On April 18, Lou Reed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with touching speeches from two of his strongest supporters — widow Laurie Anderson and lifelong friend Patti Smith.
Smith remembered first hearing of Reed’s death in Oct. 2013 while at Brooklyn’s Rockaway Beach. She returned to Manhattan an hour later and was greeted by an outpouring of emotion from friends and strangers alike. “Please take care of yourself so the world can have you as long as it can,” she remembers telling him. Check out the video below, where Smith also remembers making eye contact with Reed for the first time in 1970, at a Velvet Underground show.
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Musician and artist Laurie Anderson, who started dating Reed in 1992 and married him in 2008, also gave a heartfelt speech, to occasional chants of “LOU!” from the Rock Hall crowd. “He was my best friend and he was also the person I admired most in the world,” Anderson says. “In the years we were together, there were a few times I was mad and there were a few times I was frustrated, but I was never ever bored.”
2015 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction: See the Photos
She recounts a recent meeting with David Bowie, where he confided in her that Lulu, his polarizing 2011 collaborative album with Metallica, was actually his greatest work and that it would take time for others to catch up with it. Check out Anderson’s speech below:
To round out Reed’s induction, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O and Nick Zinner performed “Vicious” and Beck did Reed’s Transformer track “Satellite of Love.”