Ione Skye, Kim Gordon, Bikini Kill, Grunge

At 18, Ione Skye met “the first great love of my life”: Adam Horovitz, a man she describes as “a sweetie pie.” They soon moved in together and, for a while, life was “one long daydream”. The pair tied the knot when Skye was 21 when they married in 1992, just as the Beastie Boys’ star was rising, pulling Horovitz away on months-long tours. Alone in LA, she began joyfully exploring her bisexuality, first with the British model Alice Temple, then with two of Madonna’s exes, Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu. Skye’s infidelities became more indiscreet. One day Horovitz arrived home from a tour to find her in flagrante. "With Adam Horovitz I felt completely safe for the first time," Ione Skye wrote. "I didn't know how to be happy unless we were together." But the union wasn't meant to be. Skye described herself as "a serial cheater," and the pair divorced in 1999. Her anguish at hurting Horovitz is still apparent three decades on. “I secretly hope reading my memoir helps him and his family but I kind of know their personalities and I almost think it might be doing the opposite,” she says. Source: theguardian.com

Kim Gordon: Being a woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. Women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. She didn’t care either way. The term "girl power" was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. I was four months pregnant but somehow I managed to wiggle into a skirt and T-shirt for our “Bull in the Heather” video. Bikini Kill and other Riot Grrl bands were still enforcing their media blackout, and asking Kathleen to appear in our video came from my perverse desire to have her infiltrate the mainstream. That way, people could see her also as the playful, intelligent, charismatic girl she is—a woman who controlled the action by dancing around us as we stood stationary in a rock stance, playing the song. It was courageous of Kathleen to appear in a mainstream MTV video and risk criticism from the alternative community she’d created in Olympia.

I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with Kurt Cobain, one of those mutual "I can tell you are a super sensitive and emotional person too" sorts of connections. Thurston didn’t have the same thing going with Kurt; he’d be the first to say Kurt and I had some sort of good, inexplicable connection. We weren’t close the way he was to his friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, or Tobi Vail, who was his girlfriend, or any of his male friends that he grew up with. I didn’t know Kurt all that well, but our friendship was unusual. Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from the depths of his gravelly stream of vocal sound. It wasn’t screaming, or shrieking, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. Kurt seemed always to be working against himself one way or the other.

Courtney Love was utterly self-absorbed; Kurt probably did spend more time with Frances than Courtney did. Looking back, I can’t imagine what life was like in the chaos of their drug-fueled life, and it’s hard for me to remember that they were together for only a couple of years. It took so little time to forge a life, or in this case, a brand. Riot Grrl, the underground feminist punk rock movement that got under way in the early nineties, maintained a media blackout, and for good reason. Bikini Kill and other female bands didn’t want to be co-opted and turned into products they couldn’t control by a corporate, white male world. Later on, Courtney Love would take up the role that the press was always fishing for—a punk princess, thrilling and dark. No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula L.A. glamour—sociopathy, narcissism—because it’s good entertainment! 

From the beginning, I had a feeling that Courtney, who was cunning, smart, and ambitious, asked me along only because she wanted my name associated with the record. Courtney was the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing her look for the camera. Some people are just born that way, and in the studio I felt she was performing for us. She was always sweet to Don Fleming and me because we were going to take her somewhere new and better, she hoped, but she yelled and screamed at everybody in her band. At one point during the recording, Courtney told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, “Uh-oh, train wreck coming.” That Courtney was attracted to Billy Corgan came as a surprise, as she was clearly punk rock. But she was also very ambitious and manipulative, as Don and I learned well during the recording process, and knowing she could turn on me at any moment, I always kept her at arm’s length. There had been an incident in Rome, where Kurt had OD’d, but the details were never clear. 

Obviously, though, Kurt was headed down an even darker path, and after he hooked up with Courtney, it was only a matter of time before he completely self-destructed. But I was shattered and feeling as if I were moving slow-motion inside some strange dream. The words fell far short in conveying the feeling of loss that everyone, not just me, was feeling. The night after Kurt’s death, during a candlelight memorial service for the public, a recording of Courtney reading aloud Kurt’s suicide note was played. As the vigil continued, Courtney started handing out some of Kurt’s clothes to fans. It was as if she were stepping out into her destiny—a platform of celebrity and infamy. A week after Kurt died, Hole released their major-label debut, Live Through This, which elevated Courtney to a new kind of perverse stardom. The timing couldn’t have been better. If Courtney wanted something from you, she would use 100 percent of her charm and persuasion to get it. Back then Courtney had a ragged scar across her nose. In an otherwise charismatic face, it was hard not to notice. Years later, at Lollapalooza she described to me all the plastic surgery she planned to get. She said, “You probably didn’t know this, but I had a nose job once.” I think by then she’d had a couple more before.

To me, Madonna just seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn’t have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that before the 1980s would have been a male’s idea of marketing and was reclaiming her image and power back. Even if one day dozens pass Madonna’s sales due to the dubious way they count streamings now, no one will ever have the hysteria, the phenomenon status, the organic saturation of our culture Madonna had. There has never been a female star with her reach—in the US or worldwide. Here’s the kicker: she never tried to be America’s Sweetheart. She did this by challenging the conventions, by having unpopular opinions, by daring to be seen in a negative light. 

No other pop star dared go there. Every other female wanted to be seen in the most positive light but Madonna did not. Yet, despite that, she continued to dominate the charts. Madonna was a pop star that carried herself like a rock star; it makes sense since she started out in rock bands. And that attitude carried over into her pop career. As a music critic wrote "Madonna's music was pop but her image was punk". That's true in a lot of ways. She wanted to be loved but also hated. That's why Madonna appeals to women across different genres, women from Tori Amos to Nikki Minaj love Madonna. Tori Amos has covered Frozen and Live to Tell. Courtney Love was always a subpar imitation of Madonna, but instead of joie de vivre, she brought dread and corrosive moods. —Girl in A Band: A Memoir (2016) by Kim Gordon

"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

We opened for Nirvana on April Fools’ Day 1989. Even though it wasn’t billed as a “benefit show,” Nirvana let us keep the money they would’ve made, which kept us afloat for months. Kurt Cobain suggested we go grab a drink and let things cool off. We went to a bar in the back of a restaurant called the Chinatown. Kurt came to our rescue again in June. Tobi kept things local and specific, and she shared the stuff she was in love with (the Go-Go’s, the Pandoras, the Go-Betweens, the Raincoats, the Slits). She also made up words like “hypocrobrats” and “apokalipstick.” When I finally made it back to Olympia, I moved into the same apartment building as Tobi. Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it. When Bikini Kill formed, I was closer with Tobi, but I always saw Kathi as the gravity that kept us tethered to the ground. 

