When Lou Reed wrote mass pop songs

Before combining transgression, art and experimentation with the Velvet Underground, before becoming the solo Rock ‘n’ roll Animal, Lou Reed began as an author of pop songs. When he was in his early 20s, Reed worked for Pickwick Records, a New York label dedicated to sound-alikes, copies of the great hits of the period to be released on the market in $1 collections. They were really thought of as songs written and produced in a serial manner: yet even in that period, between ’64 and ’65, Reed managed to express his personality, laying the foundations for one of the greatest careers in rock music.
It was in that period that he also met John Cale, with whom he played in the Primitives, and shortly thereafter formed the Velvet Underground.

All this is told by “Why Don’t You Smile Now: Lou Reed at Pickwick Records 1964-65”, a new collection from Light In The Attics, the label that releases Lou Reed’s archives, in collaboration with his wife Laurie Anderson.

Lou Reed Pop

The other unpublished collections released in recent years also tell the origins of the myth, but focusing on the singer-songwriter Lou Reed, the one who wrote and sang songs with voice and guitar that later became classics (“Words and music”) or the one in the transition phase between the VU and solo career (“I’m so free: 1971 RCA Demos”). Here we go even further back.
As the author of the liner notes Richie Unterberger notes, Lou Reed had recorded his first songs at the age of 16, during high school, in the late 1950s, with his first band. When he arrived at Pickwick, in New York, it was a different world: you entered a room with other authors and wrote, trying to come up with songs that were recognizable and had a market, replicating successful models.

“Pickwick’s working method was unlikely for Reed, thinking about how he would work with the Velvet Underground and his solo career, but the photo on the cover of this collection indicates that he must have found a certain level of camaraderie with his bandmates. colleagues at work,” explains Unterberger, citing the image you see above. Thus a Reed-Philips-Vance-Sims quartet was created, with Lou occasionally singing and playing, as well as writing.
In the songs contained in the collection there is garage, Motown (“Soul city”) the reference to pop, but also the hypnotic beats of guitars which will then form the basis of Velvet songs as in “Cycle annie”, attributed to Beach-Nuts and sung by Reed himself, with a harsh but recognizable voice.

Reed “felt personality, style, songs as if they were clothes, masks, secret identities, looking at these characters in the mirror, and wondering who could have been them,” writes Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s guitarist but first and foremost a rock historian, in the introduction. , curator of the “Nuggets” collection which recounted and rediscovered the origins of American garage rock. “Lou Reed was an extraordinarily prolific writer: diaristic, he borrowed riffs, he invented new ones, he found ways to reveal and grapple with himself, with his many contradictions and exaltations, to understand and accept the sharp facets of the personality that sought to coexist with each other. Strange to say, it was catchy and decidedly pop, despite its psychodrama, and is key to Lou’s lasting legacy,” concludes Kaye.

The meeting with John Cale

The collection opens with “The ostrich”, a song by the Primitives, a band in which Reed was joined by John Cale – whom the label identified in Manhattan at a party for his look and who enlisted in the band for some concerts. In the Pickwick studios Cale and Reed recorded the first demo of “Heroin” in May 1965 – shortly after Reed would abandon the job and the Velvet Underground would subsequently be born.
“Lou Reed’s time at Pickwick still afforded him great studio experience.

The mix of styles he wrote with his own.
collaborators gave him his first opportunities to explore his love of rock, soul, the sounds of girl groups, Phil Spector and a little experimentation in commercially released material,” concludes Unterberger.

“I was like an unsuccessful Ellie Greenwich, a poor Carole King,” Reed would recall years later in an interview. “There were these three other guys, we’d all go in this room and write songs. We sat there until someone came up with something… The others, I think, wanted to have a future making pop records. I, on the other hand, had my songs.” The legend of Lou Reed was about to begin