Why did Lou Reed hate working with producers?
When musicians are in the studio, the producer is either their best friend or worst enemy. While to an untrained eye it might look like they are simply twiddling knobs, the producer has the ability to turn a potentially great song into a classic, offering constructive criticism along the way. That’s not always the best policy when it comes to artists like Lou Reed.
As bands like the Beatles were turning rock inside out, Reed had started the Velvet Underground to be the antithesis of mainstream rock and roll, and he explained his desire to “elevate the rock and roll song, and take it where it hadn’t been taken before,” Reed said. “From my point of view I just thought the other stuff couldn’t even come up to the level that we were on, compared to everybody else. They were just painfully stupid and pretentious,” he added.
Throughout his career, Reed always had a standoff-ish relationship with his producers. From the start of the Velvet Underground, he mentioned how producers didn’t really understand what he was trying to get down on tape, saying: “A lot of my records sound like they were recorded completely dry and no one did anything, and that in fact was what it was because they would go to touch a button and I’d go, ‘what are you doing, man?'”
While Reed admitted that the producers went into a project with the best of intentions, none of their input served the sounds that he heard in his head. Whenever he listened to edits that had taken place on his songs, most of the time, Reed thought it ended up sounding like a watered-down version of his art. “I have faith in my own vision,” he once asserted. “And didn’t want them to tamper with it. I thought my thing coming out badly recorded this way, is better than if these people take my voice and try to make me sound like a 14-year-old.”
Typically stubborn, Reed wasn’t willing to budge an inch for commercial potential, either. If you listen to songs featured on White Light/White Heat, Reed made it a point to leave the distorted elements of noise in the final mix, creating a wall of sound that feels like controlled chaos.
As Reed went further into his solo career, it made sense that he ended up working with his friends rather than the most popular producers at the time, like bringing in David Bowie to help him on the album Transformer, for example. While having the luxury of rock star buddies certainly helps, Reed was far from a diva in the studio. When explaining his recording technique, Reed talked about wanting to keep it as authentic as possible. He said: “These lines, they mean something, I’m an adult, man. Don’t thin my voice out and make it like that high shit. This is the way I sound. You’ve got to get people to understand that because they take the nuance and character out that makes the lyric believable. It’s an important thing.”
This distrust of producers explains why Reed ended up making songs that were rougher around the edges. Although some of these tracks wouldn’t make it onto the radio, that was never what Reed was aiming for. Throughout his solo career, Reed always kept the song as pure as it could be, without having to cower to any “hit single” to wrap everything together. From one decade to the next, you can hear his voice age gracefully, with all the subtle imperfections that you would get from a singer who walked in and started playing the song for you in the room.
Are there a few blemishes in Reed’s catalogue? Yes. Could some production help have fixed those mistakes? Absolutely. Some of the missteps could have been avoided…but we wouldn’t have music that sounds like Lou Reed.
