I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played. I called it Excursion on a Wobbly Rail, after a Cecil Taylor song. “When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. And then Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, stuff like that,” Reed told rock journalist David Fricke in 1989. “There were two sides of the coin for me: That kind of music-R&B, doo-wop, rockabilly. Reed had been inspired by as much as R&B as pop, and his edgy approach belied a music lover whose tastes were informed by a wide variety of influences. But I would write new things from the day I could play anything.” When I can’t do it I’m very impressed by the person who can, and when I can do it, it means nothing. There is nothing special about it, and it only becomes special when I can’t do it. It’s the same essential chords, just various ways of looking at them. And to this day anyone can play a Lou Reed song. And the nice thing about rock is, besides the fact that I was in love with it, anyone can play that. “And I switched to guitar and did the same thing. “I studied classical piano, and the minute I could play something I started writing new things,” Reed said in 2004. His approach was to keep things simple and direct. He eventually landed work as a pop songwriter, churning out middling hits for Pickwick Records while composing songs for himself on the side. Reed’s love of music became his guide, and rock ‘n’ roll became his voice. His hyper-focus on the things he liked led him to music and it was there that he found himself.” “Panic attacks and social phobias beset him,” wrote Reed’s sister, Merrill Reed Weiner, in 2015. Reed also began suffering panic attacks and after a mental breakdown following his first semester at NYU, his parents submitted him for electroshock therapy. He taught himself how to play R&B songs on guitar by listening to the radio, eventually forming a doo-wopish group as a teen. A socially-awkward Jewish kid from Long Island, Reed’s musical voice, like so many others, was forged in pop and in pain. The cornerstone of the Velvet Underground’s image and sound was the songwriting of Lou Reed. That album was The Velvet Underground and Nico, a uniquely groundbreaking release from a band of artsy New York misfits and marketed by the creative whims of one of the most iconic figures of the time: Andy Warhol. But the year’s boldest musical moment was an album that didn’t appeal to the same sensibilities as idyllic hippie anthems or strutting soul classics-and it wasn’t born of Haight-Asbury, acid freakouts or middling interpretations of Eastern philosophy. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Are You Experienced?, High Priestess of Soul, Disraeli Gears, I’ve Never Loved A Man the Way I Love You-it was the year that popular artists fully realized the creative potential of the LP and it happened as a generation was discovering its cultural voice. There is no argument against 1967 as an epochal year in music.
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