Lou Reed

Lewis Allen Reed, best known by his stage name Lou Reed, was born on March 2, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York but spent most of his childhood in Long Island. He was born to a middle class family of Jewish descent (his father had changed their family name from Rabinowitz), his father was an accountant and his mother was a housewife. As an adolescent, Lou had many mental health issues, suffering from panic attacks, crippling shyness, and depressive episodes as well as ADHD and dyslexia. His early interest in rock n roll music was borne from learning to play basic guitar from the radio. He began using hard drugs, as much a staple of his lifestyle as music at age 16. His first ever musical recording was in 1958, with a doo-wop band known as the Jades, providing singing and backing vocals. It became Lou’s first ever single to receive airplay when it was played on the Murray the K show.

Soon after this, Lou experienced a full-fledged mental breakdown in college and his parents consented for him to receive forcible Electroshock Therapy. There is something of an argument as to the reasoning behind this treatment, while his sister claims her parents did so because the doctors said it was the only way Lou would feel better, Lou himself claims that his parents had found out about his gay relationships (Reed never publicly identified as anything his whole life, but it can be concluded he was mostly likely bisexual) and made him undergo the ECT for this reason, as many homosexual people were often forced to do at the time. Either way, Lou believes that the treatment gave him brain damage as well as permanent memory loss issues. At Syracuse, he met who would become his bandmate in the Velvet Underground, Sterling Morrison, and moved to New York with him, where they both befriended the Welsh avant-garde musician John Cale and eventually founded The Velvet Underground, kicking off Lou’s “official” professional career.

Lou Reed is best known for, as priorly mentioned, co-founding The Velvet Underground, an extremely influential band of the 1960s that was in close collaboration with the scene of extremely famous and iconoclastic multimedia pop artists Andy Warhol, who was their first manager for about three years. Lou and the VU often appeared in Warhol’s films alongside his “superstars' ', accompanied him to events, and were generally part of the downtown New York City art scene. This scene was known for its countercultural atmosphere - so much so that it became a counterculture to the counterculture of the hippie movement. They were considered to be offbeat even by ostensibly “radical” people due to the openness regarding homosexuality, crossdressing and hard drug (the hippies were mostly for weed and acid, the New York Scene was speed and heroin) usage as well as an almost laissez-faire attitude regarding the current events of the time.

The lyrics of The Velvet Underground reflected these attitudes, as did their avant-garde sounding music, compounded by “droning” (playing one note from one instrument for a long time), electric viola, and a stripped down guitar/percussion section that was quite uncommon for the music of the time, but became trendy about a decade after The Velvet Underground disbanded within the punk movement and all the alternative music movements (such as grunge, post-punk) that followed it, making many call The Velvet Underground the initial “proto-punk” band. Lou Reed also struck out as a solo artist. As a musician, he was more simplistic than the Cale-provided avant-garde compositions of the Velvet Underground (which is apparent on the final two VU albums with Lou), but stayed in touch with the radical and alternative lyrical themes of the band, which reflected a frank and straightforward discussion of ugly aspects or lifestyles. His biggest hit song - “Walk on the Wild Side” - embraced these aspects of life, talking positively about homosexuality, transvestism, drug usage, and casual sex, name checking many Warhol superstars he had known (and often had affairs with) for years. The genre of Reed’s music - both solo and with The Velvet Underground - has been classified as everything from rock, to “indie”, to proto-punk (and punk in general), to singer-songwriter. 

At Farm Aid, Lou arrived as a solo performer. He had a tumultuous decade following the initial acclaim of his early 1970s albums Transformer and Berlin compounded by his growing struggles to keep his heroin addiction and mental illness under check. By 1984, he had put out a “New Wave” album and was back in the charts, and had recanted his formerly publicly bisexual, drug addicted and wild persona for a heterosexual married man who did not approve of druggy theatrics and tried to become sober. He performed three songs from this new album and his biggest hit single, the aforementioned “Walk on the Wild Side.” He had no extreme personal connection to the crisis. So, Farm Aid seemed like an odd place for edgy, nominally apolitical New Yorker Reed to be, but this was part of his courting a more mainstream audience as well as his personal.

Reed did not enjoy giving interviews in general, and his sole comment on Farm Aid was “I’d show up there [his house in rural New Jersey] and go, what the fuck is going on? What is this, another weekend with rain? Finally, they sat me down to tell me facts of life such as there are farmers out there getting killed by the drought. I became aware of what the weather means besides New Yorkers going away every weekend.” This quote highlights that Reed was very removed from the struggles that Farm Aid was seeking to alleviate, but he wanted to help out anyway, and that he did, also performing in Farm Aid III + IIII in 1987 and 1990.