Reed foremost gained prominence when a guitarist and main singer-songwriter of The Velvet Underground. A band, which lasted from either 1965 until 1972 (with Reed departing around late 1970), gained little notice during its life-time however is typically considered a “big bang� from which virtually all guide rock sprang. When a Velvets’ songster, Reed wrote just about such taboo subjects as S&M (“Venus in Furs�) and drug addiction (“I’m Waiting for the Man,� “Heroin�). As a guitar player, he processed innovative utilise of abrasive distortion & peculiar tunings.

Reed has got an extended & varied solo career. Although he scored the hit using 1972’s “Walk on the Wild Side,� he has purposefully evaded commercial success & has freed albums that use at times frustrated potentially his fans (virtually all notably 1975’s infamous Metal Machine Music, upon which he later commented that 'there is no the single is supposed to exist as take a breath to wash a tool rather that & hold up'). Eventually, largely, Reed has been widely admired by fans, music critics & fellow ballad maker.

Reed has sleep in New York City for most of his life & tremendously of his music evokes a city.

Career
Reed was the fan of rock & rhythm and blues, playing within many high school rock bands, and got recorded the doo wop-style single as a member of The Shades. Reed attended Syracuse University where he met poet Delmore Schwartz, whom Reed credits for his simple poetic vernacular and the encouragement to turn into the writer. Reed too developed the taste for free jazz and experimental music. Reed said late his goals were "to bring the sensitivities of the novel to rock music," or even to write the Great American Novel in a record album.

Reed moved to New York City, working as a songwriter for Pickwick Records where he came higher by using the parody of so-popular dances, known as "The Ostrich". A song got hit record potential, and Reed met John Cale when Cale joined a band collectively in Reed, known as a Primitives, to promote a recording. Reed too played Cale the handful of songs (including "Heroin") he assured him "they'll never publish." Cale thought otherwise, & it became collaborators.

This attach served when a basis for The Velvet Underground where Lou was lead guitarist/vocalist/lyricist. (In "The Ostrich", Lou tuned to each a single guitar string to one note. Cale remarked at how else genius this idethe was for creating a buzzing consequence. Lou in point of fact saw this utilized prior & just copied a idea. It was utilized in the VU song "All Tomorrow's Parties". Though internally unstable (breaking higher within 1970) and never commercially viable, a V.U.'s reputation when one of a virtually all influential underground bands has remained intact.

Inside 1972 Reed, nowadays a solo creative person, freed the glam rock album Transformer, produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson. He followed this by owning Berlin, which tells something like the romance of 2 junkies in the city of the same name. This, one of a other depressing albums ever manufactured, includes "Caroline Says II" (violence), "The Kids" (prostitution and drug addiction), "The Bed" (suicide) and, unsurprisingly, "Sad Song."

Reed's chosen subject matter was far ahead of its period. Popular music would not catch as much as him until a punks in the mid- to late-1970s, but potentially so his songs were unique: whether drenched feedback or gently melodic, Reed usually sang just abretired a distressful, whenever does'nt sordid, items more lyrist left out. "Walk on the Wild Side" is a wry & graphic salute to the misfits, male hustlers and transvestites at Andy Warhol's Factory. "Perfect Day" was later involved on the soundtrack to Trainspotting and used inside an extensive promotional campaign per BBC. Within his chosen lesson Reed followed, & updated, such authors when Allen Ginsberg and Jean Genet. Reed's persona was too far advanced, preferring melanize leather and S&M-like gear even in the hippie-infested 1960s.

Around 1975, he produced a double studio album of pure feedback Metal Machine Music. A bit of regarded it as an attempt to break his record company contract. A rock journalist Lester Bangs declared it genius. Though admitting that a liner notes' listings of instruments utilized is fictitious & parodistic, Reed maintains that MMM was and occurs as good album. His albums of the late 1970s are often take to be a mixed affair by rock critics, owing at least partially to the addictions that were so overtaking Reed.

