Back when the Velvet Underground was starting up, one of its first live audiences consisted mainly of a group of sailors.
Annoyed at the band’s abrasive take on rock ’n’ roll, the seamen approached guitarist Lou Reed and warned: “Play one more song like that and we’ll beat the s–t out of you.”
Reed and his new band proceeded to play another song exactly like “that,” and a bar fight promptly ensued.
The defiant move was classic Reed: He was a grumpy contrarian who absolutely refused to do anything that was expected of him.
But it’s why we loved him — and what made him a true New Yorker.
The trait stayed with him through life, and he injected it in some of his best art. The Velvet Underground was just one of the many ways he could say, “Screw you.”
Shortly after launching his solo career in the early 1970s, Reed found himself in the unlikely position of being a pop star thanks to the huge success of his “Transformer” album. His response was to next release the incredibly dark concept album “Berlin,” about a drug-addled couple and their grim and violent lives.
At the time, it was poorly received, with Rolling Stone even suggesting that Reed should suffer some form of vengeance for daring to record such a thing.
Now, every “Best Albums Ever” list includes it. And rightly so.
And it was nothing compared to Reed’s 1975 “Metal Machine Music” album — a collage of screeching and feedback that nearly ended his career.
But again, he was ahead of his time, and the work is now cited as a precursor to the punk spirit and a set text for the avant garde. New York’s Sonic Youth was so hugely influenced by it that the band would play parts of it during their own early sets.
Age didn’t soften Reed’s desire to create music regardless of whether or not it pissed people off.
In 2003, he recorded “The Raven,” based on the work by Edgar Allan Poe, and in 2011 — his last recording, as it turned out — he teamed up with Metallica to release the brutal “Lulu.”
The sound of his growling, spoken-word monologues over a vicious audio assault again resulted in a critical kicking, including a 1 out of 10 score on Pitchfork.com.
Reed was fantastically bullish in his response, claiming that the album would only be understood by “literate” people.
He might not have had the body for a full-on bar brawl but even in his last days, Lou wasn’t one to back away from a fight.
There won’t be another musician like him again.
His death doesn’t just mark the passing of a music legend, it represents another lost piece of the gritty New York we once knew.
Don’t rest in peace, Lou. Wherever you are now, I hope you’re giving ’em hell.