[sutra]

I just heard Lou Reed died! Aw shit now I'm sad, sad.....sad.

[k-s-p]

Just came here to post that, another giant gone.

Lou Reed has died at the age of 71. No cause of death has been reported, but the Velvet Underground leader and legendary solo artist underwent a liver transplant in May.

Rolling Stone is reporting that Reed passed away earlier today. He spent more than 50 years making music, first with the influential Velvet Underground in the mid ’60s and then as a solo artist, starting in the early ’70s with a string of terrific records.

His career has been marked with milestones and several landmark records, including the Velvet Underground’s first four albums and ’70s solo classics like ‘Transformer’ and ‘Berlin.’

In May, Reed had liver transplant surgery. A month later, it was reported that he was “up and strong” following the procedure. He even sat down for an interview with The Guardian, in which he was his typically biting self, firing shots at the NSA’s then-recent spying allegations.

Reed was one of rock’s true pioneers. Even though the Velvet Underground didn’t sell too many records during their brief lifetime, they became one of the most influential groups of the ’70s and ’80s, as punk and New Wave bands began adapting their art-noise sound. Reed used his solo career to explore similar music.

His most recent album was the much-maligned 2011 collaboration with Metallica, ‘Lulu.’ But even that record offered an eye-opening glimpse into Reed’s unwavering creative spirit, which he carried with him until the end. He will be missed.

[Capt.Ahab]

Wow. What a major bummer. RIP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2EgYq_NCY

[Stoner4Life]

I went to more Lou Reed concerts than the next 5 bands combined. Being a NYC boy he played at one venue or another on a regular basis, from the smallest clubs (like the Blue Note) in the Village where there isn't a bad seat in the joint to the largest arenas like Madison Sq Garden. It seemed that one of my true pleasures back in the '70s was trippin' out to Lou Reed.......


If you haven't seen the 1983 movie 'Get Crazy' please do, I'm sure you'd find it for free viewing online. Lou Reed only has a bit part in it but cracked me up hard, he plays a burnt out rocker on his way to a New Yrs Eve rock concert, Lee Ving has a crazy role in this as well.

Here it is on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrIRmMNi800




R.I.P. Lou

[RetroGrow]

Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.

With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. "One chord is fine," he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."
Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed was born in Brooklyn, in 1942. A fan of doo-wop and early rock & roll (he movingly inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989), Reed also took formative inspiration during his studies at Syracuse University with the poet Delmore Schwartz. After college, he worked as a staff songwriter for the novelty label Pickwick Records (where he had a minor hit in 1964 with a dance-song parody called "The Ostrich"). In the mid-Sixties, Reed befriended Welsh musician John Cale, a classically trained violist who had performed with groundbreaking minimalist composer La Monte Young. Reed and Cale formed a band called the Primitives, then changed their name to the Warlocks. After meeting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, they became the Velvet Underground. With a stark sound and ominous look, the band caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who incorporated the Velvets into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. "Andy would show his movies on us," Reed said. "We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wearing black anyway."

"Produced" by Warhol and met with total commercial indifference when it was released in early 1967, VU’s debut The Velvet Underground & Nico stands as a landmark on par with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde. Reed's matter-of-fact descriptions of New York’s bohemian demimonde, rife with allusions to drugs and S&M, pushed beyond even the Rolling Stones’ darkest moments, while the heavy doses of distortion and noise for its own sake revolutionized rock guitar. The band’s three subsequent albums – 1968’s even more corrosive sounding White Light/White Heat, 1969’s fragile, folk-toned The Velvet Underground and 1970’s Loaded, which despite being recorded while he was leaving the group, contained two Reed standards, “Rock & Roll” and and “Sweet Jane,” were similarly ignored. But they’d be embraced by future generations, cementing the Velvet Underground’s status as the most influential American rock band of all time.
After splitting with the Velvets in 1970, Reed traveled to England and, in characteristically paradoxical fashion, recorded a solo debut backed by members of the progressive-rock band Yes. But it was his next album, 1972’s Transformer, produced by Reed-disciple David Bowie, that pushed him beyond cult status into genuine rock stardom. “Walk On the Wild Side,” a loving yet unsentimental evocation of Warhol’s Factory scene, became a radio hit (despite its allusions to oral sex) and “Satellite of Love” was covered by U2 and others. Reed spent the Seventies defying expectations almost as a kind of sport. 1973’s Berlin was brutal literary bombast while 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance had soul horns and flashy guitar. In 1975 he released Metal Machine Music, a seething all-noise experiment his label RCA marketed as a avant-garde classic music, while 1978’s banter-heavy live album Take No Prisoners was a kind of comedy record in which Reed went on wild tangents and savaged rock critics by name (“Lou sure is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people,” one of those critics, Robert Christgau, wrote at the time). Explaining his less-than-accommodating career trajectory, Reed told journalist Lester Bangs, “My bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds.”

Reed’s ambiguous sexual persona and excessive drug use throughout the Seventies was the stuff of underground rock myth. But in the Eighties, he began to mellow. He married Sylvia Morales and opened a window into his new married life on 1982’s excellent The Blue Mask, his best work since Transformer. His 1984 album New Sensations took a more commercial turn and 1989’s New York ended the decade with a set of funny, politically cutting songs that received universal critical praise. In 1991, he collaborated with Cale on Songs For Drella, a tribute to Warhol. Three years later, the Velvet Underground reunited for a series of successful European gigs.

Reed and Morales divorced in the early Nineties. Within a few years, Reed began a relationship with musician-performance artist Laurie Anderson. The two became an inseparable New York fixture, collaborating and performing live together, while also engaging in civic and environmental activism. They were married in 2008.

Reed continued to follow his own idiosyncratic artistic impulses throughout the ‘00s. The once-decadent rocker became an avid student of T'ai Chi, even bringing his instructor onstage during concerts in 2003. In 2005 he released a double CD called The Raven, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In 2007, he released an ambient album titled Hudson River Wind Meditations. Reed returned to mainstream rock with 2011’s Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica.
“All through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”

Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ne...#ixzz2ix1gQbRN
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook


RIP Lou Reed.....
A buddy of mine was waiting for a liver transplant @ the same time Lou Reed was. My buddy was a big fan, so when I heard that Lou got his transplant, I called my buddy to cheer him up. My buddy finally got his liver transplant about two months ago. I think I will call him today.....

[Midnite Toker]

https://youtu.be/7FdWPeHFAMk

The first Cool music I ever got into. Sweet Jane.
R.I.P. Sweet Lou ~mT

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

Damn.....

RIP Lou.

Here's the obit in Rolling Stone:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/ne...at-71-20131027

[Hold Your Fire]

RIP, Mr. Reed.

[RetroGrow]

Repost. Mods might want to combine the two threads. Original thread did not have "Lou Reed" in the subject line. OP could add Lou Reed to his title.
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=273655

[Hermanthegerman]

I hope for Him, that he found a quite side.R.i.P.