Victor Bockris: ON THE DEATH OF LOU REED

https://www.facebook.com/victor.bockris/posts/10201060012643630


 Dear Friends,

I have been thinking about Lou Reed for the last week and wondering how his death has effected you, and how it’s effecting his wife Laurie and all the other people who love him. I was blessed by Lou’s friendship in the mid to late seventies, he taught me a lot about how to live on the wild side. I didn’t really see much of him after 1980, but I kept listening to the music. In 1983 Omnibus Press in London published Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story by myself and Gerard Malanga, who played a crucial role in bringing Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground. After Andy died I went to St Anne’s in Brooklyn to see Lou and John’s first performance of Songs for Drella in 1988. I was back stage with Billy Name when he introduced Lou to La Monte Young! Things heated up in 1992 when I started work on Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. When the book came out in 1995, journalists from several countries told me when they asked Lou for an interview he asked them if they’d read my book. If they hadn’t, he told them to read it and then come back for an interview. I always dug Lou. When I published a suite of poems from his book All The Pretty People in The Coldspring Journal in 1976, he won a prize given to him at the Gotham Book Mart by Senator Eugene McCarthy, poet and hero of the anti-war movement in 1968. I could go on, but not here. I have been awakened from the dream of life by Lou Reed’s death. Tomorrow I am going to start rewriting and updating my biography of Lou. This time I think I’ll be able to ride that satellite of love up to the stars.

The last thing Lou says in Transformer is, “If you line the songs and play them, you should be ale to relate and not feel alone. I think it’s important that people don’t feel alone.”

Victor Bockris