Tobi and I are both complete hotheads, though she is more subtle about it than I am. I can count the times I’ve seen Kathi angry on less than one hand. Darren was a tan mountain biker with a short GQ haircut who talked like a Valley girl, so everyone thought he was gay. He was a few years older than me and had a cute squishy baby nose that was the perfect counterpoint for his fitness-model physique. Darren was always exercising outdoors. He was a great cook and started inviting me to eat with him a few times a week. “It’s hard cooking for one, easier for two,” he’d say. He taught me how to make his potato leek soup, which was so good I could smell it a block away. Darren was super supportive of Bikini Kill. I don’t think he loved the music, but he loved the politics. He was a sounding board for me when everyone was calling us man haters and telling us feminism didn’t matter in the punk scene. He loaned me books about race, class, and gender that we’d talk about over the many meals we ate at his desk. He lived in apartment #5, which was a tiny studio. Darren may’ve looked like a square, but he did the brattiest punk shit I’d ever seen. 

I’d sneak out of the building and walk up Fourth Avenue to Slim Moon’s house. Kurt from Nirvana lived in the apartment behind Slim’s, so when Slim wasn’t around I started hanging out at Kurt’s place. Spending time with Kurt took my mind off the whole stupid drama with my ex-boyfriend Luke. We’d drink beer and write lyrics on legal pads, handing them back and forth, underlining the parts we liked, and discussing possible changes. When we listened to music together, Kurt was obsessive. He would take the needle off a Vaselines record and place it back like he was sampling it, to hear the perfect intro or the perfect verse over and over again. He studied songs like they were medical journals and he was a doctor, always looking for new techniques he could use at practice. 

Kurt asked me if I’d want to put some writing in the liner notes and maybe do the cover art for Nirvana’s upcoming album, so he came to my apartment one day to see my ideas. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw Luke standing in the hallway. Kurt knew about Luke’s behavior and he asked Luke what he was doing there. Luke said he could be wherever he wanted. I was working at my desk drinking a beer when I heard Kurt shouting in the hallway, “Why don’t you just leave Kathleen alone?!” I opened my door to see Kurt about to physically fight Luke. I pulled him away and into my apartment. After drinking probably my fifth beer, I showed Kurt some album art ideas and tried to act cool, but I was secretly elated that someone had stood up for me.

I wasn’t attracted to Kurt, but he definitely glowed. Like he had sounds bouncing off his skin. I always picture his sunken chest barely filling out his white T-shirt as he giggled at some stupid shit on TV. Kurt’s apartment became my escape hatch over time. The bubble I wrapped myself in to get away from Luke. Kurt used to joke that we were brother and sister and the Brawny paper towel guy was our dad. We would smoke pot while watching his turtle walk around his tiny living room. He was the first feminist man I ever met who never thought being an ally meant you couldn’t defend a woman in bold strokes because she was supposed to do it all for herself. He never even flinched. “SCUM” is said to stand for “the Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the book itself is super violent and funny as hell, which reminded me of Kurt. A few days after giving the book to him, I went to a barbecue in his backyard, but every time I came close to him, he’d go into his apartment “to get something.” I came by a few nights later and Kurt let me in. I asked him point-blank if he was mad at me. 

“I don’t need you to buy me books,” he said. “I’m not fucking stupid. I can pick out my own books.” It wasn’t the content that offended him, it was me. I was acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt. And then it hit me. Kurt probably wasn’t financially able to go to college, even though he was one of the most intellectually curious people I knew. He was also treated like a local in Olympia even though he was from Aberdeen, because the town was divided that way—college students vs. locals. And now someone he thought of as a friend was telling him, “Here, let me educate you with this cool book because I’m so smart and you need my guidance.” Having being put down as a woman had blinded me to my own power to hurt people. I never would’ve guessed Kurt cared what I thought of him until that moment. I told him I was sorry but I didn’t ask him to forgive me. A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back: 

Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead. Kurt and I continued listening to records and hanging out. On one of those nights, we got drunk and talked about everything from how white the scene in Oly was to the massive new building that had just been put up down the street from his apartment on Pear Street. The sign on the building read, “Pregnancy Help,” but when I called to find out more, they let me know what they really were: a pro-life place that wanted to show me videos of infants in trash bags to scare me out of having an abortion. Kurt agreed we needed to take action via spray paint. Of course, he always had tons of stuff in his apartment—all kinds of art supplies. We went to the wooded area across the street from the fake abortion clinic like wasted feminist vigilantes. Once hidden, we staked out the “clinic” with Kurt’s binoculars and put on gloves so we wouldn’t have spray paint on our hands if the cops appeared. When the coast was clear, I yelled, “No cars!” Kurt ran across the street with his Kermit the Frog–in–jeans legs and spray-painted “GOD IS GAY” in ten-foot-tall letters.

After we did our “activism” on the building, we picked up Dave and headed downtown to my apartment in the Martin because I always had forty-ouncers in my fridge. It was springtime and my windows were open. My living room had two things in it, a shitty futon couch and a massive drafting table. That table was my HQ. I wrote both Bikini Kill zines there while listening to Rites of Spring and the Slits on heavy rotation. Pages of “Girl Power,” the second issue of our zine, were meticulously laid out on its massive surface. When Dave tried to touch it, I told him to step the fuck back. At some point, Kurt left Dave and me alone at the drafting table, talking drunk talk. Dave said he used to be in a band called Dain Bramage. And then I saw Kurt climbing through my window. He was holding yellow daffodils that I recognized instantly. “I picked them for you,” he said, like I was Darla in The Little Rascals and he was Alfalfa. “Oh shit, those are Darren’s,” I said. “He’s been trying to grow them for months. Oh shit, you got those from his window box!” Kurt dropped them. I explained loudly not to worry. “Darren is this guy who decided to take care of me,” I said. “He makes me dinner all the time. He’s my caretaker, basically.”

