Lou Reed, Gone.

Satellite’s gone, up to the skies, Thing like that drive me out of my mind

I remember turning on the TV sometime in my teens, I don’t remember what channel it was but on the screen was a rough faced skinny guy with sunglasses on in front of the mic. He started singing…

Holly came from Miami, F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, Hey babe
Take a walk on the wild side
Hey honey
Take a walk on the wild side

It was a concert for free speech, all the the musicians had one thing in common, their music had been banned or censored at one point. I had heard of Lou Reed for a while before even listened to a couple of his records (yes, vinyl). I watched the rest of the concert but Reed’s performance stuck with me – I went out and bought everything I could find by him. Lou joined Nirvana and The Clash as part of the regular rotation of my cd’s, made it on several mixtapes I made for friends.

Years later when I was a freshman in film school I was working on a film about a girl who killed herself not far from my home – she walked into the woods with a shotgun, her brother found her – I spent days searching for music that would do it all justice. The song that kept coming up was The Velvet Undergrounds slow moving sad – ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin.’ During the editing process I must have listened to that song at least a couple hundred times – occasionally just stopping and letting the audio play.

Lou died last night. We don’t know the cause – but he left us at the age of 71. He was one of the greats to say he will be missed is an understatement.

Do me a favor and put on your headphones, turn it all the way up, close your eyes, and just listen.

The music is all. People should die for it. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? – Lou Reed

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