THIS WEEK in rock history, 1973: NY fan jumps onstage and bites Lou Reed on the ass.
Lou Reed
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This week in 1973 Lou Reed was bitten on his ass by a concert-goer who jumped on stage in Buffalo, New York, and shouted "Leather!" Lou commented: "America seems to breed real animals."
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...and taking it all with him when he left this world.
Most people familiar with Lou's story knows that the Velvets pretty much disintegrated, Lou became disillusioned, worked for his dad's accounting firm for a while, recorded a first solo album that got mercilessly slammed and included session players like Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe from Yes ( ! ) and Caleb Quaye, Elton John's early guitarist ( ! )...the songs were "leftovers," lackluster versions of songs that never made it onto VU albums. No one bought it, the critics savaged it, who the hell KNEW "Transformer" and Bowie were on deck?
...so it all could have been over in June 1972, after that first solo album. But it wasn't. The stuff that Lou became famous / infamous for...not including the Velvets, of course...hadn't even happened yet. It would be another two years before Rock & Roll Animal. But instead of giving up and telling himself that he didn't have what it took, he set out on this self-destructive, hell-bent path that released the legend he knew he had inside.
There's a lesson in that for me.
...in the years between "Transformer" and his resurgence with guitarist Robert Quine, Lou was...for lack of a better term...a petulant diva, a stoned man-child. Seriously, you read that book and you start to see him as the cat with 9 lives, and he blew right through 8 of them in rapid succession.
