Last Thursday, a few hundred Lou Reed fans gathered in a grove of trees at Lincoln Center for an afternoon-long public memorial that celebrated Reed by filling the whole complex with his music, like church bells ringing in a town square. When I arrived, approaching the Metropolitan Opera House from Broadway, “Candy Says,” dreamy and ethereal, was as much a part of the landscape as Avery Fisher Hall. The kids playing around the Met fountain, and everybody coming and going from the David H. Koch Theatre, heard “I’m going to watch the bluebirds fly over my shoulder,” sung in a bit of a trance. Past the Met, in an elevated terrace of London plane trees called the Barclays Capital Grove, the music was wonderfully, but not aggressively, loud, and of an audio quality that Reed surely would have respected.
It was a cold, brilliantly sunny day. There were no speeches, no visuals—just people, trees, and tall poles with powerful speakers mounted on top. Beige chairs were set up in diagonal rows, and people of all ages, in black overcoats, leather jackets, sunglasses, knitted hats, and berets, sat in the chairs or along the wall or stood, leaning against trees, nodding their heads, looking at one another, gazing up at the leaves. Many took pictures or video. The bright sunlight was dappled under the flaking branches, extremes of light and shadow adding to the unreal, happy strangeness.
Then, violins: “Street Hassle.” A few people smiled in recognition. “Street Hassle,” from 1978, is eleven minutes long, and soothing in its sound; like so many of Reed’s rough-poetry numbers, the lyrics are full of drugs and death and sleaze. But the violins are majestic, melodic, and reassuring, and when the guitar comes in it sounds like a friend. A man wearing a baby strapped to his chest paced gently, a contented look on his face. The baby wore booties, a knitted red strawberry hat with a green stem, and earplugs. Toward the end of “Street Hassle,” Bruce Springsteen’s voice shows up, languid, intimate, late-seventies, talking about “tramps like us” being “born to pay.” The voice was a sly, welcome presence at the memorial; it was good to have Springsteen there, too.
In the middle of the terrace, milling around like everybody else, smiling, wearing a gray knitted hat, was Laurie Anderson, Reed’s widow. She wore a warm jacket and red gloves, and she held a camera with a long lens. When friends approached, she took their pictures, laughing sometimes; she looked comfortable and radiant, and seemed—as she did in the obituary she wrote for Reed, as well as in her tribute to him in Rolling Stone—to be handling Reed’s death with more love, warmth, and grace than anyone.
At “Vicious,” the upbeat, slightly pat single from “Transformer”—“You hit me with a flower / You do it every hour”—the energy picked up. Then “Beginning to See the Light” came on, from the Velvet Underground’s self-titled 1969 album—another old friend. A woman removed her sunglasses, dabbed at her eyes, and put them back on. “I met myself in a dream, and I just want to tell you, everything was all right,” Reed sang. A solidly built man in a black wool hat that said FUCK CANCER on it made his way along the perimeter, looking agitated. A beautiful older woman with blond hair, sitting alone, rocked with the music, and sang with the “How does it feel to be loved” part.
A young police officer walked through the grove, scanning the scene. Not much mayhem to rein in on Lou Reed-listening-party detail. “Femme Fatale” began playing, and then Nico was there, too. A woman entered the grove with an Irish setter, which flopped down and wagged its tail.
Every song felt significant. “Halloween Parade,” Reed’s AIDS elegy from the 1989 album “New York,” had been mentioned often the week Reed died. “This Halloween is something to be sure,” Reed sang. “Especially to be here without you.” He named some people who weren’t here anymore: Johnny Rio, Rotten Rita, Three Bananas, Brandy Alexander.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the past twenty years listening to Lou Reed sing about people he missed. Several times in the past couple of weeks, I listened to “Hello, It’s Me,” his posthumous farewell to Andy Warhol from “Songs for Drella,” the album he made with John Cale after Warhol’s death. It undid me every time: the love, the pride, the falling-out, the regret, the impossibility of fully showing your appreciation to someone who helped make you who you are.
Each song at the memorial, it was clear, had been a part of making the assembled listeners who they were. During “Pale Blue Eyes,” two women slow-danced with each other. During Morrison’s heartbreakingly gorgeous guitar solo, a man with curly gray hair leaned back, smiled, and swung his head with joy, singing along on “Down for you is up,” like it just didn’t get any better than that. The rock journalist Michael Azerrad appeared, wearing a leather jacket and a red scarf, looking satisfied with what he saw.