I was a young feminist and I was trying to sound cool, trying to fit into the tough-girl persona I assumed Kurt and Dave had of me. The undertone was: I hate and use all men except you, which makes you special. “I’ve got him wrapped around my finger. He takes care of me so I can make art.” Really Darren was one of my closest friends, my confidant and my lifeline. But I went on to describe him as if he were some loser I was just using. I wanted to give them what I thought they wanted—and I also wanted to make Kurt feel okay about rooting up the three flowers Darren had worked months to produce. We left my apartment and went back to Kurt’s. Kurt and I turned the lights off in his bedroom and went on a rampage, drunkenly destroying everything. We wrecked every inch of his room—his paintings, his blanket, the wall—because it was dark. Because we were drunk. Because we were young and angry and broke. I scribbled above his bed with the Sharpie from my back pocket: “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel. . . Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Earlier in the day, Tobi and I had been at the local supermarket looking at deodorants, and we both laughed hysterically when we saw one called Teen Spirit. What the fuck does teen spirit smell like? we wondered. Capitalism apparently knew no bounds.

After our rampage, I fell asleep fully clothed next to Kurt with the Sharpie marker still in my hand and woke up with the kind of hangover I can only describe as Did we kill someone last night? Kurt called a few months later asking if he could use the line “Smells like Teen Spirit” in a song. I was immediately transported back to that terrible night and wanted to get off the phone as fast as I could, so I just said, “Sure,” thinking it was no big deal. Outside, after the show, a guy walked up to me and said he wanted to make a record with Bikini Kill. He said he loved the show and felt we needed to record something ASAP. I assumed he was a creep. As I walked away, Kathi and Tobi said, “What did Ian MacKaye just say to you?” I was a big Fugazi fan but hadn’t recognized him. We were obnoxious feminist punks, and in the summer of 1991, DC embraced us. “Suggestion” wasn’t a perfect song. I never liked that Ian used the word “I” repeatedly in the lyrics, since it implied he was speaking as a woman. But when I first heard Fugazi play it in Seattle, it was a watershed moment for me. I had never seen punk men stick their necks out for feminism before.

We played with Nirvana at the Paramount in Seattle on Halloween of the same year. We were the opening band. I knew he’d called Tobi over the summer and asked if we wanted to be in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video as anarchist cheerleaders (an image he borrowed from a drawing in our zine). I responded with a HARD NO, because I wanted our band to be judged by the “meritocracy” of the time, not through the lens of association with an all-male band. Tobi, Kathi, and I talked about it and decided to decline. Kurt was hiding in the corner of the biggest dressing room backstage, and he seemed really far away. I assumed he was freaked out by all the attention. Nirvana was touring constantly and probably living out of hotels, so I tried not to take it personally and instead focused on how sweet it was that they’d asked us to open for them. I don’t think any of us realized how huge they were about to become, but something had clearly changed. I knew Kurt was using heroin, because he’d asked me to get him some the last time we’d hung out in Portland. After the show, I was sitting in the van next to the window when Tobi scrunched in next to me. I told her I felt like we’d never see Kurt again, and she knew exactly what I meant. I could tell by her expression and the cadence of her speech that she was also in a lot of pain, but she still played the big sister and calmed me down. She told me she’d lost people to heroin before and knew the drill. 

Tobi and Kurt had broken up, but it seemed like they were on good terms. We wore pajamas at the show I’d invited Joan Jett to. It was at the Wetlands in New York City. The owner put us in a room downstairs, and I immediately began snooping around, looking for a sneaky vault of chocolate bars, vintage records, or band shirts left behind. Joan Jett came to see us play that night, just like she said she would. She took me aside after the show and told me she could hear how she would produce us while we were playing. She wanted to make a record with us. The woman who’d produced the Germs’ first album wanted to work with us! She didn’t even ask about the pajama thing. It was like she already knew. Riot Grrrl had become like a hydra monster—super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive. In LA Weekly, Emily White referred to it as “an underground with no mecca, built of paper.” In a way, she was right. Many of us had written the outlines of places where we could be heard in our zines and were now using physical locations like punk clubs and meetings to realize our imperfect dreams. In the punk tradition, we weren’t meant to have a mecca, a center, or a hierarchy. Except we did. 

And whether I liked it or not, I’d become the de facto leader. Not knowing what to do, I asked Ian MacKaye for advice. His answer was simple: “Keep your head down and do the work.” Tim Green had quit the Nation of Ulysses and had some downtime, so he offered to teach me to play guitar. But when he encouraged me after I made a mistake, I mistook his patience for condescension, put the guitar down, and stormed off. The thing is, Tim was genuinely trying to help me. He had this way of putting chords together that made me think of angels flying around with sunglasses on. He could bring everything great about Rites of Spring, the Wipers, and the Pandoras into one song. Tim lived at a punk house near the post office called the Red House. He converted the garage into a combination bedroom/music studio and we made a record, Real Fiction, there under the name The Fakes. Joan Jett made good on her promise to record us and we met her in Seattle to lay down our new songs, “Demirep” and “New Radio.” She loved “Rebel Girl” when we played it at Wetlands and had specific ideas about how it could sound better than it had on our album Pussy Whipped.

Joan and her manager Kenny Laguna had me in the vocal booth for hours. I was also sick of being in the fishbowl Olympia had become since I’d become indie famous. Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so just the three of us met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. Needless to say, we did not sign with Interscope. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Their first hit for him: “Just a Girl.” Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.” Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, who I’d met on a previous New York trip when I was writing with Joan. Kim was working on lyrics for the first Free Kitten record. She would sit at their kitchen table for hours with headphones on, listening to instrumentals with mock vocals, writing and rewriting lyrics—a technique I quickly added to my repertoire. Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana, so I tried to get info from Kim and Thurston about how Kurt was doing. 

