Lou Reed - Bewitched by rock'n'roll

"I only cared about the music, that's all I was interested in. I've always believed I had something important to say, and I said it. That's why I survived, because I still believe I have something to say. My God is rock'n'roll. It's a dark power that can change your life." (Lou Reed)

An icon. An archetype. A myth. A living legend. That's what Lou Reed is today, a man who has devoted his life to rock'n'roll. But not a legend surviving on past glories - rather an artist in constant transformation who, for forty years, has kept intact his desire to move others and be moved himself; who, for forty years, keeps surprising us, churning out song after song that he says he hears constantly in his head like a radio that never switches off.

Since the mid-Sixties there hasn't been a decade in which he hasn't left his mark, contributing substantially to a significant development of rock music, of which he still incredibly embodies the true spirit: iconoclastic, rebellious, outside the norm.

A victim for years of drug and alcohol abuse, unlike so many rock stars of his generation who died succumbing to a lifestyle that turned self-destruction into a form of artistic experience, he had the luck, but above all the strength and the ability, to come out of it, gaining that balance and integrity - utterly unthinkable only a short time before - that have finally allowed him to be at peace with himself, without any further need to hide behind the masks of his characters.

"Rock'n'roll was everything to me, and it's still the promise of a world outside my room, and whatever that world was, I was going to like it."

Lewis Firbank "Lou" Reed was born in New York on March 2, 1942, and grew up in the town of Freeport, Long Island, in an upper-middle-class Jewish family. Like all the young scions of the "good" set, he studied classical piano but, bewitched by rock'n'roll - considered the devil's music - he started strumming the guitar at age 10. At college he played in various bands, discovering blues, doo-wop and rockabilly along the way. He was an eccentric, bizarre teenager, rebellious against society and family: "I never liked schools, I didn't like groups, I didn't like authority. I was made for rock'n'roll." He scandalized people with his effeminate, provocative attitude and his talk about homosexuality: in the early Sixties, the homosexual was still considered the most culturally threatening and destabilizing figure around. The psychiatrist his parents turned to subjected the seventeen-year-old Lou to a series of electroshock treatments; the therapy, sadly fashionable at the time, was traumatic and devastating for his oversensitive, fragile personality, and it completed the process of deterioration already under way in his relationship with his parents, by whom he felt betrayed, and towards whom he poured out a resentment that, in later years, would also come through in some of his harshest songs, such as "Kill Your Sons", "Family", "My Old Man" and "Standing On Ceremony". By the end of the treatment, he had convinced himself that his personality had fragmented into numerous "other" selves, which he could summon at will. "I hate psychiatrics", he would later write in one of his finest poems.

But Lou would be saved by music, which, in his own words, gave him back the desire to dream. "Music is everything. People die for plenty of other reasons, so why not for music. It saves so many people!".

"The most incredible piece of work I've ever read; I read it in college and it changed my life forever". This was the hold that the short-story collection "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities And Other Stories", published in 1937 by Delmore Schwartz, exerted on the young Reed's mind - Schwartz being the Jewish-American poet and writer of the Middle Generation whose student, disciple and confidant he would become.

United by the torment of living a repressed homosexuality, the fruit of a straight-laced, oppressive upbringing, the two met at the Orange Cafe, where Schwartz - a great mentor and skilled storyteller - would read Joyce and Eliot and recite poetry to his students at Syracuse University, where he taught creative writing. "He gave value to an otherwise disastrous college experience", Reed would say of him. Iconoclastic and nihilistic, Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, who drew on him for the protagonist of his novel "Humboldt's Gift", called him "the Mozart of conversation". But by the early Sixties he was in decline, already with a decade of alcohol and amphetamine abuse behind him, and plagued by obsessions and increasingly frequent manic-depressive crises that would lead to his self-destruction. On his death, Lou Reed wrote "Black Angel's Death Song" for him, a song with a minimalist spoken delivery, since Schwartz had no love for rock lyrics.

"I like to write about things that represent humanity. I don't know of any subject more important than that."

The spare, unadorned prose that Lou Reed draws on, even today, to write his songs is inspired by Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs, and by names like Raymond Chandler or Hubert Selby Jr., whose raw, concise style, whose natural way of describing the brutal and cruel behaviour of the characters in "Last Exit to Brooklyn," who speak in a dark, slang-ridden language, Reed draws on in songs such as "Sister Ray" to portray the degraded urban humanity around him. The bitterness and anger embedded in Selby's writing can also be found in his songs, but while a first, easy reading leaves us without hope, we soon discover - sometimes more explicitly, sometimes only between the lines - a humour and self-irony that reveal another side of things, more positive and amusing, almost detached.

But the most authoritative figure in his life and work would be Delmore Schwartz. From his introduction to reading, from his teachings, from his poetic art - which Reed describes as "able to express incredible, powerful concepts that manage to visualize the Essence of things using simple, concise language to reach the highest artistic peaks" - Reed drew the inspiration for what would become his own writing style. "That's how I wanted to write, with simple words that stirred emotion, and set them to my three chords. It would be fantastic to hear rock'n'roll that could stand alongside a novel, but with the fun of music." Rock as the perfect language for telling the truth about reality.

He writes commercial songs for Pickwick Records, with whom, at fourteen, he records his first record. It's at the New York label that he meets Welsh musician John Cale, a talented multi-instrumentalist (piano, viola, bass) with a classical background, who is in America on a scholarship and who has worked with two of the most eminent figures in avant-garde music overseas: John Cage and La Monte Young.

The Velvet Underground - a name lifted from the title of a book by Michael Leigh whose cover features a whip and a pair of long leather boots - are the product of the union between these two brilliant artists and two exceptional sidemen: guitarist Sterling Morrison (a fellow student of Lou's at Syracuse University) and Maureen Tucker (who replaced Angus MacLise), the first woman drummer of the rock era, blessed with an extraordinary sense of rhythm. Precursors of the new wave phenomenon, deeply tied to 1960s New York - a melting pot of avant-gardes, artists and underground circles - they represent the darkest, most subterranean soul of alternative culture.

Dylan had thrown open the doors and shown the way. Rock could be a visceral, emotional music, but it could also draw on poetry to strike even deeper.

