Why did Lou Reed lie about his life story?
Although brilliant and unique in every musical way possible, Lou Reed was probably not someone you’d ever take life advice from. As he once said, “Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life.”
In fact, Reed wasn’t always the most pleasant company in interviews, and famously disliked critics, more than any usual creator, taking a certain dislike to those who don’t really get what makes their work as good as everybody says it is. But whatever Reed said in interviews was either delivered with the kind of off-kilter energy intended to break the ice or with a certain detachment that made it hard to work out if he was telling the truth or not.
Evidently, most of the time, he wasn’t. No, really – he even admitted it himself, once telling Uncut, “Look, why should any of that shit be true. I’ve lied so much about the past I can’t even tell myself what is true anymore.” He actually spent most of the peak of his fame throughout the 1960s and 1970s telling lies about his life story, mainly to poke fun at the press and the general public, and fabricate things he knew would grow a mind of their own.
“You can say anything you want, and that’s what I did for years,” Reed said elsewhere. “Unfortunately, I’m still haunted by those lies. People continue to ask, ‘Did you really put a rifle to a guy’s head?’ and ‘Do you really have a degree in music from Harvard?’” While this makes some of the deeper cuts in his storied career seem veiled in a certain kind of ambiguity, it does point towards a harsher truth about the world he rose to fame in, and why he felt the need to be so abrasive in the first place.
For instance, he already had a dislike for promotional interviews, feeling that they veered too close to intrusive, and even the ones that pulled back on that front seemed to find nuggets of out-of-context musings to run away with after the fact. But while some of this attitude was very much cynical, it also became some sort of game, like if he didn’t confirm or deny something, he still had the upper hand, because people could say whatever they wanted about someone they’d basically just made up.
Maybe that’s why, despite the prickly nature of both parties, Reed got on with David Bowie so well. They saw eye to eye, artistically and in their broader attitudes towards life and the industry, and could often call cultural moments before they’d even happened. On ‘Satellite of Love’, it was Bowie’s input that enhanced its appeal, complementing Reed in a way he hadn’t thought of before. And for Bowie, Reed was a pioneer of art rock whose masterful vision came to its peak on Lulu.
But both also existed at that strange point of contention where lines between reality and abstraction became blurred, stretching into how they came across in interviews, a glint in their eyes like they were never really sure if what they were saying was actually real or not. Reed, in particular, used it to maintain his position as one of rock’s greatest pariahs, always keeping audiences on their toes, keeping them locked in the shadows of fiction and fabrication.
