We're going to start with a sound. I want you
to imagine a guitar, but not a guitar playing
a melody or a riff. Imagine a guitar where every
single string is tuned to the exact same note
and it's just being hammered over and over again
until it creates this wall of drone that feels
less like music and more like an industrial machine.
Okay, I'm with you. Now take that sound. and
put it next to one of the most delicate, heartbreaking
string arrangements ever written about a perfect
day in the park. And somehow those two sounds
came from the same person. Yeah, exactly. We
are looking at Lewis Allen Reid. The world knows
him as Lou Reed, the architect of alternative
rock, the godfather of punk. All titles he probably
would have hated, by the way. Oh, absolutely
would have hated them. He spent 40 years trying
to outrun any label anyone tried to stick on
him. Yeah, that was his whole MO. And that's
really the mission for this deep dive. We aren't
just recounting the biography of a rock star.
I mean, we have enough behind the music specials
for that. We're trying to solve a specific puzzle.
How does a creative writing student from Long
Island who wanted to be a serious novelist end
up becoming the god of rock and roll for the
underground? And maybe more importantly, why
did he spend his entire career... seemingly trying
to sabotage his own success. Yes, that's the
core of it. It's the central tension of his life.
You look at the source material, the biographies,
the critical reception, his own notes, and you
see a man constantly oscillating between wanting
to be a pop star and wanting to be an avant -garde
alien. Well, we have a lot to get through. We've
got electroshock therapy controversies, a species
of underground spider named after him. What was
just fantastic? A fistfight with David Bowie.
and a guitar tuning technique that really accidentally
changed history. But let's start with the context.
Because if you picture Lou Reed, you picture
the leather jacket, the sunglasses, the cigarette,
the deadpan scowl. The Phantom of Rock, that
whole image. Right. But that image didn't just
appear out of nowhere. It was constructed. And
underneath it was a kid named Louis from Freeport,
Long Island, whose family name was Rabinowitz
and who really, really liked doo -wop. This is
one of my favorite contradictions in the data.
You listen to Venus and Furs or Heroin and it
sounds like the end of the world. It's dark.
It's confrontational. Totally. But Louis Reed's
first musical love wasn't noise. It was street
corner harmony. He was in a group called the
Jades in the late 50s. And this wasn't just a
high school hobby where they played the cafeteria.
I mean, they were in the system. They were a
real group. They were. In 1958, they recorded
a single called So Blue. And you can go listen
to it. It's a standard, sweet, doo -wop track.
Nothing earth -shattering. But the personnel
on that session is what's really important. It
is. The saxophonist on that record was King Curtis.
Which is just insane context for a teenager.
Yeah. King Curtis was the session guy. He played
with everyone from the Coasters to, later on,
Aretha Franklin. Right. So what this shows is
that Reed, from the very beginning, was adjacent
to greatness. He wasn't some total outsider looking
in. He was inside the machinery of the music
business before he was even 20. He saw how the
sausage was made. Exactly. He saw the gap between
the feeling of the music and the commercial product
you had to create. And I think that cynicism
started really early for him. But while this
musical side was budding, his personal life was,
well, let's say fracturing. We need to talk about
the trauma at NYU. This is the origin story moment
that gets cited in every article. But I feel
like we need to unpack the nuance here because
the narrative has shifted over the years. You're
referring to the electroconvulsive therapy, the
ECT. Right. So the short version is he has a
breakdown at NYU, gets brought home, and his
parents authorize shock therapy. Yeah. The legend,
and this is the story Lou himself propagated
for decades, was that this was basically conversion
therapy. That his parents were trying to... zap
the gay away it's a horrifying narrative and
it fueled so much of his art you hear it so clearly
in kill your sons which he released in 1974 oh
it's brutal the lyrics are so explicit all your
two -bit psychiatrists are giving you electric
shocks he frames it as this war between a non
-conformist child and parents who would rather
destroy his brain than let him be different But
the source material, especially since his death,
suggests it wasn't quite that black and white.
It rarely is. His sister, Meryl, has been very
vocal about this. She's tried to, you know, set
the record straight from her perspective. And
what's her take on it? She paints a picture not
of homophobic parents, but of terrified parents.
