It’s not exactly news that Lou Reed was an asshole. But a new biography of the musician, who died in 2013, suggests that “asshole” may be too mild a description of what he was. A better word might be “monster.”
That’s the conclusion biographer Howard Sounes reluctantly came to after interviewing 140 of those who knew Reed best. Their recollections of Reed painted a picture of a bitter, angry, volatile man who spewed racist epithets and violently abused women.
The Daily Beast’s Nico Hines has the story:
“I loved his music, but you have to go where the story goes,” Sounes told The Daily Beast. “The obituaries were a bit too kind, he was really a very unpleasant man. A monster really; I think truly the word monster is applicable.”
The genius behind one of the greatest albums of the 1960s, was unstable, egotistical, misogynistic, violent, and selfish, according to some of those who knew him best.
The book — I haven’t read it yet — evidently paints a picture of Reed as a self-centered prick with an acid tongue, referring to Donna Summer as a “nigger” and lambasting Bob Dylan as a “pretentious kike.” In one autobiographical song, Hines notes, he mocked his sister’s husband as a Long Island nobody who “takes the train/ He’s big and he’s fat and he doesn’t even have a brain.”
Paul Morrissey, a prominent personality in the Andy Warhol crowd that Reed hung out with in the 1960s, told Sounes that the best title for a biography of Reed would be “The Worst Person Who Ever Lived. … He was a stupid, disgusting, awful human being.”
As badly as he treated men, Reed was apparently even worse to the women in life. As Hines writes,
Bettye Kronstad, who married Reed in 1973, described life on tour with the tempestuous rock star. “He would, like, pin you up against a wall,” she said. “Tussle you. Hit you… shake you… And then one time he actually gave me a black eye.”
Allan Hyman, an old school friend, said Reed had even been happy to strike a girlfriend while having dinner with him and his wife.
If someone is hitting his girlfriend in public, you can only imagine what goes on behind closed doors.
Reed was a brilliant, innovative musician and songwriter who wrote and performed some amazing songs. But he seems to have been shit as a human being. Somehow I doubt I’m going to go back to listen to any of those old Velvet Underground albums any time soon.
H/T — The Daily Beast
@ epitome
Your MA sounds really interesting. Maybe one day we can have a discussion about totalitarianism.
My thesis is that, unlike Mussolini’s Italy,the Nazi state was *not* totalitarian (in the conventional sense of the word) both by accident and design.
Idk if it was the case then, but now it is, so I’ll comment on now. Getting from here to the city requires I ride a train into NYC, and the subway to wherever I’m headed (or a bus, but fuck if I can sort their buses). I think what you guys are calling trains, we’d call subways, and if the system was the same in the 70s(?), not what he meant by trains. Subway versus bus seems to mostly be a matter of choice, with the cost being about the same, but both only functioning in the greater NY area, the trains go, well, over most of the country now, in practice though it’s really the rest of New England. So a combination of “doesn’t really live in the city” and the big/fat/stupid insults.
Point here is just that the train and subway are different systems and run to/from and within the city respectively.
@Orion
D.W. Griffith is considered by many to be the most influential film director of all time and Birth of a Nation is one of the films in which Griffith developed many of the elements of cinematic techniques that shaped the modern language of film. Griffith is a towering figure in cinema, but Birth of a Nation was a 1915 silent film so people who don’t have an interest in film history may not be familiar with his work.
Still it’s one of the most written about films of all time and not just in academia, there are popular think pieces coming out about it all the time. Also the film is often discussed American History textbooks because it’s directly tied to the birth of the modern KKK.
The Worst Thing About “Birth of a Nation” Is How Good It Is (2013)
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-worst-thing-about-birth-of-a-nation-is-how-good-it-is
Several posters mentioned Birth of Nation. Policy of Madness made this comment:
I was just chiming in that because there is a history of people dancing around, down playing or even denying the clearly racist content of Birth of a Nation because they want defend Griffith’s status of a great artist. I know some people that have seen the movie may find that hard to believe, but it’s not uncommon.
