Magic, loss and Lou

It was the grayest of summers.

Darrel and I, two teenage Malaboners, watched the world die in this sleepy, sinking town north of nowhere. Bored beyond relief. I held a generic looking guitar, a piece of borrowed gear to play barely-known three chords. My friend had a skeleton of a drum kit, some parts Frankesteined together. He could play steadily despite the cymbal crash of rust and wear, the thud of cheap skins. We set up the equipment in Darrel’s living room, strumming and clanging away. Through the noise, Darrel asked me to play something, anything that wasn’t earsplitting. I knew two songs — Happy Birthday (which can be plucked on a single high E string) and a track from a worn-out Oliver Stone’s The Doors original soundtrack (1991) cassette.

It was the Velvet Underground’s Heroin.   

I fingered (erroneously) a D and G on my detuned Raon beauty and it sounded like VU resident genius Lou Reed on a terribly imperfect day. (My future friend Maxine would prefer John Cale.) Darrel and I played away, escaping from the darkened seas of our trapped lives in Malabon (where we couldn’t even get hired as waiters at the McJolly fast-food joint in Escolta… which was baffling; on the talent slot on our biodata sheet, we snootily wrote, “Poetry”)

I don’t know just where I’m going…

We sailed on a great big clipper ship, shooting for the kingdom. Away from days of flood and ignominy, and into the white light-white heat of rock ‘n’ roll.

Darrel would form his own band years later, a reggae outfit.  (Remember the apocryphal quote that while the Velvet Underground’s debut album only sold 30,000 copies, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Said Eno or someone.) I would get hired eventually (and fired and hired by another employer), form my own dysfunctional bands, and blow my salary on anything stamped with two words.

Lou.

Reed.  

Well, add two more words.

Velvet.

Underground.

When the man died last Oct. 27, it was a huge loss for the slowly-getting defunct world of rock (since the [rock] stars of today are the walking auto-tune machines, clothes horses, and E News! fodder of the pop world). What matters a world without Lou?

Surely, you can prop up the “Transformer” album and you’ll hear him singing about walking on the wild side, viciously hitting someone with a flower, and watching the pom pom pom satellite of love and surveillance. And with David Bowie and the late great Mick Ronson at the helm. There Lou is fabling his beloved New York on his 1989 album, the way James Joyce did with his Dublin and William Faulkner with the South. One track from the “New York” album became a spoken-word dirge on the United States of Poetry CD, ending doomly with the lines: “The perfume burned his eyes/Holding tightly to her thighs/And something flickered for a minute/And then it vanished and was gone.” As his beloved Manhattan sinks like a rock.

There is “Berlin” — the blood-streaked jewel in the discography. The musician at his most poignant, dirtiest best. There is also the sonic f*ck you to the recording industry: “Metal Machine Music.” I bought it a remastered, repackaged CD (I had a vinyl copy many rooms ago) when I was in Japan weeks before the singer died, didn’t know why at that time.

Lou was a poet laureate of rock. He’s Ezra Pound chronicling the pushers, pimps, drag queens and hustlers of the New York underbelly. His work is much darker than Bob Dylan’s or Leonard Cohen’s, and similar to the drug-addled commentaries of space-traveling Bowie and street-prowling Iggy Pop (the trio shot by Mick Rock in that immortal snap). Those were different times!

Patti Smith wrote a beautiful send-off for Lou in The New Yorker. “Before I slept, I searched for the significance of the date — October 27th — and found it to be the birthday of both Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath,” wrote Patti. “Lou had chosen the perfect day to set sail — the day of poets, on Sunday morning, the world behind him.”

Laurie Anderson, Lou’s wife and fellow poet, wrote, “Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.”

Not sure if it was a Sunday when Darrel and I played Heroin all afternoon. Slow at first, then throbbing with feedbacking twilight-reeling speed, then slowing down again, and then… everything raggedly and magically. We thought we were someone else, someone good… at playing rock ‘n’ roll. 

If I listened to Heroin now (or Caroline Says, or Kill Your Sons), it wouldn’t be the same.

Me then.

Me now.

A lifetime of Lou Reed in between.