A carefully targeted use of language, a perfect matching of words and syllables that gives his songs - brief stories set to music - a tone that is more narrative than lyrical; an impeccable feel for phrasing achieved through the use, for the first time in songwriting, of the plagal cadence, combined with the ongoing process of synthesis and condensation demanded by the particular structure of the song form, which requires each verse to instantly conjure precise, powerful images charged with suggestion and unease - all of this reveals, in Reed, an impressively mature style right from the start.

The innovative lyricism of his verses, with its careful use of interior monologue, intensified by first-person narration, depicts - without indulgence - a degraded and often cruel humanity. His songs speak of drugs, sex, alienation and death, creating, as John Cale put it, "a mythology of the street." Right as the hippie epic was being celebrated, utopically waving the banners of peace and love - banners that, as we now know, would leave illustrious casualties on the field - Lou Reed was already looking beyond the shattering of that collective dream against the impact of the Seventies, when youth movements would change shape, taking on far less idyllic forms, and he took part in burying the hippie myth, shaping instead the iconography of punk.

The music of the Velvet Underground, moreover, is unlike anything played before. Gone are the blues tonalities and Afro-American rhythms that had been the main building blocks of all rock'n'roll up to that point. What they offer instead is a chamber-like, minimalist rock, whose rhythmic and expressive magma is the product of an instrumentation as innovative and original as one could possibly imagine.

The extraordinary amalgam formed by the screech of John Cale's electric viola - a legacy of La Monte Young's ensemble of serial music, whose flattened bridge allows all the strings, tuned to the same note, to be played simultaneously (a particular system La Monte Young dubbed the "Just Intonation System"), producing a drone effect that can be sustained for hours - by Reed's "redundant" guitar style, in which feedback clashes and interacts with Sterling Morrison's steady rhythm guitar, and by Tucker's sparse, minimalist, almost tribal rhythms, playing two felt-covered timpani like a drum. This extraordinary amalgam is what still makes their sound instantly identifiable today.

Reed's intense, restless intellectualism, combined with John Cale's cultured avant-garde sensibility; the fusion of two musical genres that seemed so diametrically opposed, and the blending of music and poetry, set a precedent, to the point that the Velvet Underground are now considered, alongside the Beatles, the most influential band from the Sixties onward.

"He was so sweet, generous, kind - he could give courage even to those who seemed not to know the meaning of the word. Working with him meant growing richer in imagination and expanding your own creativity without limits." That's how Reed speaks today of Andy Warhol, the figure who, alongside Schwartz, was fundamental to his artistic life.

Their first meeting took place in December 1965, when the most alternative artist on the New York scene, tipped off by director Barbara Rubin, attended a Velvet Underground performance at the Café Bizarre - on the very night the band was about to be fired - and was utterly dazzled. They were exactly the provocative, disturbing, scandalous band he was looking for. He signed them on the spot for the show he was putting together: the Eruptin, later renamed the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The EPI, a forerunner of multimedia spectacle, aimed to tear down the barriers between artistic disciplines by staging numerous events simultaneously, in the name of the newly defined "Pop Art" - an expression of the most unsettling and audacious break with the traditional idea of art, one that not only exposed art's ties to the media and the production of commodities, but turned those very ties into an idea of art in themselves: dance, photography, elaborate strobe-light effects, his films and slides - portraits no longer painted on canvas, since he declared he no longer believed in painting, but shot on film instead - projected onto a band intent on playing devastating music.

This is how they came to join the Factory, Warhol's headquarters, the "factory" understood as a collective idea of producing the work of art on a sort of assembly line, offering a new, anti-romantic notion of the artist. An exciting laboratory in which to engage with the most innovative aesthetic theories, such as the so-called "camp" sensibility, whose essence is a love of artifice and exaggeration. A tolerant environment where a new art form was being tested, built on the synergy of talents he supported - musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers - frequented by a motley universe of misfits, outcasts, drag queens, young artists, dealers, gay men and passing rock stars, all in search of their fifteen minutes of fame which, according to Warhol, could not be denied to anyone. Time spent at the Factory, an immense collection of characters and stories, would become a wellspring for Reed, one he would keep drawing from in the years to come.

The pop idea was that "anyone could do anything," exploring every creative possibility. Only an artist like Warhol, the figure who best embodied the blending of art and mass consumption, could sense, in the mid-Sixties, the unsuspected possibilities of rock, an expressive form considered worthless up to that point. He thus decided to move into the music world as well, and managed to land a deal for the Factory's house band. Despite some grumbling, he imposed on the band the presence of his protégée, the blonde, striking actress/model Nico, whose presence, whose Teutonic accent (she was of German/Hungarian origin), whose spectral, deep voice stood in stark contrast to the brutality of the Velvet Underground's music. Out of this magic formula came one of the most important and influential albums in the history of rock: The Velvet Underground And Nico. For the first time, rock music was conceived as an art form possessed of its own integrity, not merely as a commercial product to be sold. The album, released in 1967, was produced by Warhol himself, who nonetheless gave the band free rein, while still putting his name to the now-famous banana cover, which, once peeled, revealed a pink, flesh-coloured banana underneath. Alienating rock'n'roll numbers, sung by Lou Reed and arranged with searing feedback, are set against slower, dreamier ballads sung by Nico. These are stories of assorted humanity told through distorted guitars, a dissonant viola locked in murky counterpoint, and tribal percussion - music far removed from anything fashionable at the time. An album praised by critics - the Village Voice wrote that it "sounds like a marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade" - yet almost entirely ignored by the public.

From Warhol, a great manipulator of the media, Reed absorbed an aesthetic, a way of seeing things, the ability to "understand," to "take part," to "create" within art. And yet their relationship - certainly magical and built on deep affection, but always a fraught one - eventually broke, and their artistic paths parted.

The Velvet Underground released three more albums with Steve Sesnick, a producer more experienced in the music business but who, by exacerbating the tensions between Reed and Cale — rooted mainly in disagreements over the musical direction the band should take (more pop for the former, more experimental for the latter) — would bear responsibility for the many internal conflicts within the group.

