The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed

Lewis Allan Reed was born in Brooklyn on March 2, 1942, and grew up in suburban Freeport, on Long Island, where he felt isolated and was bullied. He learned guitar from the radio. After a breakdown in his first year at New York University his parents agreed to electroconvulsive therapy, which he remembered as traumatic. At Syracuse University he studied under the poet Delmore Schwartz, “the first great person I ever met”, and hosted a late-night radio show, Excursions on a Wobbly Rail, named after a Cecil Taylor tune.

In 1964 he went to work as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records, “a poor man’s Carole King”. To promote his novelty single “The Ostrich” the label put together a band, the Primitives, and in it was John Cale, a Welsh viola player from La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. Cale was surprised to find Reed tuning every string to the same note, a drone like the one he played with Young, and impressed by songs like “Heroin”. They moved in together on the Lower East Side, added Sterling Morrison, from Syracuse, and Angus MacLise on drums, and in July 1965 recorded a demo in their loft on Ludlow Street.

The filmmaker Barbara Rubin brought Andy Warhol to see them, and he became their manager. He made them the house band at the Factory, his studio, and part of his travelling show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable: his films projected over the band, a strobe light show, and the band in sunglasses because the lights were so punishing. They played New York for months, then toured the United States and Canada until May 1967.

Warhol also pushed them to work with Nico, the German singer and former model. Reed resisted, then wrote several songs for her to sing, and the two were briefly lovers. Warhol got them a deal with MGM’s Verve Records, with himself as nominal producer, and gave them free rein over their sound. Reed rarely gave an interview without paying homage to him.

Most of it was recorded in four days in April 1966 at Scepter Studios in Manhattan, paid for by Warhol and Norman Dolph, a Columbia sales executive who took a Warhol painting instead of a fee. Columbia, Atlantic and Elektra all turned it down before Verve took it. Reed wrote about buying heroin, using it and sadomasochism, not to shock, he said, but because it was what you might read in a book: “Why wouldn’t you listen to it?” Nico sang three songs, and Cale’s viola, strung with guitar and mandolin strings, droned under “Venus in Furs”.

Stores banned it, radio would not play it and magazines would not take its adverts. It peaked at No. 171, and a lawsuit over the back cover kept it out of the shops for nearly two months. Brian Eno said in 1982 that it sold only 30,000 copies in its early years, but “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”. It is now regarded as the original art-rock record; Pitchfork called it the best album of the 1960s, and it is in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Reed fired Warhol, Nico left, and in September 1967 the band went into the studio wanting to capture their live sound, as loud as they played it on the new Vox gear Warhol had got them. “You can’t do it—all the needles are on red,” Kellgren told them. Morrison called the result fuzzy, full of white noise: “what we were trying to do was really fry the tracks.” Cale called it “consciously anti-beauty”. It closes with “Sister Ray”, seventeen minutes recorded in one take.

It spent two weeks on the chart and peaked at No. 199. Rolling Stone would not review it. In time it sold over half a million copies, and its distortion became a prototype for punk, no wave and noise rock. In September 1968 Reed told Morrison and Tucker that the band was over unless Cale went; Cale played his last show at the Boston Tea Party, and Morrison was sent to tell him.

Doug Yule, from the Boston band the Grass Menagerie, came in on bass and organ, and the band went quiet. “Having made perhaps the loudest album of all time,” Richie Unterberger wrote, “it’s almost as if they’ve now decided to make the world’s quietest LP.” Reed thought making another White Light/White Heat would be “a terrible mistake”, and wrote about love, religion and loneliness instead, on matching Fender twelve-strings. Yule sang “Candy Says”, about Candy Darling, and Tucker sang the closing “After Hours”, because Reed thought her innocent voice suited a sad song better than his.

They recorded at night and stayed at the Chateau Marmont. “The sessions were constructive and happy and creative,” Yule said. Reed made his own mix, the “closet mix”, which pushed his voice to the front, and annoyed Morrison and Tucker. Critics liked it, but it did not chart at all.

MGM let them go, and Atlantic signed them and asked for an album “loaded with hits”. Tucker was on maternity leave, so Yule, the engineer Adrian Barber, a session drummer and Yule’s teenage brother Billy played the drums; Yule played bass, piano and organ, and sang four songs. Morrison was back at college and came in between classes. It holds two of Reed’s best-known songs, “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll”.

That summer the band played a nine-week residency at Max’s Kansas City, and in its last week, in August 1970, Reed quit, disillusioned and under pressure from their manager, Steve Sesnick. He said he was surprised to see Loaded in the shops, with a verse cut from “Sweet Jane”: “I left them to their album full of hits that I made.” Yule said Reed had made the edits himself.

