By Bill Bentley



I fell in love with Lou Reed twenty-one years before I ever met him. It was in a small listening booth at Moses Melody Shop in Houston. In 1967, you could take the store’s records into the booth and listen. For free. Nothing was shrink-wrapped then, so everything was fair game. I would spend hours there, lost in the sounds of the universe.

The first time I went to the record shop was in 1956. I was six years old and needed to buy Elvis Presley’s 45 of “Hound Dog.” Something had exploded inside me after seeing Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I realized that I couldn’t live without it. There was no other surefire survival fix for me. Without rock ’n’ roll, I was a goner, and I knew it from the start.

Born in 1950, I’d been hit with polio at birth and quickly realized my place was going to be on the sidelines. No sports, no girls, no swimming parties, no climbing trees, no looking cool, no nothing. Except music. When I heard Elvis, I found my future in one fell swoop.

Music has always been the great equalizer for me. The only entry fee into that world was a wide-open soul and enough energy to go completely wild. I would throw my life into those songs and live shows with such insane abandon, I knew no one could outdo me on that playing field—no one. So that’s exactly what I’ve done the past 68 years. Jumped in 100% with The Sound, whether it was rock, blues, jazz, soul, country, whatever: anything that hit my monkey nerve. When I hear something that makes my heart race and my head feel like I will live forever, I am home.

When I heard about a band called Velvet Underground, I suspected a strong strain of psychosis ran through their veins, and I knew I had to hear it all. So off to Moses Melody I went, searching for that first album with the banana on the cover. Even from afar, it seemed to promise a different way of life. In their dark aura and lyrical perversions, maybe there could be a safe place I could land. The Velvets, and especially their leader, Lou Reed, offered that gift. It was music aimed at rejects, and that was me.

I needed to find a way into the New York band’s world. The album came out in March of 1967, and by May, I was working as an orderly at Hermann Hospital. My mornings consisted of giving enemas and sponge baths, changing bedpans, inserting catheters, and often wheeling corpses down to the morgue in the basement. Starting work at 6:45 a.m., even for a sixteen-year-old, made life feel pretty bleak. But once I found the album and made my way into a listening booth, it was obvious a new approach to living awaited. It would be one that stretched the elastic ethics of human behavior and twisted the notions of modern love. The songs created a place of hope for those without it. More than anything else, the Velvet Underground pulled back the curtain on the forbidden and showed there was no need for fear.

Lou Reed offered a sensuous despair doubled-up with a powerful danger in all his songs. Along with electric viola player John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker, and guest vocalist/chanteuse Nico, the band transmitted a whole universe of emotions from birth to death. Suddenly, being a reject had strength. No rock ’n’ roll band had ever gone to all those places like the Velvet Underground did, and being produced and managed by Andy Warhol (at least on paper) put their public persona through the roof. Reed and company opened the door on the real underbelly of America and were promptly hated for it.

Living in Texas then, the chances to see the band live were next to nil. When the Velvets toured there in 1969, I couldn’t go to the club they were playing in Austin because the Vulcan Gas Company was off-limits per the terms of my probation. I’d gotten arrested with a small amount of marijuana, but it was classified a felony narcotic then and carried a stiff sentence of five years to life. I paid off the right person and got probation.

It was tough staying away from the Vulcan because I’d become an over-the-moon acolyte of the VU by then. After the mind-expanding properties of the Velvets’ first two albums, the third release overwhelmed with a softer explosion, one that bounced around the soul with songs like “Candy Says,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “What Goes On.” By then, John Cale had departed the fold, and replacement Doug Yule brought more subdued strengths to Lou Reed’s songs. Still, I wouldn’t risk going to prison to see the band. I’ve regretted that decision ever since.

Velvet guitarist Sterling Morrison quit the band in 1971, a year after Reed’s departure, and moved to Austin to start his doctoral studies in English literature. What were the odds? As soon as I found out, I started the hunt to find Holmes Morrison, as he was using his first name in Austin to keep away the VU curious. One afternoon, he was interviewed on stage in the library auditorium by new media maven Dr. Joe Kruppa, but the setup was strange.

The stage was empty except for a large screen, and Morrison sat in a chair somewhere behind the curtain, his image projected onto the screen. It all had a distinct Warholian approach, somewhat inhuman since the stage was actually empty. His fellow English grad students told me I wouldn’t like what I found if I met him and declined to make an introduction. He had clearly alienated some of the laid-back Texas crowd in the English department.

