‘Plastic Ono Band’: Lou Reed’s favourite John Lennon album
As the principal singer and songwriter of The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was infamously challenging to work with and even harder to interview. On several occasions, especially early on in his career, Reed took great pleasure in criticising revered contemporaries, including The Who, The Beatles, The Doors and Frank Zappa.
Although rather negative, these opinions were somewhat concrete. Reed’s opinion on The Beatles, however, wasn’t quite so clear cut. In his 1987 interview with PBS, Reed was asked what he thought of the Fab Four after he had spent a few minutes slating some of his ’60s rivals. “No, no, I never liked the Beatles,” he said. “I thought they were rubbish.”
However, Reed’s opinion of the Liverpool band was subject to change, likely due to the ebb and flow of his capricious and conflicted mindset. It would appear that, by the 1980s, Reed was fed up with the eclipsing durability of The Beatles’ legacy, but in the 1970s, he was quoted as saying: “They just make the songs up, bing, bing, bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever – just amazingly talented. I don’t think people realise just how sad it is that the Beatles broke up.”
During a 2015 conversation with Uncut, Reed’s former bandmate John Cale threw more light on the matter. “There was always this competition between the Stones and the Beatles,” Cale said. “Even though The Beatles could be brilliant, the Velvets would always side with the Stones because they were darker, rougher.”
“Then ‘She Said She Said’ turned up, and I could see The Beatles were changing,” Cale added. “Lou [Reed] and I looked at each other and realised something was happening, which we zeroed in on. The way [John] Lennon did it seemed so natural. It was obviously not just something he made up his mind to do; it was always part of who he was.”
It appears Reed and Cale were fans of the Beatles’ darker, more introspective material, often drawn from the troubled mind of John Lennon. Following the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, Reed maintained his fascination with Lennon through his early solo career and became an enthusiastic fan.
Not long before his death in 2013, Reed sat down at the Helsinki Music Club to write a list of 100 songs he would describe as the greatest of all time. While The Beatles didn’t make an appearance, Lennon’s name cropped up twice, for ‘Mother’ and ‘Jealous Guy’.
Revealing his love for ‘Mother’ in 1970, shortly after the single’s arrival, Reed told interviewer Bruce Pollock: “That was a song that had realism. When I first heard it, I didn’t even know it was him. I just said, ‘Who the fuck is that? I don’t believe that.’ Because the lyrics to that are real. You see, he wasn’t kidding around. He got right down to it, as down as you can get. I like that in a song.”
In 1999, Reed ranked the ten albums he deemed to be the “best of all time”. Alongside such classics as Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Scott Walker’s Tilt, he included ‘Mother’ by John Lennon. Ostensibly, Reed referred here to the song’s parent album, 1970’s Plastic Ono Band.
