MIXING STREET POETRY & ROCK
Musician Lou Reed's earliest transformation captured in collection
In 1965, Lou Reed was barely 23 and less than a year removed from his college graduation. He had just experienced his first musical success, fronting a hastily thrown-together band called the Primitives on a written-to-order garage rock single called The Ostrich, but he was also still in thrall to the writer Delmore Schwartz, his Syracuse University teacher-mentor who insisted that literary art should reflect the blood and guts of real-life emotional struggle.
That dichotomy — blunt rock 'n' roll catharsis and stark lyrical realism — would define Reed's staggering career, which spanned decades of continual esthetic reinvention from his first act with the Velvet Underground all the way to his death from liver disease in 2013. But a new collection, Words & Music: May 1965, the first of a planned archival series from Light in the Attic Records, captures this perpetually evolving, consistently transgressive artist in the unlikeliest guise of all: folky tunesmith.
The release comprises acoustic demos of some of Reed's bestknown songs, including Heroin and I'm Waiting for the Man, a couple of lesser-known treasures such as Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, and a handful that have never been released in any form. Though they feature his Velvet Underground partner and on-and-off musical foil John Cale on harmonies and accompanying instrumentation, these homemade recordings predate the duo's earliest full-band sessions and have none of the Velvets' fearless spaciousness and avant-garde ambitions. This is an intimate document of two new-found friends discovering a sound that would shape countless musicians and styles in their wake. For fans, and for the several generations who revere Reed as a creative, even philosophical lodestar, Words & Music is something like a previously undiscovered early draft of Romeo and Juliet.
“When I listen to these '65 demos, it feels like such a poetic entrance, the roots of what came next,” Light in the Attic founder and co-owner Matt Sullivan says. “You can hear the beat generation, you can hear him and John merging. But you can hear elements of punk rock, too ... It's a reminder of Lou's songwriting, the mix of street poetry with rock 'n' roll.”
Words & Music was produced in partnership with Reed's archivists and his widow, the esteemed musician and theatre artist Laurie Anderson. She and Reed met in the 1990s and became a kind of living New York landmark for the final two decades of his life — inseparable twin geniuses representing entirely different realms of the Manhattan creative world. Speaking by Skype, Anderson says the May 1965 tape “sounds exactly like the Lou I knew. It's the ghost of a very ambitious young man who was working songs out. He's laughing, he's poking around. It's the same person. You can hear someone taking chances.”
Reed was an exemplary chance-taker in his life and art, which is why Words & Music can't be dismissed as mere juvenilia. Yes, it features the earliest iterations of his defining work, but it also captures him at a moment and in a setting that even the deepest devotee has never experienced. And with Reed, moments and settings are everything. Before he was a black-clad denizen of the Warhol demimonde, a punk progenitor, a dog-collared violator of sexual boundaries, a critic-baiting chronicler of New York deviancy, a defiantly “average guy” stadium rocker, a collaborator with Metallica, an interpreter of Edgar Allan Poe, and finally, an elder statesman with a yen for tai chi and meditation, Reed was simply a young man with a guitar and an armload of disparate influences.
He was an English major, a Dylan fan and, above all, a writer.
Words & Music is truly a demo in the sense the young songwriter appears to have recorded it mainly for copyright purposes. The tape survived because he mailed it to himself and held on to the unopened package for almost a half-century. Reed's archivists, Jason Stern and Don Fleming, say he retained an enormous amount of documentation across his entire career, from stage costumes to tollbooth receipts.
Nearly all this material was donated by Anderson to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where an immersive multimedia exhibition, Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars, is running through March 2023. Between this free celebration, the newly inaugurated series from Light in the Attic, and a recent Velvet Underground documentary from filmmaker Todd Haynes, Reed has become the subject of serious mainstream study and preservation in a way that his mercurial art and confrontational reputation made difficult during his life.
For Anderson, the most important track on Words & Music is Men of Good Fortune, which shares a title with a track from Reed's 1973 junkie-romance concept record Berlin, occasionally cited as the most depressing album ever made.
The 1965 Men resembles a Child Ballad, the kind of British story-song that inspired early American folk music and its 1960s revivalists.
It's a sad waltz sung by a young “maiden” who misses her chance at marriage because of her mother's warnings about wayward men.
“He became a little girl to write that song, in his little red outfit,” Anderson says.
“He was Shakespearean: He could step into people's minds. He didn't self-pity in his songs, he went outside. He saw all these people, he impersonated them, went into their minds. This is a very unique songwriter. The importance of this record is you see he always was.”