The moment Jonathan Richman met Lou Reed
Between his work with The Velvet Underground and his solo ventures, Lou Reed left a legacy as one of the greatest songwriters of all time. Perhaps expectedly, he had a somewhat cocky and chaotic personality to match. He was unafraid to throw insults at his peers in interviews, scathingly honest and making no apology.
Still, if you managed to catch Reed on a good day, he could play nice. He might even provide you with a stepping stone into your music career, as a young Jonathan Richman discovered in the late 1960s when he ran into the frontman in Boston.
Recalling the experience on Radio Valencia, the Modern Lovers founder explained that, during his teens, he was invited to go to the Boston Tea Party, where The Velvet Underground were playing. Just one day before the show, Richman stumbled upon the ‘Walk On The Wild Side‘ singer himself strolling through Harvard Square.
After struggling to remember the season, “It was either fall or spring. I think I remember it being fall. But I’m wrong, it had to be spring. It had to be spring,” Richman settles in March or April 1967. Presumably, he’s actually referring to their two-night run at the Boston Tea Party on May 26th and 27th, 1967.
According to Richman’s memory, Reed was wearing a brown corduroy sport coat and carrying his guitar case. At just 16 years old, the soon-to-be Modern Lovers frontman approached him, tentatively asking, “Excuse me, are you Lou Reed?” When The Velvet Underground frontman answered in the affirmative, a young Richman began to compliment their sound, particularly the way they would “use the guitars like they were drums.”
Reed was taken aback by the compliment, responding, “Wait a minute, are you saying, using the guitars, the rhythm guitar tracks, as percussion instruments?”. Richman simply answered, “Yeah,” eliciting even more enthusiasm from the frontman. “That’s what we do! And you heard that?” he exclaimed. Richman had made an impression on the artist he once idolised and suddenly found himself with a fast-tracked ticket to the in-crowd.
“He told his people…” Richman continued to explain, “He said, ‘I met this 15-year-old precocious boy in the street,’ you know. And later, I ran into them and told them that I met Lou, and they said, ‘Were you that boy?’ I said, ‘You mean the one who asked him the questions about music? And they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that was me!’ They said, ‘Oh.’ So, I was in.”
He certainly was in – it wasn’t long before he was opening up for The Velvet Underground. That chance encounter changed the course of Richman’s life, as John Cale went on to produce the first Modern Lovers demo session. According to Richman, he simply said the right thing “without trying”.
He said: “I could’ve said other right things. But they grasped… how seriously I took the music, and I did, it was life or death serious, as it still is for me. If music isn’t life or death serious, don’t wanna do it.”