In the early 1980s, Reed gave up a doses & depravity, each withwithin his act & in his personal life, to locatiin other good concerns, notably on his acclaimed comeback album The Blue Mask. He married Sylvia Morales (late divorced). Reed fired an angry salvo at his hometown's political problems on the hit album New York, denouncing crime, high rents, Jesse Jackson, even Pope John Paul II and Kurt Waldheim. After 1-erstwhile Velvet Underground patron & producer Andy Warhol died after the routine surgery, Reed closed a Xxv-season hiatus to collaborate sustaining fellow ex-V.U. John Cale on Songs for Drella, a Warhol life story inside minimalist pop music. Affectingly tender & painfully confessional, typically witty, Reed's vocals bulla after singing of alleged medical errors & Valerie Solanas' 1968 assassination attempt on Warhol.

Reed continued in victims dark notes sustaining Magic and Loss, an album about mortality. Within 1997 over thirty creative person covered "Perfect Day" for the BBC's "Children in Need" appeal. Incorrect reports of his death were broadcast by many U.s. radio stations within 2001, caused by the fraudulence e-mail (purporting to become from either Reuters) which said he had died of an overdose. Within 2003, he released the Two-CD set, The Raven, based on a works of Edgar Allan Poe. Inside 2004, a Groovefinder remix of his song, "Satellite of Love" (called "Satellite of Love '04") was freed. It reached #10 in the UK singles chart.

Around 1996, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

He has been around a relationship sustaining the creative person Laurie Anderson for several years.

Discography
With The Velvet Underground
For fully discography, please view a Velvet Underground article.

The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967) White Light/White Heat (1968) The Velvet Underground (1969) Loaded (1970) ''Live at Max's Kansas City (1972, recorded 1970) 1969: The Velvet Underground Live (1974, recorded 1969) VU (1985, recorded 1968-1969) Another View (1986, recorded 1967-1969) Live MCMXCIII (1993) Peel Slowly and See (1995 box placed, recorded 1965-1970) Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (2001, recorded live 1969) The Very Best of the Velvet Underground (2003, recorded 1966-1970)

Solo
Studio albums
Lou Reed (1972) Transformer (1972) Berlin (1973) Sally Can't Dance (1974) Metal Machine Music (1975) Coney Island Baby (1976) Rock 'n' Roll Heart (1976) Street Hassle (1978) The Bells (1979) Growing Up in Public (1980) The Blue Mask (1982) Legendary Hearts (1983) New Sensations (1984) Mistrial (1986) New York (1989) Magic and Loss (1992) Set the Twilight Reeling (1996) Ecstacy (2000) The Raven (2003)

Live albums
Rock 'n' Roll Animal (1974) Lou Reed Live (1975) Live: Take No Prisoners (1978) Live in Italy (1984) Live in Concert (1997) Perfect Night: Live in London (1998) American Poet (2001) Extended Versions (2003) Animal Serenade (2004)

Collaborations
Songs for Drella with John Cale (1990) Le Bataclan '72 with John Cale & Nico (2004)

Appears on
Sweetly Relief: The Gain For Victoria Williams (1993) Brilliantly Red, Laurie Anderson (1994) Till The Nighttime Is Never to return: A Tribute To Doc Pomus (1995) September Songs (A Music Of Kurt Weill) (1997) Rockin' in Broadway (A Time/Brent/Shad Story) (2000, includes 1st recordings by owning A Jades [1958] & solo [1962]) & Whole That Stand Been (Nine inch nails tour documentary) [2002] (Uncredited) I personally'm the Bird Today Antony & the Johnsons (2005) The Thirtieth Day of remembrance Concert Celebration, Bob Dylan (1993)

Singles

|rowspan="2"|Year |rowspan="2"| Title |colspan="4"| Chart positions |rowspan="2"| Album |-

|US Hot 100 |US Modern Rock |US Mainstream Rock |UK |- | 1989 | "Dirty Blvd." | - | #One (Quatern weeks) | - | - | Just released York |- | 1989 | "Busload of Faith" | - | #11 | - | - | Just released York |- | 1990 | "Nobody But You" (by having John Cale) | - | #13 | - | - | Songs for Drella'' |}