The artist Lou Reed never got tired of: “He’s always changing”
It would always take more than a simple rock and roll song to impress Lou Reed in his prime. There were bound to be millions of people trying to outdo the biggest names in music, but if it didn’t have a good artistic centre behind it, there’s a good chance that Reed would have changed the station as fast as he could. The Velvet Underground may have been one of the reigning kings of pushing boundaries, but Reed knew he always had time for other artists willing to take risks.
By the time the Summer of Love kicked in, a whole different movement was happening across the country. While everyone was going to San Francisco wearing flowers in their hair, there were also a handful of people trying to show everyone what life was really like. The times were heavy, and Reed was one of the only people willing to bring it to people’s speakers when he released songs like ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ and ‘Venus in Furs’.
Reed wasn’t necessarily alone, though. Iggy Pop had also started to change the way people thought about the live show, and Alice Cooper was bringing macabre theatre to the live stage as well, but there was another skinny lad from England who was slowly falling in love with everything he heard from New York.
Although David Bowie got his start playing whimsical pop music, he knew that he found his calling listening to Reed. But despite being a massive fan, Bowie wouldn’t simply copy what Reed had done. The Velvets’ frontman was always preaching about being yourself, and from the minute that Bowie stepped out onstage, he knew he could go down any road he wanted if his songwriting was strong enough.
“I can’t pick a favourite Bowie record. It always depends on my mood…”
Lou REED
And when going through his discography, Bowie lived up to that standard in everything. Not many artists can claim to cover everything from blue-eyed soul to kraut rock to industrial music to glam rock to pop music all in one career, and yet ‘The Starman’ made that track record look easy, even up until his final days when he turned his own death into an art project on Blackstar.
While Reed didn’t live long enough to see Bowie’s different characters on the record, he admitted that his versatility made him one of the most interesting artists to watch, saying, “I can’t pick a favourite Bowie record. It always depends on my mood — any of the dance records, Ziggy Stardust; I always liked ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, that track on Hunky Dory. And the albums he did with Brian Eno, like Low and “Heroes”, are just phenomenal. He’s always changing, so you never get tired of what he’s doing.”
Despite Reed also getting some help from Bowie when making this glamorous makeover on Transformer, the heart of the collaboration came from his respect for him as an artist. It would have been easy for Bowie to make a tune that turned Reed into a New York-style version of a glam rock martian, but he knew that his idol would follow his muse rather than cash in on a trend.
Reed’s track record might be a little bit more scattershot than what Bowie had done throughout his career, but keeping up with the new kid was never the point. Every album was another art piece, and even if Bowie’s projects had more outspoken fans than Reed’s, it didn’t matter as long as it did its job as an effective piece of music.
