Chapter Twenty-Seven
2013
I am a graduate of Warhol University and I believe in the power of punk. I want to blow it up. Thank you.
Lou Reed
In the summer of 2011 Lou began to show signs of his sickness during the recording of Lulu with Metallica. To treat a case of hepatitis C, he had to take a course of injections of the drug interferon, which often causes the patient to feel nauseous and weak. In the midst of that treatment, doctors discovered liver cancer and an advanced case of diabetes. During the final two years of his life, Lou, always accompanied by Laurie, was in and out of hospitals searching for a cure. Laurie, his practice of tai chi, and the advice of his meditation teacher Mingyur Rinpoche were the three stable factors that he maintained to the end of his life. The ambition and drive that kept him in tip-top condition over the previous decade never left him.
In the last six months of his life, Lou oversaw the remastering of his entire catalog for numerous box sets. He worked with John Cale on the Deluxe Edition of White Light/White Heat; he and Willner were co-hosting their radio show New York Shuffle on SiriusXM; he was working on his final collection of photographs, since released as Rimes/Rhymes. In September 2013, he even went to England to publicize Mick Rock’s limited edition of Transformer, his great collection of Lou Reed photographs. Lou was still talking about his novel. “If you thought of the collected records as a book, it tells you all about me growing up in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, to the 2000s. That’s what it was like for one person, trying to do the best he could. With all the problems that go along with life except mine took place in public. And I wrote about that too.”
In April, Lou received a last-minute liver transplant. At first it worked well and he seemed to have fully recovered, but after a few weeks it failed. He was told there were no more options. Lou preferred not to hear that.
THE FINAL WEEKS
Some friends said he was cool and together. Others claimed he was suicidal. When Lou’s grown-up little sister Bunny, now Merrill Weiner, called and asked him if he was going to hurt himself, Lou summoned up his sense of humor to crack, “‘Oh Bunny, come on! I can’t hurt myself with the tai chi swords. They’re too dull.’ But he was scared,” she said. A few days before his death, Julian Schnabel was watching Berlin, the movie of his 2006 live concert performance, with him when Lou asked him, “‘Does anybody know?’ He always felt, in a way, unappreciated. He never felt like people really got it.” He didn’t, he told his sister, “want to be erased.”
It seemed like a peculiar remark from a man who had spent his last decade showered by a parade of appreciation for even his most reviled works. Perhaps Schnabel put his finger on the pulse of it: “One day, Lou told me a story from his childhood. He was standing with his father, he put his hand near his father and his father smacked him. He never got over the cruelty of that.”
On October 27, 2013, the death of Lou Reed sent shockwaves around the world. The wall of emotion that split open on the news caught many of us unaware. It was his enormous strength, combined with the great sensitivity of his poetry and music, which held us together. In a tribute to his lifelong partner on the frontier, John Cale wrote, “The news I feared most pales in comparison to the lump in my throat and the hollow in my stomach. Two kids have a chance meeting and 47 years later we fight and love the same way. We have the best of our fury laid out on vinyl, for the world to have a glimpse. The laughs we shared just a few weeks ago will forever remind me of all that was good between us.”
THE BARDO
According to Roderick Romero: “After Lou died Laurie did a beautiful thing by inviting their friends to stay with him mentally through the 49 Days of the Bardo. This is based on the Buddhist belief that the soul needs 49 days to get away. Every Sunday for seven weeks she hosted these two- or three-hour gatherings at Lou’s apartment.
“It was like, OK, this Sunday is going to be for the people who built his guitars and knew Lou very well; this Sunday will be for the poets who inspired him (and I was lucky enough to be a part of that); after that it was like, now we are going to do the artists he loved who also sang—and that was Bowie and Bono at Julian Schnabel’s place.
“If you wanted to talk, you would talk; if you wanted to listen, then fantastic. Laurie would say, ‘Do you want to say something?’ One would say, ‘No, I’m sorry’ and then another person would say, ‘Yeah, I’m willing to do something.’ You know, each person talked as if we were all part of a family.
“I had this thing that I wrote for Lou burning in my journal and then Laurie said, ‘Does anyone else have anything to say?’ And I had a couple of glasses of wine, so I was like, yeah. ‘Oh, Roderick, come sit down. You’re not just an “anybody.” Sit down.’ I was like, you know, really nervous because I was surrounded by the greatest poets in the world, and Hal Willner and everyone was there at Julian’s that night. So I just read it straight out of the heart … People really got it because I was talking about times when Lou would mimic Andy.”
***
In The Villager, Jim Fourratt reported: “Lou Reed’s memorial service took place in the evening of December 16, 2013 at his favorite Apollo Theater in Harlem. At 7.15 p.m., Laurie Anderson walked on stage and stood in a silent pool of light. She told us we were gathered to celebrate a life of her husband Lou Reed and reminded us not to cry. She said that Lou had finally left the world and there were to be no tears: ‘You are his friends and fellow artists gathered to honor his creative energy and life force and path.’”
We were deeply moved by how tenderly Laurie took Lou through his death and how elegantly she stage-managed its aftermath and his memorial service. This was one of the most nurturing things Anderson has ever done in a career that seeks to witness and comfort the distressed. She gave the whole population of the culture that she and Lou came out of and spoke to a real shot of hope for themselves and the future of the human race. She illustrated the value of the arts, the value of her husband’s art, and the value of art as a way of life. She turned Lou’s death into a masterpiece.