In December 1967 came out White Light/White Heat, a work that pushes the band's disturbing, noise-driven sound to its extreme. Certainly not an easy listen, mad and abrasive, it's the album that probably best represents the band's true spirit. Following John Cale's departure/ousting due to conflicts with Reed, skillfully fomented by Sesnick, The Velvet Underground came out in March 1969 and Loaded in September 1970; the latter saw Reed leave halfway through the recording sessions, physically and mentally wrecked by drug abuse and plagued by serious voice problems, so much so that some songs not yet recorded were sung by Doug Yule, the bassist/keyboardist who had replaced Cale.

The last two albums, which without Cale had lost the band's original radicalism and the avant-garde impulses that survive only in the track "The Murder Mystery", are nevertheless still high-quality works. Songs like "Pale Blue Eyes", dedicated by Reed to his first and by-then-lost great love Shelley, "Sweet Jane", "Candy Says" and "Rock & Roll" can be seen as a preview of what would become the New York songwriter's solo career. In an ironic twist of fate, the Velvet Underground achieved a measure of popular success right at the moment they fell apart.

In the following years two live albums were released: The Velvet Underground Live At Max's Kansas City in 1972 (a document of the Velvet Underground's last show with Reed present) and the double album 1969 Velvet Underground Live in 1974. In 1985 VU was released, and in 1986 Another View, both featuring remixed unreleased material. In 1995 came Peel Slowly And See, a box set collecting, across five CDs, all the albums plus a selection of unreleased tracks.

"I'm sad, moody, amazed at my own ineptitude, but still bewitched by the thought of possibilities".

The breakup of the Velvet Underground left twenty-four-year-old Lou in the grip of a serious psychological and physical crisis, forcing him, in the months that followed, to take refuge at his parents' house, where he considered retiring from the scene altogether to devote himself exclusively to writing. His personality, so sensitive and therefore so fragile and vulnerable, was tormented by the uncertain feeling of being a homosexual who, because of a strict upbringing, desperately wanted to be straight, torn apart by the gulf between what he was and what he wished to be. It was during this period that he married Bettye, the classic nice Jewish girl from a good family, shamelessly similar to his mother. The choice was probably driven by an attempt to dissociate himself from the embarrassing ties to the gay/bisexual world of the Factory and from his relationship with Billy Name (Warhol's photographer), even though it was in total contrast with the public image he would soon adopt, marked by a pronounced sexual ambiguity.

The renewed energy sparked by his love for Bettye, along with the legal victories against Sesnick, which allowed him to secure all the rights to the two albums Velvet Underground and Loaded (even though he would lose the rights to the name "Velvet Underground"), convinced him to come out of hibernation and leave his exile in Freeport behind.

He returned to New York, where he began frequenting the Collective Coscience, a literary salon for rock writers founded by Lisa and Richard Robinson. The latter, an RCA producer, introduced Reed to Dennis Katz, an agent at the same American label, who had just convinced David Bowie, the new rising star of British music, to sign with them. It was precisely the signing of their respective contracts that gave these two extraordinary artists the chance to meet for the first time. Thus began, with a contract signed with RCA for two albums to be recorded in London studios, his long and contradictory solo career.

In the early '70s the Velvet Underground were regarded, especially within the London art scene, as a touchstone for a new generation of artists, and Reed's transition from a cult-band figure to a solo artist was awaited like a major event.

The folk-leaning Lou Reed, produced by the Robinsons and released in May 1972, instead proved to be a disappointing opening statement, nearly derailing his solo career right from the start. It's an uncertain record with no fresh ideas, even though the songs — leftovers from the Velvet Underground sessions — are good tunes in their own right. The musicians RCA put at his disposal, while skilled, weren't suited to the sound of his compositions; Lou's rhythm guitar alone couldn't offset arrangements that came across as flat and ineffective. It's an album that deserves reappraisal today, since its only real fault was perhaps being squeezed between the masterpieces that came before and after it, but at the time it was a flop, one that plunged him back into the deepest despair.

Fate, however, had another chance in store for him, and salvation arrived in the guise of David Bowie, an artist particularly drawn to his style and to the artistic legacy of the Velvet Underground. The "king of glam", by then having fully mastered Warhol's media-manipulation strategies and communication techniques, leveraged the influence of his sudden success and, very generously, offered to produce — with the collaboration of Mick Ronson (his trusted guitarist) — Transformer, Reed's second solo album, which, in perfect glam-rock style, pays tribute to the ambiguous world of Warhol's Factory, the very soil from which glam had sprung. For the occasion Reed publicly declared his bisexuality and transformed himself, again with Bowie's help, into the "ghost of rock": smoky eyeliner, Japanese-style makeup, black-lacquered nails. The record is a string of hits: the single "Walk On The Wilde Side", the first song to contain explicit references to cross-dressing, "Perfect Day", a gorgeous ballad with a jazzy flavor, sweet and melancholy, enriched by Ronson's piano and string arrangements, "Vicious", with its playful groove and deliberately bare arrangement designed to highlight the distorted riff of Ronson's jittery guitar; and then "Satellite Of Love", one of the finest glam songs ever written, with Bowie's extraordinary voice in the backing vocals, a heart-wrenching piano accompaniment, and a wildly ironic lyric that mocks the theme of jealousy.

The album is certainly his most famous work, the one by which most of the public identifies him. Released in November 1972, it proved to be a launching pad, finally bringing him the recognition he had long sought in vain, restoring his self-confidence and giving fresh impetus to his creativity.

But Lou Reed, an artist little inclined to follow trends or make compromises, was incapable of handling success, with which he always had a contradictory relationship (wanting it and loathing it at the same time). He quickly shed his glam persona, and in the years that followed he would waver between avant-garde ambitions and his role as an icon of sexual transgression devoted to every kind of drug.