Reed went home to his parents on Long Island and took a job as a typist at his father’s tax accounting firm, for $40 a week. He wrote poetry. In 1971 he signed to RCA and made his first solo album in London, with Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman of Yes, with versions of unreleased Velvet Underground songs; most critics overlooked it.

The band went on without him. Morrison finished his degree and in August 1971, at the airport after a show in Houston, told the others he was staying in Texas to do a PhD in medieval literature; he later taught, and then captained a tugboat in Houston. After a last European tour in late 1971, Tucker went home to raise a family. Yule made the last album under the name, Squeeze, almost alone in London in 1972, and Sesnick paid him in six copies of it. By May 1973 the Velvet Underground was over.

David Bowie had been playing “White Light/White Heat” and “I’m Waiting for the Man” on stage and on the BBC, and used his fame to promote Reed. He and Mick Ronson, his guitarist in the Spiders from Mars, produced Transformer in London, and Ronson arranged it, playing guitar, piano and recorder and writing the strings for “Perfect Day”. Four of its eleven songs date from the Velvet Underground years.

“Walk on the Wild Side” began as a song for a musical of Nelson Algren’s novel that never happened. “I took my song and changed the book’s characters into people I knew from Warhol’s factory,” Reed wrote. “I don’t like to waste things.” Its transgressive words were edited in some countries and banned in others, and it still became his only Hot 100 hit, at No. 16. The album made him an international star.

Bob Ezrin told Reed that his songs had great beginnings but never really had an ending, and asked what happened to the couple in “Berlin”, from his first album. The answer was a tragic rock opera about Jim and Caroline, two amphetamine addicts in love in Berlin, that takes in drug use, domestic violence, Caroline losing her children, and suicide. Like the albums before it, it reworks older songs: “Caroline Says II” is a rewrite of the Velvets’ “Stephanie Says”.

Rolling Stone called it “a disaster”, and the reviews disheartened him. It reached No. 7 in the UK but only No. 98 at home. Its standing grew for decades, and in 2006 Reed finally staged it, with Ezrin, the guitarist Steve Hunter from the original record, a choir and Anohni. Asked if he felt vindicated, he said: “For what? I always liked Berlin.”

After Berlin, Steve Katz of Blood, Sweat & Tears suggested Reed put together a “great live band” and make a live record of Velvet Underground songs. Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, with Hunter and Dick Wagner on guitars, became his biggest-selling album, and Sally Can’t Dance went to No. 10, his highest US chart place. Through the 1970s he used a lot of methamphetamine and alcohol, and in 1975 he was too unreliable to play a European festival tour he was booked to headline.

Then came Metal Machine Music: four sides of feedback, with every guitar string tuned to the same note, after La Monte Young’s drones, and no songs at all. It became the most returned album in RCA’s history and was withdrawn within three weeks. Reed said it was a genuine artistic effort, and that “anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am.”

Five months after Metal Machine Music, Reed made what his biographer Anthony DeCurtis called “perhaps the most romantic album of Reed’s career”. Many of the songs were inspired by and dedicated to Rachel Humphreys, a trans woman he lived with for three years, and the title song ends with a dedication to Lou and Rachel and the kids at P.S. 192, the Brooklyn school he went to before Freeport.

In Rolling Stone Paul Nelson praised the best band Reed had had since the Velvets, his rekindled guitar playing and his confident singing, and called the songs “timeless, terrific rock & roll”. Robert Christgau wrote that not even with the Velvets had he let his soft side show as nakedly as on the title song.

It came out in the middle of the punk scene Reed had helped to inspire, and he kept a watchful, competitive eye on it from the shows at CBGB. It began as a live album, taped in West Germany with the audience muted, until Arista said no to a live record and the work moved to New York. It was the first commercially released pop album recorded binaurally, through microphones in the ears of a mannequin head.

Clive Davis encouraged him to expand the title song into an eleven-minute suite in three parts, which DeCurtis heard as a requiem for Reed and Rachel’s relationship. Tom Carson, in Rolling Stone, called the record “a confession of failure that becomes a stunning, incandescent triumph—the best solo album Lou Reed has ever done.”

The live album Live: Take No Prisoners (1978) was more stand-up than concert; Rolling Stone found it “one of the funniest live albums ever recorded”, and Reed thought it his best record yet. On The Bells (1979) he played with the trumpeter Don Cherry, who had played with his idol Ornette Coleman. That year he toured Europe and America, and he began to wean himself off drugs.

In 1980 he married the designer Sylvia Morales, and the marriage inspired songs on Growing Up in Public and the record after it. The New York Times later put it this way: in the 1970s he had pretended to shoot heroin on stage, with cropped peroxide hair and black circles painted under his eyes; in 1980 he “renounced druggy theatrics, even swore off intoxicants themselves”.

