When Lou Reed compared John Lennon and Bob Dylan
Of all the oddities in pop culture, Lou Reed is perhaps the oddest. A beloved prick, a revered intellectual who struggled with long paragraphs, a progenitor whose pioneering ways shifted all of 30,000 records and an ardent journo-basher loved by every single one of them. He truly was a Rockstar who didn’t give a damn and his standards remained unmovable. In the brown-nosing world of music, Reed stood out croc among the gators.
He was bornin the bohemian world of New York City. As a boy, he shut out the world and sunk into the art around him by means of salvation from the endless panic attacks he suffered through. Albeit Reed was dyslexic, books were an appealing escape for him, as did the grand libraries where they were held. As a teen in the late 1950s, this invariably meant Jack Kerouac and the beat literature craze.
Without craving long reeds, it was magic snippets that he searched for. Kerouac and the bets offered up the ones that turned his own world into poetry. It is Kerouac, in fact, who illuminates a very similar pastiche to Lou Reed’s opening ‘Berlin’ stanza when he wrote: “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I love who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.” On both counts, we have, of course, a self-absorbed fantasy.
The mix of punchy power and woven worlds was something Reed thought rock ‘n’ roll was made for, but all too often he was left wanting. in a 1987 interview with Joe Smith, Reed stated: “You don’t want to actually listen to the lyrics of a rock ‘n’ roll record. 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.”
While The Beatles might have been offering this up for some people, Reed was always an outsider standing well clear of the fanfare. “The Beatles? I never liked The Beatles, I thought they were garbage.” He later added, “I don’t think Lennon did anything until he went solo,” Reed bemoaned. “But then too he was like trying to play catch up. He was getting involved in choruses and everything.” Later kindly clarifying: “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.”
However, when he did get to grips with Reed’s own standards, he happed upon the lines of poetic sincerity that he always sought. “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’.”
The reason he thought it was “another level” was 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.”
Another star who was able to weave realism into song like the beats who artistically raised him was Bob Dylan. “Other than Dylan, there’s not much there,” he said of rock ‘n’ roll songwriters. “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,” he told Rolling Stone 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’ — I’d give anything if I could have written that. Or that other one, ‘Rank Strangers to Me.’ The key word there is rank.”
He added: “I can really listen to something like that. 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.”
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