"I'm Waiting for the Man" (The Velvet Underground)

Ah, Lou Reed.  If there's anything that you could count on, it was that he was predictably unpredictable.  (I mean, did anyone expect his disastrous collabo with Metallica, Lulu?)
Read anything about him, and you'll find that music journalists loathed interviewing him.  He was touchy, mercurial.  The only interview I've read that actually went well with Reed was a 1992 piece by writer Neil Gaiman.  
So why did people bother going back to the well, time after time, if the water was tainted?
All you have to do is listen to his storytelling on "I'm Waiting for the Man" from the groundbreaking, Andy Warhol-produced Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), and it becomes clear: he was the poet laureate of society's fringe.  Half participant, half reporter, he captures a gritty tableau of someone traveling from lower Manhattan to Harlem to buy $26 of heroin from his dealer (the "man"), who is consistently late.
For as immediate and rocking as the song is (it really is the blueprint for every punk garage band that followed), it's decidedly bleak, even though it's gracious in its reality.
Put it this way, if the song "Heroin" from the same album is the idealization of the drug, "I'm Waiting for the Man" is the harsh truth: it's a parasite that leaves you waiting in stairwells of rundown brownstones for a pricey hit of fleeting euphoria, inevitably followed by lingering hell.  (And they released that as a pop single.)
Thing is, Reed never judges or wags a finger.  He wasn't about that.  He was more about: here's the facts; make of them what you will.
And if you've wondered, like I have listening to Velvet Underground & Nico over the years, are half of the stories and characters that pop up in Reed's literate rock & roll true?  Here's what he told Gaiman in 1992:
"It's always kind of funny, over the years, people continuously asking me, 'Are these things based on reality?'  I thought it was so obvious that they were."