Hippies vs. Punks: Lou Reed

A quick Hippies vs. Punks post for this Monday morning. I saw online when I woke up that Lou Reed died yesterday in New York. The cause of death was liver cancer. I read the New York Times obit by Ben Ratliff on the way into work. This quote caught my eye:

A proud New Yorker himself, Mr. Reed squared off against West Coast rock and declared his hatred for hippies. In a 1968 interview he characterized the San Francisco bands of the time, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane especially, as “tedious, a lie and untalented.”

In addition to The Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground has to be mentioned as a stalwart contemporary critic of the Hippies.

When I was at the university in the 1980s everyone I new listened to the Velvet Underground, particularly The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), but really everything the Velvets put out including White Light/White Heat (1968), Velvet Underground (1969) and Loaded (1970). I also listened to Reed's solo work, mostly Transformer (1972) but also Rock n Roll Animal (1974) which I consumed by osmosis since every time I went into Rasputin Records on Telegraph they had it playing.

At the same time very few of my friends -- I didn't hang with Dead Heads -- listened to San Francisco Sound bands. My musical mentor Oliver I believe went through a Surrealistic Pillow (1967) period, and my friend Ben went through a Grateful Dead phase, but nothing to compare with the frequency -- the everyday rotation -- of Velvet Underground LPs and Lou Reed records.

I passed Lou Reed walking through Madison Square Park one afternoon. It would have been in the early 1990s when I was working at the American Kennel Club Gazette. The day was sunny. Lou Reed approached me from the Flat Iron Building entrance to the park. He was wearing an expensive suit of light fabric; it was an interesting color of green or plum, I can't remember which. He was smaller than I imagined. But he carried himself like he possessed great power. You could have mistaken him for a hip corporate executive.

In any event, the point I want to make is that Lou Reed's music was enormously influential in 1980s. You might have friends who were Punks or Garage Rockers or Dylanites or devotees of The Eagles or Bowie fanatics, it didn't matter. Everyone loved The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed.