94 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • NOVEMBER 2018
REAR VIEW
LOU REED
THE COOLEST MAN IN THE WORLD
By ANNIE WILKINSON
In the mid-1960s, Greenwich Village
mirrored the polarized nation.
Political upheaval and the sexual
revolution set the scene for Lou Reed
to turn music on its ear with the Velvet
Underground and the support of
pop artist Andy Warhol.
“They were … countercultural
cool,” wrote Rolling Stone. “Not the
Haight-Ashbury or Sgt. Pepper kind
but an eerier, artier, more NYC-rooted
strain.”
After six years, frontman Reed
played his last Velvets gig at Manhattan’s
Max’s Kansas City in 1970. He
walked away from the group called
the most influential American band
of the late 1960s and early 1970s — but
his demons walked with him.
WALK ON THE WILD
SIDE
Performing solo, the singer-songwriter
guitarist-poet delivered
brooding, half-spoken, half-sung
verse. He personified coolness,
signing letters “The Coolest Man in
the World.”
But the hipster was a suburbanite.
He was born in Brooklyn in 1942,
then his family moved to a modest
ranch-style home in Freeport, where
he attended Atkinson Elementary
School and Freeport Junior High as
well as Freeport High School, where
he played R&B and rock in bands.
The English major with attitude was
one of the brilliant Jewish kids who
frequented the Village and wanted
to be beatniks.
After his 1959 graduation, he
struggled academically at Syracuse
University, so he was sent home. His
depression and sexual adventures
frightened his parents — Reed later
said he knew he was bisexual in
high school — who subjected him to
electroconvulsive therapy.
Reed returned to Syracuse. Despite
his drug use, he graduated with
honors. He got a job at Pickwick Records,
where he met Welsh musician
John Cale, the Velvets’ co-founder.
Reed later recalled that at Pickwick,
“They’d say, ‘Write 10 surfing songs
…’ and I wrote ‘Heroin.’”
In 1972, RCA released his second
album with its hit, “Walk on the Wild
Side,” about drugs, transsexuals,
prostitutes, and oral sex (RCA deleted
the oral sex references).
Like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan,
Reed wrote about the city’s seedy underbelly:
junkies, hookers, and other
outsiders. Reed walked the walk, reportedly
vowing to take meth every
day for the rest of his life. Onstage,
wrapping a microphone cord around
his arm, he pretended to shoot up.
LIFE OF
CONTRADICTIONS
Reed was lauded and damned.
Rolling Stone praised him for fusing
“street-level urgency with elements
of European avant-garde music.”
Writer Ed McCormack called him
“one of the ballsiest dudes I ever
knew — the chameleon who taught
Jagger, Bowie, the New York Dolls,
and a whole generation of swaggering
rock ’n’ roll peacocks how to ‘put
their girl on’ without sacrificing
their manhood.”
Others labeled Reed a privileged
suburban rich kid. A posturing
public junkie. A monster, said biographer
Howard Sounes, “a suspicious,
cantankerous, bitter, angry man.”
Reed allegedly slapped women,
pulled fans’ hair, and pulled a switchblade
on his violin player.
Biographer Anthony DeCurtis told
The Guardian that Reed was very
private and “had a very complicated
relationship with his own history
and his own, often contradictory,
desires.” He added that Reed tried to
convey a “leather‑clad invulnerability,”
but there was a lot of insecurity
underneath that. DeCurtis added
that after a signing for Reed’s book
of lyrics, Reed wept, moved at having
people say how much his work
meant.
In 2012, he was recognized by
U.S. and European researchers who
named a new genus of spiders in Israel
after him. Loureedia annulipes is a
velvet spider that lives underground.
TOUGH, GRITTY, AND
SWEET
Reed’s career spanned four decades.
In 1992, he met performance artist-musician
Laurie Anderson, after getting
clean in the 1980s; they spent 21 years
together. Anderson described him as
“the sweetest, most tender person.”
But addiction had done its damage.
He spent his last days in East Hampton,
a tai chi master who was “happy
and dazzled by the beauty and power
and softness of nature,” Anderson
remembers.
In May 2013, after chronic liver
failure, he had a liver transplant at
the Cleveland Clinic. He died from
complications five months later.
Lou Reed, who made his name as frontman of influential 1960s rock
group The Velvet Underground before going solo, grew up in Freeport.
Lou Reed’s high school yearbook
photo