“Walk on the Wild Side” makes so much more sense now. I never did understand how a song that seems to be pro-sex-workers’-rights could be such a creepy and condescending piece of garbage. (Mark Wahlberg is not exactly a good songwriter, but at least his rewrite of it didn’t make me feel dirty.)
Brooked,
I absolutely believe you; I just think that you’re describing an analogous but distinct effect. Bringing it back to rape: Howard never raped anyone (as far as we know), but his Conan story “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” is a vile piece of rape apologia. Polanski did rape someone, but Rosemary’s Baby is not a rape apologetic. Should we be equally reluctant to praise both works, or is one less tainted than the other?
Personally, I’m happy to say that whatever other merits The Frost-Giant’s Daughter, or indeed the rest of the Conan canon might have, I can’t enjoy or recommend it because of its misogyny. I consider that very different from saying that I can’t enjoy or recommend a work because of its creator’s misogyny.
dhag85 – the reason I mentioned it was because I felt that it pointed to a greater likelihood that someone might follow through on their threat, or be successful in inciting others to violence.
Lots of music lyrics have violence implicit in them – Hendrix Hey Jo, Lou Reed Caroline Says II (can’t believe I’ve only just remembered it!), Rolling Stones Under My Thumb, Godley and Creme Under Your Thumb etc etc. Some examples are more egregious than others – Under My Thumb is just offensive, whereas Caroline Says II looks at the impact of the violence on Caroline herself.
Unfortunately the difference in the violence of some Jamaican music is the threat aspect – the artist himself really does seem to be angry and full of hate when he proposes shooting people in the head, for eg .
@Ellesar
Yeah, I agree. I do think there’s been a lot of progress since the early 90’s and the Buju Banton / Shabba Ranks controversy. Several high profile artists in the genre have made public apologies, and in my experience the type of threatening lyrics you’re talking about are not nearly as common now as they were 10 or 15 years ago.
To be fair, Dylan is pretentious(not to say he’s bad, just pretentious). I’m going to reserve judgement on Reed until I get more information.
I guess at least he’s dead and so there isn’t the whole dilemma about giving him money.
dhag85 – of course things have changed – there is now the Reggae Compassion Act! for eg, and a lot of activist work has achieved that, and other things.
Here is a quote from an interesting article I found on the SPLC:
“A lot of what’s developed in society is that there is an inability to negotiate conflict,” McFarlane said of Jamaican culture. “There is no space for disagreement. The only way to settle a dispute is violence. If somebody steps on your foot, you react with violence before you have time to realize it’s a mistake.”
In such an environment, it is easy to incite anti-gay violence through music. “Particularly in the lower socioeconomic classes, dancehall music is their life,” McFarlane said. Fans “see these guys are superstars and they are influenced by what they are saying.”
A quote from poetv that sums up my feelings nicely:
“John Cale’s earwax is more talented than Lou Reed
more pleasant to be around also”
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=109528
Here’s Patti Smith and John Cale doing My Generation:
@Alan – That is true if you equate fascism with totalitarianism. Mussolini’s Italy was where the concept of fascism originated, though he took inspiration from Ancient Rome. Ezra Pound in his book Guide to Kulchur (yes, spelled that way) and his essay Jefferson and/or Mussolini (yes, called that) praised fascism because he thought it would be good for artists… somehow.
To get back to your point, fascism does seem something that’s limited to a single state (though Mussolini’s government tried to take over Ethiopia and failed, as you probably know). The Nazi state, at least its pan-Germanic “master race” ideology, wasn’t concerned with the nation as much.
Hannah Arendt argued that this disregard of national boundaries was actually a defining characteristic of totalitarianism (so in her view fascist Italy wasn’t totalitarian). To her, it was characterized by an ideology, such as racism, that tries to be transcendent over things like countries, and by a government that’s not only imperialist but tries to take over the world (I’m probably oversimplifying). Her book The Origins of Totalitarianism named two totalitarian systems: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
In a footnote she also mentioned she was worried that North America’s racism was leading it down a totalitarian path, but this was in the 1950s before the civil rights movement was very visible. She had an interesting life story too, escaping Nazi Germany for the States like fellow philosopher Theodor Adorno (who also had some interesting writing on totalitarianism, but I don’t remember enough of what I read of him and my comment is a teal enough deer already).
