The classic Lou Reed song his label said would “never happen”
During the 1960s, rock and roll was still in its infancy. For all of the great technical innovations going on with the British Invasion bands, many acts from America were keeping up with their British counterparts by making equally exciting and adventurous songs, giving birth to the psychedelic scene out of San Francisco and Los Angeles. On the other side of the country, though, Lou Reed was about to bend rock and roll to suit his needs with The Velvet Underground.
Born out of the same art rock circles that introduced rock and roll to the avant-garde movement, Reed was known to indulge in every kind of strange anomaly that he could get his hands on. For every great rock song that he may have been able to write, he was just as likely to turn anything into an experimental musical episode, like the massive clangour of ‘Sister Ray’ off the band’s album White Light/White Heat.
When Reed started in the industry, he began as a humble songwriter trying to write tracks on commission. For all of his great artistic energy inside him, though, Reed would ultimately be asked to write the same kind of schlock that every other mainstream rock band was chasing at the time, hoping to compete with acts like The Beach Boys.
Not willing to go along with the program, Reed elected to write songs that had more to do with the life he knew every day. Coming from the world of junkies and drag queens, Reed wrote tracks that felt suitable to the lives of people around him, culminating in ‘Heroin’ off the band’s debut album.
As soon as Reed showed the piece to his label, though, they were horrified with what they heard. Expecting their budding songwriter to come through with a traditional rock track, the droning sounds of the guitars, as well as the taboo subject matter, led to the label putting their stomp on Reed’s experiment.
When talking about the song later, Reed recalled just how abrasive they were when hearing the piece, saying, “I was working for a record company as a songwriter, where they’d lock me in a room, and they’d say write ten surfing songs, ya know, and I wrote ‘Heroin’ and I said, ‘Hey I got something for ya’. They said, ‘Never gonna happen, never gonna happen.’”
While the label may not seen the appeal in making an album centred around a lengthy piece about drug abuse, the track would become a fixture of their debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico. Instead of the surfing songs that his first label envisioned, the band helped realise Reed’s twisted dream for this piece, turning it into the raw depiction of drug abuse without ever having to put that spike into your veins.
That would only be the beginning of the band’s more nefarious topics, though, talking about the pleasures of life on ‘Sunday Morning’ while balancing their odes to drug abuse and sexual fantasies like on ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ and ‘Venus in Furs’. ‘Heroin’ may not have been the kind of song that the label wanted from Reed, but it’s always for an artist to write about what they know rather than try to please the masses.
