David Bowie explained why Lou Reed was “the King of New York”
The cross-Atlantic brotherhood of Lou Reed and David Bowie is the stuff of legend. It was tumultuous at times—there was at least one all-out fistfight—but it was also rooted in a deep mutual respect that consistently motivated both men to take risks and reach further creative heights. Interestingly, despite Bowie achieving mainstream stardom a bit sooner than Reed, it was the Starman who was the mega-fan of the Velvet Underground man and everything Reed represented.
“I’d never heard anything quite like it. It was a revelation to me,” Bowie said in a 1997 interview for the documentary Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, recalling the first time he heard a Velvets recording in 1965. “It influenced what I was to do for the next few years. I don’t think, outrightly, I ever felt that I was in a position to become a Velvets clone, but there were elements of what Lou was doing that I thought were just unavoidably right for both the times and for where music was going.”
Above all, and perhaps most simply, Reed upended all previous tropes. This was a huge inspiration for Bowie, who continued his appraisal by adding, ”One was the use of cacophony as background noise and to create a kind of an ambience that had been hitherto unknown in rock. And the other thing was the nature of his lyric writing.”
While Bowie was already a fan of Bob Dylan by this point, he heard something unique and different in Reed’s way with words. “It smacked of things like Hubert Selby, Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and John Rechy’s book City of the Night, both of which had made a huge impact on me. Lou’s writing was right in that ballpark. Dylan had certainly brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting, but then Lou had taken it even further into the avant-garde,” he said.
Like Rechy and Selby’s work, Reed’s songs captured something gritty and real about New York City, in particular, which a young Bowie found captivating. It’s why, more than 30 years after first hearing the Velvet Underground and 25 years after co-producing Reed’s acclaimed solo album Transformer, Bowie still referred to his friend as the “King of New York”.
“[He wrote about] the New York that I want to know about,” Bowie, who became a resident of the Big Apple in his later years, explained in the 1997 interview. “I think probably everybody has their own New York. But for me, New York was always James Dean walking up the middle of the road. And it was always the Fugs, the Village Fugs. And it was always the Beats.”
He added, ”And it was Soho and it was that kind of bohemian intellectual extravagance that made it so vibrant for someone like me growing up in quite a grey, suburban, tenement-filled South London environment. That seemed to be the heart, the network of life, you know, and it’s where we all wanted to escape to. People like me, we wanted out [of where we were] and we wanted in to places like New York, far more so than the West Coast.”
Of course, as an appreciator of many art forms beyond rock n’ roll, Bowie recognised that the “King of New York” title could probably be rightfully claimed by a few other worthy candidates, as well. On one occasion, in fact, after using the phrase to introduce Reed to the stage at a show in New York, Bowie was directly challenged by a friendly face in the crowd.
“Chris Walken was in the audience!” Bowie recalled with a laugh. “I felt awful afterwards. He said, [doing a Walken impression] ‘Hey, I’m the king of New York!’ I said, ‘Of course you are! I have all the royalty here.’”