You have to put yourself in the sociological
context of the early 1960s. Their son is anxious.
He's socially unresponsive. He's acting out in
ways they just don't understand. And the doctors
are the authority figures. The doctors are God,
and they tell them, this is the treatment. This
is what you do for these behavioral issues. If
you don't do this, you are neglecting your child.
So it's less about malice and maybe more about
a tragic generational gap and, frankly, medical
ignorance at the time. I think that's a fair
assessment. But here's the key insight for us.
It doesn't really matter what the parents intended.
It matters how Lou processed it. To him, it was
a fundamental betrayal. He said it wiped out
chunks of his memory. It established this core
belief that authority figures, parents, doctors,
and later record labels are out to destroy you.
That trauma is the engine of the Velvet Underground.
Completely. It's why his music feels so paranoid
and defensive and, you know, on edge. So he carried
that scar with him to Syracuse University. And
this is where the big pivot happens. He stops
being just a victim of the suburbs and starts
consciously becoming an artist. And he meets
Delmore Schwartz. The doomed poet. Schwartz is
the absolute missing link between high literature
and what Reed ended up doing with rock and roll.
What was the specific philosophy Schwartz passed
on to him? Because, you know, Reed wasn't writing
sonnets. His lyrics are very direct. No, and
that's the point. Schwartz's whole thing was
that you didn't need flowery Victorian language
to reach what he called astonishing heights.
Okay. You could use the language of the street.
Concrete mounds, a door, a glass, a dirty sidewalk.
If you arrange simple words correctly, they can
be more devastating than a Shakespearean soliloquy.
That is the Lou Reed template right there. I'm
waiting for the man, $26 in my hand. It's...
it's journalism precisely reed famously said
he wanted to bring the sensitivities of the novel
to rock music he didn't want to write i want
to hold your hand he wanted to write crime punishment
or last exit to brooklyn but set it to a three
-chord beat he realized that rock and roll was
actually the perfect vehicle for this because
rock is primal it's immediate it allowed him
to sneak high art in through the back door he
was also sneaking in a lot of attitudes yeah
the stories from his syracuse days are just wild
he got kicked out of rotc not for skipping drills,
but for holding a gun to a superior's head. An
unloaded gun, supposedly. But yes, it's like
performance art as aggression. He was testing
boundaries everywhere. He hosted a late night
radio show called Excursions on a Wobbly Rail,
where he'd play like free jazz and then immediately
follow it with doo -wop just to mess with people.
Of course he did. And he was routinely kicked
out of parties for being insufferable. He was
curating the persona of the difficult genius
long before he had the genius work to back it
up. So he graduates Kim Loud, amazingly enough,
and heads to New York City. Now, if you're writing
the movie script, this is where he joins the
Warhol factory immediately. But reality is so
much funnier. It really is. He gets a job at
Pickwick Records writing knockoff pop songs.
It's the Brill Building model, but for like the
bargain bin records you'd find at a Woolworths.
Right. If surf music is hot, write a surf song.
If hot rod culture is in, write a song about
cars. And he was just churning them out. Songs
about dancing, about anything. But this leads
to the ostrich moment. We tease this in the intro.
Can you explain ostrich tuning to someone who
doesn't play guitar? What is actually happening
there technically? Okay, so normally a guitar
is tuned to different notes. E, A, D. D, G, B,
E, so you can play chords, which are harmonies.
Right. Reed took a cheap guitar and tuned every
single one of the six strings to the exact same
note, usually a D. So when you strum it... You
don't get a chord. You get a drone. It just vibrates
on one single frequency. It sounds like a sitar
or a jet engine revving up. It totally removes
the melody. It removes traditional Western harmony.
Yeah, it becomes purely rhythmic and textural.
And he wrote this parody dance song called The
Ostrich using this tuning. The lyrics were a
complete joke. Put your head on the floor and
have someone step on it. But the sound, that
was the breakthrough. And that sound is what
attracted John Cale. John Cale is the other.
indispensable half of the equation. He was a
classically trained Welsh viola player, deeply
embedded in the avant -garde scene. Very different
world. Completely different. He was working with
composers like Lamonta Young doing these endurance
pieces where they'd hold a single note for hours
on end. Cale hated rock and roll. He thought
it was juvenile trash. Until he heard The Ostrich.
