Every music journalist who should interview him has a story about meeting Lou Reed. He was considered a bad-tempered misanthrope and cynic, an aging rock star with airs and graces, a diva who quickly got bored. His moods were arbitrary or followed a secret plan – those who came away were amazed to report that he was a tidy and pleasant man who would like to talk a little longer.
But most of them didn’t get away with it. You were never allowed to talk to him about drugs – if you did, Reed became a beast, and even Prozac didn’t help. Author Sylvie Simmons documented a tantrum in which the artist called her a whore. Maybe it was the electric shocks that Lou Reed was given in his youth to combat his latent homosexuality, maybe it was all the drugs he later consumed: he wasn’t good with eating cherries.
He was born Lewis Allan Reed on March 2, 1942 on Long Island. He grew up in Brooklyn, became estranged from his family at an early age, and studied in Syracuse with the writer Delmore Schwartz, who became his mentor. At that time he loved the harmless vocal ensembles of doo-wop (he later inducted the singer Dion into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame), and in 1963 he moved to New York City, where he became a contract songwriter for Pickwick Records. Up to this point his path is similar to the careers of Neil Diamond and Donald Fagen, although he may not have studied for long.
The Velvet Underground & Nico
But he didn’t have to, because now he was studying the streets and listening to experimental music, such as that of La Monte Young, with whom a young Welsh musician named John Cale worked. In 1964 they founded the band The Primitives, then The Velvet Underground. Cale claims he had already heard the track “Heroin” when he met Reed – suggesting that The Velvet Underground & Nico’s songs had already taken shape long before the record. In 1966, Andy Warhol was looking for a band and discovered the dark, short-haired young men along with the boyish Mo Tucker on drums. The album with the banana was released in the spring of 1967 – and did nothing. Stoic electric harmony, if not noise, with the sonorous singing of a blonde German Valkyrie was the very last thing needed in the psychedelic Summer of Love. Today the album is ranked among the top ten rock records of all time in every canon around the world.
John Cale left after the second record, Lou Reed stayed until the fourth, “Loaded” (1970), which is always underestimated. His first solo LP was a failure, including with critics. Then he met David Bowie, an admirer who was at the height of his fame and produced “Transformer”: Reed’s bone-dry songs met Bowie’s emphatic glam rock, and alongside “Walk On The Wild Side”, the later anthem of the international fashion fairs, porn conventions and provincial ice cream parlors, such touching, sweet songs like “Satellite Of Love” and “Perfect Day” were created.
Lou Reed was now successful. “Berlin” (1973), however, was widely panned and thus justified Reed’s dislike of critics (and audiences). He stubbornly played the album in its entirety at concerts in 2004 and staged a celebratory stage version in New York in 2006 with Julian Schnabel, Antony and a children’s choir. In 1974 he followed up with another conventional record, “Sally Can’t Dance”, and then in 1975 he recorded the most famous commercial suicide in record history – “Metal Machine Music”, an inferno of feedback that his business partners could of course have prevented. With the melancholic “Coney Island Baby” he once again presented himself as a tough, but deep down romantic songwriter.
Grantler and curmudgeon
From then on, Lou became extremely unreliable. While the punks exploited the Velvet Underground’s template, Reed blithely recorded erratic records like Rock And Roll Heart and The Bells. In 1982 his rebirth was reported when he completed “The Blue Mask” with Fernando Saunders on bass and guitarist Robert Quine, who accompanied him almost always from then on. “Legendary Hearts” and “New Sensations” consolidated his reputation as a complainer and curmudgeon in happy times. With the loose guitar storms of “Mistrial” (1986), Reed raged against the zeitgeist. In 1989 he became a critical darling again with the masterpiece “New York”, a furious reckoning with the politics of his city, with Jesse Helms, Kurt Waldheim and everyone who stood in the way. Guitar, bass, drums – that’s all you need: This theorem gave rise to the almost brutal album, on which Reed’s mocking vocals came to the fore. After Andy Warhol’s death, Reed and Cale wrote the mild requiem “Songs For Drella.”
“Magic & Loss” (1992), Reed’s poetic dance about AIDS and death, didn’t work out so well. At the subsequent concerts he performed the album in its entirety, with a standing desk, reading lamp and reading glasses on his nose, condemning the audience to silence. Anyone who experienced it will never forget the second part after the break, when the band unexpectedly played sonic versions of “Sweet Jane”, “Satellite Of Love” and “Perfect Day”. In 1992 he reunited with Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker for a tour, but they were already arguing on the bus to the hall. The songs became steadily longer, “Set The Twilight Reeling” (1996) impressed with the sentimentality of “Egg Cream,” and live records became boring. Lou Reed wrote the music for Robert Wilson’s “Time Machine,” which the features section found, oh, too loud. In 2003 he recorded The Raven, an uninspired collection of songs based on poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Interviewer asked Reed to please be prepared.
The hardest of all
“Lulu”, the much-maligned record with Metallica from 2011, remains the last work. Reed had barely wanted to go on tour with his new friends when they fell out again. Some oddballs rose to the defense of the album, but no one else liked it.
Lou Reed, the toughest of them all, the iguana in the muscle shirt, founder of a new rock music with John Cale, the rager against the sting, provocateur, asshole, God bless us, cool old fart, joker, rock’n’roller, has died. Right now I’m listening to the long, long fade-out of “Temporary Thing.” It’s been a crazy ride, Lou.