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November 20 - December 3, 2013
Downtown Notebook
Amid a sea of bleakness, Reed was the inspiration
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Photo by Patrick Shields
Posters of Lou Reed, with his wife, artist Laurie Anderson, appeared on lampposts at Bedford and Downing Sts. the day before Halloween, two days after Reed’s death.
B Y Steven Wi shni a I discovered the Velvet Underground’s banana-stickered first album in the $1.49 bin of a Long Island record store when I was 15. All I knew was that they were some kind of East Village underground band from ’67-’68. A misfit in the Island’s centerless carscape, I found solace in music. But the blues-based white rock of the era sounded counterfeit after I heard Muddy Waters, and the old blues didn’t have the crazed electricguitar noise and drive I craved. I found it in the Velvets. It had the sound of the city, the chaos of swerving taxis, the clattering screech of an I.R.T. express train. “Gonna take a walk round Union Square / you never know what you might find there.” It also had a soft side, the bells of “Sunday Morning” three minutes of tentative peace before the onslaught of “I’m Waiting for My Man.” Almost none of my friends liked it. The Velvets and Lou Reed are venerated icons now that New York City is commemorating its punk-and-graffiti ’70s the way Paris flogs its Toulouse-Lautrec 1890s, but they were decidedly unpopular back then. The Velvets’ second album, “White Light / White Heat,” also got remaindered, and their third didn’t even make it that far, despite now-classic tunes like “What Goes On,” “Some Kinda Love” and “Pale Blue Eyes.” On the other hand, this was a good thing for a teenager whose musical hunger
exceeded his finances. I scored “White Light / White Heat” for $1.99 a few years later. “Sister Ray” was the first song I learned to play on guitar. I wasn’t the only one listening. Joy Division would later cover “Sister Ray.” Up in Boston, Jonathan Richman with the Modern Lovers twisted its two-chord lick into “Roadrunner.” David Bowie covered “I’m Waiting for My Man,” and the Patti Smith Group opened shows with “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” a Velvets song not released until 1974, four years after they broke up. For the proto-punk generation of musicians and fans, Lou Reed was crucial. The early to mid-’70s were a golden age for R&B, reggae was bubbling up from Jamaica, and hip-hop was brewing in the burning Bronx, but it was a pretty dry time for rock ’n’ roll. The music was overwritten and the lyrics dumb, whether cock-rock or mystical. Rockers looking for something better found common ground in the Velvets, the Stooges, the MC5 and the forgotten ’60s garage bands on Lenny Kaye’s “Nuggets” compilation. The New York Dolls gave hope for a while, but foundered in the bogs of commercial failure and drug abuse. Reed, along with Bowie and Mott the Hoople, was what was accessible if you weren’t in with the hip or lucky few catching Continued on page 26