Right. He was hired to play in a backing band
for Reed to promote the stupid novelty single.
But he heard the drone and he realized... Wait
a minute. This guy is doing what we do in the
high art minimalist scene, but he's doing it
with a rock and roll backbeat. That was the lightning
bolt. That was the whole thing. The fusion of
high art minimalism and low art rock energy.
That's the Velvet Underground in a nutshell.
So they formed the band, Reed, Kale, Sterling
Morrison on guitar, and eventually... Mo Tucker
on drums. Yeah. And we have to give Mo Tucker
her flowers here. She wasn't just the girl drummer.
Oh, she was absolutely essential. She played
standing up. She almost never used cymbals. She
played with mallets sometimes. Yeah. She played
this hypnotic, tribal heartbeat. It's often called
a motoric beat, even before that term was really
a thing. It grounded Reed's lyrics and Kale's
screeching viola. It made the music feel both
primitive and futuristic at the same time. Okay,
so the band is formed. They have this unique
sound. Then comes the patron saint of weirdos.
Andy Warhol. He sees them play, becomes their
manager, and integrates them into his multimedia
shows. The exploding plastic, ineditable. Inevitable.
Inevitable, right. And he forces the German singer
Nico onto them. Which Lou Reed hated. Absolutely
hated. He hated sharing the spotlight. He wanted
to be the front man, the sole voice. But he was
also pragmatic. He was ambitious. He knew Warhol
was the key to the city. He was their ticket.
He was. So he complained, but he did it. He wrote
songs for her to sing, like Femme Fatale and
All Tomorrow's Parties. And the tension, honestly,
it helped the record. You have Reed's street
rat growl next to Nico's icy, teutonic, almost
flat delivery. It's this incredible contrast
of fire and ice. So that brings us to the album.
The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Banana Album,
1967. It comes out right in the middle of the
Summer of Love. And while everyone else is wearing
flowers in their hair and singing about peace
in San Francisco. Lou Reed is in New York City
singing about shooting heroin and sadomasochism.
It was the ultimate anti -hippie statement. It
was urban, dark, cynical, and literate. And commercially,
it was a total disaster. A complete flop. It
peaked at number 171 on the Billboard charts.
But this brings us to that famous Brian Eno quote.
Right. Which is almost a cliche now, but we have
to mention it. You have to. Only a few thousand
people bought the album, but everyone who bought
one formed a band. It's so true. David Bowie,
Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, R .E .M., Sonic
Youth, Nirvana. The DNA of that album is in practically
everything that came after it that we call alternative.
But there's a deeper layer to its influence that
often gets missed in the music nerd talk. The
political angle, you mean? Yeah. Yes. Václav
Havel, the playwright who became the last president
of Czechoslovakia and the first president of
the Czech Republic. It's an incredible story.
He credited the Velvet Underground and Nico as
a major inspiration for the Velvet Revolution,
which toppled the communist government there.
Oh. What was the connection? He bought the record
while he was visiting the U .S. in the late 60s
and took it back home. He said that music showed
him that you could tell the truth, even if the
truth was ugly, and that simply existing as your
authentic self refusing to conform was a political
act against a totalitarian regime that demanded
conformity. That is just mind -blowing. Lou Reed
just wanted to write about his weirdo friends
in New York City. And he ends up helping to dismantle
communism in Eastern Europe. Talk about the butterfly
effect. It proves that the underground isn't
just a style. It's a stance. It's an ethical
position. But back in the band, the stance was
we can't stand each other. Yeah. The dynamic
between Reed and Kale was just too combustible.
Yeah, two massive egos in a very small space.
Reed wanted to write more accessible pop songs,
and Kale wanted to push further into the experimental
noise. So Reed forces Kale out. He actually had
Sterling Morrison do it for him. Classic. They
make a couple more albums moving toward a more
pop -oriented sound. especially with Loaded,
which ironically has Sweet Jane and Rock and
Roll, his most famous songs. Right. Songs that
became classics. But at the time, the band was
falling apart. And then in August 1970, Reed
quits. And this is the part that I still struggle
to wrap my head around. He doesn't go start a
solo career. He goes back to Long Island. To
his parents' house. The scene of the crime, so
to speak. The site of the trauma. And he takes
a job as a typist at his dad's accounting firm.