He’d married Courtney Love, who’d been putting Bikini Kill down in the press for a while, so it felt like seeing him with her around was a bad idea. But then Kim told me Kurt was going to be in Seattle without Courtney for a month and encouraged me to go visit him. The last time I’d spoken with Kurt was two years earlier when I was living at the Embassy in DC. He’d called for Tobi, but I’d picked up. When I told him Tobi wasn’t home, he asked if I had time to talk. As we began to chat, he brought up a Seattle show we’d played together at the OK Hotel a while back. After Nirvana’s set that night, a bunch of punk girls had yelled at him about Nirvana’s new song “Rape Me,” and he thought I was the leader of the campaign against him. I was confused by that song and had talked about it with some girls that night. We were all in agreement that a guy making a comparison between being sold out by a friend to being raped wasn’t the best idea, but I hadn’t spearheaded anything. I knew he was still doing heroin and wanted to at least let him know I cared about him and was there if he ever needed help, before it was too late. Just as I was packing my car to drive to Seattle to go see Kurt, I chickened out. I thought: He has a whole new life. He’s in one of the most famous bands in the world! 

After Kurt's suicide, everywhere I went I saw pictures of Kurt, which made me feel physically ill. I felt like he had died because he was sick of being exploited and treated like an object, and now that he was gone people were lining up to make money off his suffering. His death made me more secure in my strategy of eschewing fame whenever possible and working toward things that actually mattered. I was having a hard time dealing with the minuscule amount of fame I had; I couldn’t imagine how he had lasted as long as he did. But more than anything I was sad. Sad about the heroin, about the gun, about his not having the happiness he deserved. Sad we would never be old together, sitting on a porch talking about when we were stupid young musicians who thought we could change the world. Why hadn’t I had the courage to go see him when he asked me to? To tell him I loved him and to reassure him that I in no way thought he was a bad person for signing to a major label? I was a fucking coward. Scared of Courtney Love. Scared of Kurt rejecting me when he never had before. 

Courtney Love got in my face and started hissing like a cat. She began screaming stuff at me like, “Are you leaving now, Kathleen? Go home and feed the poor!” She held her lit cigarette up to my face and traced my features with it, like she was going to put it out on my face. Then she coldcocked me in the face. I’ll never know why she did it. Maybe because “trauma begets trauma.” Maybe she was on drugs and mourning Kurt’s death; maybe it was the fact that Tobi had dated Kurt while he was writing Nevermind, and it was widely speculated that Tobi was the inspiration for much of that record. Maybe Courtney was embarrassed because I’d seen her using my stage banter as an empty schtick. Whatever set her off, it was ironic that a woman attacked me for no reason and then claimed she was a better feminist than I was. As we left the theater’s parking lot, I got directions to the nearest police station. I just wanted the assault to be written down so no one could pretend it had never happened or say that it was a “fight,” like they had when Courtney assaulted singer Mary Lou Lord. 

Later Courtney told the media I provoked her by whispering “Where’s the baby, in a closet with an IV?” referring to her daughter. I absolutely did not say that. The “fight” became national news and was mentioned everywhere from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Weekly to the Washington Post. The media was pushing the narrative that Courtney and I had been in a “catfight,” which just reminded me that pitting women against one another sold magazines. When I handed in my rent check that month, the woman who opened the envelope read my name and said, “Aren’t you the girl who attacked Courtney Love?” A few days later we played the Warfield in Los Angeles, the same venue we’d played with the Go-Go’s a year before. Before the show, I went to a deli and looked at magazines. I flipped through Spin, the one with Green Day on the cover. Inside was an essay by Courtney about Lollapalooza. She claimed I was “Kurt’s worst enemy.” I looked up and saw Krist Novoselic, bass player for Nirvana, walking toward me. Even though we ran in the same circles, we didn’t know each other well. He made a beeline straight for me, sat down at the table, and started talking. And from what he said, it was like he knew I’d just read the interview: “Kurt would have been really upset to hear that someone hit you in the face. He loved you, I know he did.” —"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye

Born in London in 1970, Ione Skye is the daughter of folk singer-songwriter Donovan and fashion model Enid Karl. Her father Donovan is known for the hits “Catch the Wind,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch,” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” 

"My parents met in 1966, at the Whisky a Go Go in LA. She was twenty-one and Donovan was twenty. Mom had dated famous men before—Jim Morrison, Keith Richards, and Denny Doherty from the Mamas and the Papas. But the night she spotted Donovan across the crowded Whisky, that was it for her. The Sunshine Superman, as they called him, swept her off her feet and away to Greece, then London. When she got pregnant with my brother Dono, they moved into a fairy-tale house in the English countryside. Mom was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, but England was her happy place. As she once told me, sounding New Agey: “It was as if I’d lived there in another life.” Donovan was happy there chopping firewood and writing poems and songs about their budding family. His album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden is pretty much all about that time. In “Song of the Naturalist’s Wife” you can even hear my brother’s first cries. Donovan ticked all the boxes for Mom: creative, exciting, handsome, and a good provider. 

By the time I was conceived in Donovan’s gypsy caravan on the Isle of Skye, he was already drifting back to his ex-girlfriend Linda Lawrence. Then my father won Linda back from Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and initiated a new life. Mom hired a lawyer to get child support, using her first check to move us into a small apartment in Los Angeles, my first real home. Mom didn’t love her husband Billy the way he loved her, but it didn’t hurt that Billy was gorgeous—tall, dark, and shaggy, like a 1960s Keith Richards. After a dozen or so proposals, she’d agreed to marry him, and I was all for it. While shooting River's Edge I was careful not to let my hair fall over my face, I straddled Keanu Reeves and kissed him for real, moving around, parts to parts, missing sometimes and grinding on his leg or stomach. “Cut!” said Tim. “Nice work, kids. Stand by.” We pulled apart, a little bashful, a little breathless. “You good?” said Keanu, and I sensed by the husky edge to his voice that it wasn’t just me who wanted more. Tracing my lips to the side of his face, I whispered, “Can I come to your place after wrap?” On the way there, we stopped at an all-night retro diner, Norms. 

