Five of Lou Reed’s most brutal put-downs
If you can remember what it was like to be 14 years old and desperate for everyone to just leave you the hell alone, you can imagine what it might feel like to occupy Lou Reed’s brain. As the frontman of one of the 1960s most influential (and least commercially viable) garage rock bands, The Velvet Underground, Reed came to embody the cutting edge of New York rock ‘n’ roll.
Though still revered, Reed’s hostile personality has made him a very divisive figure. Yes, he was an incredibly talented songwriter. Yes, he left the world of music in an infinitely better state than when he found it. Yes, he helped inspire countless other brilliant artists. But he was also a very unpleasant man. Plagued by mental illness, drug addiction and violent tendencies, the ‘Perfect Day’ composer was violent towards his girlfriends, publically humiliated his sister in his lyrics, and pretended to shoot up on stage.
Knowing that there was no such thing as bad press, he also liked to give fairly outrageous interviews. At this level, it’s possible to view Reed as a mere curmudgeon, a talented musician with enough taste to distinguish between posers and the real deal. Here we’ve bought together some of his most brutal put-downs, ranging from atrocious attacks on revered prog-rockers to caustic comments about his interviewer’s journalistic integrity.
Lou Reed’s most brutal put-downs:
The “lowest form of life” – Niklas Källner
In March 2000, Lou Reed decided to crush one young journalist’s spirit. Recounting his traumatic experience interviewing the rock ‘n’ roll legend, Niklas Källner said: “Probably he expected a typical music journalist to show up—Journalists who know everything about Lou Reed. Instead, he meets a 22-year-old guy that knows nothing about Lou Reed… And who is just terrified.”
Seizing on poor Källner’s fear, Reed decided to deflect each of the 15 questions he had prepared, occasionally offering single-word answers. Källner went into panic mode and started grasping for a way to make the conversation more stimulating. Instead, he ended up asking the most mundane questions any journalist has ever asked. “After 15 minutes,” Källner recalled, “I started feeling that he likes me.” Wrong.
Lou Reed doesn’t like journalists. He’s an angry rock tortoise who regards them as the “lowest form of life.” After making that particular comment, Reed looked a little guilty. He’d successfully broken Källner, but what had he achieved in doing so? “You’re the exception,” Reed added. But Niklas was already halfway out the door.
The “Pretentious academic” – Frank Zappa
Reed wasn’t a huge fan of Frank Zappa and his kin. In the 1960s, The Velvets were the very antithesis of the west coast’s avant-gardists, of which Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention were the worst offenders.
In a recently recirculated magazine feature, Reed calls Zappa: “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s a two-bit pretentious academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything. He can’t play rock’n’roll because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself, and I think he’s right.” Ouch. Don’t worry, though; he made up for it when he inducted Zappa into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
The “Profoundly untalented” – Pete Townshend
Zappa may have been a bit pompous, but even fairly ordinary people like The Who’s Pete Townshend weren’t free from Reed’s scorn. Of course, by the time he came out to slate the guitarist, Reed had already made it clear that he despised British rock ‘n’ roll.
In the 1970s, Reed attacked The Who’s 1969 concept album, Tommy. “Jesus, how do people get sucked into that?” he vented. “So talentless, and as a lyricist [Townshend is] so profoundly untalented, and, you know, philosophically boring to say the least… like the record ‘The Searcher’ [meaning ‘The Seeker’]; ‘I ask Timothy Leary…’, I wouldn’t ask Timothy Leary the time of day, for cryin’ out loud.”
The “painfully stupid” – The Doors
The Doors: yet another West Coast institution Reed regarded as the musical equivalent of three children disguised in one long trench coat pretending to be a grown-up called ‘Mr Willy’.
Reed didn’t think The Doors deserved half as much praise as they recieved. When, during a 1987 interview with PBS, Reed was asked for his opinion on his rock ‘n’ roll peers in the 1960s, he seized an opportunity to deride Jim Morrison and company: “They [San Francisco rock bands] were just painfully stupid and pretentious, and when they did try to get, ‘arty,’ it was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by ‘stupid,’ I mean, like, The Doors.”
The “Urinary Tract” – Lester Bangs
As previously noted, Reed hated journalists. Actually, let’s be more specific: he hated male journalists. Lester Bangs, Reed’s one true nemesis, was the worst of all. He was the Lex Luther to his superman. The Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes. The Gollum to his Frodo. The…okay, I’m out.
My point is this: Lester Bangs and Lou Reed had an ongoing rivalry. Both blessed with a razor-sharp wit, they engaged in many face-offs over the years, with Bangs once calling Reed a “vaguely uncomfortable fat man” in a 1973 profile he wrote for Let It Rock magazine. Reed got his own back in 1975 when he responded to one of Lester’s cruel remarks with the brilliant line: “You really are an asshole. You went past assholism into some kind of urinary tract.” It’s true; Lester Bangs was an asshole. He once called Bryan Ferry (BRYAN FERRY?) “the most vacuous excuse for a superstar that has yet been presented to us.” Oooh, lemme at him.
