No matter how many times you re-check it, Lou Reed remains dead today.

But we are all still

alive. That’s a good thing. One out of two ain’t bad.

Ideally, what Lou would’ve wanted us to do right now would be to get a bin liner, kick his mortal
remains to the curb, and just wait for an NYC garbage truck to come along and compact them
without a second thought. But what Lou Reed also would’ve wanted was for people to have a
healthy disregard for the wishes of dead rock gods. So it’s in that spirit that we’re going to add a
bit more to the heap of reasons why he was a more interesting, more engaged figure than you'd
ever imagined – hopefully at least some of which will be new to you.

ONE OF HIS MAIN INFLUENCES WAS A FORGOTTEN DRUNK COLLEGE PROFESSOR

At the age of 21, one Saturday, Delmore Schwartz sat down at his desk, and wrote a short story:
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. By the Monday, his friend reported meeting Schwartz who
was beaming, convinced he’d written a literary classic. It was exactly that: Nabokov later put it
in his all-time top six American short stories. The rest of his career, though, turned out to be far
more promise than results, and by 1966, he was dead at age 52, drunk, estranged, drugged-up
and unloved, but simultaneously hymned for his genius by the likes of Saul Bellow, who wrote
Humboldt’s Gift about him. In-between, Schwartz taught English at Syracuse University, where
he befriended one of his pupils – the young Reed – who fell straight under his spell. The spare,
simple, semi-vacant verse in which Uncle Lou specialised is Burroughs all over, but it’s also
Schwartz, to whom he dedicated "European Son" and about whom he wrote "My House", the
opener from 1982 LP The Blue Mask.

PRE-FAME, HE WAS IN MANY TERRIBLE BANDS

Reed spent his teenage years playing guitar in a range of school and college doo-wop bands,
that were constantly splitting and merging. “We were so bad we had to change our name every
few weeks. No one would ever hire us twice – knowingly,” he said. In 1958, he began his
recording career by cooing along on backing vocals for doo-wop gang The Jades’ "Leave Her
For Me". It's not terrible, but it's not exactly "Street Hassle".

HE HAD A JAZZ SHOW ON COLLEGE RADIO

Until he was thrown off it for belching during a public service announcement about muscular
dystrophy.

HE WAS A TIN PAN ALLEY MAN AT HEART

The story of how Reed ended up in the arms of experimental longhair John Cale is a weird one.
The pair only met when the Welshman was brought in to front a novelty band for one of the
novelty songs Reed had written in his day job. Pickwick Records were slick rip-off merchants
who’d developed a successful business model pirating the fashions of the hour, and selling off
quick, cheap versions of them. Here, he picked up classic Tin Pan Alley tricks about how to
angle a lyric. How to start with an image. How to keep things simple and visual. At first, he used
these tricks to pay the rent by churning out songs about surfing and hot rods. As things
progressed, you could hear the same tricks being used, only now it was to write songs about
heroin and bondage instead.
AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS COOL, HE LIVED WITH HIS PARENTS
Many of history’s great men have lived with their parents. It’s surprisingly cheap. Napoleon
lived with his parents through most of the Peninsular Campaign. But it can’t have been anything
but humiliating when the Velvet Underground shut up shop for good in 1970, and Reed was met
at Freeport, Long Island station by his parents, and driven back to his childhood home. There,
he lived, doing office errands for his tax accountant dad for $40 a week while he plotted his next
move. For over a year. Somehow, he never wrote any songs about the dark underbelly of
suburban tax accounting.

BERLIN WAS MORE ART-MEETING-LIFE THAN PEOPLE SUSPECT

Bettye Kronstadt was the waitress who briefly became the first Mrs Lou Reed. In 1972, Bettye
learned that her mother had died, but her mother had already been estranged for years. As an
18-year-old single mum, she had already fled her abusive soldier husband, and then, unable to
cope, had Bettye pulled off her by social services. Coincidentally or not, this sort of scenario
became the central plot hinge of Reed’s masterpiece, Berlin. By an even grimmer coincidence,
this also seems to have coincided with Lou’s most unhinged dilatory drunk period. “He gave me
a black eye the second time he hit me,” Kronstadt later recalled. “Then I gave him a black eye,
too, and that stopped him from using his fists. Everybody knew he was abusive – abusive with his
drinking, his drugs, his emotions – with me. He was also incredibly self-destructive then.” The
couple divorced after not much more than a catalogue of fights and a year of marriage.

HIS TRANSSEXUAL LOVER WAS PANNED BY REVERED MUSIC CRITIC, LESTER BANGS
While Bowie’s flirtations with bi-sexuality often came across more as art statements, Lou Reed’s
ambi-sexual private life was a lot more, well, gay. In the 1980s he was a regular at the anything-
goes NY gay bar Ninth Circle. In the mid-70s, he took up with a transvestite-transsexual (no one
seems quite sure which), called Rachel/Tommy. They stayed together for four years, despite
having spectacularly little in common. “Rachel was wearing this amazing make-up and dress
and was obviously in a different world to anyone else in the place,” recalled Reed of their first
meeting. “Eventually I spoke and she came home with me. I rapped for hours and hours, while
Rachel just sat there looking at me saying nothing. At the time I was living with a girl, a crazy
blonde lady and I kind of wanted us all three to live together but somehow it was too heavy for
her. Rachel just stayed on and the girl moved out.”

A vampish half-Mexican Indian, Rachel reportedly had no idea of Lou’s reputation, and had no
interest in his songs. Instead, she was some kind of smiley, shiny counterweight to whatever else
was going on in Lou’s career at the time. Rachel is alleged to have died in the early 1990s, but
even now, despite all the VH1 Behind The Musics and Hunter Davies types poring over Reed &
The VU, and despite being photographed by Mick Rock and a regular at Max’s Kansas City, next
to nothing is known about this post-gendered cypher. Lester Bangs later deeply regretted
describing her in print as: ”Long dark hair, bearded, tits, grotesque, abject… like something that
might have grovelingly scampered in when Lou opened the door to get milk or papers in the
morning.”

BUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH BANGS WAS PERHAPS LESS PERSONAL AND MORE
PROFESSIONAL THAN THE WRITER ALWAYS MADE OUT
Guitarist Bob Quine remembered going round to Lou’s house to tell him that Lester had
asphyxiated after a night on the cough syrup. “When I told him that Lester died, he didn't believe
me. That marked the end of my friendship with Lou Reed because he said, ‘That's too bad about
your friend.’ But then he launches into a 45-minute attack on Lester. He's an egomaniac and
that's the way he is and that's why he has no friends. If you're not a yes man, you're not his
friend. He respected the fact that I wasn't a yes man, but ultimately I had to go. He mentioned the
article in Creem when Lester describes Rachel. He says, ‘Do you understand, Quine? This is a
person I was close to. And he is calling her a creature.’”

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