dissident and former Czech president Václav Havel, avant garde theater director and playwright Robert Wilson and artist Julian Schnabel.

    The audio and video collection includes over 600 hours of original demos; studio recordings; live recordings; and interviews from 1965 to 2013. All of Reed’s major tours and many of his guest performances are represented in the collection, including 25 hours of original recordings documenting his 1978 run at the Bottom Line in NYC from which the Take No Prisoners live album emerged.

    The archive also contains a 5 -inch tape reel that Reed mailed to himself in May 1965. It was common at the time for songwriters to create a “poor man’s copyright” by sending a recording of a new song to themselves and then not opening the package, thereby establishing a copyright date with the postmark. The package remains unopened, and is believed to be from the first Velvet Underground demo sessions that occurred on May 11, 1965 at Pickwick’s studios in Queens. It’s still being decided when, and if, to break the seal on the package.

    Public celebrations of Reed's birthday and collections begin March 2 at both the Library for the Performing Arts and Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. At the top of every hour throughout the day, the Library will play an excerpt of a different Reed recording in its cafe. Displays of ephemera also open today at the Library and will stay on view through March 20. These displays present a selection of personal artifacts, notebooks, correspondence, and other materials to the public for the first time ever.

    Patti Smith inducts Lou Reed onstage during the 30th Annual Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony at Public Hall on April 18, 2015 in Cleveland, Ohio.

    The Lou Reed Archive will be processed over the next year at the New York Public Library's Library Services Center in Long Island City, and then made available for research at the Performing Arts' Music Division and Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. Anderson and her team will continue to work with the NYPL to develop future exhibitions, programs, digital initiatives, and other projects from Reed's various materials.
    Gene Ching
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  10. #25
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    Lou's final days

    OCT. 2, 2023
    ‘I Don’t Want to Be Erased’ Frustrated by his failing health, Lou Reed spent his final days intent on making something “really astonishing.”
    By Will Hermes


    Photo: Mattia Zoppellaro/contrasto/Redux
    Excerpted from LOU REED: The King of New York. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Will Hermes. All rights reserved.

    In 2010, Lou Reed planned to perform with Gorillaz for their headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival, a highlight of a busy summer. Then his health took a downturn. The trouble began in Australia, where he and his partner Laurie Anderson had been invited to curate the Sydney Vivid Festival. They’d invited Hal Willner, Emily Haines, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and Master Ren Guang Yi, who gave free tai chi lessons; Anderson performed a low-frequency outdoor concert composed primarily for an audience of appreciative dogs. (“They barked for five minutes,” she recalled. “That was one of the happiest moments of my life.”) At a press conference, Reed answered questions patiently, in marked contrast with one at Sydney Airport 30-some years prior. When asked about plans for his next album, he hedged. “I haven’t figured out just what would be a great thing to do right now, that would make a difference — for me, for you,” he said, noting that he was trying to come up with something “really astonishing.”

    In fact, he would. But at the moment, Reed seemed tremendously frail. Along with his diabetes, he’d begun interferon treatment for his hepatitis C. But it was painful and terribly debilitating. He’d fallen on a moving sidewalk in an airport, assistants had to physically help him out of chairs, he dozed off during a presentation by Anderson, and in rehearsals was even having trouble recalling his own songs. Most performers would have withdrawn from public view. But Reed pushed on.

    In June he managed to play Glastonbury with Gorillaz, on the festival’s iconic main stage. He was backdropped by a giant cartoon image of himself as a sort of anime punk yakuza, in a motorcycle jacket, shades, and elaborate headphones, eating guitar cords with chopsticks like they were ramen noodles. The real-life Reed, however, was a small, ailing old man, in a windbreaker, baggy shorts, black socks, and beige shoes. His hands trembled as he played, and the bassist Paul Simonon recalls him losing the thread; at one point in the song, “he was supposed to be singing, but he wasn’t; he was looking at me, with a bemused look.” Reed ultimately rallied, croaked out the verses, unleashed some mighty feedback, and raised his hands in the air, while tens of thousands roared.

