{"id":2751,"date":"2013-12-07T11:47:49","date_gmt":"2013-12-07T11:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2751"},"modified":"2013-12-07T11:51:15","modified_gmt":"2013-12-07T11:51:15","slug":"goodbye-lou-by-sarah-larson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=2751","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Lou! by Sarah Larson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"goodbye_lou\"<\/a><\/p>\n

no site da New Yorker.<\/a><\/p>\n

Last Thursday, a few hundred Lou Reed fans gathered in a grove of trees at Lincoln Center for an afternoon-long public memorial that celebrated Reed by filling the whole complex with his music, like church bells ringing in a town square. When I arrived, approaching the Metropolitan Opera House from Broadway, \u201cCandy Says,\u201d dreamy and ethereal, was as much a part of the landscape as Avery Fisher Hall. The kids playing around the Met fountain, and everybody coming and going from the David H. Koch Theatre, heard \u201cI\u2019m going to watch the bluebirds fly over my shoulder,\u201d sung in a bit of a trance. Past the Met, in an elevated terrace of London plane trees called the Barclays Capital Grove, the music was wonderfully, but not aggressively, loud, and of an audio quality that Reed surely would have respected.<\/p>\n

It was a cold, brilliantly sunny day. There were no speeches, no visuals\u2014just people, trees, and tall poles with powerful speakers mounted on top. Beige chairs were set up in diagonal rows, and people of all ages, in black overcoats, leather jackets, sunglasses, knitted hats, and berets, sat in the chairs or along the wall or stood, leaning against trees, nodding their heads, looking at one another, gazing up at the leaves. Many took pictures or video. The bright sunlight was dappled under the flaking branches, extremes of light and shadow adding to the unreal, happy strangeness.<\/p>\n

Then, violins: \u201cStreet Hassle.\u201d A few people smiled in recognition. \u201cStreet Hassle,\u201d from 1978, is eleven minutes long, and soothing in its sound; like so many of Reed\u2019s rough-poetry numbers, the lyrics are full of drugs and death and sleaze. But the violins are majestic, melodic, and reassuring, and when the guitar comes in it sounds like a friend. A man wearing a baby strapped to his chest paced gently, a contented look on his face. The baby wore booties, a knitted red strawberry hat with a green stem, and earplugs. Toward the end of \u201cStreet Hassle,\u201d Bruce Springsteen\u2019s voice shows up, languid, intimate, late-seventies, talking about \u201ctramps like us\u201d being \u201cborn to pay.\u201d The voice was a sly, welcome presence at the memorial; it was good to have Springsteen there, too.<\/p>\n

In the middle of the terrace, milling around like everybody else, smiling, wearing a gray knitted hat, was Laurie Anderson, Reed\u2019s widow. She wore a warm jacket and red gloves, and she held a camera with a long lens. When friends approached, she took their pictures, laughing sometimes; she looked comfortable and radiant, and seemed\u2014as she did in the obituary she wrote for Reed, as well as in her tribute to him in Rolling Stone\u2014to be handling Reed\u2019s death with more love, warmth, and grace than anyone.<\/p>\n

At \u201cVicious,\u201d the upbeat, slightly pat single from \u201cTransformer\u201d\u2014\u201cYou hit me with a flower \/ You do it every hour\u201d\u2014the energy picked up. Then \u201cBeginning to See the Light\u201d came on, from the Velvet Underground\u2019s self-titled 1969 album\u2014another old friend. A woman removed her sunglasses, dabbed at her eyes, and put them back on. \u201cI met myself in a dream, and I just want to tell you, everything was all right,\u201d Reed sang. A solidly built man in a black wool hat that said FUCK CANCER on it made his way along the perimeter, looking agitated. A beautiful older woman with blond hair, sitting alone, rocked with the music, and sang with the \u201cHow does it feel to be loved\u201d part.<\/p>\n

A young police officer walked through the grove, scanning the scene. Not much mayhem to rein in on Lou Reed-listening-party detail. \u201cFemme Fatale\u201d began playing, and then Nico was there, too. A woman entered the grove with an Irish setter, which flopped down and wagged its tail.<\/p>\n

Every song felt significant. \u201cHalloween Parade,\u201d Reed\u2019s AIDS elegy from the 1989 album \u201cNew York,\u201d had been mentioned often the week Reed died. \u201cThis Halloween is something to be sure,\u201d Reed sang. \u201cEspecially to be here without you.\u201d He named some people who weren\u2019t here anymore: Johnny Rio, Rotten Rita, Three Bananas, Brandy Alexander.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent a fair amount of time in the past twenty years listening to Lou Reed sing about people he missed. Several times in the past couple of weeks, I listened to \u201cHello, It\u2019s Me,\u201d his posthumous farewell to Andy Warhol from \u201cSongs for Drella,\u201d the album he made with John Cale after Warhol\u2019s death. It undid me every time: the love, the pride, the falling-out, the regret, the impossibility of fully showing your appreciation to someone who helped make you who you are.<\/p>\n

Each song at the memorial, it was clear, had been a part of making the assembled listeners who they were. During \u201cPale Blue Eyes,\u201d two women slow-danced with each other. During Morrison\u2019s heartbreakingly gorgeous guitar solo, a man with curly gray hair leaned back, smiled, and swung his head with joy, singing along on \u201cDown for you is up,\u201d like it just didn\u2019t get any better than that. The rock journalist Michael Azerrad appeared, wearing a leather jacket and a red scarf, looking satisfied with what he saw.<\/p>\n

