If you’ve been reading my stories you might think this is a follow up to the time Lou Reed cussed me out. You would be wrong. This is the story of when Lou Reed apologized to me.
Again with the Peaches Record store, Lou Reed was in town for the Street Hassle Tour and making a stop there. I had been waiting for my chance to confront the bitch and tell him how I felt about the abuse he spewed at me several years earlier. Just kidding. I was just there out of curiosity. I had tickets to show and free time so why the fuck not.
His band which was about 7 people came in. They lined behind the counter to sign autographs for no one who showed up for that. Yep, there they were just milling around. I wasn’t going up to chat with them. What was I going to say. As they say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop and with nothing to do the band members started plundering the store grabbing as many records as they could. Arms full of records. I’m really surprised I didn’t see one of them grab the ever present Peaches crate to hold their records.
I was just there being a fly on the wall. I sidled up to an area where Lou and I’m guessing a road manager were talking. They were discussing the ransacking of the store like pirates by his bandmates and how this was no use to him because he was a tape man and not into vinyl. They were doing this in the punk singles area of Peaches so I could disguise my eavesdropping by browsing a well known area to me. At this point I was pretty close to them. The road manager was telling Lou he should go grab a bunch of tapes. Lou said, “yeah I’ll grab a bunch of those.” At which point he looks over to me, I suppose assuming I was a store clerk, grabbed me by the shoulder and said, “I’m sorry.” Ha! like I gave a fuck if he ripped off Peaches.
You might think to yourself well T-Bone that’s that and Lou apologized I guess this is the end of the story. WRONG!
Bout’s that time a super tall Afro-American comes into the store with two women, one on each arm. He was wearing dark sunglasses inside the store and I wouldn’t have been able to identify him. However Lou’s bass player did. He came over to Lou and said, “Lou, Lou that’s Leon Spinks, let me offer him a ticket to the show tonight.” This was at a time when Leon Spinks was the Heavyweight World Champion having recently beaten Mohamed Ali. In no time at all more people were gathering around Leon than Lou or any of the band. And while Leon didn’t seem to be annoyed with the attention he also did not seem to care about it.
I don’t recall if Leon got offered or accepted the ticket from Team Lou but I don’t recall seeing him at the show and I think I would have noticed. Here’s the thing. I watched that fight between Spinks and Ali on TV and I couldn’t help recall that Leon seemed about a head shorter than Ali. In person Leon looked to be about twice my height. Granted that my height is just over the threshold of qualifications for midget, but all the same. As I was standing there my mind was boggled that if this is the short guy in the match how much taller and scarier it would be, to be in the presence of Ali.
Speaking of tickets to the show. Frank C., who was a cousin of Mark C. and introduced me to him as a singer and we ended up forming The Camaros, was there with a ticket stub from a past show that for some reason or another he couldn’t make. So he had the whole ticket. Back in the day that was unusual because they didn’t scan your ticket when you entered a venue they tore it in half. Any way he was talking to Lou saying, “hey I got this ticket I didn’t use, get me in the show tonight.” Lou wrote on the back of his ticket, Let him in and signed his name. I can’t remember if he was able to enter with that ticket or not since it was so far back in the past.
But that was the way, in the rock and roll days.