Number 1: I once knew a guy who said he played drums for Lou Reed. This guy said he toured with Reed during the early 1970s. The drummer claimed Reed’s people paid him in cocaine instead of cash. If they paid him in cash, he said, who knows where he’d be come showtime. But if they paid him in cocaine, they knew he’d just stay there and do the cocaine, and then go out and drum like a motherfucker. But, this guy said, he didn’t appear on any of Reed’s albums from that era because that was when Reed’s studio work was being produced by David Bowie, and Bowie wanted to use his own people.
Number 2: I spent Y2k, New Year’s eve 1999-2000 in Missoula, Montana. I was visiting my friend, Jane. We spent the night at Charlie B’s Dinosaur Cafe, a wonderful bar and grill. A local band played that night. They were called something like Cold Beans and Bacon. They’d played around Missoula for years. They were tight. Mostly covers. The place was absolutely packed. By the time midnight rolled around, they were midway through about a ten minute cover of “Sweet Jane.” The entire place was jumping up and down in time. Right around midnight, Jane and I looked at each other. It was one of those moments of small magic that occasionally grace your life.
Number 3: In 1989 I was 21. By then I was cynical and jaded by a decade’s worth of phenomenally shitty music from seemingly every good and great rock artist of the 1960s and 1970s. One heap of steaming synthesized dung after another. That year I was also a DJ at WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. When Reed’s solo album New York came out, I scoffed. The only reason I put it on was because it was in the New Bin, and the New Bin was very close to the console. I needed something. I slapped the vinyl onto the platter and slip-cued the first track, “Dirty Boulevard.” I expected something horrible. I expected to come on afterwards and mock him for being a shell of his former self. But it turned out to be good. Somehow he had done it. He had shown that despite all the drugs and record company shitheads, a once great artist could still be a great artist and put out good music with interesting lyrics.
Number 4: Someone once told me Lou Reed was an asshole. Someone once told me Lou Reed was from Long Island. Someone once told me Lou Reed was married to Laurie Anderson. Someone once told me Lou Reed banged Andy Warhol and David Bowie so he could be a star.
Number 5: The first time I heard “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” was on the AM radio in my father’s 1969 Buck LeSabre. He was singing along when the colored girls sang, doo de doo.
Number 6: I once worked as an editorial assistant on a project called The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. Part of my job included producing a list of musicians for the Music chapter, and finding scholars to write about them. I included Tulsa, Oklahoma guitarist/singer/songwriter J.J. Cale, who wrote “After Midnight,” “Cocaine,” “Same Old Blues Again,” and “Call Me the Breeze.” The scholar who agreed to write the entry on Cale sent us a piece about the Welsh avant-garde violist John Cale, who was Reed’s primary partner in The Velvet Underground. I found someone else to write the J.J. Cale entry.
Number 7: There is no no. 7.