Lou Reed
Un anno fa l'addio a Lou Reed

Lou Reed, on October 27 of a year ago, passed away. The world he left had seen him fight with varying success, sometimes losing and sometimes winning. All in all, like everyone. Lewis Allan Reed, his full name, bid farewell commenting with “Tomorrow I’m smoke“, “Tomorrow I’ll be smoke“, a final reflection worthy of his caustic and poetic pen at the same time.

Lewis was born in Brooklyn on March 2, 1942. The boy came from a good family, yet his rebellious nature would become a problem for everyone, primarily for himself. School, authority, conformism, normality, and all those customs and traditions meant to shape a model citizen or at least acceptable to society, were all felt by Allan as hemp ropes that troubled his limbs. Why be nailed to the cross of a respectable society? This is the question Lewis asked himself, feeling he was born free; he didn’t feel like a fox with its paw caught in a poacher’s trap, but rather a boy with many life projects. A life in his own way, but a life: after all, what would he have had to plan, a life in someone else's way?

Anyway and unsurprisingly, Lou Reed was opposed in his personal intentions. His parents tried everything: sessions with psychologists, electroshock, and so on. The results were destructive. Various drugs and alcohol would become for Lewis the medications with which to attempt self-healing in critical moments, that is, every day and every year (excluding attempts at ‘health purification’ done in some centers like other colleagues had attempted with varying success).

The only remedy that manages to support him is music, or rather, the art of the exercise of thought. Many, when talking about rock artists, mention the ‘saving music’, creating confusion for the reader; music as it existed in the time of Amilcare Ponchielli is an obsolete relic, so it should be stated that it is the artistic/creative activity that characterizes figures like Lewis Allan Reed.

Lou Reed, together with the Velvet Underground, carries on a particularly original rock discourse faithful to the premises. In 2003, the poet Lou Reed with the double CD "The Raven", reinterprets in his own way another poet, Edgar Allan Poe. Distinguished guests of this work are Ornette Coleman, David Bowie, Willem Dafoe.

In Italy, comparable to his approach favoring poetry and disillusionment drawn from the world of the street, we find several artists who, to varying degrees, have been inspired by his figure: Edoardo Bennato with "Un giorno credi", Ligabue with "Urlando contro il cielo", Alberto Fortis with "Milano e Vincenzo", Mimmo Parisi with "Il grande cielo", Carboni with "Inno nazionale" and others.

It is worth mentioning that, to honor the memory of Lou Reed, on October 18 in Italy, precisely at the Teatro della Concordia in Montecastello di Vibio, the historic bassist of the American singer-songwriter, Fernando Saunders, performed by playing some of Reed’s songs. The bassist, thanks to the experience gained with Lou, has subsequently collaborated with Marianne Faithfull, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Joan Baez, and even Luciano Pavarotti.

By December it will be announced if the late Lou Reed will have the possibility to appear as a character in the famous Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Paraphrasing an overused saying, one could say that the first band is never forgotten; his first band was called The Shades and Lou, last year, rejoined it: for him, it was time to become a ‘shade’, a shadow again.