Earning $40 a week. I mean, does that sound like
surrender to you? He's the coolest guy in New
York, the leader of the most influential band
on the planet, and suddenly he's copying tax
returns. It looks like surrender on the surface,
but I think it was exhaustion. You have to remember
the intensity of those factory years, the drugs,
the egos, the complete lack of money or recognition.
I think he needed to touch ground. It was a strategic
retreat. But it also highlights that duality
we talked about at the start. Lou Reed could
write heroin, but he was also a middle class
Jewish kid from Long Island who knew the value
of a day job. He contained both. Fortunately
for music history, the typing gig didn't last.
He gets signed as a solo artist to RCA. The first
album is kind of a dud. It's mostly Velvet Underground
leftovers. Yeah, it doesn't really land. And
then the Starman lands. David Bowie comes into
the picture. Bowie is crucial here. He idolized
Reed. To Bowie, Reed was the authentic article
that he, Bowie, was trying to emulate with his
characters like Ziggy Stardust. So Bowie and
his guitarist, Mick Ronson, they offer to produce
Reed's next album. And they bring the glam rock
sparkle. They take Reed's gritty, street -level
stories and they coat them in glitter and beautiful
string arrangements. The result is Transformer
in 1972. And we get Walking the Wild Side. Can
we just pause for a second on how bizarre it
is that this song was a massive international
radio hit? It's baffling. It really is. I mean,
let's just break down the lyrics. The first verse
is about Hollywood Lon, a trans woman, talking
about shaving her legs and hitchhiking across
the USA. Plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved
her legs, and then he was a she. The second verse
is about Candy Darling, another trans icon from
the factory. Then Little Joe D 'Alessandro, the
Hustler and Warhol film star. Then the Sugar
Plum Fairy. Who is Joe Campbell, an actor who
had a bit part in one of Warhol's films? Right.
And the verse about him explicitly mentions looking
for soul food and a place to eat, which was,
you know, underground slang for seeking oral
sex. And then there's the famous and the colored
girls go. And somehow, radio censors in 1972
let this play on daytime AM radio. How did that
happen? I think it flew right over their heads.
The production was so slick, that iconic sliding
bass line by Herbie Flowers, the saxophone solo,
it sounded like a sophisticated jazz pop tune.
And Reed was using the specific argo, the slang
of the New York underground. The censors in middle
America just didn't know what giving head meant,
or at least they could pretend they didn't. It's
an incredible act of cultural smuggling. It really
is. So Reed becomes a massive star. He's finally
got the commercial success he wanted since the
doo -wop days. And what does he do? Does he make
Transformer 2? More wild sides. Laughs. Of course
not. That would be too easy. That will be predictable.
He does the exact opposite. He releases Berlin.
a bleak depressing concept album about a couple
of speed freaks in a foreign city who are tearing
each other apart it is relentless it's about
domestic violence drug addiction suicide There's
a track, The Kids, where the main character,
Caroline, has her children taken away by social
services. And on the recording, you can actually
hear children screaming and crying, Mommy, Mommy!
It's one of the most harrowing things ever put
on a rock record. And those were actually the
producer Bob Ezrin's own kids. He reportedly
told them their mom had left and wasn't coming
home just to get that reaction out of them for
the tape. That is... Ethically dubious, to put
it mildly. To say the least. But the critics
at the time, they savaged the album. Rolling
Stone called it a disaster. They basically said
Reed had lost his mind and was indulging in this
pointless, depressing wallow. But now it's considered
a masterpiece. Now it is. It was a pivotal moment.
It proved that Reed wasn't going to play the
game. He wasn't Bowie. He wasn't going to put
on a glitter suit and just entertain you. He
was going to make you look at the ugliness of
domestic abuse and addiction until you flinched.
And if Berlin made people flinch, his next move
made them get up and leave the room entirely.
