Bad Movie Logo
"A website to the detriment of good film"
Custom Search
HOMEB-MOVIE REVIEWSREADER REVIEWSFORUMINTERVIEWSUPDATESABOUT
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
March 29, 2024, 10:59:58 AM
713409 Posts in 53060 Topics by 7725 Members
Latest Member: wibwao
Badmovies.org Forum  |  Other Topics  |  Entertainment  |  Lou Reed dead at 71 « previous next »
Pages: [1]
Author Topic: Lou Reed dead at 71  (Read 4789 times)
El Misfit
[Insert witty here]
B-Movie Kraken
*****

Karma: 1103
Posts: 12892


Hi there!


« on: October 27, 2013, 02:25:06 PM »

http://music.yahoo.com/news/lou-reed-velvet-underground-leader-rock-pioneer-dead-171511963-rolling-stone.html
Quote
Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.

Look back at Lou Reed's remarkable career in photos

With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. "One chord is fine," he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. "Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz."

Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed was born in Brooklyn, in 1942. A fan of doo-wop and early rock & roll (he movingly inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989), Reed also took formative inspiration during his studies at Syracuse University with the poet Delmore Schwartz. After college, he worked a staff songwriter for the novelty label Pickwick Records (where he had a minor hit in 1964 with a dance-song parody called "The Ostrich"). In the mid-Sixties, Reed befriended Welsh musician John Cale, a classically trained violist who had performed with groundbreaking minimalist composer La Monte Young. Reed and Cale formed a band called the Primitives, then changed their name to the Warlocks. After meeting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, they became the Velvet Underground. With a stark sound and ominous look, the band caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who incorporated the Velvets into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. "Andy would show his movies on us," Reed said. "We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wearing black anyway."

"Produced" by Warhol and met with total commercial indifference when it was released in early 1967, VU’s debut The Velvet Underground & Nico stands as a landmark on par with the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde. Reed's matter-of-fact descriptions of New York’s bohemian demimonde, rife with allusions to drugs and S&M, pushed beyond even the Rolling Stones’ darkest moments, while the heavy doses of distortion and noise for it’s own sake revolutionized rock guitar. The band’s three subsequent albums – 1968’s even more corrosive sounding White Light/White Heat, 1969’s fragile, folk-toned The Velvet Underground and 1970’s Loaded, which despite being recorded while he was leaving the group, contained two Reed-standards “Rock & Roll” and “Sweet Jane,” were similarly ignored. But they’d be embraced by future generations, cementing the Velvet Underground’s status as the most influential American rock band of all time.
After splitting with the Velvets in 1970, Reed traveled to England and, in characteristically paradoxical fashion, recorded a solo debut backed by members of the progressive-rock band Yes. But it was his next album, 1972’s Transformer, produced by Reed-disciple David Bowie, that pushed him beyond cult status into genuine rock stardom. “Walk On the Wild Side,” a loving yet unsentimental evocation of Warhol’s Factory scene, became a radio hit (despite its allusions to oral sex) and “Satellite of Love” was covered by U2 and others. Reed spent the Seventies defying expectations almost as a kind of sport. 1973’s Berlin was brutal literary bombast while 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance had soul horns and flashy guitar. In 1975 he released Metal Machine Music, a seething all-noise experiment his label RCA marketed as a avant-garde classic music, while 1978’s banter-heavy live album Take No Prisoners was a kind of comedy record in which Reed went on wild tangents and savaged rock critics by name (“Lou sure is adept at figuring out new ways to s**t on people,” one of those critics, Robert Christgau, wrote at the time). Explaining his less-than-accommodating career trajectory, Reed told journalist Lester Bangs, “my bulls**t it worth more than other people’s diamonds.”

Reed’s ambiguous sexual persona and excessive drug use throughout the Seventies was the stuff of underground rock myth. But in the Eighties, he began to mellow. He married Sylvia Morales and opened a window into his new married life on 1982’s excellent The Blue Mask, his best work since Transformer. His 1984 album New Sensations took a more commercial turn and 1989’s New York ended the decade with a set of funny, politically cutting songs that received universal critical praise. In 1991, he collaborated with Cale on Songs For Drella, a tribute to Warhol. Three years later, the Velvet Underground reunited for a series of successful European gigs.  

Reed and Morales divorced in the early Nineties. Within a few years, Reed began a relationship with musician-performing artist Laurie Anderson. The two became an inseparable New York fixture, collaborating and performing live together, while also engaging in civic and environmental activism. They were married in 2008.