    I can’t believe we’re getting to do this while I’m alive
    — Lou Reed
    Later, he would come up with that “really astonishing” album idea. It was born of his third Robert Wilson project, which reimagined the “Lulu” plays of Frank Wedekind. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Wedekind was a writer with whom Reed had a spiritual kinship. The son of a gynecologist, Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was born in Germany in 1864. He loved winding up the bourgeoisie — Wedekind was jailed in his 30s for publishing satirical poems insulting the wrong people. His plays addressed teen sexuality, queer desire, and bogus morality; the posthumously published memoir Diary of an Erotic Life chronicled the gourmandizing author working his way through a brigade of cocottes and sex workers. His breakthrough works Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) centered on Lulu, an amoral femme fatale whose affections destroy her lovers, male and female, one by one.

    Lulu is both victim and monster, the product of a misogynist, ****phobic culture, and the embodiment of its worst fears. The Lulu narrative was an obvious choice for Wilson, given his German audience, and a perfect fit for Reed, who’d worked on Paul Auster’s Lulu on the Bridge and whose nickname back in the Factory days was, in fact, Lulu. Reed laid into the writing. By then, his failing health was being mirrored in his dog, Lolabelle — the rat terrier he and Anderson doted on so intensely, who was dying of pancreatic cancer and undergoing increasingly elaborate treatments (for a time, the couple had her set up in an oxygen tent). Torn up over it, and surely frustrated by his own infirmities, Reed created extreme music, alternately raging and tender.

    “He was going through a difficult period,” recalls Wilson, who marveled at the intensity of Reed’s work, swinging from the “very aggressive and loud” to “the softest, quietest sound one could make … These two extremes, to me, is what Lou was all about.” Lulu premiered on April 12, 2011, in Berlin. The same month, Reed began recording an album with Metallica in Marin County, California. The collaboration was highly unlikely. Metallica was one of the biggest rock acts in the world, just coming off its largest tour — a two-year run that packed global sports arenas and grossed over $200 million. The hyperbutch thrash-metal was far from Reed’s approach to rock music, but the group had broad tastes and wasn’t averse to experimentation. They’d recorded an album with Michael Kamen and the San Francisco Symphony, and as they prepared to celebrate their 30th year as a band, they were thinking about legacy. For an all-star concert celebrating the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they backed Reed on a fierce pair of Velvet Underground covers: a bludgeoning “White Light/White Heat,” and a “Sweet Jane” that suggested the guitarist Kirk Hammett had, like most hard-rock guitarists of his generation, been weaned on Rock ’n’ Roll Animal. The musicians all enjoyed the experience, and when the idea was floated to do a full album of Lou Reed songs in the same vein, everyone was onboard.
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  11. #26
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    Continued from previous


    With the Velvet Underground in 1970. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
    Then Reed suddenly changed his mind and decided that instead, he wanted to record material from Lulu with Metallica. The idea was not well received, even by his own management. “I remember to this day how viciously angry he got with me, that I thought the greatest hits was a better idea,” says Tom Sarig, who managed Reed. “To him it was like disrespecting his Lulu songs.” After a couple of uncomfortable days, Sarig gave in and endorsed Reed’s idea. The band had reservations, but similarly went along with it. They gave Reed a royal welcome when he arrived in the Bay Area to begin recording, and set up a portion of their studio building as his exclusive domain, dubbing it “Lou’s Lounge,” a private space where he could retreat to do tai chi, deal with his medications, and nap, which he needed to do regularly. The men let Reed take the creative lead, since the songs and lyrics were his. But they expected to have input as well, and there remained doubts about the material.