After three years, I was sitting in Austin’s Cedar Door bar one hot afternoon and heard the man to my left launch into a vicious diatribe against Frank Zappa out of the blue. As I looked at him, the person talking trash had a big mustache and was wearing a Dixie beer T-shirt. Still, something told me it was Morrison, so I leaned his way to ask, “Are you Sterling?”

He looked a little quizzical and quickly answered, “Who wants to know?”

I introduced myself and told him I’d been trying to meet him for three years. Over the course of a half-dozen beers, I asked if I could interview him for the Austin Sun biweekly where I was the music editor. Sterling said he’d think about it and gave me his number to call in a couple of weeks.

From that afternoon started one of the most interesting friendships of my life. As Sterling and I spent time together, I discovered a complicated man of many opinions and a steely view of modern life. He was a tough cookie with a soft heart. Sterling started sharing precise and unlimited memories of life in the Velvet Underground. His stories were stunning, and I felt like I’d won the lottery.

After a few months, I asked Sterling to join our bar band, The Bizarros, and once he agreed, the ride went into overdrive fast. Now, it was days and nights of terrorizing Austin, listening to his fascinating life on the forefront of the new cultural frontier in the 60s.

There were clearly ambivalent feelings about Lou Reed but also a deep-seated affection and admiration, like a fellow soldier who shared vivid war experiences. They had parted acrimoniously, but the brotherhood lived on. There was no retirement being a Velvet Underground founder. In fact, Sterling had the honor of being the VU member with the most years, being there at the very start and lasting longer than even Lou Reed. He always held his head high because of it.

When it came time for the Velvet Underground to start recording their fourth and final studio album, they moved to Cotillion, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. The VU were the most critically-acclaimed rock band in the world at one point, but their sales were minuscule at best. No doubt there was a terrible tension in all this because the group knew what they had accomplished musically but saw the shore of success slipping further and further from their grasp. Fortunately, the new songs included future Reed classics like “Who Loves the Sun,” “Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Head Held High,” and “New Age.” And maybe, most of all, “Sweet Jane.”

Reed would later share a telling story of the yin and yang of his relationship with Sterling, and it centered around that very song. He had just finished writing the music for “Sweet Jane” in his apartment bedroom and walked into the living room where Sterling sat reading a book.

Knowing the absolute irresistibleness of the song’s chord structure, Reed told his fellow guitarist he wanted to show it to him. At the end of playing the brand new “Sweet Jane” for the first time to anyone, he looked at Sterling and likely hoped to get a strong positive reaction. How could anyone belittle this music which would one day become iconic?

Nope, not this time. Sterling just gave Reed a flat look, shook his head slightly, and asked, “What’s with the fourth chord, Lou?”

By the time Loaded was released in November 1970, the VU did not include their center. Lou Reed left the band at the end of a show at Max’s Kansas City in the early morning of August 24. His parents had come to take him home. “Sweet Jane” became a brand new radio classic, but out on the road, the Velvet Underground played it without him. Reed might’ve not known where he was heading, but he surely knew it would be alone.

Lou Reed went on to become an utterly uncompromising solo artist, capable of following the “Walk on the Wild Side” radio-friendly glam rock of Transformer with the doom and gloom masterpiece of Berlin. I remained enthralled by his albums all through the 70s. I was also still hoping to get a chance to meet him somewhere along the way.

When Reed finally booked an Austin show in ’77, I asked Sterling to go. “There is no way I’m buying a ticket,” Sterling steadfastly said. “I was in a band with the guy. I shouldn’t have to pay to see him.” So I bought Sterling a ticket, and off we went to the Texas Opry House. Once we settled in and Ian Dury and the Blockheads had finished their rousing set, out came Reed in full-tilt leather and, near the end of the set, a stage prop syringe, which he used to mime shooting up during “Heroin.”

Next to me in the audience, Sterling kept patting his stomach and saying “165 here, same as I weighed in the Velvets.” Reed had put on weight and was heavier, and his former co-guitarist wouldn’t let him off the hook! The last I saw Sterling that evening was after

the show sitting on an amplifier case outside Reed’s dressing room. He looked like the student waiting his turn to go see the principal because of some bad behavior.

Two days later, Sterling resurfaced and said he and his former bandmate had a civil reunion, though Reed had almost totaled the car he barely knew how to drive going to meet Morrison at a pizza parlor. “That would have been perfect. Lou gets killed coming to meet me, and I end up with the blame for his death.”

