Chris told me about his Lou Reed record when we talked a few months ago. K bought tickets for the release show at a venue I’d never heard of in the near west burbs. I’m not much for cover bands but this is different. Because of the guy covering and the one being covered.

Reed’s music has been with me since my childhood friend, Dan’s, dad dubbed a tape of Velvet Underground & Nico for me when I was about twelve. It’s soundtrack-of-my-life type thing. Even as the man spent much of the last four decades of his career making schlock, the songs that came before make that decline moot.

The couple singles Chris has released from the record so far are not covers but originals. He did the same some years back for Reed’s onetime collaborator, Nico. He’s the rare performer whose tributes work both to evoke their source while becoming their own thing.

At the show though, backed by a band he calls the Dirty French Novels, it’s all Reed ringers and I know each last one by heart.

William Burroughs isn’t as important to me as Lou Reed but watching the freshly unearthed footage that makes up Nova ’78 is a transfixing experience nonetheless. Filmed by an NYU student to document a festival devoted to the man’s work, it’s a nonstop parade of notables. Philip Glass plays a hypnotic bit, Frank Zappa reads about talking anuses from Naked Lunch, poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg make actual asses of themselves, and the man of the hour appears now and again to make his grave, laconic pronouncements.

It’s a portrait of a time and place that would be decimated by AIDS and Reagan in a few short years. By the time I got to in NYC in the fall of 1989 even a dumb nineteen year old could tell it was all over.

I knew nothing about the Minyo Crusaders but K has been waiting for them to tour America for years. It’s a miracle they made it under the treacherous conditions imposed on travelers fool enough to come to this stupid country but I’m glad they did it. An unlikely marriage of traditional Japanese folk song and a dizzying mash of Latin instrumentation, their music is all joy all the time.

A sight and sound I won’t soon forget.

I wrote about a play set on a couple planks of wood out at sea.