There's no way to approach Lou Reed: Words & Music, 1965 with anything less than astonishment. A set of recordings from a young Lou Reed, mailed to himself to ensure copyright protection, the tape sat untouched for decades, and it reveals, as one would imagine, a nascent talent finding its voice. Joined by future bandmate John Cale on a few tracks, Lou Reed is practically inventing himself as the tape rolls. This Light in the Attic release is absolutely essential.
"I'm Waiting for the Man", here in two versions, lacks the outright street-wise nastineess of the Velvet Underground version, but there's something revolutionary here all the same. In 1965, what else could have sounded like this? What was the young Reed thinking when he set out to write about this stuff? Similarly, "Heroin" might carry the traits of folk music, but its subject matter is in another category entirely. "Men of Good Fortune", later to appear on Berlin, is a Bob Dylan cribbing, while "Walk Alone" is nearly light-hearted. With John Cale's deep voice moaning about on the edges of this one, and the duo having a helluva time, the vibe is utterly unlike what the two would conjure up in Velvet Underground shortly after this. Imagine, for a moment, a world where Reed and Cale were just a folk-y duo in Greenwich Village, and VU never happened. Now imagine every band you love never existing because VU wasn't there to inspire them.
As an artifact, Lou Reed: Words & Music, 1965 serves a purpose of pulling the curtain back on how a mythic figure of rock-and-roll was born as an artist. It's also an effective record of how a song is written, and the importance of context. Tracks like "Pale Blue Eyes" and "Heroin" are familiar even here, but there's a spark missing, the hint of danger that Velvet Underground brought to everything they touched. And for that reason, these recordings are useful. It was, as Lou and John sang on Songs for Drella, all about work, and this is the work that birthed The Velvet Underground. "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams", with Cale taking lead vocal duties, does hint at something sinister, something of its own genre being created as we listen, but "The Gift" and that sort of thing are a few years away still. Even so, there's a hint here of what's coming.
You know most of these tunes, but you've never heard them in their infancy. You've never heard Lou Reed sound so naive (in a good way), and unaffected. There's no attitude here, no leather jacket persona being put on, and no real artistic intent. This is just a craftman's record, with two players figuring out exactly what they are doing, and how they're going to do it. And in a matter of a couple of years, they'd make some of the most important albums ever made. That starts here.
Lou Reed: Words & Music, 1965 is out now via Light in the Attic.
[Photo: Julian Schnabel]