It was busy and bright inside, but the clatter and voices fell away as we slid into our booth. I could only marvel at every little thing Keanu did. The way he slung his arm across the back of the booth, tore a sugar packet with his teeth, licked a dot of ketchup from his thumb. Each gesture was sexier than the last. Spacey from lack of sleep and maybe even love, I felt the old diner drifting upward, lifting us into the sky. Just above the city. Just above real life. Keanu had his own barebones studio apartment to stay in during filming. A brown carpet, a mattress on the living room floor. We lay on our sides on his mattress and I ran my hands over Keanu’s smooth back as he kissed my face and neck. I felt both shy and proud of my body, my soft skin and full breasts in my Calvin Klein bra. I knew I was nice looking but wished I were the most beautiful girl in the world. This might have been the most beautiful boy. He was different from any boy I’d known, self-possessed and calm. But when I tried to maneuver him on top of me, he wouldn’t budge. “Let me drive you home,” he said abruptly, pulling up my bra strap. 

I wound my way up Mulholland, then Woodrow Wilson, finally pulling up outside the Zappas’ compound. The road was empty, but the canyon was rippling and alive. I sat on my hood and lit a shoebox joint, checking over my shoulder. I didn’t smoke often—yet—partly because you couldn’t at the Zappas’. It was no secret that Frank was staunchly against drugs of any sort, unless you counted the Winstons he chain-smoked. Anything stronger dulled the intellect and killed ambition, he believed. And because Frank was no ordinary father but something more like a cult leader to his kids, they were proud straight arrows too. Me, I was whoever they wanted me to be. Inside the compound, at least. You never knew who you might find there. That was part of the fun. Maybe it was Molly Ringwald on a pool float, pale and lovely as a forties Vargas girl. Molly and Dweezil Zappa were no longer together but still friends. Though newly famous, thanks to Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Molly was wonderfully un-stuckup. 

I found her worldly and proper, in a vaguely old-fashioned way. “That’s what makes Hollywood so dynamite,” Anthony Kiedis said. “That desert energy, blowing in. I can really get down with it.” I liked that he thought Hollywood was great and wasn’t too jaded to admit it. But it was the thing about the wind that got me. I’d always had a connection with the Santa Anas. They brought up something in me, a wild yearning feeling. Anthony was now staring at me with focused intensity, his eyes tracing my hair, my mouth, my neck, as if memorizing me. No defensiveness, no beatnik shtick. For hours, we lay there, shedding layers, words flowing into kisses flowing into words. He stroked my face and said I was like an angel and I understood that we were falling under the same spell. And then, like it was Christmas in August, we shared all the things we loved: the Santa Ana winds, and perfect pieces of fruit, and Marilyn Monroe’s arched eyebrows, and the joy of a warm, still ocean, and getting comfortable after being shy and uncomfortable.

The Chili Peppers had just released their third studio album, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, to not much of a bang. Anthony was broke and living with the band’s manager, Lindy Goetz, in the Valley. I’d pick him up at Canter’s Deli, or sometimes we’d just drive around, shouting our life stories over the radio. Anthony drove fast and reckless, and I was driving like a maniac too. Anthony would have to hit rock bottom to quit drugs, just as I’d have to hit my own rock bottom to quit the feeling I had to take care of Anthony. The need to save him was an addiction in itself. I was hooked. If Anthony’s sex drive had a soundtrack, it would be Fun House, the Stooges album he’d turned me on to. He liked to brag that he only exercised in bed and onstage, though I saw him doing push-ups all the time. He was obsessed with leading me to climax, and the pressure could be a lot. After five years of struggle, the Chili Peppers were finally moving on from being just a fringe local band to being played on KROQ. Tickets for the upcoming Uplift Mofo Party Plan tour were selling out and the record was sidling up the charts. If using was what kept Anthony alive, I was willing to help him. 

“If you’re going to do it,” I told Anthony that night, trailing him out the kitchen door, “just do it here with me, where you’re safe.” “I don’t deserve you,” he said, hanging his head. “I’m coming with you,” I said. In my pajamas and robe, I drove Anthony to meet a dealer on the corner of Wilton and Franklin Avenue. Then we came home and I watched, biting my knuckles, as Anthony shot up in my bathroom. The same bathroom where Karis Jagger and I used to stand on the tub’s edge, lip-synching in the mirror. That was the first of many times I went with him to score. He didn’t like me tagging along at first, but then we discovered I had a sixth sense for the fuzz. One time we were parked in the Mayfair Market parking lot and Anthony had just smoked some dope; I got a weird feeling and put the tinfoil in my pocket seconds before a cop car swooped up. They searched the car and questioned us separately, and miraculously, we had the same story: We were just going to the market to get bagels. Heroin would make Anthony remote but also snuggly. We’d curl up on the waterbed, listening to Neil Young or Lou Reed. Sometimes we watched old movies, and not just because I wanted to. 

Anthony had a thing for Veronica Lake and might have seen Sullivan’s Travels as many times as I’d seen The Blue Dahlia. But then there were the nights he shot speedballs, a mixture of coke and heroin. Those nights weren’t sweet at all. I’d try to sleep while he crouched on my floor. “Don’t look at me!” he’d snap when I tried to pull him into bed. “I’m bad. I feel like a demon.” I’d look away for his sake, but Anthony wasn’t a bad person, he was just in a bad way. In the New Year, Anthony and I moved our joint belongings—his duffel, my three suitcases, and whatever else fit into the Toyota—into a quite glamorous 1940s triplex on North Orange Drive. I loved the apartment, with its original pink-tiled bathroom and Art Deco moldings. Heroin was “the worst drug in the world,” the “crossing the line” drug, and needles were so gross. All the same, I’d grown curious about heroin, now that it was in front of me so much. I wanted to know how the drug felt from the inside, why it was so bewitching. “Can I try some?” I asked one night as Anthony laid his lighter and tinfoil on the bathroom sink. 

