The Velvet Underground song Lou Reed saw “disturbing” responses to
Perhaps the most infamous recording that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground ever made was ‘Heorin’. The 1967 song featured on the band’s debut album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, had actually been written by Reed a few years earlier, but his initial gig as a songwriter for Pickwick Records didn’t allow him the opportunity to share his darker songs.
“I was working for a record company as a songwriter, where they’d lock me in a room and they’d say write ten surfing songs, ya know, and I wrote ‘Heroin’ and I said, ‘Hey I got something for ya,‘” Reed claimed in a 1972 radio interview. “They said, ‘Never gonna happen, never gonna happen.'”
A nearly eight-minute track featuring sped-up tempo changes meant to channel the high of shooting up, ‘Heroin’ was the most boundary-pushing song to come out of the summer of love. Dark, depressing, and unflinching, ‘Heroin’ was the apex of Reed’s obsession with bringing stark realities to his music.
For Reed, songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ weren’t meant for shock value. Instead, they were reflections of the time that Reed found himself in, namely the seedier corners of New York City in the mid-1960s. But when fans would tell Reed just how literally they took ‘Heroin’, he began to feel a bit queasy about the song.
“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,” Reed told Creem in 1971. “But when I saw how people were responding to them, it was disturbing. 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,” Reed added. “But I don’t think that anymore; it’s really too awful a thing to consider.”
Reed remained hesitant to play ‘Heroin’ in the later years of The Velvet Underground, with the song not appearing on the band’s final live album Live at Max’s Kansas City. However, it did remain in setlists and can be heard on albums like 1969: The Velvet Underground Live. Reed also kept the track in rotation during his solo years, with ‘Heroin’ appearing on his legendary 1974 live album Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal.
Check out ‘Heroin’ down below.
