Lou Reed (1942 -2013) taught me that there is beauty in being different. In fact, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.
Reed was not the world’s first out bisexual rock star, but everyone thought he was. He certainly wasn’t straight. As a teenager, Reed had queer stirrings that alarmed his parents, who forced him to undergo electroconvulsive therapy. He vividly described the treatment in his song Kill Your Sons (1974):
All your two-bit psychiatrists are giving you electro shock
They say, they let you live at home, with mom and dad
Instead of mental hospital
But every time you tried to read a book
You couldn’t get to page 17
‘Cause you forgot, where you were
So you couldn’t even read
Don’t you know, they’re gonna kill your sons
During the Glam Rock era, Reed’s stage persona bordered on androgyny, which, combined with his tumultuous friendship with David Bowie, created the illusion that they were both pansexual.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Reed was rumored to have had same-sex lovers. Photographer Billy Name, an Andy Warhol Factory regular, claimed that he and Reed had sex in 1968. There was also Reed’s relationship with Rachel Humphreys, a trans woman. She toured with Reed in the mid-1970s, and they became lovers. Although Humphreys identified as a female, Reed referred to her with two genders, sometimes in the same breath. Reed:
”Nothing could impress her. He’d hardly heard my music and didn’t like it all that much when he did.”
After they broke up, Reed married Sylvia Morales, a straight woman who worked as a dominatrix. They later divorced.
During his lifetime, Reed was perpetually evasive about his queerness. In an infamous interview with Rolling Stone, Reed said:
”The notion that everybody’s bisexual is a very popular line right now, but I think its validity is limited. I could say something like if in any way my album helps people decide who or what they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something in my life. But I don’t feel that way at all. You can’t listen to a record and say, ‘Oh that really turned me onto gay life, I’m gonna be gay’. A lot of people will have one or two experiences, and that’ll be it. Things may not change one iota. By the time a kid reaches puberty they’ve been determined. Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn’t men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have? ”
Despite the candor of his music, Reed’s sexuality remains a big question mark. He married longtime girlfriend Laurie Anderson in 2008, and the two were, by most accounts, were a happy couple. The precise parameters of his sexuality, however, remain unclear.
Whether Reed was bi, pan, or ambisexual, to the end he was a thoroughly modern man. It isn’t even that important, it’s that everyone thought he was queer. It was part of his transgressive, druggy, kinky image. In the Velvet Underground‘s first album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), with the song Venus In Furs, a reference to the 1870 erotic novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave us the term “masochism”, Reed was already dropping clues.
Reed brought queer characters into the mainstream consciousness through his songs. There’s Jackie from Walk On The Wild Side, a boy hitchhiking across the country who “plucked his eyebrows on the way, shaved his legs and then he was a she.” Jackie was, of course, Jackie Curtis.
There’s whoever he’s singing to in Oh, Jim:
Oh Jim, how could you treat me this way
How could you treat me this way?
Oh Jim, how could you treat me this way
How could you treat me this way?
You know you broke my heart
Ever since you went away
Now you said that you love us
But you only make love to one of us
Oh Jim, how could you treat me this way
You know you broke my heart
Ever since you went away
There’s also the album art for Transformer (1972) by Ernst Thormahlen:
Those songs, in that era, performed by a guy in heavy mascara and leather pants, presented something shocking and new. But Take A Walk On The Wild Side became an unlikely hit, and Reed became a star.
Before Reed, Rock ‘n’ Roll was a part of the entertainment industry, still ingratiating itself with its target audience even as it tried equally hard to alienate parents. Reed made alienation the dominant theme for future generations.
With The Velvet Underground, and in his solo career, his odes to transgression influenced Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, The Sex Pistols, Joy Division, and REM. His fearlessness was the most distinctive quality that Reed brought to popular music. He was unafraid to zap listeners with noise elements borrowed from Jazz and classical avant-garde or with images of himself as a part of sexually ambiguous underworld. He found an audience of outsiders who grabbed hold of his example.
