Lou Reed felt “lucky to be alive” to witness Leonard Cohen
Musicians are often very difficult people to please, but Lou Reed took that to another level; achieving a mere grin from the king of New York was like getting blood from a stone, particularly if you were a rock journalist or fellow musician. Still, the famously taciturn songwriter did have his moments of vulnerability.
Every angst-ridden, moody teenager of the past 50 years owes something to the existence of Lou Reed. From the outset of his songwriter career, establishing The Velvet Underground in 1965 alongside the similarly inclined John Cale, Reed dealt almost exclusively in moodiness. Admittedly, the songwriter had a lot to be moody about, subjected to electro-therapy and nervous breakdowns during his college years, and thrust into the grimy concrete jungle of New York City in the hopes of making it as a musician, only to be ignored by the cultural mainstream.
Listening to The Velvet Underground, it almost sounds as if the band were existing in captivity, locked away in Andy Warhol’s Factory without any outside influences. Now, that is obviously not the reality of the situation, and we are not bringing any charges of entrapment against Warhol, but The Velvets sounded unlike anything else around at that time – arguably, nobody has matched their penchant for experimentation and inventiveness since. So, it is difficult to imagine the band embracing any outside influences.
At his core, though, Reed was a musical obsessive just like the rest of us. From his deep-rooted adoration of 1950s old-school R&B and early rock ‘n’ roll to his endless appreciation for jazz, soul, and folk; the cult musician had an insatiable appetite for emotive songwriting, so it should come as no real surprise that Leonard Cohen was always a figure of worship for Lou Reed.
As a young writer in the late 1960s, Cohen spent a considerable amount of time hanging around Warhol’s Factory, finding a particular love for Nico’s performance style, so the fact that he crossed paths with Reed and The Velvet Underground on a number of occasions is something of an inevitability. Although, when Cohen started to find success as a songwriter, his style was already worlds apart from the subversive mastery of Reed, the pair shared a certain degree of mutual respect.
Eventually, Reed got the opportunity to espouse his deep respect for his Canadian counterpart, inducting the ‘I’m Your Man’ songwriter into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2008. During his induction speech, the former Velvet Underground songwriter declared, “We are so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is,” a sentiment which had likely been rattling around in his head since Cohen’s early days back at the Factory.
The same goes the other way around, though; Cohen was lucky to be around when Reed was at his arguable best. In fact, during that same induction speech, Reed recalled when Cohen once told him, within the famous walls of Max’s Kansas City, that The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ was the track that made him want to be a songwriter.
It could certainly be argued, therefore, that, without Reed, Leonard Cohen would never have gifted the world with his life-affirming, heartbreaker, and utterly inspiring body of work – at least not in a musical form. So, Reed was inarguably correct that we are all lucky that Cohen existed on this planet, but we must also give thanks for the inspiring existence of Lou Reed, too.
