I was vaguely aware of the Velvet Underground but I didn't become a Lou Reed fan until someone played me his BERLIN album in 1971 or 72. It was shocking, the scenes these songs described mostly horrible things done by and happening to marginal, dysfunctional people---like a Hubert Selby novel set to music---addicts and abusers, people throwing their infidelities in each other's faces, having their kids taken away, a heartbreaking song about domestic violence, then this same woman's suicide numbly described by man who realizes he's responsible for it. Grim realities that had never before been set to music, and what great rock and roll it was. A masterpiece that the critics like most people didn't know what to think of, that only later got the critical raves it deserved. The song linked below is the last song on the album. Then I went back and got the lighter and more fun TRANSFORMER album, and yeah the TG songs were cool and spoke to me. The next few albums were great, and then some not so hot ones while he bottomed out in his addiction; and then that amazing album NEW YORK. Lou's deliberately homely and off-key voice---an in=your-face New Yorker affectation---wasn't everybody's cup of tea, and his experiments sometimes produced musical disasters; but I loved the big stunad and when he was good it was fantastic. His dying didn't surprise me too much, I'd known about his health problems and his liver transplant; but it's still a loss for me. And a somewhat lonely one since so few people GOT Lou Reed, and it's so strange when the passing of some asshole who starred in some fucking sitcom 20 years ago gets more news, more praise, more mourners than this man whose music meant so much to me. Glad this blog is here and that at least a couple of folks here feel like I do...
~hugs, Veronica
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SAD SONG from the album BERLIN:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MT3fRjKiLs

(And oh, the bit about "somebody else would have broken both her arms" is not an endorsement of spousal abuse. In the context of the album's story it's the not-so-nice character's justification for his abuse, that someone else would have done worse; not Lou's attitude...)