In Lou Reed’s final interview, he put it plainly: “My life is music.”
As the principal songwriter of the Velvet Underground and an acclaimed solo artist after that influential band broke up, Reed spent greater than 5 many years honing his craft, increasing sonic horizons and making an indelible mark on well-liked music. Now, his life in music will be examined in a brand new exhibit that includes artifacts from his expansive profession.
Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars opens right this moment on the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Middle and can be on show till March 4, 2023. (The exhibit’s title takes its identify from a lyric in “Romeo Had Juliette,” the opening monitor off Reed’s 1989 solo album, New York.)
Curated by producer Don Fleming, who served as archivist for the Lou Reed Archive, and Jason Stern, who labored as Reed’s technical director, the exhibit was additionally made attainable by Reed’s widow, Laurie Anderson.
“We have been working for years to place this collectively,” Anderson mentioned at a latest press preview of the exhibit. “And I simply wished to say that it is my dream to have this nice poet of New York within the public library.”
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Music & Recorded Sound division first acquired the Reed archive in 2017, although that is the primary time the supplies have been displayed in a significant exhibition.
There are many highlights within the exhibit, starting from objects of great historic advantage — a five-inch reel-to-reel tape with a few of Reed’s earliest recordings that he had mailed to himself in 1965 and had remained sealed till he died in 2013 – to private artifacts like valentine playing cards from Reed’s Velvet Underground bandmate Mo Tucker, by which she lovingly addresses him together with her nickname for him: “Honey Bun.”
There are additionally photographs taken by legendary photographer Mick Rock – who snapped the well-known picture of Reed seen on the quilt of Transformer – together with snapshots of Reed with Andy Warhol, handwritten lyrics, a duplicate of Reed’s Rolodex, his faculty diploma (he graduated cum laude), a number of guitars and some of Reed’s beloved tai chi swords.
One total wall is made up of Reed’s document assortment. Subsequent door is the recreated workplace of producer Hal Willner, a good friend and shut collaborator, arrange prefer it was when Willner died in 2020. In one other room is an audio expertise that Reed developed in 2012 with the audio-visual lab Arup: a sound set up able to enjoying Reed’s music in mono, stereo, quadrophonic and full Ambisonic spatial audio. Reed as soon as lamented that he was by no means been capable of translate the sound of a dwell efficiency onto a document, however standing in the middle of this set up comes fairly near replicating what Reed heard as he carried out onstage.
The new exhibit paints a hanging portrait of an artist lauded for his radical strategy to music-making, although, as Anderson describes it, “you do not want white gloves” for Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars. Admission is free and open to the general public. You may see a gallery of photographs from the exhibit under.
Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars Images
Exhibit of artifacts from the late singer-songwriter’s profession can be on show till March 2023.