Thanks to the success he'd achieved, he nevertheless managed to persuade his record label to back a difficult work like Berlin, the sublime and intense peak of his talent. Released in July 1973, it completes the London trilogy. It's a concept album set amid the foggy, decadent atmospheres of early-20th-century German cabarets, telling, like a long poem, a sick, harrowing, degenerate and cynical love story, a tale of desperation, sex and drugs. Described by Reed as "my electric Hamlet", it mirrors his private life and his disastrous relationship with his wife. The characters aren't described but outlined through monologue, dialogue and their actions, with a masterful use of language. "Lady Day" is a clear reference to the ill-fated jazz singer Billie Holiday, who died prematurely from drug and alcohol abuse, her figure used metaphorically in relation to the protagonist Caroline, already hinting at the story's tragic ending. In "Caroline Says Part 1", through the narrator's indirect account, we hear the protagonist's words, in whom, through the phrase "Germanic Queen", we can recognize the prototype of many of the domineering female figures who played an important role in Reed's life. In "How Do You Think If Feels", the most autobiographical track on the whole album, Lou poses a series of rhetorical questions to his woman, questions he already knows will go unanswered, certain as he is of not being understood. And "Sad Song" is the cynical epitaph with which he absolves himself, easing his conscience of the weight of possibly being responsible for his partner's suicide ("I'm gonna stop wasting time, somebody else would have broken both of her arms"). Produced by Bob Ezrin, who also crafted its lush, baroque arrangements that make it, if anything, even more "sick", Berlin is a work that would long be misunderstood: poorly received by critics, who judged it nihilistic and depressing, and almost entirely ignored by the public, especially in America, who had been expecting another Transformer.

Disappointed by hopes that came to nothing, Reed hid behind another mask, turning himself into an androgynous, bleached-blond, gangly puppet. The role he played was that of an elegant yet cynical and corrupt character, that "Rock N Roll Animal" we get a glimpse of in the shocking, provocative cover photo of the album of the same name, one of the most celebrated live albums in rock history. Recorded at the Academy of Music in New York and released in February 1974, it documents his superb vocal performances and the exceptional playing of his band, with Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner on guitars (the same pair from Berlin), delivering masterful hard rock reinterpretations of several Velvet Underground tracks.

When, in August 1974, he releases Sally Can't Dance, the paranoia brought on by heavy use of amphetamines and methedrine has reached unbearable levels, turning him into a violent, irascible man teetering on the edge of madness. The music press names him, in a prophecy that would turn out to be utterly wrong, as the most likely next rock casualty alongside Keith Richards. The album, deliberately engineered to be commercial - and indeed it climbed high in the sales charts - is the second instalment he owes his record label, after the live album, in exchange for releasing Berlin. Producer Steve Katz chases the musical trends of the moment, rhythm and blues and soul, but the result is just a mediocre parody of Transformer. Lou claims he took part in it apathetically, limiting himself to just singing. He has always branded it as garbage, going so far as to declare, with one of his famous, irresistibly sarcastic quips typical of his yiddish humour: "It's incredible. The worse I suck, the more I sell. If I don't appear on the next record at all, I'll hit number one." Despite everything, the record has a dignity of its own and contains remarkable tracks with touching lyrics, like those of "Kill Your Sons", where Reed recounts his terrible experience with electroshock therapy.

It was John Cale, as far back as the Velvet Underground days, who introduced Lou Reed to electronic music and the concept of drone tonality. It's this style that inspires the double album Metal Machine Music (July 1975), an irreverent and bleak work that will have the same explosive effect as a cannon blast. Provocative from the liner notes onward, where Reed writes "If you don't like this record, I don't blame you. It's not for you. My week beats your year." The 64 minutes of sonic assault, layers of pure and simple feedback, overdubs, slowed-down guitars and distorted, reverberated electronic noise - cacophonous and entirely devoid of vocals - stand as a declaration of his artistic independence, both towards the audience ("I wanted to clean house and get rid of all those fucking assholes who come to my shows and start screaming 'Vicious' or 'Walk on the Wild Side'") and towards his record label, which demands nothing but commercial works from him and to which, in an elaborate speech, he presents it as a grandiose artistic masterpiece, the fruit of six years of work. The vinyl version consists of four identical sides, each lasting 16 minutes. Thanks to a technical trick devised with Andy Warhol for the Velvet Underground but never used, the fourth side gets stuck in the final groove and plays on into infinity, forcing the listener to get up and lift the needle by hand. Only by understanding the excellent use Reed makes of sarcasm can one perhaps grasp the true scope of this "con" crafted with style and intelligence. An album revolutionary in its own way - it will become a source of inspiration for various artists, such as Sonic Youth, or for the punk movement, of which Reed is considered, despite himself, the godfather, and which already has its roots in the sonic revolution of the Velvet Underground - it will gain fundamental value over time for the history of music. At the time, however, it sells very little, and even among the few buyers there are those who actually return it.

With Coney Island Baby, released in February 1976 and produced by Godfrey Diamond, after the sonic provocation of Metal Machine Music the New York songwriter rediscovers his best compositional form.

The album, soft and intimate, is dedicated to Rachel, a stunning icon of New York's transvestite scene with whom he's living, having left his wife Bettye amid the scandal of every respectable moralist. Blessed with intelligence and wit, Rachel is the architect of his newfound peace of mind. In the song "Crazy Feeling", Reed recounts their first meeting and the fateful "love at first sight". A commercial yet classy work, musically more in keeping with his style thanks to the return of the guitar/bass/drums line-up, it contains some beautiful songs with sweet melodies. The splendid title track, inspired by the Harptones' "Glory Of Love", is one of his most autobiographical lyrics; a glimpse that lets us catch sight of part of his soul as the eternal child of Coney Island, revealing his softer side, brought out also thanks to his love for Rachel, to whom, in the song's final lines, he declares he'd give up everything for her; but the classic "punch in the stomach" we've come to expect from him isn't missing either, embodied by "Kiks", a careful, attentive study of "Evil" and perversion.

Rock'n'Roll Heart, released in October 1976, was meant to be a confirmation after the success of the previous record. Instead it proves markedly inferior and comes as something of a shock to his fans, even though, as in all his work, his talent always shines through. A commercial album made for pure fun, perhaps a toll to pay for the contract with his new record label, but enriched by the presence of Michael Fonfara on keyboards and Marty Fogel on sax, who will remain by his side in the years to follow.

The "Rock'n'Roll Heart" tour, undertaken after the album's release, is exceptional by contrast, thanks to a mammoth stage set made up of 48 television screens showing footage shot by Mick Rock, but also, and above all, because, alongside his excellent band, Reed enlists one of his musical idols, trumpeter Don Cherry, for whom he re-arranges the songs in a rock-jazz vein, giving space to the solos and flourishes of his refined trumpet.

