In the later years of his life, Lou Reed kept an office in Manhattan’s West Village and a storage space in New York City’s Chelsea district. The latter, says his former technical assistant Jason Stern, was “stacked almost floor to ceiling” with unlabelled cardboard boxes. “I had no idea what was in them. I never asked Lou.”
When Reed died in 2013, the question of what to do with it all loomed large for his wife, the artist, musician and film director Laurie Anderson. No, she sighs, Reed left no instructions regarding his archive. “Wouldn’t that be great! No, nothing. Zero. We didn’t really talk about it,” she says. She even balks at the notion of calling it an archive. “I wouldn’t say that because he kept things, he was aware of their value. He didn’t think about his stuff that way. He wasn’t curating at all. He really wasn’t that interested in his past. He just left it there. This stuff was not important to him.”
