Lou Reed the Transformer

Published: 2007 - November, Culture

If Andy Warhol had not wanted to start a band that would celebrate his mentor-talent scout role then perhaps Lou Reed, born Lewis Allen Reed in 1942 in Freeport (Long Island), NY, would have never put together the Velvet Underground and would have remained an obscure rock ’n’ roll musician.
But destiny had something in store for the restless Lou. Born into a Jewish well-to-do middle class family, young Lewis was brought up like any other good Jewish boy. He read a lot, learned to play the piano, but like many other boys his age was literally swept away on the rock ’n’ roll wave and was drawn to the electric guitar. Lewis, who now went by the name of Lou, was a very special young man, a living oxymoron. An introvert who at the same time was also totally uninhibited, he scandalized people with his provocative behavior, demonstrating openly his homosexual tendencies. His family, concerned about their rebellious 17-year-old, so different from their social circles, sent him to a psychiatrist who ran him through a series of electric shocks. The electric discharges and the interminable sessions with psychoanalysts drove the boy further away from his family. A bit later Lou cut all ties and left home forever. The sense of resentment and bitterness of that period was put to music in such tough songs as “Kill Your Sons,” “Family,” “My Old Man” and “Standing On Ceremony.”
But it was the period he lived in New York City that was the most formative, musically and artistically, for young Lou. His meeting with Andy Warhol and his court of miracles at the Factory threw open the floodgates for a series of extraordinary songs. He began an artistic collaboration with the Pop Art genius which led to the creation of the Velvet Underground, headed by Reed. The band’s name was borrowed from a Michael Leigh book that had an illustration of a whip and tall leather boots on its cover, a befitting image for the group’s first masterpiece, “Venus in Fur.” Warhol designed the Velvet Underground’s famous album cover, featuring a yellow banana. The band’s leading talents were Lou Reed and a gifted classic musician, Welshman John Cale, who played the piano, viola and bass and was in America on a scholarship, collaborating with two of the most eminent personalities of American avant-garde music. Warhol wanted Reed to take into the Velvet Underground also singer-model Nico, who had a dark voice and Teutonic sex appeal. Reed’s music and lyrics were the harbingers of the New Wave, which would take form years later in England and in America. At the height of the Beat Generation movement, in 1965, when the band roster was established, Reed and Cale often used alternate guitar tuning to create a droning sound that could go on endlessly and rendered even more turbid and enigmatic by lyrics that would talk explicitly about drugs. This was when “Heroin” was recorded, an autobiographical song about Reed’s drug experience, as well as other songs about subjects like sadomasochism and homosexuality. Within three years Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground had all critics applauding them, but not the public at large. During those very years the “Village Voice” described the group as “a marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis De Sade.” But the best was yet to come. Reed’s quitting of the Velvet Underground, coincided with a private and interior crisis, led him to start pursuing a solo career. His meeting with David Bowie was fatal. The ideologue of glam rock, with his Ziggy Stardust persona, the ambiguous alien who fell to earth and died, sucked under by his own ego, gave Reed a new image. Reed moved to London and transformed himself into a rock ghost: eyes heavily made-up, Japanese makeup, nails painted black. That’s how Reed was photographed for the cover of his “Transformer” album, produced by Bowie and the New York singer’s undisputed and liberating masterpiece. Thanks to his ‘transformation’ Reed could finally announce to the world his bisexuality and share his nocturnal hallucinations. The album included such gems as “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Perfect Day” and “Satellite of Love” – in which the voice of the Thin White Duke, Bowie, can be heard in the chorus. By now, Lou Reed is a legend around the world. A legend who can walk without hiding his wild side, revealing quite a number of secrets.