Lou Reed, who died yesterday, was an amateur photographer. Here he is photographing the people photographing him at the opening of the "Lou Reed's New York" exhibit at the Serieuze Zaken Studio in Amsterdam, October 10th, 2007. Photo by Corine van Mierlo, courtesy loureed.nl.
I've never seen the book.
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Mike
(Thanks to Steve Rosenblum)
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Featured Comments from:
Michael Tapes: "I had the pleasure of producing a live radio concert with Lou Reed on Dec. 26, 1972. It was part of the WLIR Radio Concert Series which we broadcast live from the Ultra-Sonic Recording Studios once a week for several years. I believe it was the first show he did as a solo artist. Or perhaps the first broadcast as a solo artist. It was a great night. Here is a photo by Steve Orlando:
"A funny Lou Reed story...I was assisting on a session with the Chieftains in Nashville in the late '90s. I had just come back from England where in the cab on the way to Heathrow I listened to the entire Lou Reed 'New York' album which had just been released. I was blown away by the live sound of the recording. Done in the studio, but with a sound and energy of a live performance. Talk about coincidence...the engineer I was assisting on the Chieftans' session was the engineer who did the Lou Reed recording! You can't get much different musically than the Chieftains and Lou Reed, so I asked the engineer how he came to work with Lou on that record. He told me, 'Lou is now drug free, and I was the only engineer he could find in NYC that didn't do drugs.'
"Rest in peace, Lou."
Ludovic: "do not have a single Lou Reed music file on my hard disk. It is, however, filled with several gigabytes of music by Laurie Anderson, whom he married, so at least people have a reference point when I try to explain my odd musical tastes."
Lynn: "On the news last night, a nice story about Lou Reed's most recent visit to Sydney. Early morning visitors to the Opera House were delighted to find Lou running a Tai Chi class on the grass nearby."
One of my top memories is seeing Lou Reed with Dr. John on Halloween night, sometime in the 70's, in Milwaukee (!). Dr. John had some sort of glitter cannon and kept blowing it off, and we were in the third row, so we were covered with the stuff, it was in my closet and in my car for years afterward. Lou was supreme, and I shot some transparencies of him doing "Heroin". I'd scan one and send it, but it's at the bottom of my storage space (heated and air conditioned, or course).
Posted by: Tom Kwas | Monday, 28 October 2013 at 05:20 PM
He had three photo books; that said, he was a one of a kind artist whose musical accomplishments and cultural contributions are, as they say, the stuff of legend.
Posted by: Stan B. | Monday, 28 October 2013 at 07:20 PM
A nice interview from CBC's Q with Jian Ghomeshi from 2010. http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2013/10/28/so-long-lou-q-essay-and-archival-interview/#ARCHIVE
Posted by: Collin Orthner | Monday, 28 October 2013 at 07:34 PM
I saw him play at Rutgers in 1974 or 1975. He was great in a small hall. Wish I had seen him again.
Posted by: Al Patterson. | Monday, 28 October 2013 at 10:56 PM
Saw Lou Reed at Manchester Polytechnic (UK) in 1972, shortly before he started recording Transformer in London. My memory of the event is that his act consisted of a lot of unfamiliar songs, which I now take to be songs for Transformer, then he went off and came back and did a blistering VU set as an encore. The encore is 'available for download' though misattributed as the set itself.
Posted by: Ed | Tuesday, 29 October 2013 at 05:52 AM
I was really saddened by this news. He is one of my favourite musicians.
Posted by: Paulo Bizarro | Tuesday, 29 October 2013 at 05:59 AM
I always had Mr. Reed in high esteem as a musician - IMHO his "Lulu", recorded with Metallica, is a little masterpiece. Now I want to know him as a photographer.
Posted by: Andrea Costa | Tuesday, 29 October 2013 at 06:43 AM
Hi Mike,
That made me sadder than I thought it would. Transformer was owned by all the serious musos I knew.
You might not know that it was used as a promo by the BBC in '97 (having featured in the film 'Trainspotting' – one of my all-time favourites), and was then released as a single in aid of the BBC's 'Children in Need' charity; 3 weeks at No. 1 and over £2 million made for the charity;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJpQJWpVJds
Performed by Lou and lots of stars.
I hope it makes No.1 again now.
Best wishs phil
Posted by: Another Phil | Wednesday, 30 October 2013 at 03:50 PM
Lou Reed's work with the Velvets remains some of the greatest rock music of the era and stands up today - every single album - as superior to most of their contemporaries, including the biggest Big Names. Of course John Cale and the rest of the band were an inherent component of what made them great. I doubt that any other band has been so consistently influential in the following decades.
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum notwithstanding, his recorded solo work is hugely inferior and some of it just plain awful.
Roy
Posted by: roy | Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 12:56 PM