By the late Seventies, Reed begins his search for the perfect sound, and is increasingly praised for the technique he uses to record his albums, which he describes as "aimed at finding the most immediate and pure way to transfer art onto a record, in constant pursuit of the tone that touches the heart of the soul."

Released in February 1978, the album Street Hassle - literally "road accident", though it plays on its assonance with "street trash" - is essentially a live recording with studio overdubs and minimalist arrangements, and is yet another masterpiece through which his harsh, cynical streak resurfaces in full. "Violent music" has by now replaced the "stupid music" of his most recent albums. A raw, provocative work, a fierce piece of social commentary and savage critique of hypocritical American respectability, to the point of being banned from radio play despite positive reviews. The title track, enriched by a vocal cameo from Bruce Springsteen, is a song worthy of the best Velvet Underground, both for its subject matter and its composition: a three-part suite underpinned by spiritual music led by a cello. The story is told, in his typical style, through a poetic visualisation of images, and reaches moments of touching lyricism.

The album's release also coincides with the end of his relationship with Rachel, his muse of recent years.

The double live album Take No Prisoners is the recording of a show held in 1978 at the Bottom Line, a New York club, a stop on the "Rock And Roll Heart" tour, by then sadly without Don Cherry. He's backed by the same fine musicians from Street Hassle, who provide an ideal soundtrack for his rants.

The record, which he himself has called his "comedy album", is a perfect portrait of Lou at that moment, so much so that at one point he declares: "I play Lou Reed better than anyone else", and where, rather than singing (though when he does, it's spine-chilling, proof of his splendid form), he completely upends the songs and lashes out, directly and without mincing words, at everyone and everything. Dressed in black, wearing mirrored black sunglasses, with a detached, cocky expression, he spares no one with his sarcastic quips: artists, musicians, and above all music critics, onto whom he pours out all his resentment. The album is the triumph of his egocentrism, a textbook example of how arrogant, cynical, cruel, cocky and unpleasant he can be, while also being delightfully entertaining. "An urban blues album, the closest thing to Lou Reed you'll ever get", he said to his fans when the record came out in November 1978. The amazing sound is down to a recording technique he'll also use for "The Bells", particularly innovative for its time, known as Stereo Binaural Sound, in which voice and music sit on the same plane.

The Bells, from April 1979, is a more experimental work with strong jazz influences - a genre for which Reed has never hidden his love - also thanks to the presence of Don Cherry's trumpet, a master of free jazz. Recorded in Germany using the binaural technique, it's a splendid example of the fusion of rock and jazz, and is described by Lester Bangs upon its release as "the only genuine fusion of jazz and rock recorded since Miles Davis's 'On The Corner'". In a strange twist of fate, Reed makes up the lyrics of the title track - inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Bells" - entirely on the spot while recording the track, just as Don Cherry is improvising a musical reinterpretation of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" - a musician who would go on to take part in his recent work The Raven, dedicated precisely to Poe.

After spending the Seventies "refining, correcting, denying and contradicting his image", as one critic of the time wrote of him, no longer able to tell his real life apart from his public persona, Lou finds in the Eighties a breath of fresh air, a way out of a life marked by drug and alcohol abuse that has often brought him to the brink of the abyss, to the point of describing himself as "a tightrope walker without a net who has gone through a terrifying experience from every point of view." He drops the poses and provocative attitudes, turns to Alcoholics Anonymous and a psychiatrist, and, after giving statements to the press confirming his homosexuality, in yet another contradictory gesture, baffling to most, marries Sylvia Morales on Valentine's Day 1980.

Always attentive to the needs of the weaker strata of society, from this point on he begins his commitment to political and social causes, taking part in countless charity initiatives, various demonstrations for civil rights on behalf of Amnesty International, the Sun City anti-apartheid project, and even performing for the Pope at the Jubilee concert for "A World Without Debt".

But the Eighties were, musically speaking, a via crucis for almost all the great artists of the past, and Lou Reed is no exception to this ordeal. Albums like the honest Growing Up In Public from April 1980, Legendary Hearts from May 1983 and New Sensations from April 1984, a tribute to Central American music, are enjoyable records that don't leave much of a mark, probably also the result of a relaxed, bourgeois lifestyle that doesn't quite suit an artist who, up to that point, had made restlessness and torment his main sources of inspiration. Reed hits rock bottom with the bland, embarrassing Mistral, released in April 1986: an emblematic work of an artist in creative crisis.

Yet the virtuoso's flair is still there: The Blue Mask, the album released in February 1982 and dedicated to Delmore Schwartz, is a small gem, perhaps still too underrated. It's a refined work, with impeccable lyrics and an excellent musical level: spare, essential instrumentation reduced to guitars/bass/drums. The line-up features Fernando Saunders on bass (still his loyal collaborator today), Doane Perry on drums and, on guitars, Reed himself alongside the brilliant Robert Quine (Reed's guitar mixed on the right channel, Quine's on the left).

The inventor of a new guitar style built on dyslexic riffs and semi-atonal solos, Quine came out of the New York experience of Richard Hell's Voidoids, who, alongside artists such as Patti Smith, Ramones and Blondie, marked an era of major musical and cultural change, made possible in part by the revolutionary innovations of the Velvet Underground, of whom Quine was a fan from the very start. With remarkable foresight, he recorded a series of tapes of some Velvet Underground shows in San Francisco in 1969, in the period immediately preceding the release of Loaded. The recordings have recently been remixed and released on three CDs collected in the Quine Tapes Vol. 1 box set, and, even though the sound quality isn't the best, they stand as historical proof that, even by then orphaned of Cale's "cursed" viola, the band could still be hypnotic, perverse and dark — starting with the three marathon versions of "Sister Ray," moving through the leaden atmospheres of "Black Angel's Death Song," and on to the heroin blues of "I'm Waiting For The Man."

