Lou Reed

Date of Birth: 02/03/1942

"I tried to give up drugs, drinking himself senseless ..." - Lou Reed.

Lou Reed was born March 2, 1942 on Long Island in New York. As a child, Lou Reed wanted to play rock 'n' roll. Perhaps the most common dream of a young man in those years, but Reed thought about it differently. As a teenager he learned to play guitar, made his first record, he broke with his parents because of drug addiction took a course of electroconvulsive therapy. Like many parents of Reed advocated to ensure that he took lessons in typewriting, and saw the future of his son in the trade, but it is not combined with his desire to play music.

. He entered the College of Syracuse University in New York, and after graduation took a job in Pickwick Records songwriter, which tried his pen in creating hits for Top10
. But, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for his future fans, he was unable to generate any hits. Quickly enough, he realized that writing songs is not trite his rock 'n' roll dream and in 1965 together with another songwriter John Cale, it creates a group of Warlocks. As fast as there were new members of the band, they changed the name. Only a year they managed to stay The Primitives, The Falling Spikes and, finally, The Velvet Underground - the name taken from a pornographic novel. Reed and Kail, along with Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker worked, . as a group, resident in a cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village, . but one fine night were fired from there for the performance of "Black Angels Death Song" immediately after, . as they were forbidden to play it,
. Fortunately, that night they become acquainted with Andy Warhol and how to magically appear in a new adventure.


. Warhol decided that The Velvet Underground-Good deal for his multimedia project The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
. He led the group of German vocalist Nico and the band started their first tour of America and Canada. The success was due not only avant-garde theater show, but Reed's songs, which were diametrically opposed to the content of sentimentality Summer of Love. The Velvet Underground released four albums in four years before Reed left the band in 1970. All this time the audience and critics simply ignored the group.


During this period of his life Reed wrote songs about the crowded streets of Manhattan, which he knew well and where he lived. The place where decades of settled artists, drug addicts, homosexuals, and other alternative flagellant the audience. Sometimes he collected all this motley bunch in one song, such as, "Sister Ray" - about a transvestite heroin-sellers. These strange "epic" songs sung characteristic ridovskim boring voice in the great melodies. This unusual combination surprised even the most sophisticated listeners. Influence of the new generation of musicians was a huge. It seems that everyone who bought the album The Velvet Underground, organize their own group or becoming a rock critics.


. After Reed left the band at the time he came down from the music scene and began working in the company of his father
. A year later, in 1971, RCA offered him to sign a contract to record solo albums, which became "Lou Reed" (72). In England, Reid met with David Bowie, who calls himself a fan and becoming a producer of his next album "Transformer" (1972), which includes the most popular ridovskuyu song "Walk In The Wild Side". The next few years, Reed is working efficiently for a particular circle of connoisseurs of experimental music and special ridovskogo vision of beauty in the ugly ( "Berlin", . 73) or noise in the music ( "Metal Machine Music", . 75), . but the mass audience nevertheless remains cold to ridovskim exaltation,
.


In 1978, Reed recorded the album "The Bells", which is compared by critics with the classic albums van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" and the Rolling Stones - "Exile on Main Street". In the mid-80's Reid changes his style and began to write light and more temperamental songs ( "New Sensation", 84, and "Mistral", 86), but would still like not leaving the theme of death and other gloom. ( "Magic and Loss", 92).


In 1993, Reed re-unite with the participants The Velvet Underground and performs last in the history of the group tour of Europe. Sterling Morrison died in 1995. In 1995, a retrospective album comes VU "Peel Slowly and See", consisting of 5 CDs.


. Album 1996 "Set The Twilight Reeling" has turned out very reassuring, as the work of a man who concluded, finally, peace with life
. In 2000 a new album of a musician "Ecstasy", to the best traditions of the late period of creativity