    The sessions were not stress-free; according to the drummer, Lars Ulrich, Reed challenged him to a fight after a disagreement (Ulrich declined). Reed’s health had stabilized since Australia, but he was still dealing with tremendous pain and was often foggy; weeks into the sessions, he was still referring to the front man, James Hetfield, as “Hatfield.” Reed was reaching for maximum freedom in his vocal delivery — “just kind of acting it and singing it at the same time,” as he put it — and his delivery could feel disconnected from the band. And even by Reed’s standards, the Lulu lyrics were often shocking, with Reed’s gruff, croaking delivery conjuring Lulu’s voice. “I would cut my legs and tits off / When I think of Boris Karloff,” the record began. Reed’s explicit additions to Poe’s work in “The Raven” were mild compared with lines in “Pumping Blood,” where Lulu, bleeding to death at the hands of Jack the Ripper, begs the killer to do his worst: “I swallow your sharpest cutter / Like a colored man’s dick.” Equally startling is a section where Reed yells for “James” to “top” him (a sly echo of Reed’s “Whip it on me, Jim” outro on the Velvets’ “Sister Ray”). Images of fisting and coprophilia flash through “Mistress Dread.” On “Iced Honey,” he yells in a parched voice over Metallica’s roaring din, “And me, I’ve always been this way / Not by choice.”

    But the finale, “Junior Dad,” was something else. The album’s quietest song, with lyrics written roughly two years prior, it was delivered with a tenderness that had scant precedent in Reed’s work. The verses moved through a Freudian minefield of parental failure and childhood
    fears. The singer asks to be saved from drowning, to be kissed on the lips, and envisions their dead father driving a boat. Awakening from a dream, the singer sees how time had “withered him and changed him,” perhaps both of them, invoking the “greatest disappointment.” A father’s disappointment in a child, a child’s disappointment in the father, the child realizing they’d become the parent: Take your pick.

    Listening to the playback, the lyrics cut Reed’s bandmates to the core. Hetfield’s dad abandoned him when he was 13; Hammett’s had been physically abusive toward him and his mother, then abandoned them, and had died just a month prior. “I had to run out of the control room,” Hammett said; “I found myself standing in the kitchen, sobbing away. James came into the kitchen in the same condition. He was sobbing too.” Reed shed his share of tears, too. One night during the sessions, he took a break to catch U2 in Oakland with Willner and their friend Jenni Muldaur. When the band paused and noted his presence — Bono calling him “a great man,” Larry Mullins Jr. singing the chorus of “Perfect Day” a capella and shouting “We love you, Lou!” — Reed wept.

    The recording was rapid-fire by Metallica’s usual standards — there were rarely second takes — and was done in a couple of months. Any doubts about the project were pushed aside. The day before the album was released, Reed received the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters; Antonin Baudry, cultural counselor of the French Embassy, described Reed as “one of the major American writers of our time.” In that honor’s wake came the response to Lulu in the press, which was as harshly polarized as the reception to Berlin. Old-guard critics were mostly measured, but on the internet, the new guard let loose. Pitchfork gave it a 1.0 on a scale of 10, finding parts “laughable” and the full work “exhaustingly tedious,” while Consequence of Sound gave it an “F” and declared it “a complete failure.” Fan reactions online ranged from enthusiastic to baffled to nasty to hilarious; parody videos abounded. At least one clip featured a cat having a panic attack triggered by the music. Another sampled the 2004 German film Downfall, about Hitler’s final days, grafting on subtitles that show him sputtering in rage at news of the Metallica project: “Lou ****ing Reed? That **** from Velvet Underground? That ancient sack of **** wouldn’t know metal if it bit his shriveled cock off!” Reed and Willner had a hearty laugh over that one. But in general, the response to Lulu wasn’t amusing. Press events were hair-trigger.
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
    Support our forum by getting your gear at MartialArtSmart

  12. #27
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    Continued from previous


    Playing with Metallica in 2011. Photo: Peter Wafzig/Getty Images
    At the album release in New York, Reed’s *****iness toward reporters led to Hetfield storming out of the event. “I understand that to some 13-year-old in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, it can all seem a little cringeworthy,” Ulrich told a writer for Spin, “but to someone raised in an art community in Copenhagen in the late ’60s, that was expected.” In public, the musicians gushed over the project and one another. “They are my spirit brothers,” Reed told another journalist, with Hetfield and Ulrich beside him. “Every time I listen to the record, I pray to God I was so lucky to meet these guys.”

