NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
LOUREED wasn’t known as the sentimental sort. And yet, he kept a memento of his earliest days as songwriter where he could see it every day. The demo tape he posted to himself to self-copyright in 1965 is one of the treasures in the Lou Reed Archive and the exhibition celebrating it, Caught Between The Twisted Stars, which opens on March 2, Reed’s 80th birthday. “We’d tried getting into a locked safe, thinking it was there,” curator Don Fleming recalls. “But it was right behind him at his desk in his office, on a shelf with a bunch of CDs, still unopened that whole time. It was so mind-blowing to me.”
“Lou kept. “Signed photographs of his friends were precious. But Lou was never nostalgic. He was very practical with certain things like guitars. If he had gotten the sounds he’d wanted out of one, he’d give it away.” Yet, following Reed’s death in 2013, Anderson found he’d left her over 8,000 items, ranging from unreleased music to bar tabs, in 200 boxes stuffed floor to ceiling in a 10 by 15-foot lockup, round the corner from his Sister Ray company’s office on New York’s Bank Street. Reed had never mentioned this trove’s existence, or his intentions for it. Faced with this unsuspected legacy’s sheer scale, Anderson felt “like a 15-storey building fell on me”.