Oh, yeah. Metal machine music. 1975. The ultimate
line in the sand. We mentioned the noise earlier,
but let's be really specific. This is a double
album. Four sides of vinyl. No songs, new drums,
no vocals, just modulated guitar feedback. It's
electronic screeching and humming for over an
hour. Why? I mean, just why? Was it a contract
dispute? Was he trying to get dropped by his
label RCA? That's the most popular theory. You
want another album? Here's an hour of garbage.
Now let me out of my deal. And that's plausible.
Okay. Then there's the other theory that it was
just a giant prank on his fans and the critics.
He famously wrote in the liner notes, anyone
who gets to side four is dumber than I am. Which
is a fantastic line you have to give him that.
But I think there's a third option, and it connects
all the way back to his days with John Cale and
Lamont Young. I think part of him genuinely believed
this was modern classical music. He claimed there
were hidden melodies buried in the frequencies
if you listened hard enough. So he was serious
about it. On some level. I think so. It was an
act of aggression against the rock star myth
that Transformer had built. He was screaming,
you think I'm the walk on the wild side guy?
No, I am this. Well, the public screamed back.
It was returned to stores by the thousands. RCA
eventually pulled it after a few weeks. But again,
you have to look at the long tail. Sonic Youth,
Nine Inch Nails, Merzbo, entire genres of industrial
music and noise music trace their lineage directly
back to this quote unquote unlistenable album.
He was wrong for the time, but right for history.
That's a good way to put it. And while he was
making this aggressive music, he was living an
incredibly aggressive life. The mid 70s is what's
known as the Dachau Panda era. Yeah. We need
to address this because it's the darkest part
of the biography. He was heavily, heavily addicted
to methamphetamine and alcohol. And his appearance
was shocking. He cut his hair short, bleached
it to blonde, and then painted these huge black
circles under his eyes. He looked like a ghoul.
He looked ill. And acted like one, from all accounts.
Yes. The anecdotes from this period are rough.
He was reportedly physically and emotionally
abusive to his partners. He was verbally vicious
to journalists. He would use racial slurs just
for shock value. The story about him calling
Bob Dylan a pretentious kike. It's just wild.
Considering Reed himself was Jewish, it feels
like he was testing people. How awful can I be
and still have you worship me? Or maybe, how
awful can I be until you finally leave me alone?
That, too. It was self -destruction as a public
spectacle. He was playing the role of the rock
and roll animal until it very nearly killed him.
But he survived it. And the 1980s bring this
massive shift in his life and his work. He gets
sober. He does. He marries his first wife, Sylvia
Morales. And the music changes. It stops being
about me and my drug dealer and starts being
about the world around him. This is the journalist
phase resurfacing, right? The creative writing
student from Syracuse finally grows up. I think
so. He releases The Blue Mask in 1982, which
is just this terrifyingly honest album about
marriage, jealousy and sobriety. But the real
peak of this era. is New York in 1989. Oh, New
York is such a masterpiece. It's a concept album
about the city in decay. It's dealing with AIDS,
homelessness, racism, political corruption. And
the writing is just so sharp. You listen to a
song like Dirty Blavity or Busload of Faith.
He's not celebrating the underground anymore.
He's reporting on the tragedy of it. He's angry,
but it's a focused, sober anger. He's not a wasted
rock star anymore. He's a concerned citizen with
a guitar. And this newfound maturity seems to
lead him to the final. and most significant relationship
of his life with Laurie Anderson. This is the
happy ending. The story really didn't promise
us, you know. It really is. Laurie Anderson is
a giant of the avant -garde in her own right.
She wasn't a groupie or a muse in the traditional
sense. She was his peer, his equal. And she seemed
to tame the beast. Or maybe the beast just got
tired of fighting. I think she understood him.
She wrote after he died that he was a prince
and a fighter. And with her, he found a new spiritual
practice. He got deeply, deeply into Tai Chi.
That image is so incongruous to me. The guy who
wrote White Light, White Heat, practicing these
slow meditative movements with the Tibetan master.