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to work at the LA Weekly, one of the first interviews I chased was with Lou Reed. He was coming to play the Roxy, so I wrote his publicist, Barbara Shelley at Arista Records, an impassioned request. It worked, too, and the day for the call from Reed felt electric.

But when the phone rang, I froze. His new wife Sylvia told me she would put Lou on the phone, and when she did, he said, simply and directly, “Now that you got me, what do you want?”

I stammered around with a few inane questions, but in the end, I choked up, and I knew it. He wasn’t in the mood to be interviewed, and I didn’t have the goods to turn that reticence around. I beat myself up about that for several years.

I was working at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank in 1988, and the day I found out that Lou Reed was joining the fold felt like a massive lightning bolt shot through my entire cerebral cortex. To suddenly get to be Lou Reed’s publicist validated all of the various hijinks of my 38 years on planet Earth. And once I heard the New York album via a nondescript clear plastic advance cassette, I knew the golden road had opened up. There were several serious fans of the man at Warner Bros. but none as psychotic as me. This was a life-changer.

When I’d first heard New York, I wrote a gushing letter to Lou and mentioned I had been close friends with Sterling in Austin, and he had played in our band, The Bizarros. So Lou knew who I was and that I was coming to the studio in New York to do an interview with him about New York that would be distributed to radio and press people. He was waiting in the studio for me to arrive, and Sylvia told me he’d liked the letter I’d sent.

Walking into the studio control room in November 1988, Lou took one look at me, crooked his finger, and said, “Come with me,” in a not-too-welcoming tone. No hello or even introductions. We went to a back room, and he said, point blank, “Sterling remembers everything, and I remember nothing. Do we have that clear?”

Lou had to mark his rules. He was like that: he liked to set the boundaries, with no questioning what was outside the lines, so he did that with me.

During our first discussions about the songs on New York, he talked a lot about how much rewriting he’d done and how proud he was of what he accomplished. When I mentioned the song “Halloween Parade,” where he sings about the ravaging results of the AIDS epidemic in his crowd, I mentioned the line, “The past keeps knocking on my door,” and how devastating it sounded in the song.

Lou gave me a deep look, adding, “I got out just in time.” As a person and as a lyricist, Reed could sum it all up in a few blunt, beautiful words.

My adventures with Lou (and Sylvia, who had become his manager, too) really started around Christmas of 1988. New York was bursting at the seams with holiday spirit, and I was walking on air. I’d fly from Los Angeles to New York, check into Le Méridien hotel, stop by Colony Records on Broadway to buy Lou an album I thought he might like, and then head uptown to their apartment on the 17th floor at 424 West End Ave. I’d bring an album every time I went there—O.V. Wright, Bobby Bland, Lee Dorsey. Lou loved classic R&B and soul. One time I found the single of Eddie & Ernie’s “Outcast.” That flipped him. Sterling had told me once in their early pad on Ludlow Street in ’66 that Lou got so excited listening to it that he ripped it off the little record player and took a bite out of it!

I knew by our first foray out that things were going to be different. We headed to a club on Long Island so Lou could sit in with The Feelies, a band who were clearly influenced strongly by the Velvets. Reed always appreciated the attention and was encouraging to young bands.

Somehow our town car ended up on the tarmac of JFK for one of the freight airlines. The driver had no clue where we were going, and I could see Lou getting agitated, but he kept it at a low boil. He would look at Sylvia and send a secret signal he was not happy.

Like a pro, Lou suggested we go to an arrival area at JFK then hire a taxicab to drive to the club which our town car would follow. I remember thinking, boy, this guy could have been a Boy Scout.

Once we found the spot, Lou walked onstage, plugged in his guitar, and played blistering versions of the Velvets’ “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” “Sweet Jane,” “White Light/White Heat,” and, just for kicks, his new song, “Dirty Blvd.” for about 300 people.

I kept watching the stage and the audience—and my own reactions in a bar mirror. I’m pretty sure I’d levitated a few inches off the ground. I could feel the blood racing through my body, and I experienced it all the way back to Manhattan when Lou insisted on stopping at Gray’s Papaya uptown for double hotdogs.

New York became Reed’s third act, following the Velvet Underground years and the early-70s success of “Walk on the Wild Side.” Lou knew when he had re-entered that zone. His laugh came more often, and his cynical side took a small vacation.

