Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer, Dead at 7. Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today on Long Island. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May. Look back at Lou Reed's remarkable career in photos. With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street- level urgency with elements of European avant- garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2.

The Hollywood Reporter is your source for breaking news about Hollywood and entertainment, including movies, TV, reviews and industry blogs. Certified Fresh. Movies and TV shows are Certified Fresh with a steady Tomatometer of 75% or higher after a set amount of reviews (80 for. She was 71.

Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. Three chords and you're into jazz.

A fan of doo- wop and early rock & roll (he movingly inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1. Reed also took formative inspiration during his studies at Syracuse University with the poet Delmore Schwartz. After college, he worked as a staff songwriter for the novelty label Pickwick Records (where he had a minor hit in 1. In the mid- Sixties, Reed befriended Welsh musician John Cale, a classically trained violist who had performed with groundbreaking minimalist composer La Monte Young. Reed and Cale formed a band called the Primitives, then changed their name to the Warlocks. After meeting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, they became the Velvet Underground. With a stark sound and ominous look, the band caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who incorporated the Velvets into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

But we were all wearing black anyway. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde. Reed's matter- of- fact descriptions of New York’s bohemian demimonde, rife with allusions to drugs and S& M, pushed beyond even the Rolling Stones’ darkest moments, while the heavy doses of distortion and noise for its own sake revolutionized rock guitar. The band’s three subsequent albums – 1. White Light/White Heat, 1.

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The Velvet Underground and 1. Loaded, which despite being recorded while he was leaving the group, contained two Reed standards, “Rock & Roll” and “Sweet Jane,” were similarly ignored.

But they’d be embraced by future generations, cementing the Velvet Underground’s status as the most influential American rock band of all time. But it was his next album, 1. Transformer, produced by Reed- disciple David Bowie, that pushed him beyond cult status into genuine rock stardom. Reed spent the Seventies defying expectations almost as a kind of sport. Berlin was brutal literary bombast while 1. Sally Can’t Dance had soul horns and flashy guitar.

In 1. 97. 5 he released Metal Machine Music, a seething all- noise experiment his label RCA marketed as a avant- garde classic music, while 1. Take No Prisoners was a kind of comedy record in which Reed went on wild tangents and savaged rock critics by name (“Lou sure is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people,” one of those critics, Robert Christgau, wrote at the time). Explaining his less- than- accommodating career trajectory, Reed told journalist Lester Bangs, “My bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds.”Reed’s ambiguous sexual persona and excessive drug use throughout the Seventies was the stuff of underground rock myth. But in the Eighties, he began to mellow. He married Sylvia Morales and opened a window into his new married life on 1. Film Noir Movies Adult Beginners (2015).

The Blue Mask, his best work since Transformer. His 1. 98. 4 album New Sensations took a more commercial turn and 1. New York ended the decade with a set of funny, politically cutting songs that received universal critical praise. In 1. 99. 1, he collaborated with Cale on Songs For Drella, a tribute to Warhol. Three years later, the Velvet Underground reunited for a series of successful European gigs. Within a few years, Reed began a relationship with musician- performance artist Laurie Anderson. The two became an inseparable New York fixture, collaborating and performing live together, while also engaging in civic and environmental activism.

They were married in 2. Reed continued to follow his own idiosyncratic artistic impulses throughout the . The once- decadent rocker became an avid student of T'ai Chi, even bringing his instructor onstage during concerts in 2.

In 2. 00. 5 he released a double CD called The Raven, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In 2. 00. 7, he released an ambient album titled Hudson River Wind Meditations. Reed returned to mainstream rock with 2. Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica.“All through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter,” he told Rolling Stone in 1. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”.

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