The artists Lou Reed called musical heroes: “I love the way those guys play”
If you have ever come across that harrowing footage of Lou Reed psychologically torturing a young Swedish journalist, seemingly for little more than his own personal enjoyment, you will be all too aware of the fact that the king of New York’s underground was a famously difficult man to please.
Over the course of his long and illustrious career, Reed almost seemed to make a career out of moodiness. From behind his dark sunglasses and inscrutable persona, the songwriter attacked, downplayed, and subverted everybody and everything without prejudice.
Going right back to his Velvet Underground days, surrounded by the vibrant primary colours of the ‘peace and love’ age, it was Reed’s comparative moodiness which set the standard for virtually all future frontmen; in other words, that dark subversion is part and parcel of the songwriter’s appeal.
Still, it does make you wonder – did Lou Reed actually enjoy anything? If you pitched up in Central Park for months on end, would you even catch so much as a smirk from the ‘Vicious’ songwriter as he sipped a sangria on a spot-on summer’s day? Maybe, but don’t hold your breath. Music always seemed like his main source of comfort, though even then, he was oddly cagey about revealing what actually tickled his ear.
Virtually every modern songwriter, regardless of whatever genre conventions they subscribe to, could list Lou Reed as a major influence, but Reed’s own influences are a little harder to distinguish. After all, nobody was creating tracks like ‘Venus In Furs’ or ‘Heroin’ before Reed and Cale stepped into Andy Warhol’s Factory; they were archetypal trailblazers in that sense. In actuality, Reed always leaned more towards the world of jazz and R&B to get his music fix.
If you examine any list of Reed’s favourite tracks, of which numerous have been published in the wake of his death in 2013, names like Fats Domino, Jimmy Reed, and Ornette Coleman are a lot easier to find than any of the abrasive punk revolutionaries who followed in the wake of The Velvet Underground during New York’s punk boom. In fact, when The Guardian valiantly asked Reed to cite his own musical heroes back in 2003, the songwriter revealed, “I love Ornette Coleman. I love Don Cherry. I love the way those guys play. Just my God!”
That flicker of passion in Reed was only fleeting, and he soon resumed his typical impenetrable interview style: “If you want to know records I like, on the web pages, there is a top 100 or something like that,” he dismissed. Even still, it is worth digging down into the songwriter’s brief elation at the chance to talk about Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.
Some of – if not the – most important figures in the free jazz movement, Coleman and Cherry represented an entirely new approach to jazz back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Forever abandoning the old days of big band records and populist guff, the pair created something of unparalleled innovation, subverting expectations not just of jazz but of melody and rhythm itself. So, Reed’s apparent adoration of those figures goes some way to explaining his own musical manifesto.
While Reed himself never threw himself fully into the world of free jazz with regard to his own discography, he certainly emulated the otherworldly innovation of folks like Coleman and Cherry in his own subversive way. Just as that pair revolutionised the world of jazz, rock and roll has never been quite the same since Reed got his hands on it, and perhaps that is all owed to a rare contented version of the songwriter sitting back and listening to Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.
