LOU REED
Words & Music, May 1965 LIGHT IN THE ATTIC
8/10
IN 1965, Lewis Reed was a half-formed thing. In fluctuating quantities he was a street poet, a reporter, a Greenwich Village folkie, a comedian, a pop hack. He had his own ideas, some of them borrowed, a few of them blue. He was an experiment. He wasn’t yet an original. Run the tape backwards – to 1963/4, say – and it’s evident that Reed’s metamorphosis was speeding up. Back then, when two years in pop history was an age, the Dylanisms came loaded, from 1970. The end and the beginning were the same.