The 90s brought one of the bigger surprises of Lou Reed’s long musical life: a reunion with fellow founding VU member John Cale. Reed and Cale had a bad end in the VU, but now, all these years later, the two were writing songs in honor of their mentor Andy Warhol’s life and having a grand time of it.

So much so that the Velvet Underground reunited and actually toured Europe before the inevitable implosion. Before the tour, though, there was a spontaneous leap onto the stage at the Cartier Foundation in Paris after the opening of an exhibition in the City of Lights celebrating The Factory.

Reed, Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker had traveled to Paris to be part of the opening day and somehow managed to drop all residual hard feelings from the 60s. Tucker never had any issues, but the three men sure did. In Paris, everything went away, so by the time they took the stage to play an ominous version of “Heroin,” it was as if nothing ill had ever happened. All four were absolutely buoyant, with the men’s wives and Tucker’s daughter, Carrie, watching.

At dinner that night, with Factory stalwart Billy Name and Nico’s grown-up child, Ari, everyone acted like it was 1967, and the world lay spread before them. Through the graces of Warner Bros. Records’ expense accounts, I managed to pick up the tab, walking home on Paris streets in an absolute dream state.

Things started amping up after Paris, and it wasn’t long before a European tour by the Velvet Underground was a reality. Rehearsals were held, the shows opening for U2 started, and what had seemed like the perfect idea quickly stumbled. Sterling Morrison said it felt like the VU were now Reed’s backing band, and some of the decades-old resentments started to flare up onstage and off.

By the time the band returned to the States, Lou Reed was again a solo artist.

The Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed relationship had been one full of tension and, after the 60s, distrust. Both grew up on Long Island, had met in college, but were really worlds apart. Morrison stayed fixed on getting his Ph.D his entire adult life, working on it for fourteen years until he finally finished his studies and wrote a dissertation. Reed went the total rock ’n’ roll route and never looked back. When the VU reissues started coming out in the 80s, Morrison claimed he’d never signed the contract to allow them, and the lawyers jumped in to try and figure it out.

While those battles progressed, Morrison moved to Houston and became a captain on a tugboat at the Houston Ship Channel, a far cry from The Factory and rock ’n’ roll infamy. At its deepest level, though, Lou and Sterling were brothers bonded by an insatiable urge to create music at its most original and were melded together by the determined, obstinate desire to never compromise. And brothers fought and often drifted apart.

But when Morrison was dying back at his wife Martha’s house in Poughkeepsie in 1995, Lou Reed took the train alone from Manhattan to hold his hand and tell him he loved him. He wrote a story about Morrison in The New York Times magazine, calling him his “Vulcan warrior,” and he meant it. The connections formed in a person’s twenties are sometimes never surpassed, and both Velvets knew it. Fight? Sure. Fix it? Sometimes. Forgive? Always.

In 1992, Lou recorded Magic and Loss. He’d lost two close friends—Factory stalwart Rotten Rita and songwriting legend Doc Pomus—and was scrambling to find a way through the pain. While Lou didn’t really show those emotions in public very often, it had shaken him down deep, and he needed a way to respond in song.

Warner Bros. wasn’t sure how to cope either, but that was because promoting a whole album about death wasn’t what they had in mind to follow New York, the only gold album Reed ever received. But the label did their best, and I raced into the press world to carry the flag and point out the music’s amazingness.

When I lost a best friend then and told Lou, he just looked at me and said, “Magic and loss, Billy B., magic and loss.” Sure enough, the more I thought about it, the clearer it became. When Lou and the band went to The Today Show to tape the song “Power and Glory” for broadcast the next day, a buzz saw had been fired up and was waiting to be walked into.

Lou told me as we arrived at the studio that morning at 6:30 a.m. that he’d been up all night. “These early shows, I approach from the other side. My voice is too scratchy if I’ve slept.” Smart man, and once again, common sense ruled the day.

He’d also added jazz singer Jimmy Scott to the band, which was a genius move that perfectly matched the music. Jimmy had been one of Doc Pomus’ dearest friends, and the songwriter had put in his will that when he died, Scott would sing at his funeral, knowing all the record executives who refused to sign Jimmy to a deal for so many years would be marveled by the man’s voice and do exactly that. And it worked. Sire Records’ Seymour Stein offered Scott a recording contract the day after the funeral, and Lou added him to his group almost as fast.

