Deep Purple - Night at the Proms - Smoke on the water. Offenbach / Je chante comme un coyote. Die Antwoord - "Cookie Thumper" Die Antwoord - "Fatty Boom Boom". Photos du journal - Awkward band and musician photos. 'Heroin' Was Our Heroin: On Seeing Lou Reed at the New York Public Library. On a December weeknight in 2009, five hundred Velvet Underground fans lined up outside the Forty-second Street entrance to the New York Public Library, all of us playing it cool but feeling giddy. When passers-by asked what we were going to, people said things like “A panel.” Inside, Lou Reed, Moe Tucker, and Doug Yule would be talking to David Fricke, of Rolling Stone. No music, no John Cale, and, of course, no Sterling Morrison, who died in 1995—but even that much Velvet Underground, for a fan born too late to have seen them in their era, was almost too exciting to comprehend.
After two decades of listening to their albums, and of scraping together modern-day connections to the band where I could—watching Reed and Cale play some of “Songs for Drella” on Letterman, in 1990, reading articles about the band’s European reunion tour in 1993 (Tucker: “ ‘Heroin’ is our fireworks. We waited in the cold. Then the lights went down—way down—and stayed that way. The room was dark. Patti Smith: Mourning Lou Reed. On Sunday morning, I rose early. I had decided the night before to go to the ocean, so I slipped a book and a bottle of water into a sack and caught a ride to Rockaway Beach. It felt like a significant date, but I failed to conjure anything specific.
The beach was empty, and, with the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy looming, the quiet sea seemed to embody the contradictory truth of nature. I stood there for a while, tracing the path of a low-flying plane, when I received a text message from my daughter, Jesse. Lou Reed was dead. I flinched and took a deep breath. I had seen him with his wife, Laurie, in the city recently, and I’d sensed that he was ill. I met Lou at Max’s Kansas City in 1970. Within a few years, in that same room upstairs at Max’s, Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, and I presented our own land of a thousand dances.
As my band evolved and covered his songs, Lou bestowed his blessings. As I mourned by the sea, two images came to mind, watermarking the paper- colored sky. Patti Smith: Mourning Lou Reed.