Why ‘twisted' Lou Reed hated his fans

Telegraph

19-07-2025

Reed's 1975 album Metal Machine Music, there's one moment that is undeniably sweeter, more memorable, more perfect than any other. It's when you turn it off. You'll never regret that moment. Not today. Not tomorrow. And not for the rest of your life.
The LP was released 50 years ago this week. Its cover is a backlit shot of the former Velvet Underground guitarist and singer on stage; he exudes New York street cool in leather and shades. Only for the first 10 seconds of the actual record, though, is there even a hint that this might be the start of a rock album, picking up perhaps from the howling feedback and distortion that closes European Son, the final track on 1967's The Velvet Underground & Nico.
That hope is soon dashed. Metal Machine Music's vinyl grooves contain 65 minutes and three seconds of dissonant noise, screaming in your ear like a hell's-mouth chorus. There's no discernible melody, very little progression, and only at minute 62 and 46 seconds does the suggestion of a rhythm occur. Music magazine Creem reviewed it in a box that simply said, in capital letters, 'NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO…' (plus a lot more 'NOs'). So many fans returned it immediately after purchase that Reed's record company, RCA, withdrew the original vinyl LP within weeks.
Review of Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music", 1975.
50 years this month pic.twitter.com/oPv8qmmO9P
— Bill Pourquoimec (@BillPourquoimec) July 17, 2025
Remarkably, the album landed less than three years on from the release of Transformer (1972) – the masterful David Bowie and Mick Ronson-produced solo album, which included Vicious, Walk on the Wild Side and Perfect Day (on which Reed was beautifully accompanied by Ronson on piano). That album confirmed Reed as one of the great songwriters of his generation; audiences adored it. But for the surly Brooklynite, that was the problem.
'I put out Metal Machine Music precisely to put a stop to all of it,' he declared in Victor Bockris's 1994 biography Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. 'It was a giant f--- you. I wanted to clear the air and get rid of all those f---ing a--holes who show up and yell Vicious and Walk on the Wild Side.'
It's the sort of truculence that Reed was famous for; his former Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale called him 'a twisted, scary monster'. And that 'S' word crops up a lot. Bockris later noted that 'it wasn't easy to make Lou a famous pop figure. He was a hard figure to market because the edges were so hard, and he was kind of scary, you know, a scary figure.'
That extended to fans and friends alike. In Dylan Jones's oral biography David Bowie: A Life, the rock journalist Allan Jones describes seeing Reed's 1979 concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon, at which the crowd kept 'calling out for his old songs… Lou eventually told us all to f--- off, so lo and behold a lot of people did.' When most of the audience had left, Jones added, 'he started playing [the Velvet Underground's] Heroin, Waiting for the Man, and all the songs they'd been screaming for'.
It was after the concert, though, that the writer was told by a press officer that Reed had left with Bowie, and he was invited to join them for dinner. Jones was seated at an adjacent table, he recalled, 'and suddenly there was this kind of explosion, smashing glasses and Lou was dragging Bowie across the table and b---h-slapping him across the face'. He reported Reed screaming, 'Don't you ever say that to me!'
Eventually they were separated – and soon hugged and made up. But five minutes later, 'David was being dragged across the table again, with far more ferocity this time, with Lou screaming, 'I told you not to say that!' This time he really went for it and was raining blows on Bowie's head.' Reed was hustled out of the restaurant, and Bowie left sitting at the table, 'head in his hands… sobbing.'
Jones suggested that Bowie had offered to produce another album for Reed, 'as long as he got himself clean and straightened himself out. Which Lou obviously didn't like.' This for the man who had helped Reed to his only significant chart success – a Top 30 album and a Top 10 hit, for a song about transgenderism, fellatio and casual prostitution, no less.
We'll put it down to coincidence that Bowie went into a studio less than six months later to begin recording Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). (He said he'd got the title from a Cornflakes packet.) Others, though, would go further. When writer Howard Sounes approached the former Velvets' manager Paul Morrissey for his biography of Reed, the director of Andy Warhol's Flesh and Trash suggested that the book should be titled 'The Hateful B—h' or 'The Worst Person Who Ever Lived', if it were to reflect its subject truly.
As for Jones, who got into a scuffle with Bowie that same evening, when the singer realised he was a 'f---ing journalist', he was at least spared the sort of scorn that Reed regularly directed towards the press, usually delivered in a bored monotone that was at least in part borrowed from Andy Warhol, especially when responding to inane questions.
'Would it be right to call your music gutter rock?' he was asked by an Australian journalist on arrival in Sydney in 1974. 'Gutter rock?' Reed responds. 'Oh yeah.' In the infamous Lester Bangs interview for Creem in 1975, though, it is the writer who appears both rude and petulant, and further takes advantage of having the last (printed) word by launching a tirade of (written) abuse at the artist and his work after the fact.
On his 1978 album, Live: Take No Prisoners, recorded at the Bottom Line in New York, Reed let the press have it with both barrels. After giving a shout-out to Bruce Springsteen in the audience, who'd added his voice to the album cut of Street Hassle eight months earlier, Reed turns on critics Robert Christgau of the Village Voice and John Rockwell of the New York Times, mocking the venerable New York newspapers' tradition of calling him 'Mr Reed' – 'F--- you, I don't need you to tell me that I'm good.'
Christgau, meanwhile, was an 'anal retentive… nice little boxes, B-plus. Imagine working for a f---in' year and you got a B-plus from an a---hole on the Village Voice? You don't have to take this s---. You don't have to f---ing talk to these f---ing journalists. They're negative for free, in the best seats.'
Elsewhere, he gave an insight into his psyche before playing Street Hassle, launching into a burst of guitar feedback in response to heckling from the audience. 'That's how Metal Machine was born by the way,' he says. 'I can drown you out. Go on, leave if you don't like it.'
Some did like it, even Metal Machine Music. Paul Morley launched a defence of it in The Observer in 2010, calling it an 'intense collision of surreal object, hate letter, emotional outburst, poetic assault, bubblegum serialism, artistic bombshell' and more, suggesting that if it had inspired bands like Throbbing Gristle and Sonic Youth, it must be doing something right. Reed himself suggested that one could hear aspects of Beethoven in it and pronounced that 'It's the only record I know that attacks the listener.'
Of course, Reed's uncompromising approach to his career ultimately proved to be a lucrative decision – with income from publishing royalties ensuring his estate was worth more than $30m after his death, aged 71, in 2013.
We're not sure quite how much of that was for Metal Machine Music, but perhaps it would be wise to bear in mind something else that Reed said to the crowd on Take No Prisoners. 'I do Lou Reed better than anybody. Enough attitude to kill every person in Jersey.'