When Lou Reed, the singer, guitarist and poet behind the influential rock ‘n’ roll band the Velvet Underground, died Sunday from a liver-related ailment, it almost seemed fitting for a man that gave so much to music, including the beautifully haunting “Sunday Morning,” that he would die on a Sunday morning.
Reed, who never achieved the commercial success he was due over a career that spanned nearly 50 years, left behind one of the most lasting influences on rock music through his albums with Velvet Underground and his own solo records.
By the time Reed broke onto the scene in the mid 1960s, rock ‘n’ roll had found itself wrapped in formulaic three-minute radio singles. While the Beatles sang about wanting to hold your hand, and the Beach Boys couldn’t wait until you were married, Reed wrote songs about watching you hold another boy’s hand from behind a tinted window while yearning to marry you, as found on 1972’s “Satellite of Love.”
Reed began his musical career by writing pop songs based off successful contemporary songs for Pickwick Records. He met multi-instrumentalist John Cale in 1964 in New York City. Reed’s deadpan, poetic vocals and Cale’s classical orchestral background on the viola and cello blended in an artistically odd manner, so much that the two decided to form a band, the Velvet Underground.
Adored and mentored by the avante-garde artist, Andy Warhol, who latched onto their seemingly tasteless sound and financially backed the band, the Velvet Underground released its debut album, “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” in 1967. Upon release, the record was rejected by both critics and the public for its blatantly controversial themes and its experimental musicality. The drug references in “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin,” Cale’s screeching viola and Reed’s droning “ostrich guitar,” where he played his guitar with all strings tuned to the same note, were met with disfavor.
But in time, it became these same oddities that transformed the center of rock music, from the ’70s to the present. Reed’s masterful songwriting inspired artists across generations, from Patti Smith to Morrissey to Nirvana, earning him high praise for giving a voice to the unfamiliar.
The Velvet Underground fizzled out through the end of the decade and into the next, but the band’s impact on music was already made. Musician Brian Eno famously remarked that while only 30,000 people bought “The Velvet Underground & Nico,”everyone who did went on to start a band.
After leaving the Velvet Underground with such tracks as “Sweet Jane,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Pale Blue Eyes” under his belt, Reed set out on a solo career that cemented the musician as truly legendary.
Though his first solo album flopped, Reed set out in 1972 to record an album under the production of David Bowie . The result was “Transformer,” which stands today as one of the greatest albums of the ’70s because of Reed’s eerily charming songwriting abilities.
In one of his most commercially successful tracks, “Walk on the Wild Side,” Reed crafted a bitter testimony of the “Warhol superstars,” a group of New York men, women and transgender individuals who belonged to Andy Warhol’s ’60s scene.
“Holly came from Miami, Fla./ Hitchhiked her way across the USA,” Reed sings at the beginning of “Walk on the Wild Side.” “Plucked her eyebrows on the way/ Shaved her legs and then he was a she.”
Reed’s ability to tell a story with a penchant for the weird and the taboo in a comforting and approachable manner is what made thousands of bands latch onto Reed’s music and inspired genres from punk to post-punk, from grunge to alternative rock.
With Reed’s passing, so too goes a rock ‘n’ roll pioneer whose five decades of music, spanning from the days of Velvet Underground to his live album “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal” to “Sunday Morning”, changed the face of rock music more than any other individual has.
As musicians and non-musicians alike have mourned Reed’s passing since Sunday, there’s one lyric that keeps surfacing – from 1972’s “Perfect Day” – “Just a perfect day/ You made me forget myself/ I thought I was someone else, someone good.”
Whether Reed is alive or not, his music transcends genre and style. Reed will always be someone good.