That morning at The Today Show, though, the song worried the staff from the first note at the sound check. It was clearly about dying, and that plus Scott’s otherworldly voice and unique stage demeanor had these hardened stagehands shooting each other looks like, “What the hell is going on? People can’t eat their eggs and put on their make-up to this. Death doesn’t sell at 8 a.m.” Sure enough, the next day I got a call from the show that the song would not be used.

One of the wonders of Lou Reed was that he did not let obstacles stop him. They just made him stronger. He had grown up leaning into the wind, whether it was his parents’ disapprovals or the critics insulting his music. It mattered to Lou but not enough to stop him. And the life-changing moment when he and artist Laurie Anderson joined as a couple in the first half of the 90s set the course for the rest of his life.

In ways that weren’t always explainable, it was like their union gave Lou an inspiration to become even bolder and to explore other sides of his talents like photography with as much passion as he put into music. It supplied Lou with a renewed spirit.

I sensed the days of peaches and cream were over for him at Warner Bros., and I wasn’t far wrong. Set the Twilight Reeling came out in 1996, and Lou insisted the first single be “Sex with Your Parents.” That was pretty much the end of that album. The brilliant follow-up, Ecstasy, came out four years later, and the title song single included an astonishing video made by a Reed friend who unfortunately did not get releases signed by all the civilians in the streets, so it couldn’t be officially used.

By now there was no way around it: Lou Reed was damaged goods at Warner Bros. Lou knew it, too but didn’t flinch. In fact, he decided to record a double-album, titled The Raven, based on the poems of Edgar Allan Poe—really. The Raven had issues before it ever came out. It was a double album consisting mostly of spoken word performances with guests ranging from Willem Dafoe and the Blind Boys of Alabama to Steve Buscemi and Ornette Coleman. I could feel the coldness whenever I brought up the album in company meetings. I even got tagged “the King of Lost Causes” in one of them, but inside, I knew that was likely the highest honor you could ever receive, and I learned that from Lou.

For several years, Lou Reed had become an ardent student of Tai Chi. It gave him a physical and mental focus that almost defied gravity. His three-hour workout with heavy swords led to a continuing relationship with Master Ren, a Chinese champion who not only guided Lou through his studies but also became part of his live concerts.

It wasn’t every day at a rock ’n’ roll show that a Tai Chi master in full-on robes came onstage with the band to participate in the show. When Reed went to Austin to deliver the keynote address at Austin’s SXSW music conference in 2008, hours-long Tai Chi workouts were part of his daily regimen.

For that, he needed a large empty hotel conference room with carpets. Staying at the Four Seasons in Austin, he asked my help in getting such a room. Off we went to the concierge in the lobby, and that guy just happened to be an old friend of mine. Lou was standing behind me when I explained his request, and halfway through my spiel, the concierge started laughing. Oh no, I instantly thought, this is not going right. So Lou gently moved me aside, stepped up to my friend’s desk, and simply stated, “Listen, does it look like I’m kidding?!?” Within five minutes, Lou had his room and went to get the swords.

Later that night, a live film of his performance of Berlin at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York was being screened at the prestigious Paramount Theatre downtown. At the sound check, there were problems with the audio system. It just wasn’t up to Lou’s expectations, and I could see a dark cloud roll in front of his face. Once he found the presentation producer, Reed pulled the pin on a few verbal grenades and lobbed them in her direction.

I could hear the argument halfway across the empty theater, and the next thing I saw was the producer in tears. This was definitely turning into a nightmare with Lou suggesting we pull the plug on the entire event that night and go to dinner instead. Cooler heads prevailed, more sound equipment was brought in, and by the end of the screening, there was a five-minute standing ovation for the film. And even Lou was smiling.

Lou didn’t show much emotion in public unless he really liked something, and then he was the first and the loudest to say so. But I often thought he had a high vulnerability in life, and his way of dealing with it was to be tough and sometimes aloof. That didn’t mean he didn’t have feelings, but he just chose to keep them to himself. If he was displeased about things, whether it was sound, stage set-up, advertising, or, heaven forbid, sound mixes, he said exactly what he thought and in a way that would get heard. He never settled for less than what he expected things should be.

Once, we went to see the play Jersey Boys on Broadway. He was overcome by the sensitivity of the story, and I looked over to see him in tears. Although show business was a big part of his life, he always stayed open to what others went through and let it affect him deeply. He would talk about the inequities of what blues and soul artists endured and try to help when he could. He tried to get Warner Bros. Records to sign Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons, now known as Anohni) to no avail.