Just as Bowie had a decade earlier, Quine was the one who restored Lou's confidence in himself, to the point of convincing him to pick up the electric guitar again in the studio, something he'd abandoned on his more recent records. Among the 10 tracks, standouts include: "My House," which tells of a séance-like psychic contact with Delmore Schwartz (Dedalus and Bloom, characters from Joyce's Ulysses, were the nicknames the two had given each other); the moving "The Day John Kennedy Died," a song of enormous emotional impact with gorgeous lyrics sung impeccably; the paranoid "Waves Of Fear," featuring a superb Quine solo; the violent, anguished electric charge of the title track, a self-portrait of his warring "personalities," with an ending worthy of a Rossini crescendo; right up to "Heavenly Arms," an act of love forged with intense, passionate lyrics and breathtaking vocal melodies, dedicated to his wife Sylvia. The album was recorded almost entirely live in the studio, with the musicians interacting with an almost magical empathy.

But the partnership with Quine — very close in artistic stature to the one with Cale, both men intelligent and cultured, and above all, unlike Reed, capable of sharing credit for the genius they helped create — would end just as that earlier one had. Reed always showed great instinct in choosing exceptional people to work with, forever seeking out the best, but his egocentrism also made him utterly incapable of sharing credit and success. In December 1984, at the end of the New Sensation Tour, after yet another argument, Quine walked out for good, slamming the door on a collaboration that had lasted almost four years. What that band — Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on bass and, later, Fred Maher on drums — was capable of is documented on the album Live In Italy. A lean, essential sonic record of newly achieved artistic maturity. Light years removed from the excesses of the past, it's a mix of the best of Reed's output, both with the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist. Recorded between Verona and Rome and released in January 1984, it's his fourth official live album.

On February 22, 1987, Andy Warhol died suddenly following routine surgery. In shock, Lou Reed and John Cale found themselves together at his funeral and, after 22 years, decided to work together again. The project called for a musical biography whose title would be the nickname friends had given Warhol: "Drella," a combination of Dracula and Cinderella — in other words, a representation of the opposing sides of his character. The aim was to pay tribute to their mentor, showing the world their affection, but also to counterbalance the various commemorative tributes that were typically, horribly pedantic and didactic. They shut themselves away in the studio and realized that, magically, the musical chemistry between them still worked and that, just as in the Velvet Underground days, Reed's lyrics settled perfectly onto the bed of notes laid down by Cale. In ten days they wrote their own personal requiem for Andy Warhol: 14 biographical songs arranged in chronological order, even though the process proved difficult and fraught, to the point that, in the liner notes, Cale had written: "'Songs For Drella' is a collaboration, the second between Reed and me since 1965, and I must say that, even though most of the work is his, on this record he allowed me to keep my dignity."

Having finished writing the lyrics for Songs For Drella, Reed — deeply shaken by the reflections concerning him found in Andy Warhol's newly published diaries — began recording the album that would turn out to be yet another masterpiece, and for many, "the" masterpiece of his career.

New York, released in February 1989 and centered on the social, moral and economic decay of the dying "Big Apple," is, in the author's own words from the liner notes, "an album to read, a book to listen to."

His poetic vision reaches its highest peaks here. With concise, precise lyrics, Reed once again points the finger at the ills of society and family, denouncing them with clarity, rage and force. His gaze is fixed on New York City, a gaze full of love, but also disillusionment, for a ruthless city, the embodiment of all the world's evils.

The song lyrics are devastating indictments. Against a city where the tale of Romeo and Juliet inevitably turns into a sick, decadent story, set in a poor, squalid New York among gun dealers and cops, where the Puerto Rican Romeo Rodriguez ultimately "has" Juliet ("Romeo had Juliette") and where "Manhattan's sinking like a rock into the filthy Hudson"; where AIDS, dismissed by moralists as "the gay plague," strikes again and again, and the occasion for drawing up the list of the "vanished" is the annual Halloween parade of the gay and lesbian community ("Halloween Parade"); where violence, racism and drugs reign; where the homeless sleep under bridges and scavenge through garbage to survive; where children are abused and wives are beaten; where Pedro, the protagonist of the intense "Dirty Boulevard," dreams of flying away from the "dirty boulevard," an anthill of poor and alienated people, and where Reed, with a clever phonetic twist, turns the Statue of Liberty into the Statue of Bigotry, which cries out: "Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, and I'll piss on 'em"; where sons are destined to repeat the mistakes of their fathers in an "endless cycle" ("Endless Cycle"), partly because of the way the average man typically raises his child ("Beginning Of A Great Adventure"), dumping all his own fears and frustrations onto him; where, as described in the beautiful parable "Last Great American Whale," punctuated by Maureen Tucker's percussion, the "great white whale," a symbol of purity and innocence, is killed by "some local yokel army reserve type who was keeping a bazooka in the living room"; where survival demands you "hold on" ("Hold On") and have a "busload of faith" ("Busload Of Faith"). Against a greedy, hypocritical, selfish world, with Reed identifying in ruthless Reaganism the embodiment of the defeat of the "American Dream" ("Sick Of You"). Against racism and political hypocrisy ("Good Evening Mr. Waldheim"), and against those who, having brought devastation to Vietnam, above all through the reckless use of Napalm, then abandoned the war's veterans to their fate ("Xmas In February"). Against a rich, bloated America, which Reed portrays as a "strawman" ("Strawman") moving and investing millions of dollars while completely ignoring the poor and the destitute living on society's margins; where there's no time left for anything because the future is just around the corner and time is running out ("There Is No Time"). The last song, "Dime Story Mystery," Reed dedicates to Andy Warhol, who had died not long before, and, accompanied by Maureen Tucker's percussion, he takes the opportunity to engage, very poetically, in a series of reflections on faith, life and death. As he himself explains in the liner notes, "you can't beat two guitars, bass and drums," and indeed, musically, bare-bones simplicity wins out once again. The high-caliber ensemble is made up of bass (Rob Wasserman), drums (Fred Maher and Maureen Tucker) and two guitars, his own and that of Mike Rathke, who worthily replaced Quine and with whom he began a long collaboration that, remarkably, continues to this day.

His public image changed too. He was no longer the tormented, cursed rocker, but an intelligent, cultured fifty-something intellectual, fully freed from his old anxieties, who could finally look back on his embarrassing past with detachment and indifference.

