“Turn a phrase”: The songwriter Lou Reed would give anything to write like
“I do Lou Reed better than anybody,” Lou Reed himself declares on his live album, Take No Prisoners. While humbling a heckler, he makes a strong point of his singularity. “This is rock & roll. It’s my rock & roll,” he spits as if he’d never taken inspiration from anywhere beyond the depths of his own brain. But in reality, there’s one other rocker that Reed always paid attention to.
“If you don’t like my rock & roll, why don’t ya just split? Get a refund, motherfucker,” Reed continued to fire at the heckler at one infamous 1978 gig. The idea of ‘Lou Reed’s rock and roll’ is apt, though. There is no reference point for it other than himself. Since he first emerged as part of the Velvet Underground, it has been Reed who has become to reference. He’s the man who launched a thousand bands and a thousand other moody, experimental artists who followed in his footsteps. But it always seemed that the lineage started with him.
His creations felt utterly singular. Even while The Velvet Underground definitely borrowed from rock and roll references, they were doing something completely new and different when it comes to tracks like ‘Sister Ray’ or ‘European Son’. Then, when Reed went solo, his uniqueness only became clearer. Who else would make an album like Berlin? Where does a record like that even come from? Because it certainly didn’t come from inspiration he was plucking from the music world around him.
But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t clued in. Reed was still a music fan and an admirer of other musicians. He was even still a somewhat jealous man, hearing the work of others and thinking the classic thought of ‘man, I wish i wrote that.’
Mostly that came from one direction – the direction of whatever it was that Bob Dylan was doing. “I always go out and get the latest Dylan album,” Reed said to Rolling Stone in 1989 as if it were a ritual or even homework, like it was a task all artists should be ticking off their list. Reed was paying attention to Dylan in a way that made it seem like paying attention to Dylan was a studious thing for a songwriter to do, as if even decades into his career, he could still be learning a thing or two from the folk star.
“Bob Dylan can turn a phrase, man,” Reed said in a statement of deep admiration for the way Dylan pieces his words together. Beyond even just being inspirational, Reed seemed to find it almost irritating, as if despite his devotion to his rock and roll, he wished he could have a little piece of Dylan’s.
He picked a track out, new ones as proof of his focus on the artist’s ongoing career. “‘Going ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street’”, he quoted from the track ‘Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street)’, stating, “I’d give anything if I could have written that.” Ironically, though, Dylan didn’t write that. While the point of Reed’s admiration still stands, it’s a bad example given that the track in question was written by Don Robertson and Hal Blair, two country songwriters, way back in 1963.
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