Source: http://www.chez.com/syberpop/andnico.html
"Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground" by Jessamin Swearingen (adapted and edited by Allan Metz)
‘We Created It: Let's Take It Over!' web site, 1999-2001
Source: http://www.chez.com/syberpop/andnico.html
The influence of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground on
punk rock–Ed.
Lou Reed's influence on punk rock in New York and Britain was
unequaled. So important was Reed's worth that in Roman Kozak's documentary of
the club CBGBs, This Ain't No Disco, the author asks if, "had there been no
Velvet Underground a couple years earlier, would there have been a CBGB?" (Kozak
xiv). With his band the Velvet Underground, Reed gained the status of punk's
forefather. Though Reed left the Velvet Underground by 1970, Reed's songwriting
and collaboration with the Velvets left its mark on the New York live music
scene.
The Velvets began performing in New York City in 1966 and became the earliest example of the nihilism punk would later act out. The Velvets far surpassed the artistic pout of Dylan and the Stones and clarified the political ravings of the 1960s protest genre. According to Fred Bronson's book, Billboard's Hottest Hot 100 Hits, popular music in the late 1960s was fattened with songs like "I'm A Believer" by the Monkees in 1966 and Lulu's theme to the 1967 movie "To Sir With Love." As in the later years of punk, the music in New York City was in no way reflected on the pop charts. In New York, Lou Reed's songwriting portrayed the horrors of alienation and drugs in the Big City. The 1967 release of the Velvet Underground's first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, contained songs like "Heroin," which changed rock music forever. The song was an ode to a killer narcotic, and it basked in a subtle moral decay that had never before been heard in a rock song. Other Reed songs had undercurrents of sadomasochism, for example the first album's "Venus in Furs," a song that hinted at the aggressive fashion to come in British punk fashion scene. Reed's lyrics made references to leather boots and whiplashes. Years later British punk would offer its equivalent. Malcolm McLaren's clothing shops sold "strict fetish clothing in rubber, leather, and vinyl" (Savage 68), which seemed the obvious evolution from Reed's lyrics....