Lou Reed's lost treasure: The inside story of the rediscovered demo tapes
Lou Reed — Words & Music 1965 is released on Friday, Sept 16.
Lou Reed’s Sister Ray office in New York’s West Village housed a cornucopia of artefacts spanning the singer’s life and career. Among this vast collection were his private photos, personal letters, tour memorabilia and bootlegs.
From his early days in the music business, Reed was on the cutting edge of technology, filming rehearsals and various early performances leaving over 100 hours of video footage as well as around 600 hours of audio recordings.
A tape was even known to exist that featured early versions of Velvet Underground tracks such as I’m Waiting For The Man and Heroin. Reed had written the latter as early as 1964 quipping: “The Beatles released I Want To Hold Your Hand when I was writing Heroin.”
After his death in October 2013 at the age of 71, Reed archivists Jason Stern and Don Fleming were invited to help sort through the considerable collection. While they were aware of the tape Reed had sent to himself as a “poor man’s copyright” in May 1965, it proved to be elusive.
“It wasn’t turning up,” explains Stern. “We thought it would be in this safe, we had to get a locksmith to open this thing up which turned out to be empty. By this stage the clock was ticking, the lease was running out on the office and we were weeks away from everything having to go into storage”.
It turned out the evasive tape was right under their noses on a shelf behind a desk among a pile of CDs. The package which had remained unopened for almost 50 years had been within reaching distance of Reed.
“It was a five-inch reel-to-reel about the same size as a CD case and covered in postmarks addressed to ‘Lewis Reed’ at his childhood address,” says Stern. “There was a debate about this thing being underwhelming and we wondered if it would be better to preserve the mystery."
After ensuring the tape was in good enough condition to be played, it was time to reveal what was on it. "Four of us packed into this little room and hit the play button," says Stern. "We were just looking at each other with eyes wide open, we could hear right away Lou and John [Cale] in this folk music style.”
Reed had met Cale while both were working at Pickwick Records and were members of the label’s studio band. The new collection, Words & Music — May 1965, captures the early alchemy between the pair, harmonising during an alluring Pale Blue Eyes. It’s the first version to feature Reed and Cale together as the Welshman had left the Velvet Underground when the song was released on their third self-titled long-player.
“This version was almost two years before the first [Velvet Underground & Nico] album. It was mind-blowing because the words are different, it’s still a work in progress, although it sounds complete the words aren’t finished,” explains Don Fleming.
Born a week apart in March 1942, Cale and Reed busked together as the Falling Spikes. “We are hearing this formative time pre-Velvet Underground when he met Cale and they were busking on street corners, we knew they had done this but we never knew what it sounded like,” says Fleming.
Words & Music is a beguiling collection that reveals several ideas that Reed would continue to shape and mould for over a decade. ‘Men Of Good Fortune’ is featured among the tracks and sounds radically different from the final cut which appeared on Berlin in 1973.
“That was mind-blowing,” adds Fleming, “this version sounds like one of the Child Ballads, the English and Scottish ballads compiled by Francis Child. He’s writing in this old form and the other crazy thing was it had the same title as the song he used years later, it's completely different, all the lyrics have been changed.”
The rock’n’roll animal image of Lou swigging from a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red behind aviator shades under cropped peroxide hair by 1974 was a notable shift in just under a decade. As his third wife, Laurie Anderson recently said: “You don’t become Lou Reed overnight.”
Words & Music does provide a significant marker, as Fleming suggests: “It's when he met John Cale and everything went wacky.” The Velvet Underground would soon be a going concern but at this point, Reed was informed by the folk tradition associated with Lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village and Bob Dylan. The collection includes a snippet of Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’.
“Here’s Lou and John singing in this folk style, we knew he was a big fan; we had already found a tape of him singing Dylan covers with the neck brace and harmonica. He saw Dylan perform at Syracuse [University].” Reed would often refer back to his time at Syracuse under the guidance of his English professor, the poet Delmore Schwartz.
“He was the biggest influence on his life in terms of wanting to be a poet and a serious writer”, says Fleming. “It’s reflected in all of his work, lyrics and poetry. As far as mentors go Delmore and Andy Warhol are the two biggest influences. He spoke well of them his whole life. He had just left school when this tape was made and that connection was very fresh.”
Included in the deluxe version of the release is the reproduction of a letter written to Schwartz that offers a sense of Reed getting the grit of New York under his fingernails, where it would remain throughout the rest of his career. Perhaps filmmaker Martin Scorsese put it best. “He actually spoke and sang in the voice of the lowest of the low, the dregs, the ‘least among us' — the people looking to follow the first thing that gives them a right to be. He spoke the language of people who had nothing but their own humanity, and he elevated them”.
As part of the celebrations of what would have been the late singer’s 80th birthday, a new exhibition Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars is presented by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Music & Recorded Sound Division who acquired Reed's archive in 2017.
Stern and Fleming have co-curated the event shining a light on some of the subject’s more controversial works such as Metal Machine Music (1975) the long out-of-print vinyl record was granted a reissue overseen by Reed in 2009.
“We both have an affinity with Metal Machine Music, there was no having to convince the other person,” says Stern. “There was a tape in the archive labelled ‘Electric Rock Symphony’ which stood out as it sounded like a demo tape for that record. After a while we matched it with some other tapes, it’s now more likely it dates back to around 1965 or ’66.
“It was hearing the voices of both Nico and John Cale that dated the tape to a Velvet Underground session, further proving how much Reed’s formative experiments and writing would shape the next decade and run deep into his solo catalogue.” Words & Music includes a cut that dates back to when Reed was a 16-year-old doo-wop fan rehearsing at the family home in Long Island.
“Gee Whiz is the earliest thing we’ve found,” reveals Fleming. “It went from this rehearsal in 1958 to him doing Dylan songs about three years later. It’s with the Shades who would become the Jades, it’s crazy this thing even exists.” There’s been much conjecture as to why Reed kept the tape so close throughout his life. One writer suggests it was a sort of ‘talisman’.
Down the line from the apartment she once shared with Reed, the Brooklyn-born singer’s ex-wife and manager Sylvia Reed suggests the truth is far more practical. “He explained to me the reason for keeping and not opening the package. It was protection, that was his focus because various events had happened, he went through some disagreements with the Velvet Underground. He had to make sure his work was protected. A lot of people in the music business didn’t have his best interests at heart.”
Whatever the reason, the tape has provided a fascinating way to revive memories of Reed over five decades after it was recorded.
- Lou Reed —Words & Music 1965 is released on Friday, September 16. Physical formats on vinyl, CD and cassette, including a deluxe edition, will follow on October 21