Reed continued to follow his own idiosyncratic artistic impulses throughout the ‘00s. The once-decadent rocker became an avid student of T-ai Chi, even bringing his instructor onstage during concerts in 2003. In 2005 he released a double-CD called The Raven, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In 2007, he released an ambient album titled Hudson River Wind Meditations. Reed returned to mainstream rock with 2011’s Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica.
“All through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”  
« Last Edit: October 27, 2013, 04:28:59 PM by El Misfit » Logged

yeah no.
Rev. Powell
Global Moderator
B-Movie Kraken
****

Karma: 3100
Posts: 26776


Click on that globe for 366 Weird Movies


WWW
« Reply #1 on: October 27, 2013, 08:28:07 PM »

Ouch.  Bluesad

Small | Large
Logged

I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...
InformationGeek
Leader of the Friends' for Info
B-Movie Site Webmaster
Frightening Fanatic of Horrible Cinema
****

Karma: 441
Posts: 5349


Let's all be Friends.


WWW
« Reply #2 on: October 27, 2013, 08:35:32 PM »

Small | Large
Logged

Website: http://informationgeekreviews.blogspot.com/

We live in quite an interesting age. You can tell someone's sexual orientation and level of education from just their interests.
lester1/2jr
B-Movie Kraken
*****

Karma: 1110
Posts: 12271



WWW
« Reply #3 on: October 28, 2013, 08:54:57 AM »

Small | Large
Logged
tracy
Inventor of the Turnip Twaddler and
Frightening Fanatic of Horrible Cinema
****

Karma: 309
Posts: 3144



« Reply #4 on: October 28, 2013, 02:25:45 PM »

Man...that stinks! Here's one of my favorites....

Small | Large
Logged

Yes,I'm fine....as long as I don't look too closely.
Allhallowsday
B-Movie Kraken
*****

Karma: 2280
Posts: 20726


Either he's dead or my watch has stopped!


« Reply #5 on: October 29, 2013, 08:17:37 PM »

My great friend wrote to me today he was listening to LOU REED... at that time, I had not heard.   

Terrible, terrible news.  LOU REED is just started, like ERNEST BORGNINE.  Sometimes great artists need to be dead to be appreciated.  I am sad to hear this, but glad to know we'll be talking about LOU REED for a long time.

Small | Large
Logged

If you want to view paradise . . . simply look around and view it!
zelmo73
Eater of Hobbits
Frightening Fanatic of Horrible Cinema
****

Karma: -15
Posts: 1071


Bad day at the construction site


« Reply #6 on: October 30, 2013, 10:26:51 AM »

I've had "Loverman" stuck in my head for the past few days now since the news broke. Rather strange since I've never really been into the guy's music aside from that song. I may have to pursue his backlog.
Logged

First rule is, 'The laws of Germany'
Second rule is, 'Be nice to mommy'
Third rule is, 'Don't talk to commies'
Fourth rule is, 'Eat kosher salamis'
------------------
The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop and says "Make me one with everything!"
Allhallowsday
B-Movie Kraken
*****

Karma: 2280
Posts: 20726


Either he's dead or my watch has stopped!


« Reply #7 on: October 30, 2013, 08:35:40 PM »

Small | Large
Logged

If you want to view paradise . . . simply look around and view it!
Pages: [1]
Badmovies.org Forum  |  Other Topics  |  Entertainment  |  Lou Reed dead at 71 « previous next »
    Jump to:  


    RSS Feed Subscribe Subscribe by RSS
    Email Subscribe Subscribe by Email


    Popular Articles
    How To Find A Bad Movie

    The Champions of Justice

    Plan 9 from Outer Space

    Manos, The Hands of Fate

    Podcast: Todd the Convenience Store Clerk

    Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

    Dragonball: The Magic Begins

    Cool As Ice

    The Educational Archives: Driver's Ed

    Godzilla vs. Monster Zero

    Do you have a zombie plan?

    FROM THE BADMOVIES.ORG ARCHIVES
    ImageThe Giant Claw - Slime drop

    Earth is visited by a GIANT ANTIMATTER SPACE BUZZARD! Gawk at the amazingly bad bird puppet, or chuckle over the silly dialog. This is one of the greatest b-movies ever made.

    Lesson Learned:
    • Osmosis: os·mo·sis (oz-mo'sis, os-) n., 1. When a bird eats something.

    Subscribe to Badmovies.org and get updates by email:

    HOME B-Movie Reviews Reader Reviews Forum Interviews TV Shows Advertising Information Sideshows Links Contact

    Badmovies.org is owned and operated by Andrew Borntreger. All original content is © 1998 - 2014 by its respective author(s). Image, video, and audio files are used in accordance with the Fair Use Law, and are property of the film copyright holders. You may freely link to any page (.html or .php) on this website, but reproduction in any other form must be authorized by the copyright holder.