\u201cSunday Morning\u201d felt significant because of its music-box beauty and its innocence, laced with something darker, and because it was many people\u2019s first encounter with Reed. He had died on a Sunday morning, which many people, Patti Smith among them, had mentioned in written tributes. \u201cSword of Damocles,\u201d from \u201cMagic and Loss,\u201d about impending death, was written after Reed had lost some friends to cancer. \u201cI Love You Suzanne\u201d felt significant because\u2014well, I\u2019ve never really understood what \u201cI Love You Suzanne\u201d means to other people; it seems as anomalous and funny as Reed\u2019s bleached-blond-hair phase. But I know what it means to me: it\u2019s my first memory of knowing who he was. It was 1984, the year of his Honda Scooter campaign, and I saw the video on MTV during a trip to New York with my parents. Lou Reed wore sunglasses and a leather jacket, and he acted tough. So why was he singing a retro pop song and hawking a scooter? (I still don\u2019t have answers for this.) \u201cI Love You Suzanne\u201d is fun, and you can dance to it; it may be Lou Reed\u2019s most uncool song, and its inclusion here made me very happy.<\/p>\n

Salman Rushdie, wearing a black baseball cap and a black overcoat, appeared among the trees, by himself, looking around. When the spare, invigorating guitar lines of \u201cDirty Blvd.\u201d started playing, a bearded man in a tattered coat put down his sandwich and yelled, \u201cWhoo! There you go!\u201d \u201cDirty Blvd.\u201d is one of Reed\u2019s quintessential New York-as-Hell songs, about a kid named Pedro whose \u201cfather beats him \u2019cause he\u2019s too tired to beg,\u201d full of lyrics like this:<\/p>\n

Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I\u2019ll piss on \u2019em<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what the Statue of Bigotry says<\/p>\n

Your poor huddled masses, let\u2019s club \u2019em to death<\/p>\n

and get it over with and just dump \u2019em on the boulevard<\/p>\n

It was hard not to marvel at the layers of New York that this moment condensed\u2014eighties New York, described by an icon of sixties and seventies New York, in 2013, in the Barclays Capital Grove, in the Lincoln Center newly renovated by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with better sound and better access and a lawn, sponsored in part by Bloomberg and David Koch.<\/p>\n

Reed sang, or talked, a bit snidely:<\/p>\n

Outside it\u2019s a bright night<\/p>\n

there\u2019s an opera at Lincoln Center<\/p>\n

movie stars arrive by limousine<\/p>\n

The klieg lights shoot up over the skyline of Manhattan<\/p>\n

but the lights are out on the Mean Streets<\/p>\n

People laughed and cheered at \u201cLincoln Center.\u201d I wondered how many movie stars had come to operas in limousines, even in the eighties, but took his point. Next: more significant songs, \u201cSweet Jane\u201d and \u201cPerfect Day.\u201d And then the song: \u201cSister Ray.\u201d At its first guitar notes, a man yelled, \u201cHa-HA!\u201d triumphantly.<\/p>\n

The moment when you realize someone has started playing \u201cSister Ray\u201d\u2014a seventeen-minute celebration, dirge, and orgy at once\u2014is always a thrilling one. It\u2019s instant pure rock energy and bliss\u2014grinding, thrusting propulsion that you want to dance to. And it also means that you\u2019re in the presence of other people who want to hear \u201cSister Ray,\u201d which isn\u2019t always the case in life. Sterling Morrison\u2019s guitar filled the air. \u201cI\u2019m searching for my mainline \/ I said I couldn\u2019t hit it sideways,\u201d Reed sang. Near Anderson, a determined-looking woman holding a NY1 mic talked into a camera. Moe Tucker banged on her drums; Reed sang about sailors and ding-dongs; John Cale\u2019s demonic organ propelled the song into a chaotic, frenzied trance. Everyone among the trees looked pleased\u2014a bearded man in a leopard-print fez; a birdlike woman in a fur hat; a tall, Nordic father and his two sons, all in colorful outfits. Philip Glass, wearing a blue parka and round glasses, approached Anderson and hugged her, talking to her intently. A crowd began to form around them at a respectful distance. Young teens entered the scrum and took pictures of Anderson and Glass, charming the older people who observed them. \u201cSister Ray\u201d whirled on. \u201cDon\u2019t you know you\u2019ll stain the carpet,\u201d Reed sang.<\/p>\n

At the far end of the trees, toward the Library for the Performing Arts, a young man in a T-shirt danced, furiously air-guitaring. A jacket lay on the ground next to him, as if shucked off. A small ring of onlookers watched him, some filming or taking pictures. He was in his own world, dancing as if he had a job to do. When \u201cSister Ray\u201d concluded, everyone cheered. The dancer put his jacket on and smiled, satisfied.<\/p>\n

The afternoon was heading toward its conclusion; \u201cWalk on the Wild Side,\u201d the song most of the world associates with Lou Reed, began. At the opposite end of the grove, back toward the Met, twenty or so people were walking around with red roses whose stems were about four feet long, like sunflowers or walking sticks. \u201cIt\u2019s from Laurie,\u201d a man holding a rose said. Anderson had been handing them out. Now she stood at the bottom of the stairs to the grove, smiling and hugging people. This continued through \u201cAll Tomorrow\u2019s Parties\u201d and \u201cSet the Twilight Reeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The finale: feedback, glorious feedback\u2014the first minute or so of \u201cMetal Machine Music.\u201d People laughed when they recognized it, and cheered when it, and the memorial, came to an end. Everyone at that end of the plaza was pointed toward Anderson, some with roses in hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks, all you music lovers, for coming!\u201d Anderson called out. \u201cGoodbye, Lou!\u201d She waved. People clapped. Anderson pumped her fist. Then, surrounded by friends, she walked away, leading her and Reed\u2019s scruffy little dog by its red leash.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Ebet Roberts\/Redferns\/Getty<\/p>\n