Jane’s Addiction guitarist and all-around celebrity Dave Navarro once remarked that you haven’t lived until you’ve been hugged by Lou Reed, obviously enchanted by the moments spent in the presence of the legendary musician who penned songs like Rock’n’Roll, Venus in Furs and The Bed (all of them covered by Navarro in some form or another) and inspired the title of the quintessential Jane’s Addiction track Jane Says.

I’ve never been hugged by the great Lou Reed, but metaphorically speaking, he’s hugged me long before I’ve met him. I’ve discovered him by chance, listening to a cassette tape that someone left on the bench of the school basketball court, and became instantly enamored with his diversity, truthfulness and unconventional approach to tunes-crafting. From the frank junkie tale of Heroin and Coney Island Baby‘s monumental glory of love, to the telling-it-how-it-is inner city vignettes of New York, Lou’s powerful delivery left a lasting impression on a budding teenager who was just about to shed his tadpole skin. In a way, he prepared me for everything I was bound to achieve. I felt I was ready to hit the world with my own traits and quirks.

By then, I have ventured to another stage of my musical exploration – Jane’s Addiction and the early Nineties underground-to-the-fore movement. For what seemed like a perfect band, Perry’s surreal echoes, Eric’s viscerally organic bass lines, Stephen’s thunderous tribal blasts and Dave’s masterful-yet-unpretentious licks led the ferocious wolfpack of my musical preferences for a number of years. They combined The Velvet Underground’s streetwise poetry with Led Zeppelin’s larger than life presence and nurtured a unique mixture of several musical genres before the alternative rock explosion in the early Nineties made it a mainstream standard. Jane’s Addiction rocked like hell, but weighting everything in retrospect, it all came down to honesty. Perry’s portrayal of life and the soundscape of the band’s instrumentalists was the most honest thing I have heard since Lou Reed.

I shook Lou’s hand before a concert in 2000. He wasn’t in the mood for talking (I was told that he rarely was). Nevertheless, I will always consider him a father figure that taught me how to survive the toughest of times through the varsity of his music. He’s the king of all my heroes, the instigator of the “Pris Says” of my life.