Sometimes, it takes an addict: Lou Reed, co-founder Velvet Underground and Velvet Revolution inspiration
Sometimes, It Takes an Addict:
Velvet Underground co-founder, front man and lead guitarist Lou Reed, dead from liver disease at age 71, six months after a liver transplant. His “dark vision” helped the 1960s rock band become one of the most influential of its time. Greg Harris, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said that Reed’s work “provided the framework for generations of artists;” many consider him the “grandfather of punk.”
There is little doubt from an addictionologist’s vantage point that he was already a full-on addict in his teens. According to biographer Victor Bockris, he threatened to throw the “mother of all moodies if everyone didn’t pay complete attention to him” as he “tyrannically” presided over their middle-class home. That’s classic alcoholism-rooted narcissism.
Although they dissolved in 1970, Velvet Underground’s four albums, plus two others released in the mid ‘80s, profoundly influenced world history: according to David Feith and Bari Weiss in the Wall Street Journal, “In the 1970s Czechoslovakia’s anti-Communist movement coalesced around a Velvet Underground-inspired rock group called the Plastic People of the Universe. The Communist government branded the rockers enemies of the state….Playwright Vaclav Havel documented [the band’s] trial and imprisonment in 1976, then published the ‘Charter 77’ human-rights manifesto and eventually led the Velvet Revolution against Communism in 1989.” Havel later acknowledged the name derived in part from Reed’s band. When they met in 1990, Havel asked Reed, “Do you know I am president because of you?” Now that’s influence.