There’s a great recap of Lou Reed’s private Web 2.0 show on SFGate. I’m a big fan of his bass player, Rob Wasserman, having seen him play the “Bob and Rob” shows with The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir in LA and Dallas in the 80s. His Duets and Trios discs were amazing.
Lou Reed started out with some guitar warm-up noise, but it was all pretty quiet. After Life’s Good and Gassed and Stoked, people were still standing and talking in the back and sides of the room and it angered Lou. He told us we had 20 minutes and if we wanted to talk through it we could. Then he asked if we wanted him to turn it up and hurt us and soon it was too loud for anyone to talk. Next he did Dirty Boulevard, which was the one song I was looking forward to. After that was Sweet Jane and Lou ended with an unreleased song called Gravity that will be appearing in an AOL-related movie soon.
He told us that this was the moment he’d been waiting for his whole life — that sitting on St. Marks Place that he hoped someday there’d be a cyberspace and an Internet and that he’d be playing for all of us. It was touching to know that this was a dream come true for Lou Reed and that I was there for it.
Really I think he just wanted to jump off the stage and start slugging people.
Brian Alvey 