    Still, there’d be no collaborative tour, and no U.S. production of Wilson’s Lulu. The truth was that the album was a difficult listen at best, especially given the disconnect between Reed’s delivery and the band’s. And disconnected from Wilson’s stagecraft, the songs were strange, often unpleasant and incoherent things. Except, however, for “Junior Dad.” Shape-shifting like “Sister Ray” over its 19 minutes, the finished recording was powerfully emotive. Its sound and imagery conjure the sea that enraptured Reed as a kid, roiling in a groove as hypnotic as the Velvets’ “Ocean,” cresting in majestic stumbles that one observer likened to recurring heart failure, as Reed begs to be saved, to be loved, it would seem, by a father who taught him only “meanness” and “fear,” the singer savoring the sibilant salt of the phrase “psychic savagery” as the song drifts into a warm string coda. “Junior Dad” took its place among Reed’s finest work, and as the last song on the last studio album released in his lifetime, one might consider it the closing passage of the Great American Novel he’d often suggested was serialized in his LPs, his “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

    Reed devoted much of his final two years to writing. He published a preface to a new edition of Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories. There were also plans for books of his own, including a volume on tai chi, possibly even a memoir. He also revived the notion of turning the New York album into a narrative work, this time as a stage musical, one more mainstream than his Wilson collaborations, and which could be rooted in his hometown. “We were working with CAA’s Broadway Department on a sort of a remake of the plot of West Side Story — Jets versus Sharks — set to the songs,” says Sarig. “Eric Bogosian was committed to writing the book, and Bill T. Jones was going to direct it. We were putting the whole team together when he passed. It would have been great.”

    In a turning of the tables, Reed took a stab at music criticism, reviewing Kanye West’s Yeezus LP for the artist-centered website Talkhouse. At the time, the two could almost be seen as kindred spirits, artists who subverted the status quo, with sometimes questionable tactics, while becoming consequential enough to be acknowledged by sitting presidents. Reed felt West was essentially daring his audience to like his creative choices, and much of what he said of Yeezus might be said of his own albums. “Very perverse,” Reed concluded. There were recording projects on deck, too, including a standards set with Willner, for which they’d begun selecting songs. Reed also played a handful of what turned out to be his final shows in Europe, enlisting a brilliant young guitarist, Aram Bajakian, and a violinist, Tony Diodore, who doubled on guitar. Reed was in rough shape, but the shows were among the most powerful he’d ever played. He hadn’t done a proper U.S. tour in nearly a decade, and booked a string of California dates for the spring, including one at the prestigious Coachella Festival in April. Kevin Hearn was making the set list — a “greatest hits” of sorts — when he got a call from Reed. “Kevin,” he said, “I’ve got bad news.” Reed was dying, and his last hope was a very risky liver transplant. Years prior, Hearn had been through a near-death battle with blood cancer, and Reed frequently noted that his bandmate had come back from a place few ever see. In the coming weeks, the two spoke frequently. In one conversation, Reed described an extravagant new speaker system he’d just bought. “If I’m going to kick the bucket,” he told Hearn, “I’m going to do it while listening to the best possible sound.”

    Reed’s final public musical performance was in Paris, at the Salle Pleyel, a classical-music concert hall. On March 6, 2013, he sang “Candy Says” with Anohni and the Johnsons, and given his condition, the “hate” of the main character for their body, and all it required, took on a very particular meaning. Reed sang the opening lines in a ravaged voice, reaching for the key as the band played hushed changes. Anohni stood in shadow, head bowed, hands clasped in a sort of prayer, as Reed sung-spoke his words according to his own metrical sense, improvising with a Jimmy Scott–style playfulness. And as he began the “doo-doo-wah” coda, Anohni joined him, quietly, gracefully, in a voice barely there until it was, rising to meet Reed’s. They traded and finished each other’s lines, both asking what they’d see if they could walk away from themselves, and Reed repeating the line “maybe when I’m older,” which was now an invocation of great faith.