Lou wasn’t so much a loner but someone who preferred only one or two people to be with. He was wary of crowds of people he didn’t know. Once, someone stopped him on Broadway near his apartment and started laying a long rap on him about how Lou’s music saved his life. I tried to be sympathetic listening. Finally, Lou just took hold of my coat collar and steered us away. I learned a lesson that night: never let a stranger get too close.

A few years before the SXSW trip, I’d known it was time to try pulling a large rabbit out of a hat for a new Reed release, so I went back to the playbook and saw that live albums had usually done well for Lou. Rock ’n’ Roll Animal still made waves, so I thought, Why not try it in 2004?

I scribbled down a sort-of budget of $100,000, which I’d never done before, and attempted to get a meeting with the label chairman for his approval. And tried. And tried. But nothing. No meeting, no call backs, no emails. Radio silence.

It was down to the wire–a week before Reed and company would play Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre, and my hopes were shrinking. In the back of my mind, I heard Lou saying, “Don’t quit. Keep trying.” It was the day before the show, so I left my office to drive home. I was almost there and got the call from the chairman’s assistant to come see the boss. Turning around and racing back, I strolled into his big room, laid out my wrinkled sheet of paper with the figures on it, and made my case. He asked me if I could do it for that money. I lied, since I was only guessing, and said, “Without a doubt!”

We were on. The show the next night was incredibly moving. The line up was a drummer-less band with bassist Fernando Saunders, keyboardist Michael Rathke, cellist Jane Scarpantoni, singer Anohni, and Master Ren going through involved Tai Chi movements. My mind melted the moment they walked onstage. When Anohni sang the Velvets’ “Candy Says,” I had to shiver it was so beautiful. And I was reminded, a little uncomfortably, of a night 15 years ago when I was first getting to know Lou. I was curious, so I asked him if the lyrics in that song, “Candy says I hate the quiet places, that cause the smallest taste of what will be,” reflect the idea of a body’s long home in the casket after death. He just looked at me like I was a Martian and laughed. He didn’t even say no.

When the invoices started coming in for the album–soon to be called Animal Serenade–I noticed they were getting close to the total of the $100,000 maximum I’d promised it would cost. All of sudden, Lou decided it would be a double album which meant double the mixing time.

Engineer Nick Launay had agreed to mix only a single album for $10,000. A double album would be more. I told Lou we were in a bind. “Call him up, and tell him that’s all we have. And ask him if he wants to work with the real thing or not. That’s it.” I did, and Launay was in. And I learned another valuable lesson: never underestimate the power of Lou Reed.

A few weeks later when mixing was finished, Reed called me and simply said, “Hello Mr. Executive Producer.” He’d given me a credit I’d never have asked for–and did it with such quiet grace, I still smile at the memory.

By the time Animal Serenade came out in 2004, there was barely a soul at the label who had an interest in it. Later that year, I got called into the HR department and was terminated. A week later, I got called by the chairman, and he asked me if I wanted to stay. “I never wanted to leave,” I said. I hadn’t even moved out of my office yet.

Years later, after Lou had died, I found out he’d written the chairman a letter asking I be kept on the staff. Lou had never mentioned it to me. Nor did he mention the utter lack of success of Animal Serenade. It was the last solo album of his life, and I know he was proud of it.

In my job, I’ve worked with a lot of famous musicians. Lou was different. He really wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. He’d cut his teeth in the music business recording songs like “Heroin” and “Sister Ray,” so what could anyone say to him? Lou didn’t ask for favors and wasn’t afraid to tell his truth exactly like he saw it. He knew, however, who was on his side and who wasn’t.

Also, he possessed the purest sense of loyalty I’ve ever witnessed in the music business. It was his true test of friendship, and he understood its value better than anyone I’ve ever known. If you were with him and he was with you, nothing ever changed that. Many times, when the times are good, the artist is all in. But if it changes, they’re the first to forget you. Not Lou. He actually cared about the people who helped him and would stand up to anyone.

I spoke with Lou shortly after Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica, came out, and he wasn’t surprised at all by the poor reviews. He’d been there before, he said, and would be there again. He knew the critics’ praise came and went and even joked, “Sometimes it’s good to put out something like Metal Machine Music just to shock everybody.”

During the Lulu sessions, Lou had threatened drummer Lars Ulrich to “step outside to get his ass kicked” during one argument. Now, that would have been the perfect music video for “Junior Dad,” one of Lou’s best songs.

