The greatest story ever written, according to Lou Reed
It’s hard to describe the work of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, but David Byrne did a good job of it.
When chatting about the bands that shaped Talking Heads, David Byrne gave a nod to the Velvet Underground, praising their versatility and free-spirited approach. They never boxed themselves into one sound. Whatever vibe came to them in the moment, they just went with it. And fair play really, why put limits on your creativity when there’s so much going on in your head?
“The Velvet Underground were a big revelation. I realised, ‘Oh, look at the subject of their songs: There’s a tune and a melody, but the sound is either completely abrasive or really pretty’,” explained Byrne, “They swing from one extreme to the other. ‘White Light/White Heat’ is just this noise, and then, ‘Candy Says’ is incredibly pretty but really kind of dark. As a young person, you go, What is this about?”
Byrne certainly has a point. The range of styles that the Velvet Underground had was incredibly groundbreaking. While bands these days might be a bit more willing to embrace variety, it was rare when Lou Reed and co were making music, given genres had much stricter boundaries. The downside was that they didn’t have the mainstream success a lot of other bands did, but the Velvet Underground influenced a lot more artists in the modern age.
The other benefit is that you had writers like Lou Reed who weren’t restricted to the various themes that they wanted to touch upon. Reed was more of a poet and a storyteller than a lyricist, so by having songs which expanded across a range of different ideas, he was able to engage with his creativity more so than if he had been involved in a different band.
That same curiosity for pushing boundaries carried over into his solo work, too. Stick on an album like Transformer, and it’s obvious – you’re not just hearing someone chucking lyrics together for the sake of it. You’re hearing an artist genuinely trying to say something that matters. Take a track like ‘Heroin’ – it’s so raw and brutally honest, it’s almost uncomfortable to sit with.
“I meant those songs to sort of exorcise the darkness, or the self-destructive element in me, and hoped other people would take them the same way. But when I saw how people were responding to them, it was disturbing,” said Reed, “Because, like, people would come up and say, ‘I shot up to ‘Heroin,’ things like that. For a while, I was even thinking that some of my songs might have contributed formatively to the consciousness of all these addictions and things going down with the kids today.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that so many of Reed’s songs have a narrative you can follow attached to them, given that so many of these songs are actually just watered-down stories. After reading what he called his favourite book, he wanted to write his own novel along the same lines, but it never came about. Instead, the narrative got lost amongst the lyrics. While some may be disappointed they never got the chance to read one of Reed’s stories, they can still check out the book he adored, and the subsequent songs that it inspired.
“I would say I owe 100 per cent to them,” he said. “To this day, I think In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz is one of the greatest short stories ever written, and that changed my life. For a writer, it was an inspirational thing to have looked at. I did try to write a detective novel at one point, but I wasn’t good at it; anything that went along those lines ended up as a song. Some of it is on the Raven album, and some of it is on Street Hassle… the perfect little piece of film noir. It’s quite a monologue, I guess you could say.”
