Lou Reed on the true leader of Velvet Underground: “He was in charge of us”
Deciding on the leadership role in a band is always a touchy subject. While playing music with friends without worrying about who takes the spotlight might sound ideal, the mark of any great group is having one person to help guide them—whether through business deals, songwriting, or general group morale. Although Lou Reed was the de facto leader of The Velvet Underground when they formed, that wasn’t always how he saw it in his own mind.
Granted, there was no one looking to compete with Reed’s songs once they heard them. Compared to everything else going on in rock and roll at the time, Reed had his finger on the pulse of something much more nasty, practically writing songs that felt like a spit in the face to everyone who wanted to throw their cares away and move out to Woodstock to find peace on the festival grounds.
That’s not what Manhattan life was like, and with only one listen of ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’ or ‘Heroin,’ everyone knew that there was something a bit more edgy to be had from traditional rock and roll. Rather than the traditional catchy single that had been a cornerstone of the charts, Reed’s songs were meant to be thought of as art pieces, even if a handful of them did have knockout choruses like ‘Sunday Morning’.
But the main partnership with the band wasn’t even musically related. The whole concept was about freedom of expression, and their connection with Andy Warhol was what really set everything in motion. Warhol may have only been an overseer of what they had done, but much of what is considered their classic material comes from them thinking about music in a different way than most groups.
There are no real rules when it comes to abstract art, so that mentality drove them to push everything beyond the point of compression on White Light/White Heat or make strange detours like having two different sides of a story being told at the same time on ‘The Murder Mystery.’ Even if Reed was still writing everything, that mentality came down to what Warhol brought to the table.
“He was the leader, which would be very surprising for a lot of people to work out. He was in charge of us, everyone.”
lou reed
When talking about the band’s development later, Reed felt that Warhol was instrumental in putting them together, saying, “He was obviously a kindred spirit if ever there was one, and so smart with charisma to spare. But really so smart. And for a quote ‘passive’ guy, he took over everything. He was the leader, which would be very surprising for a lot of people to work out. He was in charge of us, everyone.”
That wasn’t even limited to their approaches together, either. Looking through Reed’s solo career, an album as caustic as Metal Machine Music or as genre-bending as Transformer was always about documenting where he was in the moment rather than writing a hit, and despite some of them standing the test of time, that was never the point he was trying to make.
He had been through the wringer of being a professional songwriter, and this approach to music was about something much different. Here, he was forced to stop singing for his own audience and start singing what was in his soul.