The last time I saw Lou perform was when he came to Los Angeles to sing a song with Gorillaz. Walking from Reed’s dressing room into the backstage area, Lou led me to the side before he joined the group to perform. He had walked around backstage looking for a chair to move to a place so I could sit and see the band. It was such a kind, thoughtful gesture, and I recall thinking of all the judgmental comments I’d heard about Reed over the years. Never had anyone made such efforts to make me comfortable during a show. It’s often the smaller things we remember about the past that bring the deepest resonance.

Not too long after Reed’s Gorillaz appearance, he came to Los Angeles to give a lecture at the Cal State Long Beach campus. Record producer Bob Ezrin, who’d worked with Lou on Berlin and other projects, led the Q&A. Only ten minutes into the evening, a combatant in the audience started yelling at Lou to talk about something besides sound quality and equipment. It got ugly quick, as it often did when spectators started screaming suggestions. Lou told the man to “shut the fuck up” and then demanded he leave, saying he’d get his money back. The emotional climate had bottomed out, and it was hard to change the dynamic that night. Once more, I realized when Lou Reed made up his mind, that was it.

As I said goodbye backstage after the lecture was over, in a million years I didn’t think I wouldn’t see him alive again. He looked a bit frail, but there was such a strong strength Reed always projected, I pretended not to notice. I always just figured Lou would live forever.

Then, when I turned on the radio on the Sunday morning of October 27, 2013 and heard the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” playing, the first song on their first album, I just had an instant sinking feeling something was wrong. It felt like I was watching a car barreling towards me at 100 miles an hour, and there was nothing I could do to avoid the final crash. I knew Lou was gone.

He had undergone a liver transplant five months previously, and his recovery seemed sure and strong. We’d been talking about making a new album, but he said he hadn’t written anything recently. I suggested he sing a collection of his favorite songs by others, and we had a lot of kicks going back and forth regarding choices (“Rhythm of the Rain” by The Cascades, Eddie & Ernie’s “Outcast,” Garland Jeffreys’ “Lon Chaney,” and T. Rex’s “Jeepster” were all contenders).

There are many moments when Lou Reed’s soul still rushes through me like a warm wind on a motionless day. It might be a certain chord I hear, a word spoken with his distinct New York accent, or even just a glancing memory of the way he smiled when he was happy followed by a restrained cackle which assured all was right in Reed’s world. Other times, I hear him silently speaking to me, his words of advice echoing across the 25 years we were friends.

His spirit is there, undiminished with a worldly peaceful wisdom he had never quit seeking. He had lived long enough and worked hard enough to have earned that peace, and to be next to it felt like I had entered a secret spot in the cosmos. It’s hard to describe, but I know it will never leave me. I will always recall those days and nights of being by his side, whether we were walking the New York streets, laughing about the absurdities of human beings, or listening to music. He had an exacting eye and ear for what was roiling all around him. It was in his blood and made life sing for him.

One of my most vivid memories is driving away from the Ed Sullivan Theater after Reed had taped a song for that night’s Late Show with David Letterman. He was sitting in the backseat of a town car as he looked west towards the Hudson River. The sun was glowing with its last rays of the day, turning the brownstones on the street a shimmering golden hue. The fall air was brisk, something you could almost reach out and touch. Lou, leaning back in his black leather seat, said to himself in a soft voice what felt like a prayer: “God, I love this city.” It might’ve been a cliché coming out of another mouth but not Lou’s. For a moment, I could barely breathe, feeling a physical gratitude to have shared something so powerful with a man I’d loved for so many years. All I could say was, “Amen.”

As I write tonight, it is Lou Reed’s birthday, and as I always do on this day, I’ve been listening to his music. And, once again, the chorus of “Heroin” keeps coursing through me. Those seven words, “I guess that I just don’t know,” are the ones I remember most from when I heard the first Velvet Underground album in 1967, exactly fifty-seven years ago. They were Reed’s blueprint for life, the mantra that encouraged him to explore what it actually means to be alive.

Because Lou Reed never looked away, never stopped trying to find the next step to take him forward, never quit rejoicing at the indefinable experience of when worlds collide and the unexpected occurs. For him, his time here was forever a surprise, and it lit up everything around him when the words and the chords and the sunrises and the sunsets would merge into a feeling of reverence for all he had been allowed to see. In that moment, Lou knew.