Preceded by a show held on November 30, 1989 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (featuring film projections, an explicit homage to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable), the intense and at times harrowing Songs For Drella was released in April 1990: an epitaph by Reed and Cale for Andy Warhol, a great artist honored by two great artists. The album rests on their voices, Reed's guitar, and Cale's keyboards and viola. The musical structure is stripped down to the bone to let the lyrics stand out, which, very poetically but without giving up Reed's characteristic sense of irony and self-irony, narrate the life and times of the king of Pop Art.

In the summer of 1991, Reed fulfilled a long-held dream, publishing the collection of lyrics and poems "Between Thought And Expression." He personally chose the running order of the pieces, with the aim of having them read without any need for music, as genuine poems that help carry forward a narrative following one person's journey through New York across three decades: the Sixties, the Seventies, the Eighties. Described by Reed himself as "material for adults," the collection also includes two interviews: one with Hubert Selby Jr., a writer Reed particularly admired, and the other with Vaclav Havel, president of the then newly liberated Czech Republic and a Velvet Underground fan from way back, who returned the favor by giving Reed a copy of one of the 200 hand-printed books of his poems and song lyrics that had circulated among dissidents in pre-Glasnost Prague.

The album Magic And Loss (January 1992), dedicated to two dear friends who died of cancer in the early Nineties — musician Jerome "Doc" Pomus and "Rotten" Rita — confirms his rediscovered creative spark. "Between two Aprils I lost two friends, between two Aprils, magic and loss," he writes in the liner notes. The pain of loss can be eased by magic, a magic capable of transcending and sweeping everything else away with it. It's an occasion for unflinching reflection on life and death, a theme that has always held an enormous fascination for him. Death is indeed a seductive siren, but precisely for that reason also an enemy to be fought, one that unfortunately keeps winning too many battles. The lyrics — captivating, rarefied, pure poetry — supported by extremely simple melodies with almost imperceptible arrangements, not only let us understand his suffering but make us part of it. It's a work of enormous emotional impact, one that Newsweek called "the most adult rock record ever made."

From that point on, his live shows took a new turn, held mainly in theaters. He demanded that, when performing Magic And Loss in full, strictly following the album's track order, the audience remain in reverent silence — a move that cost him part of his fan base, but it was by then clear that Lou Reed had grown and wanted his audience to follow him down this new path, even at the risk of losing some of them along the way.

Magic And Loss, New York and Songs For Drella form an ideal, intense trilogy through which Reed takes stock of his life and his artistic maturity, fully establishing him as one of the most refined poets and one of the most intellectual musicians on the American scene — confirmation that, almost twenty-five years after his debut, he was an artist at the very peak of his vital and creative powers.

On February 18, 1992, he receives the investiture as "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" in Paris, and during the ceremony declares that the most important thing for him is art, which is what he turns to in order to survive.

1993 sees, after 25 years, the reunion of the classic Velvet Underground line-up, albeit without Nico, who died in July 1988 following a banal bicycle accident. The band performs a series of European concerts, later documented on the double album Live MCMXCIII; but the pathos and the magic can no longer be recreated, and their performances, however splendid and technically flawless, lack the emotional impact that always defined them.

The project was also meant to include the release of a new studio album, but the old tensions between the band members soon resurface and the attempt falls apart, largely due to Reed himself, his egocentrism, his inability - which is also a kind of talent - to accept compromise, and his wish to impose his own obsessive production methods on Cale, who refuses to make an album "the Reed way".

Sterling Morrison's death from a heart attack in August 1995 inevitably puts an end to the Velvet Underground's story. Cale, Reed and Tucker will play together one last time in 1996, on the occasion of the Velvet Underground's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, where they perform a song written for the occasion and dedicated precisely to Sterling.

Once again, Lou Reed completely changes his life, cutting himself off, in one clean sweep, from entire groups of people.

In 1994, after divorcing his wife/mother-figure/manager/protector Sylvia Morales and ending a 14-year marriage, he begins a romantic relationship and an artistic collaboration - still ongoing today - with multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, one of the most brilliant figures of the New York underground, whom he met at the end of 1993 at the Munich Arts Festival, where, at Reed's own invitation, she sang "A Dream" from Songs For Drella. "I was stunned when she sang it exactly as I would have, rhythmically, with all the right intervals," Reed would later recall.

Although it may seem paradoxical, the breakup of the Velvet Underground turns out to be a winning move for his solo career, which from that point on will always maintain a high profile. Directly or indirectly, having played with the Velvet Underground was, for Lou, a moment of exceptional inspiration. The proof is Set The Twilight Reeling, the album released in February 1996, dedicated to New York, a city with which he claims to be in perfect harmony, and to Laurie Anderson, his partner at the time. A meticulous work down to the smallest detail, produced personally by Reed, who composes all the arrangements and plays every guitar part himself. The sound, the result of two and a half years of obsessive research, is meant, according to Reed, to give listeners the impression of witnessing a live performance. Having abandoned the minimalist style of his most recent work, the rhythms here are those of the purest, most energetic rock'n'roll, at times bordering on noise, alternating with tender ballads featuring a few remarkable guitar solos. The themes are those of love and relationships - the description of Laurie in "The Adventurer" is splendid - telling, without sentimentality and never banally, the story of a new, rediscovered man, freed of all his regrets, in love and happy enough to "make the twilight reel"; even if, through learned Shakespearean references, he's keen to point out that he's still a tough guy, a "New York City Man". Inevitably present is the hard-hitting, socially charged "Sex With Your Parents", a scathing attack on the moralism of certain figures on the American religious right, accused of pushing a harsh crackdown on sex, and on a radio host obsessed with restoring order through the nightstick, the rifle and the electric chair.

On July 13, 1997, on the occasion of the Meltdown Festival, a London music event curated by Anderson herself, Reed performs a semi-acoustic concert with a guitar specially commissioned from a master luthier, which, in his words, "sounds like a diamond". The album, released in April 1998 under the title Perfect Night, is the recording of that concert, which, song after song, ideally retraces his career, from the old Velvet Underground classics to his most recent theatrical work, Time Rocker. Lou Reed sings and plays with real precision, and the guitar duets with Mike Rathke bring to mind those with Robert Quine.

1997 also sees his reconciliation with David Bowie, after almost twenty years apart. The official celebration of their rekindled friendship takes place on January 8, during the Benefit Concert held at New York's Madison Square Garden for the White Duke's fiftieth birthday, where Bowie introduces Lou as "The King of New York", before launching into duets with him on "White Light/White Heat" (Velvet Underground) and "Queen Bitch", a song Bowie wrote with Reed as his direct inspiration.

