It’s hard to believe that this goofy slice of The Blooz was written by the same guy, and at around the same time, as “Heroin,” “Waiting for the Man,” and “Venus in Furs.” I mean, what would Lester Bangs have said?

Lester, for those unfamiliar, was a rock ctitic who wrote for Rolling Stone until he was canned for “disrespecting musicians,” then for Creem magazine. He was Lou Reed’s biggest fan and harshest critic. He idolized the Velvet Underground — “modern music starts with the Velvets,” he said — and in the Seventies wrote a series of unsparingly frank State of the Lou articles, including one called “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves.”

We are too early in the timeline here for Lester, who didn’t really get going until about 1969. But this quote from “Death Dwarves” should probably be plastered across the masthead of this blog, just by way of countering the inevitable Stockholm syndrome that will occur when you write about someone over a long period of time:

A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.

Lou Reed was not perfect, certainly not personally, and not artistically either. “Buzz Buzz Buzz” is pretty weak sauce — not objectionable, necessarily, just derivative and lightweight. It’s fun to hear once, then can go back on the shelf with the rest of the false starts and dead ends.