Set the twilight reeling

Satellite’s gone, up to the sky,Things like that drive me out of my mind.— Lou Reed, Satellite of Love

I remember watching Lou Reed at Boston’s Orpheum Theater years ago. At the time, he had guitarist Robert Quine in the back, wearing sunglasses and making with the squonking lines as Reed looked out over the crowd, rather like a disapproving school headmaster. He was singing Satellite of Love, and that’s when the band slowed down, Fernando Saunders dropping in rubbery eraser bass lines, and Reed’s voice became like a machine gun, spitting out syllables.

I think the voice of Lou Reed is really what characterizes him best: it’s a kind of flat mumble, inflected at various iambic points of the narrative. He usually told his stories through talk, though at times he wanted to sing like a bird (not an ostrich, which was the subject of his early novelty song, Do The Ostrich).

Lou Reed, who passed at 71, was the guy who told you the story, what really went down, without cream and sugar. As the main singer/songwriter of the Velvet Underground, he wasn’t afraid to present unvarnished tales of heroin, and whips, and femmes fatale, and tomorrow’s party girls waiting to score; but he also told stories of undisguised tenderness, such as I’ll Be Your Mirror, which dared say that telling a person what they’re really like might be a genuine act of kindness, of love, even.

An NYU dropout, Reed transferred to Syracuse University where he hung around poet Delmore Schwartz like a puppy; he got shock therapy as a teen and later worked as a songwriter for Pickwick before meeting up with guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Maureen Tucker and Welsh viola/bass player John Cale. They formed the Velvets and, backed with Andy Warhol’s money, played at art events and even a psychiatrists’ convention before recording their debut album in 1967. The cover featured a zip-down banana peel designed by Warhol and it went absolutely nowhere. But, as Brian Eno later remarked, if it sold only 30,000 copies, everyone who bought one formed a band.

It’s hard to imagine, now, how much that voice mattered to a teen growing up in a New England town in the late ‘70s. It seemed so much more real than, say, The Eagles. It was… alternative. Hearing Walk on the Wild Side on WBCN first thing in the morning. Exploring the live “Rock and Roll Animal” LP on vinyl, all glam guitar and attitude. Digging the noise implosion of White Light, White Heat, or Sister Ray (which my college roommate later said made him “feel sick”).

But half of Lou Reed’s gift was gab, the spoken word. Marathon interviews with Lester Bangs and others, where it was clear Reed would say anything to shock or confound, added to his mythos. He was his own P.T. Barnum, selling the Lou Reed Experience. “Sha-la-la, man,” Lou sang/spoke on 1978’s epic Street Hassle. “Why don’t you just slip away?”

Then it became about the music again. He regenerated in the ‘80s, making sparse, beautiful albums like “The Blue Mask” and “Legendary Hearts” with Quine, Saunders and drummer Fred Maher. His wit was writ with a ballpoint flourish, and he picked up the guitar again. The man — who once said he was “better” than Jimi Hendrix — traded distorted guitar lines with Velvets disciple Quine.

All through it, there was no one more assured of his own inviolable perch in rock history than Lou Reed. He just claimed it. Deal with it, a**holes. Imagine doing an album with Metallica (2011’s “Lulu”) that drew screeds of hate from both Metallica fans and Lou Reed fans. That takes serious stones. He could last out the wags and the critics, rebirthing albums such as “Berlin” and even (gulp!) “Metal Machine Music” onstage in the scrubbed-up setting of postmodern rock appreciation. You know: orchestras, dinner jackets and all that. Because rock and roll is the new classical music. Right?

But most of all, Reed can be credited with freeing rock from its basic rhythm and rhyme, cracking open its soul to find the inner pulse of noise. There’s something really wiggy and ecstatic about the way the guitar and viola clash in Heroin, the way the bass and guitar rumble in Waiting for the Man, the way Mo Tucker’s drums pound like a boulder rolling down a hill. Reed’s rhythm guitar was unhinged: listen to the live double album “1969” to hear the fluttering metallic moth wings of a thousand alternative bands to come, still ensconced in their lo-fi cocoons, waiting to be born. It was gutter rock, way outside the garage. And his words matched the casual chaos of the music. And his voice spoke it all like a wide-eyed, deadpan journalist.

Married to Laurie Anderson — performance art meets performance Lou — he continued to curate his own legend until the very end. His wit stayed sharper than a balisong. The man who said two chords is enough, three chords is overdoing it? He just kept doing the things he wanted to do.

I remember Lou finishing his set at the Orpheum, someone coming from the wings and, in a parody of James Brown (or was it Muhammad Ali?), laying a jacket around his shoulders. Lou looked up at the audience, sweat beading his face, the headmaster’s eyes weary now. I flashed an “L” sign to him, and for a moment he seemed to notice it. Then he turned and was gone.

Sha-la-la, man.