When William S. Burroughs said Lou Reed had surpassed him
Before the beat generation, literature was being left behind by the technological age. Things were moving quickly and suddenly books seemed stilted in their age-old separatist way from society. While the printed medium was steadily losing its artistic prominence, the likes of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs set about getting the printed press’ hands dirty for a change, wading into the world, capturing it on the wing, and reflecting it back to contemporary America. A revolution was underway. Something was germinating among the young minds of the day.
Lou Reed was utterly enamoured by this as a boy. The rocker in waiting was born amid the gaudy chaos of North America’s bohemian hub: New York City. He shut out the world and slunk into the art around him by means of salvation from the endless panic attacks he suffered throughout his youth. Albeit Reed was mildly dyslexic, books were an appealing escape for him. As a teen in the late 1950s, this invariably meant Jack Kerouac and the beat literature craze.
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. But that is a folie au plenty in the pop culture age where we all live in our own little movies. Reed set out to direct his own in song.
This is palpable in many of his greatest works. The Lou Reed masterpiece ‘Street Hassle’ has more depth, near-tangible imagery and character than most novels can achieve in half a tree’s worth of pages. In many ways, the song was the realisation of a goal he always held in his songwriting: “To bring the sensitivities of the novel to rock music.”
The sensitivities of a novel were never far from his thoughts whenever he picked up his guitar. The Velvet Underground, in many ways, slid out from the grimy shadow of William S. Burroughs, whose prominent impact on music came from the extreme daring of his prose. When Junkie was released in 1953, it served as an incendiary attack on decency and controversially challenged American ideals of what can be spoken about in art, much in the same way that fellow New York denizens The Velvet Underground would do over a decade later.
Lou Reed’s fractured narratives of New York or Berlin and beyond would paint a similar kaleidoscopic picture. His literary ways defined him as a truly original songwriter, and as the cliché goes, one who was perhaps too far ahead of his time to fully be appreciated in his day. His early dyslexic struggles meant that the madcap machinegun bursts of rock ‘n’ roll were ideal. And there was an apt poet to help him with his quickfire, pointed lyrics: Delmore Schwartz was a huge early influence.
Schwartz became a mentor of Lou Reed’s during his days at Syracuse University, turning him on to other seminal authors and nurturing his own musical malicious intent. When this spark of inspiration burst into flame and launched his rock ‘n’ roll career, Lou Reed eventually met his other idol, Burroughs, in 1979. At that fateful meeting, he asked, “Can a pupil ever do better work than his teacher?” To which Burroughs humbly replied, “In this case, I believe so,” according to Transformer: The Lou Reed Story by Victor Bockris. Who said never meet your heroes?
