“He was a master.” If anyone should know, it’s David Bowie. News of Lou Reed’s death has been settling in for a couple of days now, accompanied by countless spins of his solo records and seminal works as part of the Velvet Underground. A fiercely independent artistic presence in modern music, his experiments became blueprints for elements of rock, indie, punk and metal.
From his laconic delivery, through his deeply personal, poetic lyrics and inventive, sometimes confrontational guitar style, Reed was a one-off. His records, as Brian Eno told us, were the spark for thousands of bands. His demeanour was that of the proto-punk: derisive, sneering and often wholly unpleasant. There are as many journalists with tear-stained Reed anecdotes as there are are good Reed songs.
But beneath the exterior were those songs, Heroin and Sweet Jane, and albums like ‘Transformer’ and 'The Velvet Underground & Nico'. Reed’s mark on popular music isn’t going to fade any time soon, and here we’ve collected just some of the tributes paid to him by fellow musicians, collaborators and friends.
"The news I feared the most, pales in comparison to the lump in my throat and the hollow in my stomach. Two kids have a chance meeting and 47 years later we fight and love the same way - losing either one is incomprehensible. No replacement value, no digital or virtual fill...broken now, for all time. Unlike so many with similar stories - we have the best of our fury laid out on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse. The laughs we shared just a few weeks ago, will forever remind me of all that was good between us." - John Cale, Reed’s bandmate and sparring partner in the Velvet Underground.
“Lou was talking a mile a minute and going through tubs of Häagen-Dazs ice cream while he suggested some variations and adjustments we might make to some of our songs. He began to play our song Tentative Decisions (a very Lou song title, no?) but he played it way slower than we were doing it. He was showing us how the song might be as a ballad - which made it more melancholic and elegiac than our bouncy version. It suddenly was of a piece with Candy Says, Some Kind of Love or Pale Blue Eyes. Of course we were in awe - here was one of our heroes playing one of our little songs.” - David Byrne of the Talking Heads recounts a meeting with Reed early in their career, Rolling Stone.
“Lou was a very special poet - a New York writer in the way that Walt Whitman was a New York poet. One thing I got from Lou, that never went away, was the process of performing live over a beat, improvising poetry, how he moved over three chords for 14 minutes. That was a revelation to me.” - Patti Smith pays tribute to Reed, a man of NYC, Rolling Stone.
“When Lou Reed asked me, "Emily Haines, who would you rather be, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?" I shot back, "The Velvet Underground." Quick thinking, sure, but also the truth. In our song Gimme Sympathy, we lament the fact that none of us living today are likely to achieve the stature or saturation the signature acts of that era enjoyed. But for me none of that music comes close to the contribution Lou Reed has made to the world. It's immeasurable. Famously cranky, his integrity is unrivalled. He irritated everyone with difficult music. He refused to spend his life re-writing Walk On The Wild Side, effectively sparing himself a lifetime of boring conversations with fools. Anyone who couldn't see that his tough exterior was an essential shield for the man who gave us Pale Blue Eyes, with all its intimacy and relatable sadness, has missed the point of his life completely." - Emily Haines of Metric, a collaborator of Reed’s later in life, Rolling Stone.
"I loved Lou. I admired Lou very much. He was a very genuine person. He was always decent to me. His talent was so wonderful in my life and it gave me great pleasure and guidance. I am sure that his was a worthwhile life, and one he would have enjoyed had it continued longer. He and his wife Laurie were such a good couple.” - Legendary Stooges frontmanIggy Pop.
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