Lou Reed

Singer

• Born: March 2, 1942
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: October 27, 2013

Rock musician and songwriter

Reed was a founding member of and the principal songwriter for the highly influential avant-garde rock music group Velvet Underground. After the group broke up in the early 1970s Reed pursued a solo career that flourished with creativity.

Areas of achievement: Music; literature; photography

Early Life

Lou Reed was born at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Sidney George Reed (originally Rabinowitz), was an accountant. His mother, Toby Futterman, reputedly had been a beauty queen. In 1953, Lou Reed’s father, whose accounting practice was prospering, moved the family to the middle-class suburb of Freeport, Long Island, which was also home to a significant number of actors and entertainers.

The young Reed was fascinated by the new genres of popular music that appeared in the late 1950s, especially rock and roll and its offshoots. Having received some training in classical piano and having largely taught himself to play guitar, Reed began to play in various doo-wop groups. Reed’s rebellious temperament increasingly concerned his parents, and in 1959 Reed underwent shock therapy treatments at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital. This experience, which Reed later confronted in such songs as “Kill Your Sons” (1974) and such albums as Growing Up in Public (1980), left him profoundly ambivalent about conventional family life.

From 1960 to 1964, Reed studied literature at Syracuse University. The most formative relationship of Reed’s early life was with the Jewish writer Delmore Schwartz. From Schwartz, Reed learned the naturalism that would characterize his lyrics and a conception of the artist as an unavoidably alienated adversary of mainstream culture. At the same time, Reed took an increasing interest in free jazz musicians, such as Ornette Coleman.

Life’s Work

After graduation Reed took a job as a songwriter for the budget record label Pickwick International. Through Pickwick, Reed, who was experimenting with guitar technique, met the Welsh music student John Cale, who was working with the minimalist composers John Cage and LaMonte Young. The convergence of the musical interests of Reed and Cale led to the creation of Velvet Underground. The band soon attracted the attention of the artist Andy Warhol, who was looking for musical accompaniment for his work in multimedia. Warhol provided for Reed a model for how an artist might manipulate his public image for a mass audience.

Between 1965 and 1970, the Velvet Underground released four albums that are generally considered among the most innovative in the history of rock music. Reed overtly explored transgressive subjects—the complex interplay of sexual dominance and debasement and, in songs such as “Heroin” (1967) and “Sister Ray” (1967), the urban drug culture and New York City’s gay and transgender scene. The Velvet Underground’s musical style, with its use of drone, distortion, and feedback, only underscored their divergence from the mainstream good vibrations of the 1960s.

With the disintegration of the Velvet Underground, Reed embarked on a solo career. The 1972 album Transformer produced the most successful single of Reed’s career, “Walk on the Wild Side,” which celebrated leading figures of the demimonde that clustered around Warhol’s studio, The Factory. Throughout the 1970s, Reed experimented with a variety of musical styles, such as the androgynous glam rock and the incipient heavy metal of 1974’s live recording Rock and Roll Animal. In 1980, Reed married British designer Sylvia Morales. Songs such as “Blue Mask” (1982) remained as menacing as anything Reed had ever written. However, Reed had written songs of rare emotional complexity, such as “Coney Island Baby” (1975). Much of his songwriting in the 1980s developed this latent romanticism and suggested a Reed who was containing his more self-destructive tendencies.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a veritable renaissance of Reed’s career. The 1989 album New York evoked both the energies and the pathologies of the city that had always been his creative inspiration. Throughout much of his career Reed had downplayed his Jewish heritage. The New York album reversed this practice, with such songs as “Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim” calling out contemporary forms of anti-Semitism. In 1990, Reed and Cale reunited to do a Warhol tribute album. Songs for Drella—“Drella” being a nickname for Warhol that blended “Dracula” and “Cinderella”—was followed by Reed's 1993 album Magic and Loss, a moving reflection on the death of two friends from cancer. In 1996, Reed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

While Reed continued to write and record music into the new century, his divorce from Morales in 1994 and his relationship with performance artist Laurie Anderson coincided with a new eclecticism in the projects he pursued. In 1996, Reed teamed with theater director Robert Wilson to provide songs for Time Rocker, a reinterpretation of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). In 2000, Reed and Wilson collaborated on a staging of the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, POEtry, songs and readings from which Reed issued in a 2003 recording The Raven. Reed also published three books of photography: Emotion in Action (2003), Lou Reed’s New York (2006), and Romanticism (2009). In 2010, Reed premiered his first documentary film, Red Shirley, which recounts the life of his one-hundred-year-old cousin from her emigration from Poland in 1938 to her years as a labor organizer in New York City’s Garment District. 2011 saw the release of Lulu, a full-length album in collaboration with the heavy metal band Metallica; unlike most of Reed's work it drew largely negative reviews.

Despite having struggled with drugs and alcohol during his rise to fame, Reed was sober from the 1980s on and was a noted champion of health practices such as tai chi. In 2013 he underwent liver transplantation surgery, which was reportedly successful. However, symptoms of liver disease returned and he underwent further treatment. He died of the illness on October 27, 2013, at his residence in Southampton, New York. He was seventy-one years old. Many fellow musicians and artists commemorated Reed following his death, acknowledging his great influence as an innovator in rock and roll and beyond. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his solo career in 2015.

Significance

In one of his earliest and most affecting ballads, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (1967), Reed promised “to reflect what you are.” Reed shared with fellow Jewish rock musicians Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen a desire to bring a literary sensibility to his music. Many critics, for example, treat the three-part “Street Hassle” (1978) as a model of the short story in song. What sets Reed apart from other musicians is the uncompromising naturalism in which he voices his lyrics. The point, however, was never pure provocation, and Reed was no mere voyeur. He treated the denizens of even his darkest songs with compassion, and, in so doing, he held out the possibility of redemption and transcendence. As he observed in his signature song “Sweet Jane” (1970), “Anyone who ever had a heart/ They wouldn’t turn around and break it.”

If Reed opened up a new world for rock music, he also owed much to the Old World. He reversed his family’s assimilationist trajectory, returning to the lower East Side and Greenwich Village and embracing the Jewish tradition of songwriting that combined self-effacing irony with sympathy for the disadvantaged.

Bibliography

Beeber, Steven Lee. The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. Chicago: Chicago Review, 2006. Print.

Billig, Michael. Rock and Roll Jews. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000. Print.

Bockris, Victor. Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Print.

Doggett, Peter. Lou Reed: Growing Up in Public. London: Omnibus, 1992. Print.

Ratliff, Ben. "Outsider Whose Dark, Lyrical Vision Helped Shape Rock 'n' Roll." New York Times. New York Times, 27 Oct. 2013. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.

Reed, Lou. Pass Through Fire: The Collected Lyrics. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Print.