To honor the dead is not to pretend they haven’t died, or that nobody has died, ever, or to make sure they’re safely buried or to think that a few gentle words and two coins on their eyes alone make for a proper send-off.
With that in mind let’s talk about what a genuine motherfucker Lou Reed allegedly was.
“A lying sack of shit” Lester Bangs called him. He had a very intense love-hate relationship with Reed, mostly one-sided. The Velvet Underground were “the greatest band that ever existed”, because they questioned the opposition of mind and body, and because they were adults. “I’m a realist. That’s why I listen to Lou Reed.”
Bangs was a great moralist too, when he felt like it. He accused Dylan of dallying with “Mafia chic” in his song “Joey”, he pointed out the racism and sexism of the CBGB scene – and he said that Lou Reed was complicit in the death of his friend Peter Laughner, “the first casualty of New Wave”. Laughner, an early member of Pere Ubu, had died from pancreatitis at age 24, “because he wanted to be like his idol”.
So he swore to avenge his friend’s death: “You stupid fuckheads, you who treat life as a camp joke, you who have lost your sense of wonder about the state of being alive itself – I AM OUT FOR YOU” And there was plenty of that in late 70s New York, starting with Richard Hell and his “Please Kill Me” shirts. Bangs saw this Death Trip for what it was: a prolonged adolescence, a denial of both death and life.
Even at his most clownish Lou Reed was above all that. He had the good fortune to grow up and make honest music about his own stupidity and his own addictions and maybe even life and other people. That’s all Lester Bangs ever wanted from him anyway. He died before he could mourn Lou Reed’s death.