It’s 2:35pm on Tuesday 29th October and I’m going to guess a Lou Reed filled NME is being hurried together as we speak. Lou Reed died on the 27th and the offices of every music magazine and blog have been in overdrive ever since. The final piece will hit the stands either tomorrow as planned or possibly next week (if they are going the whole hog and making it a special!). I envisage an edition crammed full of tiny paragraphs and regurgitated stories about the Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick links as well as talk of “the dark side of the summer of love” and the “grisly underbelly of subterranean New York City in the sixties” and will no doubt have a plethora of ‘todays stars’ giving their 2 cents about their own personal favourite tracks.
None of course will be so bold as to choose well known classic solo-era hits or Velvet Underground songs such as ‘Venus In Furs’ or ‘I’m Waiting for The Man’ or dare I say ‘Walk on The Wild Side’ (number 16 with a bullet) as by doing this the individual would risk letting his cool mask slip and give the reader the impression that as the rhythm guitarist for such a hotly tipped band of the moment that they didn’t have an unshakeable encyclopaedic knowledge of the whole history of music at their disposal.
I will guess that tracks such as ‘Billy’, ‘She’s My Best Friend’ , ‘Trouble with Classicists’ as well as the whole mess of ‘Metal Machine Music’ will be trotted out like they were putting together a Motown compilation and those left to choose great, great songs such as ‘Sweet Jane’, ‘Who Loves The Sun?’, ‘Heroin’ or ‘White Light/White Heat’ will instead chose the versions from live albums like ‘Live at Max’s Kansas City’.
When did it all become so complicated?
R.I.P Lou.
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