When Lou Reed moved back home to his parents: “That’s where all his best work comes from”
In Pass Thru Fire, the collected lyrics of Lou Reed, there is a proclamation from the ranting rocker that reads: “Rock & roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don’t understand. The music gave you back your beat so you could dream…The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not for music? Die for it. Isn’t it pretty? Wouldn’t you die for something pretty?”
Now, I wouldn’t say that Reed himself was willing to die for rock ‘n’ roll, but he was willing to join its roots in the gutter. This placed him on the outside of things. As Brian Eno once said: “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
He inspired the few he managed to reach from his lowly perch to pursue a greater realism in rock. In an era of staunch conservatism – despite the retrospective view on flowery 1960s – Reed’s tales of fetishes, freaks and f—king about with drugs surely ostracised him even if they were just pipedream tales to go with his equally visceral melodies.
Thus, in a weird sort of way, following his rise – if you can call it that – through the Factory alongside Andy Warhol to a status where he could mutter at critics, ‘Can 150 fans really be wrong?’, the next chapter in Reed’s wayward existence is almost more stupefying than the flopping first. In 1970, Lou ‘The Wild Child’ Reed wrapped up a set suddenly and quit the Velvet Underground basically mid-show. He waltzed out of the dingy dive bar where they were playing, phoned his parents from the bar and got them to collect him from the street. At the time, he was the 28-year-old barely recognised king of seedy, sultry and account-eviscerating rock ‘n’ roll.
Upon return to his parent’s abode, he was broke, spiritually beaten, and ready to settle down into the quiet life of Long Island, all suited and booted at his father’s accountancy firm. Thereafter, in a state of post-traumatic despair, he entered a 48-hour stupor and failed to emerge from his old boyhood room. A few weeks later, as if to purge his body, he donned a business suit and sulked his down to his father’s office. In an alternate universe, this could’ve been the end for Lou Reed, the rocker and start of Lou Reed, the successful family businessman, but naturally, he hated it. In a twist of fate, it proved to be the most fertile creative ground of his career.
As John Cale once told Nick Kent in 1974: “I think he might start writing good songs again, were he to go back and live with his parents. That’s where all his best work comes from. His mother was some sort of wealthy ex-beauty queen, and his father was a wealthy accountant.” From that safe bosom of his childhood home, Reed was able to view the underbelly like a voyeur and his self-titled solo masterpiece was born while back at his parents’.
However, it is a note that will change tracks like ‘I Can’t Stand It’ forever when you picture Reed punching figures into a calculator before returning home for a pot-roast before scurrying up to his room, turning over the ‘Keep Out!’ sign on his door and scribbling down a quick ‘Ride into the Sun’. Alas, this is the reality stranger than fiction, and if you strip away the comic element of the image, it makes quite a lot of sense that he would work well in this environment: “There is only one good thing about a small town,“ he sings in ‘Songs for Drella’, “You know that you want to get out.“ So, he found himself reinvigorated and looking back at the underground from afar, reconciling things with clarity thanks to the space he was now afforded.