    In May, Reed flew to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, chosen for its reputation with organ transplants. “It’s medical tourism,” Anderson, the Midwesterner, conceded wryly. “You send out two planes — one for the donor, one for the recipient — at the same time. You bring the donor in live, you take him off life support … I was completely awestruck. I find certain things about technology truly, deeply inspiring.” According to Reed’s transplant surgeon, the liver was “less than perfect.” But Reed understood his situation and didn’t hesitate. “It’s good enough for me,” he said. “Let’s go.”

    His new liver began working immediately, and Reed was soon doing tai chi, kvetching about the hospital food, and getting his strength back. Family and friends came to visit. His sister talked about seeing the Velvet Underground in Cleveland when she was in college. When it was quiet, you could hear the helicopters nearby, taking off and landing, transporting organs and patients.
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  13. #28
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    continued from previous


    With Laurie Anderson in 2011. Photo: Billy Farrell Agency/Shutterstock
    Reed was soon home and, though weak, returned to work. There was optimism, even opportunities to laugh. The satirical news publication the Onion ran an item titled “New Liver Complains of Difficulty Working with Lou Reed.” (“‘It’s really hard to get along with Lou — one minute he’s your best friend and the next he’s outright abusive,’ said the vital organ, describing its ongoing collaboration with the former Velvet Underground frontman as ‘strained at best.’ ‘He just has this way of making you feel completely inadequate.’”) In June, Reed commuted near-daily to Masterdisk, the recording facility on West 45th Street, to work with Willner and his co-producer Rob Santos on remastering his early solo catalogue, a project Reed had long wanted to do. Reed savored and scrutinized much of his life’s work. He swooned over Bowie’s backing vocals on “Satellite of Love.” He pumped his fist to Berlin’s “Lady Day.” He time-traveled through the binaural space of “The Bells.” “He took so much joy from rediscovering these records,” Wilner says. “And being able to sit there in the room with him while he was doing it? Whew. I felt like the luckiest person in the world.”

    After the final day of mastering, Reed and Willner went to record their radio show with a guest: the actor Natasha Lyonne, a friend of Willner’s and a huge Reed fan (Reed was a fan of hers, too, admiring her work in the new series Orange Is the New Black, which he watched while he was in the hospital). Discovering they’d just finished Reed’s back-catalogue remastering, Lyonne suggested they listen to some songs. As a rule, Reed never played his own recordings on the show. But they made an exception. Willner recalls Reed saying, “I can’t believe we’re getting to do this while I’m alive.”

    Reed also managed a trip to Europe in June, where he attended the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s premier ad-industry gathering. In a public dialogue with the creative partner Tim Mellors, Reed groused about MP3s and the digital distribution of music, praised Kanye West (“The only guy really doing something interesting”), and thanked the ad industry, from which he’d earned a small fortune. “In a world of downloading, the only people who will pay you for what you do is you guys,” Reed said. “Ad people play fair with you.” Reed got involved in a major ad campaign that fall, in fact, for high-end headphones developed by a French company, Parrot; he helped design an app optimizing the headphone EQ for rock music. A photo shoot for the campaign, scheduled with Jean-Baptiste Mondino for September 30 in New York City, included a filmed interview conducted by Farida Khelfa. Reed, wearing a distressed black leather jacket over a skull-motif T-shirt, appeared diminished and spoke with a faint tremor in his voice. The interview got off to a typically testy start: When asked if his father had gotten him a guitar when he was young, Reed snapped, “My father didn’t give me ****.” Deadpanning, he claimed he never went to school, and that he slept with his amp. But soon he softened, waxing poetic about the magic of aural perception, about being in a hospital and hearing your blood flow during an ultrasound.

    Asked about his earliest sound memories, Reed said his was the same as everyone’s: his mother’s heartbeat. “And that’s why we love PPWHOH, PPWHOH, PPWHOH,” he said, beatboxing the primal rhythm. “It’s so simple.” He also described the sound of love, which he conjured by pursing his lips and softly blowing, as if to dislodge the fluff of dandelion seeds.