The Velvet Underground & Nico, an album ostensibly produced by Warhol, features the famous artist’s peel-off banana on the cover. The music by Reed and his colleagues was listened to only by a devoted few fans. Those few eventually emerged as the shapers of a new and powerful popular music. Once the punk and new wave explosions had occurred, it could be seen that Reed changed the mood and the direction of pop music. From the start, the Velvet Underground’s songs plunged into the real darkness of hard drugs and sexual degradation.
Darkness was reflected in the way Reed rebooted the music’s primal look; he wore black, black, and blacker, a conspicuous challenge to the psychedelia and peace and love philosophies of the era. The look is still around today with young musicians still trying to evoke the illicit thrill of The Velvet Underground.
Reed’s songs have a literary slant. His heart belonged to Raymond Chandler, William S. Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. His later career included collaborating on theatre pieces with Robert Wilson, films with Wim Wenders and collaborations with the Anderson.
Reed was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn. Growing up on Long Island, he was attracted to the sounds of doo-wop vocal groups and avant-garde Jazz. He taught himself to play the guitar and made his first record with a doo-wop group, The Jades, at 14 years old.
In 1960 he enrolled at Syracuse University, where he studied film directing, creative writing and journalism. On graduating in 1964, intent on a career in music, he went to work as a songwriter for Pickwick Records, whose principal business was churning out budget-priced discs for sale in supermarkets. When one of his compositions, titled The Ostrich and intended to promote a made-up dance craze, threatened to become a hit, a band was quickly assembled to help promote it. It was there that Reed met composer John Cale, who would become his most important musical collaborator.
Cale, whose instruments were viola and the bass guitar, studied composition with gay composer Aaron Copland. His discovery that Reed played The Ostrich on a guitar with all its strings tuned to the same note encouraged him to pursue a collaboration. Rehearsing in a loft on the Lower East Side, they went through a series of names before calling themselves The Velvet Underground, after a pulp paperback devoted to kinky sexual behavior.
Returning from a visit to London, Cale suggested a shift from their conventional Dylan-influenced folk-rock style to something more confrontational.
Both simple and highly sophisticated, their music appealed to Warhol, who was looking for a rock group to add to his stable of superstars. They soon became familiar figures at the Factory, where they were introduced to the German model Nico (Christa Päffgen), who had recently made a record in London. At Warhol’s suggestion she joined the band, adding an element of glamour and mystery to Reed’s songs, with her deep expressionless voice.
Nico left the band after the first album, but the remaining Velvets recorded a second album, White Light/White Heat (1968) with 17-minute track, Sister Ray.
Tensions with Reed led to Cale’s departure before their third album, The Velvet Underground, where Reed used a gentler approach. A fourth album, Loaded (1970), contained two songs that would become classics, Sweet Jane and Rock & Roll, but Reed left the group, disillusioned by its commercial failure.
He returned to his parents’ home, and worked as a clerk in his father’s firm for more than a year, re-emerging at the end of 1971 to begin a series of albums with RCA Records. The first was not a success but the second, Transformer, produced by his new friend Bowie, contained a hit single, the seductive Walk On The Wild Side, which portrayed a series of Warhol characters.
Glam-Rock gave way to Punk, and Reed’s career was rather inconsistent, often sub-standard, occasionally brilliant. His best work such as a song-cycle Berlin (1973), and Metal Machine Music (1975), a noisy double album devised to bring the termination of his recording contract, lost him some fans, but with New York (1989), which commented on AIDS, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Magic And Loss (1992) gave the basic three-chord song a scrumptious fresh raw sound. The Raven (2003), a series of pieces inspired by Poe, demonstrates his extraordinary range.
He collaborated with Cale one last time on Songs For Drella, (1990), an homage to Warhol. In 1993 the Velvet Underground re-formed for a series of European concerts that ended, appropriately enough with in-fighting. They played together once more, while being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
What Reed possessed was authenticity. When he sang about going up to Harlem to buy heroin or about transgressive sex, his writing came from first-hand experience. Drugs and drink were a constant companion for most of his adult life.
He gave up drinking and drugs in his 50s and became a Buddhist. He underwent a liver transplant in 2013 but died soon after in the Long Island home he shared with Anderson. Reed’s distinctive deadpan voice, poetic lyrics and experimental guitar were the trademarks of his long career.