@Argenti Aertheri – sorry for the confusion. I was actually thinking of above-ground trains, not subways. I haven’t travelled a lot outside Canada and I’ve never been to NYC (yet). If you say “train” in Montreal (in English or French – the word’s the same) it generally means the above-ground kind; the underground kind is called the subway or the metro.
@ epitome
The ‘boundary’ definition is interesting, but not one I’d necessarily agree with.
To me a totalitarian state is one that, perhaps tautologically,tries for total control.
What I find interesting was that even at the height of the war, the Nazi state still didn’t adopt a command economy. There were firms producing luxury goods all through the war. There’s an irony that a national socialist party could be so laissez-faire in economics, when nationalising industry would have seemed both the most obvious and most practical thing to have done.
Of course, expecting rationality from Hitler’s regime is perhaps optimistic.
Lou had a reputation for being a generally volatile, sometimes repellent person to be around. I’m not trying to excuse his abusive behaviour, but It’s common knowledge he underwent shock therapy as an adolescent to “cure” him of depression and homosexuality, something touched on in that story.
“Some of Reed’s erratic behavior may have been related to the major mental health issues he endured. After suffering a breakdown at college, he was treated with a barbaric course of electric shock therapy. When the Velvet Underground split, Reed suffered a second less well-known breakdown and was forced to return to his family home to live with his parents.
He was diagnosed as bipolar and certainly suffered manic depressive episodes.”
Errr, the Nazi party was not socialist. It was the farthest thing from socialism. Hitler and the socialists of Germany were blood enemies and the socialists were some of the first to go to the concentration camps.
That’s why I said “national socialist”; they’re obviously different things.
Wasn’t much of a workers’ party though either.
Epitome — no apologies needed, I’m usually causing the confusion! Just wanted to give a (modern) local-ish perspective on it since we’re weird here 🙂
(And then there’s Pittsburgh where what anyone else would call a subway is above ground and called the T!)
Bryce,
But lots of people with bipolar disorder aren’t violent, misogynistic, and racist. So, if you’re not trying to excuse his behavior, I’m not sure what your point is? Because it smells like the same old excuse the bad behavior of a white man by blaming it all on mental illness bs.
Fun fact
Most of the London Underground Rail Network is above ground.
Lou Reed had a life long reputation for being an asshole, just google his name and “asshole”.
The Lyrics from “Oh Jim” from Reed’s album Berlin (1973)
Here’s the typical fanboy rock crit hand waving.
That’s from page 55-56 of Chris Roberts’ “Lou Reed: Walk on the Wild Side: the Stories Behind the Songs” that came out in 2004.
As mysterious as the truth behind this song seems to Roberts, Betty Kronstad, Reed’s first wife, spoke about Reed’s abuse as early as 2007. Kronstad and Reed’s five year relationship ended in 1973 during the recording of Berlin. Per Wikipedia, “the album is a tragic rock opera about a doomed couple, Jim and Caroline, and addresses themes of drug use, prostitution, depression, domestic violence, and suicide”. And it was admittedly autobiographical.
I’m not sure why anyone familiar with his work would be gobsmacked by this new biography unless they were blinded by hero worship.
Bettye Kronstad on Lou Reed’s Berlin
By Bettye Kronstad
July 20, 2007
http://www.cloudsandclocks.net/features/kronstad_on_berlin_E.html
And somehow this turned into an argument about Birth of a Nation! Cool.
Not to downplay the severity of Reed’s actions, but wasn’t it already known that the man was this much of a colossal douchebag?
@ColeYote
Someone else mentioned Birth of a Nation but I really ran with it because it’s been a hot button issue for me for twenty years, despite being a hundred year old film. I’m not very with it.
I brought up Birth of a Nation only because it had been mentioned earlier as an example of circumstances under which art and artist can be separated.