    On October 4, Reed joined the photographer Mick Rock at the John Varvatos clothing store — located on the Bowery in the building that had formerly housed CBGB — for a book-release event. Transformer was a coffee-table volume assembling many of Rock’s iconic images of
    Reed — images that defined him as an artist. Nico appears in several, as do Bowie and Warhol. Rock’s photos of Reed with Rachel Humphreys didn’t make the cut. Nearly a decade earlier, Reed wrote a short essay for a small-circulation art magazine. It considered a black-and-white photograph by Robert Frank, a death meditation that showed the phrase “sick of goodbye’s” [sic] written in paint that drips like blood on the surface of two mirrors, one reflecting a hand gripping a skeleton figurine. “To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera,” Reed observed, “is the least a great artist can do.” There was a bit of that spirit in Modino’s final ad image: Reed’s face in a close-up, jowls succumbing to gravity, laugh lines like trenches, hair and eyebrows streaked with white, eye bags puffy. But within them, Reed’s eyes are full-bore, staring down the lens, while in the foreground, in soft focus, is his clenched fist — an expression of street-fighter strength at a moment when Reed was about as weak physically as he’d ever been.

    I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died
    — Laurie Anderson
    In the months, then weeks, before his death, Reed fretted about his legacy, worrying that time would erase him. Julian Schnabel recalled rewatching the Berlin film with Reed, and his friend wondering at what impact he’d made. “He always felt, in a way, unappreciated,” Schnabel said. “He never felt like people really got it.” Reed’s sister recalls him
    saying point-blank: “I don’t want to be erased.”

    When Reed’s body began rejecting the liver, he was flown back to Cleveland for follow-up care. But little could be done. When the doctors told him they were out of options, Anderson recalls, he fixated just on the word “options.” Kevin Hearn flew out to help with what, at this point, was hospice care. “It became very personal,” Hearn says. He recalls Reed speaking to a doctor, parsing the difference between the words “faith” and “hope.” (“‘Hope’ leaves room for failure,” Reed explained, “but ‘faith’ is the belief that things will be a certain way.”) One day, mirroring his New York routine, Reed had Hearn take him up to the hospital roof. Reed lay down on the tar paper in his gown and looked up at the sky. “Kevin, aren’t you coming down here with me?” Reed asked. Hearn lay beside Reed. He recalls Reed yellow from jaundice, face thin, body wasting. Reed began to weep and thanked Hearn for coming. “You mean so much to me,” Reed told him. He kissed his friend. The next day, Reed flew back home to die.

    In the end, not even Lou Reed wanted to die in New York City. He and Anderson went out to the house on Long Island, near the ocean he was raised by and that had informed his imagination for a lifetime. He spent his last days with friends, listening to music and floating in the heated pool. Willner and their friend Jenni Muldaur stayed overnight. “We didn’t talk much,” Willner recalled. “We just lay there with him, and he had me DJ. And as we were [listening], he sat up and told us that ‘I am so susceptible to beauty right now’ and just lay back down … I can still see the goosebumps on him.” Willner’s playlist included the Shangri-Las’ “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” Frank Ocean’s “Forrest Gump” and “Sweet Life,” Radiohead’s “All I Need,” Valerie June’s “Tennessee Time,” Nina Simone’s “When I Was a Young Girl,” Big Joe Turner’s “Lipstick, Powder and Paint,” Roberta Flack’s “Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner,” and unsurprisingly, Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.”

    Reed and Anderson stayed up all night that Saturday, talking and doing breathwork. When daybreak came, he asked to be helped to the porch. “Take me into the light,” Reed said — his final words, spoken on a Sunday morning. “As meditators, we had prepared for this — how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart and out through the head,” Anderson said. “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.” Anderson made the appropriate calls, but wanted to spend some final hours in the house with Reed. That night, Willner, Hearn, and others joined her, listening to music, talking, and crying alongside Reed’s body, laid out and surrounded by things he loved, among them a tai chi sword and a guitar.
    Nice retrospective.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
    Support our forum by getting your gear at MartialArtSmart

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