Anthony looked horrified. “No,” he said sternly. Thankfully I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get hooked. Not long after Hillel’s death, Anthony had gone back to rehab and gotten clean again. My worst nightmare was that he’d relapse if he found out I was falling in love with Adam. People thought Anthony was indestructible, but I wasn’t convinced. I was bound by a strange belief that I had to be with him to keep him safe. Then one beautiful September day—just a perfect day, as the Lou Reed song went—everything changed. Anthony sent me a letter. He was working the Twelve Steps and making his amends.

Once it occurred to my brother Dono that he might actually be able to date the models he worked with, he went on a mission to woo his big crush, Kate Moss—and by God, he succeeded. I went to see Nirvana perform on MTV Unplugged in New York while Dono and Kate were briefly an item. That winter I met Anthony on Becky's in Brooklyn, I knew that would be our last date. When Anthony started to yell at me, I was on the verge of tears, but fortunately there was Lou Reed who was leaving the bar and stared him in disapproval, which shut Anthony up on the spot. While we were shooting Four Rooms, all the actors shared a makeup trailer, but Madonna was soon moved to a private space because we couldn’t stop staring at her. I mean, it was Madonna. I’d only seen her in the flesh once before, from the audience at her Blond Ambition concert in LA in 1990. Adam had scored prime seats because the Beastie Boys’ first tour had been opening for Madonna. He and I were secret fans. Commercial pop was uncool to us, so we were acting like, Oh, isn’t it ironic that we’re here at this mainstream pop show? 

But from the minute the Blond Queen strutted onstage in her Jean Paul Gaultier bondage gear, all our judgment went out the window. Madonna was very fun and a little bit of a mean girl too. She loved taking the piss out of Tim Roth, who played the bellboy in all four stories. My old friend Paul Starr was Madonna’s makeup artist. Near the end of one long day of filming, when he swooped over for a last touch-up, she playfully smacked his hand and snapped, “If you put any more makeup on my face it will crack!” Paul just laughed and went on doing his thing. “Go ahead, hon,” said Madonna, patting the bed. I’d been summoned! Cinching my terry cloth bathrobe, I lay down next to Madonna. Her eyes were still closed, so I closed mine and we lay quietly, side by side on our backs. Turning my head ever so slightly, I opened one eye to look at her. She was almost otherworldly, with her feathery black lashes and fantastic bone structure. I had the urge to wrap her in a maternal embrace but didn’t dare. 

Madonna took care of herself. Madonna might not have been a fan of my brother, but she took a small shine to me. When Four Rooms wrapped, just before Christmas, I was invited to a holiday dinner party at Castillo del Lago, her Mediterranean-style estate perched above Lake Hollywood. A few decades before Madonna, another bigwig, the mobster Bugsy Siegel, had lived there. It was magnificent, the whole exterior painted in ocher stripes inspired by a church in Portofino. The view from the grand dining room, with its honeycombed Moorish ceilings, stretched from Lake Hollywood to the ocean. Best of all, a Frida Kahlo painting, Self-Portrait with Monkey, hung over a small table in the foyer. It was a small group that night. Debbie Harry was there, with a spiky new haircut. I still worshipped Debbie but my attention was mainly focused on Madonna’s ex-lover and best friend, Ingrid Casares. A few years in the future, when Howard Stern asked me about our romance on his show, I’d say she was my true initiation into the lesbian nation. When I married Adam, my bridesmaids were Karis Jagger and Mick Fleetwood's daughter, Amelia. 

Adam and I had never once fought in our entire seven-year relationship. I’d always thought that was our strength, but in fact it was our greatest weakness. I was reading a letter that had been sent to Adam, handwritten. It meant something. I scanned the lines, trying to understand what. It was from Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill. They’d met at the Summersault music festival in Australia. They were only friends, Adam said. The letter was not overtly flirtatious or inappropriate. She knew he was married and was trying, at least, to be respectful. But I could tell she wanted to leave an impression by the way she wrote—cool and smart and witty. And he must have liked her too, or why else would he have shown it to me? I handed it back to him, my hand shaking. “Should I write back?” Adam asked, his voice soft. I couldn’t, in good conscience, promise to be faithful to him. If my husband was going to like someone else (“like” was as far as I could let my imagination go), at least Kathleen was a good person. I admired her punk feminist mission and loved her songs, especially “Rebel Girl.” —Say Everything: A Memoir (2025) by Ione Skye

Before the End, Lou Reed (Endless Cycle)

 

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison, documentary directed by Jeff Finn. Release date: January 13, 2025 on Apple TV.

Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison is less an excavation of truth than an exercise in indulgence, a quixotic pilgrimage through the mists of conspiracy and nostalgia. Directed by Jeff Finn, the documentary styles itself as an investigative probe into the final days of The Doors' frontman, but in reality, it is more séance than scholarship. It toys with the well-worn whispers of Morrison faking his death without the burden of serious evidence. Finn and his parade of interviewees seem convinced that the "official story" is somehow suspect, yet they produce little more than speculative embroidery on an already rich tapestry of myth. To his credit, Finn unearths rare archival material and interviews that offer a glimpse into Morrison as a man, not just a spectral figure in rock 'n' roll lore. 

But where the documentary might have explored Morrison's literary ambitions, his existential unraveling, or the paradox of his self-destructive genius, it instead opts for the well-trodden path of counter-narratives that fail to hold up under scrutiny. The introduction of a shadowy "Mr. X," hinted to be Morrison himself is laughable because his name is Frank Wagner and he's younger than Morrison. Critics seem divided, with some lauding Finn's passion and others dismissing the documentary as a hallucinatory echo chamber. Jonita Davis of The Black C.A.P.E. magazine acknowledges its compelling storytelling, while audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes skew toward exasperation, one viewer branding it "filled with innuendo, half-baked theories and outright fiction." Before the End is not an exposé but a testament to our inability to let our icons rest. This documentary does little but add another layer of fog to a legend that scarcely needs it. 

