Reed had storyteller’s eye for detail, poet’s flair for wordplay
Lou Reed, singer and songwriter: b New York, March 2, 1942; m (1) Sylvia Morales (diss); m (2) Laurie Anderson; d New York, October 27, 2013, aged 71.
LOU REED never had quite the notoriety or sales of 1960s peers such as the Beatles or Bob Dylan – his only major commercial hit was Walk on the Wild Side. But his influence was just as vast, if not more so.
Punk, post-punk and most strains of underground music of the past 40 years would not exist without the one-of-a-kind merger of music and words pioneered by Reed and his groundbreaking band, the Velvet Underground.
Reed leaves behind one of the most profound musical legacies of any 20th-century artist.
His lyrics suggested a new street poetry – raw and literary. His music, with Velvet Underground’s John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, merged primitivism with sophisticated avant-garde ideas.
The Velvets made four landmark studio albums before crumbling in 1970, each a template for the underground music to follow. The artists in their debt include R.E.M, David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, U2 and Patti Smith, and stretch from Iceland (Bjork) to South America (Os Mutantes). In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1990, Roxy Music founder Brian Eno reiterated his famous remark about the Velvets – ‘‘Only a few thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them formed a band.’’
In a 1992 interview with the Tribune, Reed explained his daring mix of high and low art. He only wanted nothing to do with the middle-brow territory occupied by most rock music in the 60s and beyond.
‘‘I was an English major in college, for chrissakes,’’ Reed said. ‘‘I ought to be able to put together a good lyric at the very least. It would be embarrassing if I couldn’t. And I really like rock.
‘‘But I wanted something that would engage you mentally, that you could listen to on another level. I just thought that would be the perfect thing in rock’n’roll. That 10 years from now you could intellectually, if not spiritually, on the level that a novel can.’’
Reed grew up in a middle-class family and studied at Syracuse University, where he was mentored by the famed poet Delmore Schwartz.
His staunch interest in Beat literature and classic soul and doowop was perhaps underutilised in his job as staff songwriter for Pickwick Records in New York, but the for-hire writing sharpened his affinity for writing simple twoor three-chord melodies.
That gift flourished in the Velvets, where he wrote such future classics as Rock ‘n’ Roll,
and Pale Blue Eyes. In the mid-60s, he befriended Cale, a classically trained musician from Wales, who brought a cutting-edge sense of harmonics and texture to Reed’s melodies.
At a time when rock music was only just beginning to grapple with deeper subjects, Reed’s songs put society’s misfits, outcasts and pariahs at the centre, and not in a judgmental way. The epic Heroin, its dire scene set by the ebb and surge of the guitars and Cale’s viola, focused on a junkie.
As shocking as the subject matter was when Reed and his bandmates began performing it in New York City clubs in 1965, Heroin was a nuanced and tragic first-person portrayal of addiction.
‘‘I don’t think I’ve backed away from any subject,’’ Reed told the Tribune.
The Velvets were embraced by Andy Warhol, who made the band part of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Warhol would project his art films on the band, dressed in black, while dancers writhed and, in some cases, cracked whips.
Reed’s lyrics looked at transgressive subjects, whether sadomasochism ( Venus in Furs) or drug dealing ( Waiting for the Man), with a storyteller’s eye for detail and a poet’s flair for wordplay. The music could be ferociously violent or deeply sensitive, expanding the vocabulary of the rock quartet to include Eastern, European, classical and experimental impulses.
But the band was never widely understood in its time, and Reed left at the start of the 1970s to pursue a solo career. His work was soon championed by a new wave of bands out of England and New York, including the New York Dolls, Sex Pistols and Patti Smith, and Reed became the ‘‘godfather of punk’’.
The Bowie-produced Walk on the Wild Side single and Transformer album in 1972 became key moments in the gender-bending glam movement.
Along the way, Reed went from a widely misunderstood, even reviled underground figure into an international man of letters, published author and respected artist.
His solo albums became more elaborate, conceptual works, such as the much-praised 1989 release New York; his 1990 collaboration with Cale in tribute to their late benefactor Warhol, Songs for Drella; and his deep dive into the work of Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven (2003).
His last major project was a deeply divisive collaboration with Metallica, Lulu. It was in keeping with a history that includes its share of controversial releases, such as the all-instrumental noise album Metal Machine Music in 1975 and the brutal rock opera Berlin in 1973.
The latter ‘‘didn’t get one positive review and was considered a disaster’’ when it first came out, Reed once remarked, ‘‘and now people think it’s a masterpiece’’ upon its reissue several decades later. ‘‘I’ve learned it takes people time to figure out what I’m up to.’’
Embedded within this cycle of reluctant acceptance was Reed’s defiant, sometimes downright icy public persona.
He was notorious for chewing up interviewers who did not properly defer to him. His jousting with the late critic Lester Bangs is one of the great chapters in the rock-media civil war.
But Reed once showed a different side when a Tribune reporter tried to interview him backstage at the 1990 Farm Aid concert in Indianapolis.
Reed, hiding behind shades and giving mono-syllabic answers, was in no apparent mood to talk. Then the writer’s tape recorder inexplicably stopped working.
‘‘Here, let me take a look at that,’’ Reed offered. ‘‘Let’s reload these batteries . . . Have you checked the pause button?’’
Then Reed took off his shades and peered up from the bulky machine.
‘‘You know,’’ he said, ‘‘we’re just going to have to improvise.’’