He took it incredibly seriously. He studied for
years with a man named Master Ren Guanji. He
would even bring his instructor on stage during
his rock concerts to do Tai Chi forms while the
band was playing intense, distorted music behind
him. Laughs. That is so perfectly Lou Reed. I'm
going to find inner peace, but I'm going to make
it a confrontational performance art piece for
you all to watch. It just shows that he never
stopped seeking. He replaced the heroine with
Tai Chi, but the intensity of the pursuit, the
dedication was the same. He wasn't a dabbler
in anything. Even in his later years, he kept
finding ways to be weird and surprising. We have
to talk about the video game, because when I
saw this in the notes, I thought it had to be
a hallucination. Ten and Tellers, Smoke and Mirrors.
An unreleased Sega CD game from 1995. Yep. And
in it, Lou Reed appears as an unbeatable boss
character. How does that even work? If you select
the impossible difficulty setting for one of
the minigames, Lou Reed just walks onto the screen
and kills you instantly with laser beams that
shoot out of his eyes. No way. Yes. And he delivers
this short monologue. He says, this is the impossible
level, boys. Impossible doesn't mean very difficult.
Very difficult is winning the Nobel Prize. Impossible
is eating the sun. Impossible is eating the sun.
It's a throwaway line in a joke game that never
even came out, but it's also... it's strangely
profound. It sums up his entire career. He was
always trying to eat the sun. He was always trying
to do things that shouldn't work. Like mixing
doo -wop and feedback. Or poetry and punk rock.
Or Metallica and spoken word. Ugh, yes. We have
to mention Lulu. 2011. Just two years before
he died. The final middle finger to the critics
and to audience expectations. I think it's fair
to say everyone hated it. It was universally
panned. It's a double album based on these German
expressionist plays by Frank Whittakin, with
Metallica playing these heavy thrash riffs and
Lou just sort of rambling poetry over the top
of it. It's dissonant and it's difficult. And
what was Reed's reaction to that clash? It was
classic, Lou. He joked that he had no fans left
after Metal Machine Music anyway, so he had nothing
to lose. He stood by it completely. He told people
he believed it was the best thing he ever did.
That confidence is what I admire. Even if I can't
physically listen to the record for more than
five minutes. It's the absolute refusal to compromise
right to the very end. So he passes away in 2013
from liver disease. Laurie Anderson wrote this.
Beautiful, moving piece about his death, saying
he was doing Tai Chi forms with his hands as
he passed, looking at the trees in their backyard.
A peaceful end for a famously chaotic life. And
the legacy is secure. I mean, the accolades came
pouring in after he was gone. He's got an asteroid
named after him, 270553 Lared. Which is cool.
And as we mentioned at the top, a spider. The
Laredia, a species of velvet spider that lives
underground. Scientists are fans, too, apparently.
It's perfect. It's so perfect. So let's try and
pull all this together. We've gone from the shock
therapy to the Velvet Underground, from the Dachau
Panda drug addiction to the Tai Chi master, from
the $40 a week typist to the rock god. What is
the through line? What's the lesson for the listener
here? I think the lesson is about the value of
being difficult. I mean, we live in a culture
that rewards being. Agreeable, being brand friendly,
fitting neatly into the algorithm, Lou Reed spent
50 years refusing to fit. He actively dismantled
his own myth every time it got too comfortable
for him. Exactly. When they wanted pop, he gave
them noise. When they finally got used to the
noise, he gave them a tenor love song. He proved
that you don't have to be likable to be loved,
and you certainly don't have to be perfect to
be profound. And he proved that rock and roll
could handle adult themes. That it wasn't just
disposable music for teenagers. It could be literature.
It could have weight. My God is rock and roll,
he once said. And he was a faithful servant to
that God. in his own prickly way until the very
end. So here's a final question to leave you
with. If Lou Reed had played it safe, if he had
written Walk on the Wild Side Part 2 after Transformer
and just coasted on that success, would we be
sitting here talking about him today? I really
doubt it. He'd be a footnote in the Glamrock
story. It was the friction that made him matter.
He tried to eat the sun, and sometimes he got
badly burned, but he made sure that we all felt
the heat. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Thanks for diving deep with us. Go listen to
The Velvet Underground and Nico. Maybe skip Metal
Machine music, unless you're feeling particularly
brave. We'll see you on the next one.