Jeff Finn: I think Oliver Stone’s a brilliant filmmaker: JFK, Natural Born Killers. I think his documentary work on Kennedy is amazing. But that brilliance is not displayed in The Doors. I was just so disappointed because it just clearly presented a one-dimensional view of Jim Morrison as this dark, narcissistic, self-absorbed asshole. And that’s not to say Jim didn’t have his asshole-ish moments. Of course, he did. We all have a dark side. I was doing street interviews in Virginia, outside the library Jim went to as a child. One young man replied, “He was an asshole.” And he knew that from the Oliver Stone movie. So, I’ve tried to do damage control regarding Jim’s legacy from the fallout of that biopic. Everybody has their version of Jim. The notion of Jim as an introvert, as being neurodivergent is not what we generally think of Jim Morrison. I want people to know the Jim that Gayle Enochs, one of his lovers, knew. A man who drank wine and read poetry. A contrast to this rock god. Where are The Doors of today? Why people today aren’t rising up and forming bands the way it was in the late 60s and protesting? I’m probably unaware of them, but I keep my ear to the ground and haven’t seen anything. It could be just as Jim said that it was an incredible springtime, that moment in the late sixties, and it couldn’t be replicated. Source: bandsaboutmovies.com

“I’m most concerned with compassion and happiness these days. I know things that impede happiness; drugs impede it, tension impedes it. People just don’t want to believe there’s any integrity. They’re always looking for some really ugly little thing. I think drugs are the single worst, terrible thing. And if there was any single thing that I thought would be effective to stop people from dealing in drugs and taking them I would do it. However I don’t think there is, apart from telling people to use them with caution. I find self-destructive people very boring. I would like to think that I’m not one of them.” —Lou Reed, interview for BBC Radio 1 (June 5, 1980)

It took years for The Velvet Underground to be understood. Most people caught on with the rise of alternative rock in the ‘90s, 30 years later. Now matter how bad, low, worthless someone feels there is Lou saying: 'I find it hard to believe you don't know, the beauty you are...' You are being told how, despite what you feel, that you are valued and loved. And Reed pulls that trick again and again in his solo work. And the fans of John Cale must know it’s hard to imagine The Velvet Underground commercially successful with Cale staying in the band longer. If they’d delivered another album like White Light/White Heat there’s no way they'd make the jump to Atlantic from Verve. 

MGM kicked the Velvet Underground off the label around the beginning of 1970 as part of its infamous "purge" of artists who supposedly advocated taking drugs. In November 1970 Mike Curb announced the termination of the contracts of eighteen bands that "advocate for drug use." In a December 1970 Rolling Stone news item, an MGM rep claimed that "The cuts were made partly to do with the drug scene—like maybe a third of them had to do with drug reasons. The others were dropped because they weren't selling." Certainly the Velvet Underground would have been at the top of the drug purge list. Sterling Morrison thought so, telling Mix magazine that Curb "wanted to get rid of the controversial bands, including the low-selling Velvets." 

Despite of the chronic painting of Lou Reed as the miscreant in his fallout with John Cale and later with Robert Quine, the reality is in fact quite different. In White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day By Day by Richie Unterberger, Michael Carlucci, longtime friend Lou Reed's guitarist Robert Quine said: "Lou told Quine that the reason why he had to get rid of John Cale in The Velvet Underground was Cale's ideas were just too out there," says Carlucci. "Cale had some really wacky ideas. He wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and Lou just couldn't stand it." Cale's autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen?, which was written in collaboration with Victor Bockris is a clear example of one-side reporting. After the dissolution of The Velvets, Sterling Morrison explained that Cale could be also a hard pill: “People talk about Lou, but John was also truly difficult to work with. Once we were doing “Pale Blue Eyes,” which is a quiet song. I’m playing the solo, which is also quiet, and in the middle of my solo, he purposely steps on the button that turns on my distorter. It’s a Vox distorter, so all of a sudden there’s this blast of sound distorted and three times louder than all the rest. John looks at me like I’m the crazy one, turns it off, and then kicks it! I look over at Lou and we’re both going, OK, what the hell?! But if I had done that to him he would’ve had a stroke.”

John Cale obsessively blames Lou Reed of the acrimonious reunion of The Velvet Underground in 1993, with a great deal of jealousy. In What's Welsh for Zen? Cale whines about Reed to no end: "We supported U2 for Swiss stadium dates. As soon as we did that we were no longer the focus of attention and Lou could not bear the fact that he was a small fish in a big pond. Everybody else was having a great time, U2 were fun people to be around. Eden and Rise joined the tour in Switzerland. Rise was very worried and tried to understand what was going on between Lou and me, via Sylvia, which was a big mistake. One afternoon in the first week I was sitting around with a bass riff and Lou started playing guitar through this echo machine he had that was just making gorgeous noise. It was floating around in a miasma and then he started singing. I asked 'What did you say? You said "coyote"?' He said, 'Yeah.' So that song got done. And I expected that when we got out on the road we'd start trying new songs. In the middle of it all, I brought up this thing about publishing. All of a sudden Lou stopped the rehearsal, went outside and got on the phone. Sylvia showed up and came up to me and said, 'You can't talk like that to Lou. If you do, you're going to be very disappointed.' 'This is band business,' I said, 'are you a member of the band? You're not, are you? Right, so why don't you stay out of it?' She said, 'I manage Lou Reed.' That was a dead end. We knew we would attract a lot of ambulance chasers, people who wanted to see us fail. I read an article that said, 'There are some bands who shouldn't even think about re-forming.' We were one of them. 

Lou was trying to control everything and I knew a storm was coming. One night in Italy, I was doing 'Waiting for the Man' with a huge orchestral introduction, and I was trying to give them the tempo from the piano, but I was too far away. Lou went and told my tech to turn the piano off. At that point I was ready to knock his teeth down his throat. He was getting stranger and I couldn't deal with that. As soon as the tour was over, Lou was completely lost. I looked at him on the plane back from England to the US, and I realized: this guy is empty. He does not know where to draw the line. He's completely adrift. MTV wanted the Velvet Underground as part of their series of 'Unplugged'. Lou was insisting that he had to produce the 'Unplugged' album. 'I'm the only one who can produce the VU,' he said. I pointed out that we could have Chris Thomas or George Martin. Lou likes to obsess over things. I have different production values, in that Lou will go for the audiophile situation and I will go for the excitement. Everybody left Lou alone and he was very quiet, saying only, 'I must produce.' 'Absolutely not,' I replied. That night I dreamed he did not drive back to Manhattan; he swam away, just drifted off into the wild blue yonder and drowned. The thing about being a star is it's so one-sided that it's corrosive. 

