Earlier this week, New York punk icon Lou Reed passed away. He's notable to metalheads for the ill-received collaboration with Metallica from 2011, Lulu (our poignant review here).
Metallica's Lars Ulrich, who got to know Reed during the recording process of their collaboration penned a pretty touching tribute to the fallen icon. Here it is in full:
“We’d had communicated about a month ago when we were going to come by New York to play the Apollo, and Lou was going to come to the show and hang out,” he tells The Guardian. “He didn’t make it because his health took a turn for the worse, so I knew things were not good, but I didn’t know it was that serious. So I was half shocked and half crushed — shocked that he went so quickly and crushed over the loss.
“We were both outsiders, we both never felt comfortable going down the same path that everyone else was doing. Metallica’s always been autonomous, and Lou Reed is the godfather of being an outsider, being autonomous, marching to his own drum, making every project different from the previous one and never feeling like he had a responsibility to anybody other than himself. We shared kinship over that. And we brought him something that he didn’t have, or maybe hadn’t experienced so much, which in his own words were ‘energy’ and ‘weight’ and ‘size’ and whatever it is that happens when we start playing. He was so into what we brought him. And, of course, he brought us this incredible piece of work that he had already written, ‘Lulu’, and about her escapades and sexual endeavours. We brought something to each other, and we shared a common lack of ability to fit in with our surroundings.
“The hard rock community, they can be pretty harsh, so I’m pretty thick-skinned. And so when the hard rock community turned its back on the record, I wasn’t surprised. A lot of people were saying, ‘Oh, Lou Reed doesn’t sing.’ Yeah, no shit. What do you think he’s been doing for the last 40 years? Did you expect him to sound like Robert Plant? That’s not what he does. In the hard rock community I was not particularly surprised. But I was surprised that some more intellectual writers were pretty harsh to it.
“I’ll always remember his fragility. I felt in some way that I connected to his fragility, and identified with it. He was very open, he would say, ‘Lars, I love you,’ and text me a heart. It was so beautiful. The way he was so unfiltered is what I will remember most, and his fragility, and how I’ve never met anybody who, no matter what he was saying, he was always speaking his truth. It never felt cerebral, it always felt like it came from some other place somewhere. When people talk, it comes from their brain; I don’t know where his words came from, but they came from somewhere else. Emotional, physical, everything — it really resonated with me. I wanted to give him strength, and I think Metallica gave him strength. His being was so beautiful once that guard went away, and it was childlike.”
I love Reed's solo work and especially his albums with The Velvet Underground, and he truly could not give a shit, which is always respectable. But, I don't think I'll be revisiting Lulu ever again.
[via Metal Hammer]
