Forever Lou

Forever Lou

By: Ghost Writer

“One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”

Lou Reed

It's already starting to become hard for me to remember when I started listening to Lou, it was almost by pure chance, I was standing on the corner, no suitcase in my hand, I was hanging out with some friends, I was 14, and a guy I knew arrived with some old used Lps he bought at a flea market downtown, I remember the first time I saw a Velvet Underground record, it was a live recording, the awful cover depicted a woman butt, the band was already without John Cale, less abrasive but still very abstract, I remember the guy, who knew I was into The Doors, told me, "This guys are more acidic than The Doors", so we went to his house and started playing these records, I can't remember what we listened that time except for the Velvets, those ringing guitars, the "I don't give a fuck" cool vocals of Lou and that enigmatic music, a totally iconoclastic band, yes, it was quite a shock and a revelation, VU records were almost impossible to get in those days, it was quite a feat to get records like the first groundbreaking VU recording with Nico, or the ear splitting second album, the last they did with Cale.

I became a fan of the VU's uncompromising music style, and their rebellious attitude towards sounds, and the power struggles between Reed and Cale, I was lucky to find many information in the school library about the Velvets and about Lou, my first Lou Reed album was New York, a perfect record, Magic and Loss, was another high point, and all thru the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, Lou was able to deliver a very distinctive, and rebellious again, approach to music, launching record after record of wonderful avant-garde stuff, from the glammy debut Transformer, the nostalgic Coney Island Baby, the beautifully depressive Berlin, the brutal The Blue Mask, the indomitable Metal Machine Music, the sweaty Street Hassle, the monumental New York, the poetic Magic & Loss, and the relentless Lulu, Lou did musically what he wanted to do, always light years ahead of the game, I remember thinking when The Strokes hit big with their first recording, that such sound was created almost 3 decades ago by Lou, and condemn to the underground as it was widely misunderstood and despised, but as a true visionary, Lou's genius was confirmed definitely as time passed by.

These days it's impossible to dismiss Lou's relevance in music, he raised from the underground and his fingerprints remind all over pop and the avant-garde, even in his late years Lou continued as a ferocious experimentalists getting into the worlds of ambient music, live improvisation and heavy metal, not an easy feat, but one accomplished by Lou in a convincing way, playing along such artists as David Bowie, John Zorn and Metallica, which make us think that we are living in the world Lou Reed created, and after a couple of years of his death, really is hard for me to believe that Lou is gone, despite this, his music will live forever, and thanks to his nearly low profile is easy to listen to him continuously, he never suffered of over exposition and the chance of him becoming hip is impossible, Lou will remain a secret to the masses, a praised possession to many of us who were lucky to have open ears and open mind towards his music, and it was a definite pleasure to share this time and this world with Lou.