In April 2000, when he releases Ecstasy, Reed is 58 years old. His first album of the new millennium - dedicated to Laurie Anderson, his muse - is once again astonishing. The 14 tracks, spanning 80 minutes of music, like small pearls on a splendid necklace, offer further confirmation of his talent. Standing out among them are the startling 14-minute acid jam "Like A Possum"; the gorgeous "Rock Minuet"; the minimalist poetry of the title track; the relentless "Big Sky"; right up to "Paranoia Key", probably the most convincing track, thanks in part to its infectious, gripping rhythm. As for the lyrics, his mature years and calmer circumstances have clearly led the artist to reflect on his wild past and the mistakes he made.

In June 2001, a concert performed by Reed on December 26, 1972 in New York for the radio broadcast American Poet is finally released in official form, featuring splendid reinterpretations of Velvet Underground songs and tracks from Transformer.

Robert Wilson - with whom he had already collaborated, having composed 16 songs with lyrics by Darryl Pinckney for the theatrical production Time Rocker, inspired by H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine" - gets in touch with him about a project involving the staging of a theatrical piece titled POEtry, a clever play on words combining Poe's surname with the word "poetry"; the ambitious, daring undertaking centers on the poetics and themes of Poe's work, filtered and reworked by Reed, who also writes the spoken-word parts for the show.

In 2000, producer Hal Wilner, a great admirer of E.A. Poe, had invited Lou Reed to read "The Tell-Tale Heart" at St. Anne's Church in New York. "Suddenly, for the first time, while I was reading it, I understood the meaning of the story," he would later reveal. There are many affinities between the 19th-century American writer, so incredibly modern and in tune with our times, and an artist like Lou Reed, so close to the twilight spirit of the man he considers, in his mind, the father of William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. They share the same biting sarcasm, a fatal attraction to Evil from which they have the courage not to look away, the fascination that guilt and obsession hold over them, a strong drive toward self-mortification, toward a desire for destruction. Both ask themselves the same questions: Who am I? Why are we driven to do what we shouldn't, to love what we cannot have, to reject what we have, and to grow passionate about what is wrong?

The album The Raven, released in January 2002, is nothing other than the theatrical work revised and reworked by Reed specifically for recording.

Reed also wrote songs for films, and in a few of them reserved himself small cameo roles, as in Wim Wenders's "Far Away, So Close" or in Paul Auster's "Blue Face".

He lived dangerously, and came so close to the flames of hell that he could claim: "I walked through fire, running my tongue over my lips," the title of his last lyrical autobiography, gathering all his lyrics up to Ecstasy, produced with an eye-catching graphic design for the original texts that fits perfectly with the words (even though the Italian translation drew some criticism). Page after page, we venture into the pain, the squalor, the suffering of trans people, prostitutes, drifters, the mad, heroin addicts, and into the degradation that he has always been able to "photograph" so skillfully. "I've always thought my words went beyond reportage and took emotional, if amoral, stances."

A complete artist, gifted with charisma and culture, adorable and charming, seductive but also wicked and anything but accommodating, he was, and is, a writer, poet, inventor of sounds, musician, researcher. His greatness lies in having managed to elevate rock music — until then regarded as a youthful art form — to intellectual stature, turning it into what he himself repeatedly called "rock for adults." Just as Warhol had done in other fields, he knew how to carry "high culture" into a format accessible to the masses. Through his lyrics he portrayed, with compassion, the dark sides of contemporary society, revealing the hidden, desperate depths of the human soul. He made suffering beautiful while leaving room for hope, never giving in to the temptation to judge. His work has never seemed dated — his songs from yesterday still sound as if they were written today. The tight t-shirt and the tar-black leather trousers form a kind of uniform that has outlasted decades of changing fashions, styles and philosophies. The wrinkles that cut across his face — inscrutable, ironic, indifferent and reserved — are like ideograms telling the entire story of rock, through every phase of his decades-long career.

His style as a guitarist is intense, visceral, thrilling. For him the guitar is "like a tool, a means to communicate emotions, states of mind, to experiment with sonic solutions that give shape to thoughts." His voice, deep and unmistakable, perhaps not even beautiful and almost bizarre, can be ironic and biting, warm and light, trembling and fervent, compassionate and declamatory, to the point of sounding like a dear friend telling us a story, always capable of delivering powerful emotions. Today he devotes himself to literature, poetry readings and concerts. He still lives and works in his New York, in constant search of the exact expressive means that will allow him to keep being creative and to preserve his integrity intact, without ever losing the defiant edge that has always defined him. "One of my rules is: never listen to your own old records. Anyone who does is just a nostalgic idiot wallowing in the past with no interest in inventing something new. I believe life is too short to dwell on the past — I'd rather look to the future."

In 2007 Reed released the bizarre Hudson River Wind Meditation, a record of electronic meditation-experimentation released by Sounds True: cyclical sounds attempting to evoke the wind blowing over the New York river. That same year, the bard of the Big Apple picked the songbook of Berlin back up, bringing it to the stage in European theatres.

In spring 2011 came the classic bolt from the blue: a partnership with Metallica took shape, and within just a few months it materialized into the double album titled Lulu. It's a genuine rock opera, inspired by two stage plays written by the German author Frank Wedekind. And while disapproval mounted on both sides of the fan divide, the album shows the classic declamatory Reed backed by the dark, uncompromising sound produced by the San Francisco band. Singer-songwriter fare in a metal sauce, one might say. What's certain is the story of Lulu, a lost yet lucid victim of today's violent confusion. Media response was split: amid numerous outright rejections, quite a few voices also hailed it as (almost) a masterpiece. Either way, the result is neither to be dismissed nor applauded unconditionally. A decent heavy rock record, all things considered harmless and predictable, yet sound and well made.

Weakened by various health problems, which led him to undergo a liver transplant and to be hospitalized several times, Lou Reed died in New York on October 27, 2013, leaving the rock universe with an enormous void and a precious legacy. His wife Laurie Anderson remembered him with these words:

"As a special tribute, Lou's three meditation teachers... "

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