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The gloriously rude Lou Reed keeps sounding better with age

Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars can be seen at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Lincoln Center until next March

August 4, 2022 10:25
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NEW YORK - CIRCA 1976: Lou Reed poses for the cover session for his album Coney Island Baby circa 1976 in New York City (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
3 min read

If there was a competition to name the rudest Jew in New York, living or dead, the qualifying rounds alone would take months. But one of the finalists would be Lou Reed. Songwriter, guitarist, founder of the Velvet Underground — Reed is admired for all this, but he is notorious, at least in New York, for his spectacular rudeness.

The Swedish Jewish actor Erland Josephson once went to New York for an awards ceremony, and left under the impression that he had met a fellow honoree called Lee Rude. It was an easy mistake to make, if it was a mistake at all.

Reed dispensed the rudeness so lavishly that it was almost a form of generosity. Almost, but not quite. When the old misery died in 2013, his widow, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, inherited Reed’s archive.

It turns out that when Mr. “Rock n Roll Animal” wasn’t shooting methamphetamine, drinking Johnny Walker Black or, more recently, waving Tai Chi swords around in passive-aggressive assertion that time might have given him the aspect of an angry bullfrog but it most certainly had not withered his rudeness, Reed was putting all his stuff in boxes.

Just as you might expect from the rock monster who was born Lewis Rubinstein, the son of an accountant.

There were more than 600 boxes. Anderson gave them to the New York Public Library, and the Library has now selected some of the more interesting items for Caught Between The Twisted Stars, an exhibition at Lincoln Center.

Reed was an aspiring poet before he became a rude boy, and among the early photos of Reed playing with his college band is a certificate, recording for posterity that he was such a good student at Syracuse University that he made it onto the Dean’s List for Spring, 1964.

A year or two later, and the rudeness has begun. There are photos of Reed with Andy Warhol (sunglasses, not smiling), and films of Reed jamming with the Velvets at the Factory (sunglasses, not smiling).