“He’s a loser”: the two American icons Lou Reed hated the most
For the most part, Lou Reed’s musical critique seemed oddly patriotic.
Overwhelmingly, if he was going to take shots at any act, he’d be firing them wide over the Atlantic towards British bands or the general UK rock and roll scene. However, there were two major instances of shots being fired on the home front, and they certainly weren’t friendly fire.
For the most part, Reed typically kept his head down. Once he’d grown out of Andy Warhol’s celebrity-fuelled scene and moved further into his more niche, high-art solo projects, Reed didn’t seem to have much time to get involved in the tit-for-tat of slamming his peers. Instead, he’d sometimes talk about how he liked or who inspired him, sharing his deep love for Bob Dylan or even crafting playlists of his favourite songs.
However, sometimes the vitriol boiled over and had to be spat out in his classic, short, sharp and savage take-downs, like commenting on The Beatles, “I thought they were rubbish.” Roxy Music also got a no-fuss criticism of “I don’t Like ’em.” The Who were another British act that Reed hated with a passion, mocking them as he said in the 1970s, “Tommy is such – Jesus, how people get sucked into that.”
Pete Townshend especially got a lashing as he went on, “So talentless, and as a lyricist [Townshend is] so profoundly untalented, and, you know, philosophically boring to say the least… like the record ‘The Searcher’ [meaning ‘The Seeker’]; ‘I ask Timothy Leary…’, I wouldn’t ask Timothy Leary the time of day, for cryin’ out loud.”
It seemed as though broadly, Reed wasn’t impressed by the British music of the 1960s and ‘70s, but when he looked towards his homeland, two major players stood out as disgusting sore thumbs to him, and no matter what, he just couldn’t reconcile his opinion towards them.
Frank Zappa is perhaps the most surprising dislike of Reed’s life. Both made odd, art-rock, both clearly informed and able to make classic rock and roll, yet both chose not to do that. It might be thought that Reed and Zappa should have been friends, or at least respected one another. But it couldn’t be further from the truth as Reed slammed the West Coaster, stating, “He’s probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life.”
While the stereotype is for New York artists to look at Californians as dumb, his problem with Zappa was the opposite. “He’s a two-bit pretentious academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything,” he said, not holding back as he added, “He can’t play rock ’n’ roll because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself, and I think he’s right.”
However, his hatred of another Los Angeles figure comes in the more typical, expected package as he merely brushed Jim Morrison off as a “silly Los Angeles person”. No matter how many references he spewed or how much poetry he wrote, Reed still would only ever see Morrison and his band, The Doors, as dumb and try-hard, saying they “were just painfully stupid and pretentious, and when they did try to get ‘arty,’ it was worse than stupid rock and roll.”
“They can’t play, and they certainly can’t write,” he said in the 1970s, cutting the band down to the tiny, minute size he thought he deserved against the looming power of the New York crowd.