“Sunday Morning” felt significant because of its music-box beauty and its innocence, laced with something darker, and because it was many people’s first encounter with Reed. He had died on a Sunday morning, which many people, Patti Smith among them, had mentioned in written tributes. “Sword of Damocles,” from “Magic and Loss,” about impending death, was written after Reed had lost some friends to cancer. “I Love You Suzanne” felt significant because—well, I’ve never really understood what “I Love You Suzanne” means to other people; it seems as anomalous and funny as Reed’s bleached-blond-hair phase. But I know what it means to me: it’s my first memory of knowing who he was. It was 1984, the year of his Honda Scooter campaign, and I saw the video on MTV during a trip to New York with my parents. Lou Reed wore sunglasses and a leather jacket, and he acted tough. So why was he singing a retro pop song and hawking a scooter? (I still don’t have answers for this.) “I Love You Suzanne” is fun, and you can dance to it; it may be Lou Reed’s most uncool song, and its inclusion here made me very happy.
Salman Rushdie, wearing a black baseball cap and a black overcoat, appeared among the trees, by himself, looking around. When the spare, invigorating guitar lines of “Dirty Blvd.” started playing, a bearded man in a tattered coat put down his sandwich and yelled, “Whoo! There you go!” “Dirty Blvd.” is one of Reed’s quintessential New York-as-Hell songs, about a kid named Pedro whose “father beats him ’cause he’s too tired to beg,” full of lyrics like this:
It was hard not to marvel at the layers of New York that this moment condensed—eighties New York, described by an icon of sixties and seventies New York, in 2013, in the Barclays Capital Grove, in the Lincoln Center newly renovated by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with better sound and better access and a lawn, sponsored in part by Bloomberg and David Koch.
Reed sang, or talked, a bit snidely:
People laughed and cheered at “Lincoln Center.” I wondered how many movie stars had come to operas in limousines, even in the eighties, but took his point. Next: more significant songs, “Sweet Jane” and “Perfect Day.” And then the song: “Sister Ray.” At its first guitar notes, a man yelled, “Ha-HA!” triumphantly.
The moment when you realize someone has started playing “Sister Ray”—a seventeen-minute celebration, dirge, and orgy at once—is always a thrilling one. It’s instant pure rock energy and bliss—grinding, thrusting propulsion that you want to dance to. And it also means that you’re in the presence of other people who want to hear “Sister Ray,” which isn’t always the case in life. Sterling Morrison’s guitar filled the air. “I’m searching for my mainline / I said I couldn’t hit it sideways,” Reed sang. Near Anderson, a determined-looking woman holding a NY1 mic talked into a camera. Moe Tucker banged on her drums; Reed sang about sailors and ding-dongs; John Cale’s demonic organ propelled the song into a chaotic, frenzied trance. Everyone among the trees looked pleased—a bearded man in a leopard-print fez; a birdlike woman in a fur hat; a tall, Nordic father and his two sons, all in colorful outfits. Philip Glass, wearing a blue parka and round glasses, approached Anderson and hugged her, talking to her intently. A crowd began to form around them at a respectful distance. Young teens entered the scrum and took pictures of Anderson and Glass, charming the older people who observed them. “Sister Ray” whirled on. “Don’t you know you’ll stain the carpet,” Reed sang.
At the far end of the trees, toward the Library for the Performing Arts, a young man in a T-shirt danced, furiously air-guitaring. A jacket lay on the ground next to him, as if shucked off. A small ring of onlookers watched him, some filming or taking pictures. He was in his own world, dancing as if he had a job to do. When “Sister Ray” concluded, everyone cheered. The dancer put his jacket on and smiled, satisfied.
The afternoon was heading toward its conclusion; “Walk on the Wild Side,” the song most of the world associates with Lou Reed, began. At the opposite end of the grove, back toward the Met, twenty or so people were walking around with red roses whose stems were about four feet long, like sunflowers or walking sticks. “It’s from Laurie,” a man holding a rose said. Anderson had been handing them out. Now she stood at the bottom of the stairs to the grove, smiling and hugging people. This continued through “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Set the Twilight Reeling.”
The finale: feedback, glorious feedback—the first minute or so of “Metal Machine Music.” People laughed when they recognized it, and cheered when it, and the memorial, came to an end. Everyone at that end of the plaza was pointed toward Anderson, some with roses in hand.
“Thanks, all you music lovers, for coming!” Anderson called out. “Goodbye, Lou!” She waved. People clapped. Anderson pumped her fist. Then, surrounded by friends, she walked away, leading her and Reed’s scruffy little dog by its red leash.
Photograph: Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty
