January 22, 1972 - Lou Reed Article Melody Maker

by Richard Williams

THE big speakers at the far end of the small, narrow room are about to burst.

Guitars wash across them, while a kettle-drum cracks and a gong explodes in slow motion, like a flower opening, aaaaoooommmmm!

Inside those speakers, a man is going mad.

Lou Reed leans forvard, lights a Marlboro, and emp- ties a glass of beer into his face.

Someone's gotta speak for those people," he says.

LOU REED made his first record when he was 14. His group was called the Shades, changed to the Jays when they found out that somebody else already had the name.

"Our lead singer couldn't reach the microphone they had to put him on a stool," he says. "We played shopping centre openings, things like that. Typical teenage hoodlum band."

The Jays were in the tradition of the New York vocal groups of the Fifties. "The Ravens, the Diabolos, the Cleftones, the Jesters. I used to go crazy for records like that, the street group sound."

Favourite

One of his all-time favourite records, he says, was only ever popular on his block. It was called "Why Can't I Be Loved," by Elisha and the Rockways, and he proudly drags the words out of his memory: "Why can't I be loved/Why doesn't someone take me/If I've been asleep/Won't somebody please come and awake me."

"I fall down when I hear those lyrics," he says. "I don't think that a lot of our contemporary poet laureates are nearly up to songs like that."

For the Velvet Underground's fourth album, Lou wrote a song which was based on that old sound. It even had a solemn speaking bit in the middle. And on his next album, which he's finishing right now in London, there's a tune called "Love Makes You Feel Ten Feet Tall" which is another attempt to regain the directness of the sounds of his adolescence.