Nico, for instance, was really in need of being completed as an artist and at the same time she could hold that grandiose position of being a star. Lou attempted to do the same, but he wasn't truly elegant enough in his demeanour to pull it off. People laugh at Lou a lot, but the thing is, Lou doesn't know when he's funny. He can be absolutely hysterical and have you rolling on the floor grasping your stomach, begging him to stop, and he still doesn't know what's going on. The point is, I don't think that Lou would like it if you told him. Lou and Sylvia had earlier insisted that the reunion tour would only happen if everyone refused to cooperate with Victor Bockris's work on his Lou Reed biography. And now they demanded that the mixing and production of any Velvet Underground recordings be Lou's domain. To me, if he did not want our input, fine, he would not get it. Certainly our only reason to refuse him was our conviction that we were best served by an outside ear. As a solo performer, I had been earning an income the equivalent of what we each could have expected from the reunion tour. What attracted me to the reunion tour, therefore, had not been the financial bonuses that were on offer, but the artistic stimulus of recreating the still uncompromised values of the original entity. 

The final stroke in this conflict was a fax Lou wrote Moe in reply to a gentle note from her suggesting another producer. Moe told me it said something like, 'Moe, of course your drums sounded great because I made them sound great. John of course doesn't realize that, because his viola never sounded better because I picked the amplifiers and the PA system.' Now I wanted to say to him, 'While you were making holes in your arm, Maureen was raising her children, so fuck you! And as far as making remarks about my knowledge of recording and production, I've been known for producing people and I've been a successful at it, so I'd be careful if you're accusing me of not knowing what goes on in studios too, because I have my own studio that's fairly well equipped and I know what I'm doing down there.' So I said, 'If you don't stop doing this, you're not going to have me as a friend anymore.' 

Moe called me up again and said, 'I just got a very nice fax from Sylvia.'  I saw red. Yeah, what does it say?' 'Well, it says, "John's a musician, don't listen to him." The resentment I felt at the end of the day was the same I had felt throughout the years. The situation with him and Sylvia just went on and on like that. I don't want to see Lou and I don't want to talk to him and I don't want to hear anything about him. I went through the roof. My subsequent letter to him was intended to purge him of even the slightest doubt of what I saw as his motives, total control. Moe could not have known how deeply offended I was by the meanness of his tone. I was not going to forgive him again. So I wrote Lou a nine-page fax that I knew he wouldn't get up from and he hasn't. There were many blow-ups. I'm sure there will be many more. The fax machine should have been taken away from Lou and me."

Lou Reed in RockBill magazine (August 1984): “I’ve never wanted to offend anybody. I’ve never wanted to make fun of anybody. This might sound strange coming from me. I have written songs where the characters are very bitter or are borderline psychotics. But I try to be non-judgmental about things.” After his break-up with Bettye, Lou rekindled a relationship with Barbara Hodes, a clothing designer that Lou had met at the Factory. She designed knitwear-style mohair jumpers. Betsey Johnson had given Barbara a whole corner of her boutique Paraphernalia. Barbara and Lou reconnected—he moved in with her and they had a romantic and sexual relationship before Barbara married Michael Gross, a reporter from The New York Times. According to Barbara, Lou was 'tender and polite' while he was not on drugs. She said Sally Can't Dance was critiziced by Lou because of Steve Katz's involvement. "I fear that I am a lone voice in proclaiming the brilliance of that record! Seriously. I think it contains some of his loveliest melodies. “Sally Can’t Dance” is actually about a woman who lived life on the edge and was always into the latest fashions, but later wound up in a rent-controlled apartment living a hum drum life." 

“When Lou Reed talks in Coney Island Baby about wanting to play football for the coach and “giving the whole thing up for you,” he is expressing the profound dream of the damned—and his loss is given greater intensity because both he and we know that such wishes were impossible from the very beginning. And it hurts all over again. It's also a way of recapturing his more innocent days.” —Paul Nelson for Rolling Stone magazine (25 March, 1976)

Bob Quine had a singular sound but he was just a sideman. Quine was a Velvet Underground superfan—something Reed’s wife Sylvia appreciated when she scouted him for The Blue Mask. A musicologist, Quine gave Lou a thorough analysis of why Lou’s particular guitar playing was genius and what an impact it had. “We recorded it in this gigantic orchestral soundstage that was built inside a mid-century office tower on 6th Avenue in Midtown,” Fred Maher says about those sessions: “Lou was in very good humor and we really stretched out. It was just me on drums, Lou, Bob, and Fernando Saunders. During the recording, everything was hunky-dory, and Bob and Lou were getting along. But when the final mixes were done, I think Bob wasn’t very happy with the mixes. He complained bitterly to Lou, and that was pretty much that.” “Bob didn’t really have ambitions beyond being a sideman,” Richard Hell recalled: “He didn’t like having his stuff edited. He couldn’t handle it. I talked to him about it. I was like, ‘Bob, it’s their record, not yours.’ But he was not rational that way.” 

 

Even those who say that Lou Reed had "normal parents" acknowledge that his father had a cutting sense of humor, cutting people down to size. That might seem innocuous from the outside, but for a child it can have a big impact. "Beginning of a Great Adventure" shows us Reed facing down the impossibility of being a father. Reed had grown as an artist, as a writer, and tapped into universal truths in New York and Magic & Loss and expressed them in such a crystalline way that almost everyone could relate. The true depth of Reed’s artistry sunk deeper and deeper whereas most of his 60s contemporaries were out of ideas and churning out drivel. The last song on his last album Lulu: Junior Dad is absolutely heartbreaking. It belongs alongside with other songs that paint negative or frightening portrayals of father figures: Kill Your Sons, My Old Man, Endless Cycle, Sex With Your Parents, Rock Minuet, etc. —Sources: Lou Reed: The Life (2017) by Mick Wall and Lou Reed: A Life (2017) by Anthony DeCurtis