The artist Lou Reed would “give everything” to write like
The late Lou Reed was a tough customer at the best of times. One of the first sneering hipsters in music, over the years, he had many prominent names in his sights, from The Beatles to Frank Zappa. Some might even say that Reed was well within his rights to be a curmudgeon. After all, he was an undoubted genius who helped pull music and culture forward with the gravity of his musical decisions, lyrical themes, and unforgettable performances.
Demonstrating the kind of vitriol that Reed produced, and his aversion to the norm, is his damning critique of The Beatles from 1987. When talking to Joe Smith, Reed went as far as to call the Liverpudlians “garbage”, a point at odds with the widely held opinion that they’re the most significant band ever. Alas, this was Lou Reed.
“The Beatles? I never liked The Beatles, I thought they were garbage,” the former Velvet Underground man said. “I don’t think Lennon did anything until he went solo. But then, too, he was like trying to play catch up. He was getting involved in choruses and everything … I don’t want to come off as being snide because I’m not being snide. What I’m doing is giving you a really frank answer; I have no respect for those people at all, I don’t listen to it at all, it’s absolute shit.”
Despite his tendency to denigrate the works of prominent artists, for Reed, there was one artist he held in higher regard than anyone else: Bob Dylan. In a rare display of humility, Reed even revealed that he’d “give anything” to have written some of the troubadour’s best lyrical moments. As a side note, Reed mentions the track ‘Ninety Miles An Hour (Down a Dead End Street)’ as one of Dylan’s finest lexical efforts. However, the song was actually written by Don Robertson and Hal Blair. Hank Snow first recorded it in 1963 before Dylan covered the song on his 1988 album, Down in the Groove.
“Other than Dylan, there’s not much there,” Reed once said in a critique of contemporary songwriting. “The thing Dylan did with Sam Shepherd, ‘Brownsville Girl’, I mean, I think that is one of the greatest things I ever heard in my life. I fell down laughing. You can listen to that, you can listen to the words going on, and it’s tremendous.”
“I always go out and get the latest Dylan album,” Reed told Rolling Stone in 1989. “Bob Dylan can turn a phrase, man. Like his last album [Down in the Groove], his choice of songs. ‘Going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street’ [‘Ninety Miles An Hour’] — I’d give anything if I could have written that. Or that other one, ‘Rank Strangers to Me.’ The key word there is rank.”
“I can really listen to something like that,” the New Yorker continued. “The rest of it is all pop. I have zero interest in it. But Dylan continuously knocks me out. ‘Brownsville Girl’, the thing he did with Sam Shepard, he said, ‘Even the SWAT teams around here are getting pretty corrupt.’ I was on the floor. I have that same reaction to some of my own stuff. And the only other person I can think of who does that for me is Dylan.”
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