The one writer that never failed to impress Lou Reed: “Knocks me out”
Rock and roll hasn’t always been about being the greatest musician of all time. Most people want to wow any crowd they get in front of in the early days, but it’s far more interesting for people to challenge the audience and give them something they’ve never seen before with their musical art projects. And while Lou Reed remained one of the most singular artists of his time when making his solo records, that’s not to say he couldn’t appreciate great rock and roll when he heard it.
Then again, Reed was always slightly on the fringes of rock and roll. He had friends in the business that he could always count on, like David Bowie and Iggy Pop, but as far back as The Velvet Underground, it was his personal mission to do something far different from anything he heard out of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. That was teeny-bopper stuff, and what he said needed to matter much more.
And when The Velvet Underground’s debut record, it wasn’t shocking to see it be met with much trepidation from fans. Many people didn’t know what they were hearing, but that was because Reed was as indebted to poets as he was to rock stars. He was infatuated with getting a guitar to sound nasty, but it wasn’t out of the question for him to start talking about scoring drugs on the street or partaking in some twisted S&M fantasy.
If anything, Reed was shoving rock and roll poetry together and turning it into one thing. Most punk kids were more concerned with the blaring guitars, but that was simply window dressing for the main event, and while Reed was the king of that sound in New York, he wasn’t doing anything more shocking than what Bob Dylan was doing for the culture years beforehand.
Sure, Dylan may not have started with an electric guitar and massive blasts of feedback on his records, but he was always interested in the written word far more than the melodies. Nothing on his first albums could be considered that heavy from a musical perspective, but when looking at his own parables like ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ or ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, Dylan wasn’t afraid to go to places many artists were to scared to go, and over time, Reed couldn’t get enough of that style of music.
“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.”
Lou Reed
Even into the 1980s, Reed said that Dylan was one of the only consistent artists who never failed to surprise him with his records, saying, “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.”
But if there’s one thing that Dylan taught Reed more than anything, it was the importance of switching things up. Reed could have settled for making any number of Transformer soundalike albums if he wanted to, but in the same way that the Dylan of Time Out of Mind was miles different from his past, there’s hardly any way to tell that Reed could go from Berlin to The Raven to his cameo on Gorillaz’s ‘Some Kind of Nature’ without breaking a sweat.
Because when looking at all forms of rock and roll, all of it was malleable for Reed. The legends like Chuck Berry were always going to be there, but any artist could take the makings of the past and deliberately mess it up to make something even stronger. It may not have always worked for Dylan or Reed, but they would much rather fall on their sword in the name of experimentation than sell out for the hell of it.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.