“The glory of youth”: Lou Reed’s favourite band from the CBGB scene
Lou Reed certainly has a lot to answer for when it comes to the world of alternative rock and experimental music. By forming The Velvet Underground alongside John Cale, Reed’s songwriting inspired countless future artists on their own path to musical greatness. Even during his long and illustrious solo career, Reed’s quality rarely faltered. Despite his wide-reaching influence, the New York icon was often quick to denounce other artists, making the Lou Reed seal of approval something of a rarity within rock music.
Certainly, as Reed aged, he became somewhat less argumentative, allowing him to forge musical friendships with groups like Metallica, Gorillaz and The Killers, to name only a few. However, during his younger years, as the king of the New York underground scene in the 1960s and 1970s, Reed clearly was not out to make friends. Within these early years with The Velvet Underground, the songwriter was quick to attack other musicians of the time that he deemed to be unworthy of the spotlight.
Even when the punk explosion of the CBGB scene came around, in which groups like Television, Blondie and Talking Heads sought to subvert the expectations of mainstream rock and disco by blazing a path for an entirely new genre, Reed was largely unconvinced. The Velvet Underground were an inarguably essential influence on the early punk movement, but Reed found most of the scene to be pretty phoney and inauthentic on the whole.
If you look back at interviews the songwriter conducted in the early 1970s, shortly after walking out on The Velvet Underground and embarking upon a solo career, Reed can be heard attacking everybody from Television to his own former bandmates and even the journalists interviewing him. Earning the love of Lou Reed seemed to be a pretty impossible task, yet one that every punk band worth their salt were striving for.
Seemingly, Reed approved of only one group within this East Side punk scene: the Ramones. On the face of it, the Queens-based punk pioneers might seem an unexpected choice from Reed, given their pop sensibilities which seemed at odds with the endlessly anti-pop manifesto of the ex-Velvets singer. Nevertheless, when introduced to the band by manager Danny Fields, Reed was reportedly infatuated.
“That is without doubt the most fantastic thing you’ve ever played to me!” he said in 1975 after Fields played him some of their early work, “It makes everybody else look so bullshit and wimpy – Patti Smith and me included, man!” After seeing a photo of the band, becked in leather jackets and ripped blue jeans, Reed became even more enticed, apparently declaring, “Ah! It’s too perfect! They are their own dream! You gotta be kidding! Johnny Ramone? Oh, leave me alone! How can they not be monsters? Jeez. It’s what everybody’s been waiting for”.
Reed then went on to compare The Ramones to some of the countercultural heroes of old, decisively announcing, “The Stooges? No! The Stooges weren’t smart. What they did was natural. This is calculated, it’s so insanely perfect,” before adding, “Twelve songs in the same key and they all start and end the same? It demolishes everything! Can you think of Joni Mitchell now? Or The Grateful Dead? [This] is the glory of youth”. High praise indeed, especially from a man whose praise was something of a scarcity during the alternative music scene of the 1970s.