Reed made it around his 40th birthday, sober, about marriage and settling down as well as violence, paranoia and drink. Robert Quine, who years before had followed the Velvet Underground across the country taping their shows, played the other guitar, in the left channel to Reed’s right. They had never played together before the sessions, there were no rehearsals, and most of it was done in one or two takes. “My House” is a tribute to Delmore Schwartz.

Tom Carson in Rolling Stone asked who had expected anything like it from Reed “at this late stage of the game”. Robert Christgau gave it an A+, “his most controlled, plainspoken, deeply felt, and uninhibited album”, and the New York Times called it the year’s most outstanding rock album.

New Sensations put Reed back in the US Top 100 for the first time since Street Hassle, and he was public enough again to advertise Honda scooters. He played the first Farm Aid in 1985, sang on Steven Van Zandt’s “Sun City” against apartheid, and in 1986 joined Amnesty International’s A Conspiracy of Hope tour, outspoken about New York’s politics and politicians.

Andy Warhol died in 1987, after routine surgery. At his memorial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that April, Reed and John Cale spoke to each other for the first time in years.

Fourteen songs about crime, AIDS, Jesse Jackson, Kurt Waldheim and Pope John Paul II, naming the NRA, Rudy Giuliani and the “Statue of Bigotry” along the way, set to plain rock and roll so that nothing would distract from the words. His liner notes asked listeners to hear its 57 minutes in one sitting, “as though it were a book or a movie”. In Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis called the songs “fierce, poetic journalism”.

Critics were unanimous, “Dirty Blvd.” spent four weeks at No. 1 on the new Modern Rock chart, and it became his second gold record. It revived his career, and with it the idea of the Velvet Underground playing again.

The painter Julian Schnabel suggested Reed and Cale write a memorial piece for Warhol. They played it first at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn in January 1989 and recorded it after a full run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: a song cycle that tells Warhol’s story roughly in order, mostly in his own voice, down to his would-be assassin, Valerie Solanas, and the doctors who could not save him. It was their first whole record together since White Light/White Heat.

In Rolling Stone, Paul Evans wrote that the two, both nearing fifty, were “the survivors Warhol wasn’t fated to become”. By the end Cale vowed never to work with Reed again, and the tour was shelved. But at a Warhol and Velvet Underground exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Jouy-en-Josas, France, in June 1990, Morrison and Tucker joined them on stage for “Heroin”.

It was meant to be about magic, after stories Reed heard about magicians in Mexico. Then two close friends fell ill with cancer and died: the songwriter Doc Pomus, who had given him his start some 25 years before, and a woman he called Rita, popularly taken to be Rotten Rita from the Factory. The album became a concept record about mortality, with Little Jimmy Scott singing on “Power and Glory”.

It went to No. 6 in the UK, his highest chart place there, and “What’s Good” was his second No. 1 on the Modern Rock chart. Greg Kot heard “a great rocker at the peak of his powers”; Christgau thought it a failed concept.

Tucker and Morrison had both worked with Reed and Cale over the years; Morrison toured in Tucker’s band. In June 1993 Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker reunited for a European tour that opened in Edinburgh and took in Glastonbury and five dates supporting U2, with Cale singing most of Nico’s songs. An American tour, an MTV Unplugged and maybe new records were proposed, and then Reed and Cale fell out again.

Sterling Morrison died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma on August 30, 1995, aged 53. When Patti Smith inducted the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, Reed, Cale and Tucker played together one last time, a new song for him: “Last Night I Said Goodbye to My Friend”.

From 1992 Reed was with the musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson, and they played on each other’s records; they married in 2008. He wrote music for two plays by the director Robert Wilson, one after H. G. Wells and one after Edgar Allan Poe, which became The Raven, with Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, Bowie and Ornette Coleman. In 1998, at Václav Havel’s request, he played a state dinner for him at the White House.

In December 2006 he staged Berlin in full at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, 33 years after it was released, and toured it to Sydney and across Europe. He practised tai chi, studied meditation and called himself “a student of Buddhist philosophy”. In 2011 he and Metallica made Lulu, after Frank Wedekind’s plays; most people disliked it, and he joked that he had no fans left after Metal Machine Music anyway.

Reed had lived with hepatitis and diabetes for years, and developed liver cancer. In May 2013 he had a liver transplant, and wrote afterwards of feeling “bigger and stronger” than ever. He died of liver disease at home on October 27, 2013, aged 71. Laurie Anderson said his last days were peaceful, and called him “a prince and a fighter”. John Cale said he had lost his “school-yard buddy”.

That night Pearl Jam played “I’m Waiting for the Man”, the Killers “Pale Blue Eyes” and Arctic Monkeys “Walk on the Wild Side”. In 2015 Patti Smith inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. His papers went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Lou Reed Archive Series, with Anderson, has released recordings no one had heard, starting with Words & Music, May 1965.