The songs Lou Reed wishes he had written
Beyond the artistic merits for which he’s widely revered, Lou Reed was prone to bouts of obstinacy and overt insolence. This side of Reed’s personality would often rear its ugly head during interviews in tandem with a wicked sense of humour. Consequently, it was often difficult to know what to believe when listening to the former Velvet Underground leader shoot his mouth off. In one interview, he’d lambast an artist as having little to no talent, then just a few months later, he might be heard singing their praises.
While Reed’s interview transcripts often required a pinch of salt for optimal digestion, he appeared to speak candidly when discussing songwriting with Joe Smith in 1987. “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record,” he said. “I mean, for what? It’s not like when you read a book, and you come across a great line, it would be great if you got that in a song, I thought.”
One of Reed’s more constant – and therefore trustworthy – assertions was that The Beatles were overrated in their time. As a member of the formerly-underappreciated Velvet Underground, Reed maintained an arm’s length appreciation of the Fab Four. Ostensibly, a small selection of The Beatles’ songs ticked Reed’s box, but on the whole, he thought they were “garbage”.
“The Beatles? I never liked The Beatles, I thought they were garbage,” Reed told Smith. “I don’t think Lennon did anything until he went solo. But then, too, he was like trying to play catch up. He was getting involved in choruses and everything … I don’t want to come off as being snide, because I’m not being snide. What I’m doing is giving you a really frank answer; I have no respect for those people at all, I don’t listen to it at all, it’s absolute shit.”
Despite his fierce criticism of The Beatles, Reed singled out one Lennon solo hit he enjoyed immensely. “But [Lennon] wrote one song that I admire tremendously; I think it was one of the greatest songs I ever heard, called ‘Mother’. Now, with that, and he was capable of great pop stuff, which is nothing to sneeze at, but the question you asked me was ‘on another level.'”
Reed continued, explaining that ‘Mother’ was on “another level” because “the song had realism. When I first heard it, I didn’t even know it was him. I just said, ‘Who the fuck is that? I don’t believe that.’ Because the lyrics to that are real, you see, he wasn’t kidding around. He got right down to it, as down as you can get. I like that in a song.”
“Other than Dylan, there’s not much there,” Reed elaborated in a critique of contemporary songwriting talent. “The thing Dylan did with Sam Shepherd, ‘Brownsville Girl’, I mean, I think that is one of the greatest things I ever heard in my life. I fell down laughing. You can listen to that, you can listen to the words going on, and it’s tremendous.”
“I always go out and get the latest Dylan album,” Reed told Rolling Stone in further appreciation of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter in 1989. “Bob Dylan can turn a phrase, man. Like his last album [Down in the Groove], his choice of songs. ‘Going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street’ [‘Ninety Miles An Hour’] — I’d give anything if I could have written that. Or that other one, ‘Rank Strangers to Me.’ The key word there is rank.”
“I can really listen to something like that,” Reed continued. “The rest of it is all pop. I have zero interest in it. But Dylan continuously knocks me out. ‘Brownsville Girl,’ the thing he did with Sam Shepard, he said, ‘Even the SWAT teams around here are getting pretty corrupt.’ I was on the floor. I have that same reaction to some of my own stuff. And the only other person I can think of who does that for me is Dylan.”
The songs Lou Reed wishes he had written:
- Bob Dylan – ‘Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street)’ (Written by Don Robertson and Hal Blair)
- Bob Dylan – ‘Rank Strangers to Me’ (Written by Albert E. Brumley)
- Bob Dylan – ‘Brownsville Girl’
- John Lennon – ‘Mother’
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