Lou Reed: the shock therapy where his rage came from

And the parents decided to take the boy to a psychiatrist.

Lou Reed was 17 years old and Toby and Sidney, his parents, wanted to correct his son's tendency to mannerisms.

It was the late fifties and for a middle-class New York Jewish family the possibility of having a homosexual son (he was actually bisexual) was not conceivable.

The psychiatrist diagnosed the following: “Lou suffers from delusions and hallucinations and sees spiders walking on the walls.

Maybe it's schizophrenia."

As told in Anthony DeCurtis

(Dome), the future singer framed the letter and hung it on the wall of his room.

It was the rebellious and brash way of reacting to him.

The following days the teenager underwent electroshock treatment, an episode that would mark his artistic and vital personality.

This is how Ignacio Julià, one of the European journalists who best knows the figure of the composer of

and author of the book

“The trauma that these

sessions entailed has been well documented and it is clear that they explain, in part, his artistic rage, his refusal of normality, his rebellion against the industry and his antipathy towards journalists … ”.

The album is released on September 16

(three topics have already been advanced),

where

the first recordings of that grumpy, traumatized and complex character Reed that was forged in that adolescence as unhappy as it was stimulating come to light.

Lou Reed performing on January 13, 1966 in New York with The Velvet Underground.

Adam Ritchie (Redferns)

The history of

offers essential data on the creative personality of Lou Reed (New York, 1942-2013).

We talked about when he was 22 years old and The Velvet Underground hadn't been formed yet.

Reed was always one step ahead.

His friends started drinking at 16 and he was already smoking marijuana;

if his colleagues anxiously looked at a

stolen from the newsstand, he was already looking for the Marquis de Sade.

He took a liking to dangerous writers: Burroughs, Vidal, Kerouac, Ginsberg… the

He liked offending, messy, offbeat sex.

He wanted to experiment and transgress.

And then write it and sing it.

When he entered Syracuse University at the age of 18, he was undergoing treatment for depression.

Also there he begins to form bands.

In the

describes him as an "experimenter": with sex, drugs, music.

He is said to have started out as a heroin dealer in college fraternities.

He even said that he used his first serious girlfriend, Shelley Albin (to whom beautiful works of his like

to make deliveries.

He used it too.

In 1964, at the age of 21, he graduated with a degree in English Literature.

He had struck up a friendship with the writer Delmore Schwartz, at the time a drunkard in creative decline, but an artist with a work of reference.

Reed adored Schwartz, listened to his stories always washed down with alcohol and longed to reach the excellence of his texts, especially his story

which he considered a masterpiece.

Around this time he got a job as a songwriter for Pickwick Records.

He wrote to the letter.

A song about the California sun?

There you go.

Then, that piece was offered to groups.

There he began to develop his own themes.

One of the first was

.

Reed described the sensations of injected heroin too well not to have experienced it.

He describes it as a storyteller, without moralistic messages: “Because this makes me feel like a man when I put a needle in my vein.

/ And I'll tell you that things are no longer the same… Heroine, be my death.

/ Heroine, she is my wife and she is my life.

/ Because a dose in my vein / leads to the center of my head.

/ And then I'm better off dead."

includes the first version of this rock classic that he later recorded in 1967 for the first album with The Velvet Underground

.

This first -

sounds like a voice and rough acoustic guitar and lasts 3.55, compared to the 7.13 of the original.

Reed even offered

to his bosses at Pickwick, who told him: “You're never going to get anywhere with that song.

You better dedicate yourself to writing more

He recorded up to 11 songs in that first session (all in

, including pieces that would later form part of The Velvet Underground's discography, such as

or

To this last one is added a harmonica and a second voice, by John Cale, later his partner in The Velvet Underground and whom Reed had known from playing on the New York circuit.

All the songs breathe a folk and country air from the New York Greenwich Village of the sixties.

Some

also comes out , like

.

In general, these recordings inevitably refer to Bob Dylan, whom Reed adored.

John Cale and Lou Reed, in December 1965, four months after forming The Velvet Underground, at a concert at the Cafe Bizarre in New York.

Adam Ritchie (Redferns)

The singer Christina Rosenvinge, a follower of Reed, analyzes these recordings for EL PAÍS: “These demos can be understood as the missing link between the American tradition and the

New York

Hearing

as a folk song is truly amazing

the same.

With that arrangement one would expect to hear about trains, girls from far away lands, fields and flocks of birds, and instead you find yourself deep in the Lower East Side, another kind of wilderness, pining for a shot.

A real contradiction.

In these recordings, one glimpses a Lou Reed who was still looking for himself, playing with a John Cale who was already part of the La Monte Young group, and who must have been playing the songs of his friend thinking about how to substitute wheat for dissonance.

A marvel".

Ignacio Julià outlines what that Lou Reed was like when he was 22 years old: “A troubled boy who was driven by a great passion to explore the underworld, the periphery of society and its marginalized inhabitants, and to create music that reflected that search.

I was always fascinated by the fact that he recorded his first record, a

when he was only 16 years old;

and also that he was still active as a musician until his last days.

If we outline the trajectory that goes from these first essays to his misunderstood but in my opinion extraordinary final work

Together with Metallica, we observe in all its dimensions an unrepeatable creator who broke aesthetic, literary and moral borders”.

Adds Rosenvinge: “My older brothers had some Lou Reed vinyl.

I remember listening to them at the age of 14 with real fascination.

From

I loved the songs;

From

I was attracted by the mysticism of the live show (I hadn't been to a concert yet), and from

the drama of the story.

But above all it was that semi-spoken voice, velvety, fragile and deep, that managed to penetrate the speakers and sound as if it were singing in your ear, which was, and is, hypnotic”.

Lou Reed and his partner of recent years, artist Laurie Anderson, at an art gallery in 2005 in New York.

Patrick McMullan (Patrick McMullan via Getty Image)

The mystery part of the recordings contained in

it comes here: that twenty-year-old Reed recorded them on a tape that he put in an envelope with a stamp dated May 11, 1965. The sender was himself: Lewis Reed (his real name) and it was signed by a notary.

The reason for this surprising shipment?

It was common for some musicians to mail recordings to themselves as a way of establishing copyright.

A sealed and notarized package proved that the songs existed on that date.

In conclusion, Reed was looking to his future and wanted to make sure that those compositions would always be his.

So clearly he had to transcend.

Two months after recording those songs, in July 1965, Sterling Morrison joined Reed and Cale's group and they decided to call themselves The Velvet Underground.

The unopened envelope containing the tape was found in his office after his death in 2013. Why did Reed never open it?

That he took with him to the grave.

It was in 2017, when his partner, also an artist Laurie Anderson, reached an agreement with the New York Public Library to donate various material from the musician, when it was discovered.

The tape with those first recordings was hidden, therefore, 52 years.

A story of a guy with a reputation for curmudgeon and allergic to the press who sang to the lost souls of the cities better than anyone.