Lou Reed(1942–2013)

Lewis Allan Reed was born at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, New York City, on the second of March 1942, eldest of the two children of Sidney Joseph Reed, an accountant from a Russian-Jewish New York family who had changed the family surname from Rabinowitz to Reed in 1944, and Toby Futterman, a homemaker and former beauty-queen. The family moved to Freeport on Long Island when Lou was nine and he was raised in the Long Island suburbs through the 1950s. He took the BA in English at Syracuse University in 1964 under the New York poet Delmore Schwartz (Schwartz became the central literary influence on Reed's later songwriting, and Reed dedicated several of his early songs to Schwartz).

He moved to New York City in 1964 to take staff-songwriter work at the Pickwick Records demo-label at Long Island City, met the Welsh-born avant-garde composer and viola player John Cale at a Pickwick session in late 1964, and through 1965 the two of them founded with the rhythm guitarist Sterling Morrison and the drummer Maureen Tucker the band the Velvet Underground (taking the name from the title of a 1963 paperback book on suburban-American sexuality that Tony Conrad had left at the rehearsal space). The Velvet Underground came under the patronage of Andy Warhol in early 1966, was packaged into Warhol's multimedia event Exploding Plastic Inevitable through 1966, and produced under Warhol's nominal production with the German singer-model Nico the foundational album The Velvet Underground & Nico, recorded April 1966 to November 1966 and released in March 1967.

The four Velvet Underground albums (The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967; White Light/White Heat, 1968; The Velvet Underground, 1969; Loaded, 1970) sold modestly on first release but became across the next decade the foundational catalogue of the modern American underground-rock tradition: Brian Eno's famous summary that everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album started a band has been confirmed by the long sequence of post-1975 American art-rock bands (Patti Smith, Television, the Modern Lovers, the Talking Heads, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Pavement) whose original members cited the Velvet Underground records as the central formative influence. Reed left the Velvet Underground in August 1970 in his twenty-ninth year.

His solo career through the next four decades produced the body of work on which his world reputation rests: Transformer (1972, produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, with the singles Walk on the Wild Side and Perfect Day and the album's foundational role in the emergence of glam rock); the song-cycle Berlin (1973, produced by Bob Ezrin), Sally Can't Dance (1974, his best-selling album, reached number 10 on the US Billboard 200); the live double-album Rock 'n' Roll Animal (1974); the abrasive noise-and-feedback Metal Machine Music (1975); the long late catalogue running through Coney Island Baby (1976), The Bells (1979), The Blue Mask (1982), New York (1989, the late-career critical and commercial peak), Magic and Loss (1992), and the final studio album Lulu (2011, in collaboration with Metallica). He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Velvet Underground in 1996 and as a solo artist in 2015 (the posthumous induction). He died at his East Hampton, New York, home on the twenty-seventh of October 2013 in his seventy-second year. The Reed name in modern American popular music carries the weight of the four Velvet Underground albums and the long solo catalogue.