on heroin

how lou reed helped me learn that too much of a good thing can be a very very bad thing

i don’t know just where i’m going
but i’m going to try for the kingdom if i can

so two weeks ago i woke up in a universe where lou reed was dead. mind you it could have been worse : i could have woken up in a universe where lou reed had never existed and that would be a lesser place. in an oblique way this is what alex burns alludes to in his piece.

Reed was Sending his future Selves with each new song to Change the objective universe.

anyway so lou reed died and a lot was said and a lot was written. patti said what she wanted to say and it was good. it was a piece mourning new york, the way it was, which i didn’t know because i wasn’t there. i was in london starting my own band but i knew the feeling and i shared the excitement of patti’s gig at cbgb’s where iggy pop walked on stage and said he had just been worked over by a transylvanian masseuse in san francisco many times in my room only a couple of years later when i found the concert on a bootleg in a shop in amsterdam — and laurie wrote her story of how it all began and how it all ended and it was good but it was a piece in the new yorker by sarah larson which mainly focusses on listening to ‘heroin’, called ‘heroin was our heroin’ which is so beautifully written it got me writing.

you know how it is : some writing inspires writing just like some music makes you want to make music and the underground were like that, even if people who weren’t alive in the 60s and 70s get confused and don’t realise that it wasn’t until years later that people began to really ‘get’ this about the velvet underground. when i was 15 and listening to ‘heroin’ over and over and over again in verity’s room in surbiton where ‘the good life’ was set because it was the most boring place in the whole of britain it set a process in motion which sent a future me into a universe where i was on the stage at the roxy on the bill with siouxie and the banshees but i am not telling that story now

verity was the elder sister of my best friend and she was the only person i knew who had the record and her room was the only place you could hear it because she wouldn’t lend it, it was like a scared object to her and this song was the only way i had of approaching the idea of transcendence and i wanted more than anything to really feel something which was not total and utter crap, like everything in fucking surbiton except king crimson’s earthbound seemed to be to me in 1973 and all i knew was that this song was about that. i didn’t know anything about heroin then, not for lack of trying. i didn’t know it until years later when i found that everything lou had said about it was true

when i put a spike into my vein
and i’ll tell you, things aren’t quite the same
when i’m rushing on my run
and i feel just like jesus’ son

it was warm, but it was much more than that. it enveloped me like a sun, like a dream in which everything was all right and nothing mattered except the feeling where everything is slow and you take a deep breath and you’ve arrived and you look around you and nothing can touch you, all your feelings of powerlessness have left you, it is not that you feel powerful, that you want to hurt or maim, there is no need for any of that because you see it doesn’t matter, nothing matters except this and this is so benign and good and real…

lou got it all into that song and i played it on stage myself a few times years later which is kind of a foolish thing to do because it is so impossible to do it justice and i could never remember all the lyrics “the great big clipper ship, the sailor suit and cap, the spike in the vein, the blood in the head, the closing in on death, the jim-jims in this town, the politicians making crazy sounds.” but it didn’t matter. what mattered was the energy of the song and i could do that because i had done it and i knew it but what i didn’t know then and what i know now twenty years later is that i’d managed to rid myself of what became my heroin habit. there were many too many who didn’t manage it and it ended their lives in one way or another but that is where it gets its power but for me at least ‘heroin’ became my heroin too..

and so this is how lou reed helped me learn that too much of a good thing can be a very very bad thing but as to how he did that, and how i ended up in this particular universe right here right now, i guess that i just don’t know…

and i guess that i just don’t know
and i guess that i just don’t know