(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 31 August 2025 16:30, UK
When you’re a musician with an artistic flair and the gift of the gab, it’s easy to get caught up in your own little pretentious bubble. How dare the plebs ever question what you mean? This conundrum was something that troubled Lou Reed.
After all, he was a nut who went to his deathbed in 2013 that no one had ever really managed to crack, let alone even get some semblance of truth out of. It all tied into the fact that, despite seemingly appearing with the same name, there was a subtle difference between Lou Reed the star and Lewis Reed the human, which was basically impossible to discern – apart from knowing the one solid piece of evidence, that he was an enigma.
One such worldly story that Reed had in his locker, without rarely ever expanding on what it meant, was the regaled incident, before he got famous, in which he supposedly held a gun to a man’s head while serving as a platoon in the training corps. The gun itself was unloaded, but for obvious reasons, Reed was soon let go from the ranks afterwards, and subsequently enjoyed retelling the story in the years that followed.
But soon this was all found out to be nothing but a sham, to the relief of some but disappointment of others, depending on how you looked at it. You can’t exactly blame people for becoming caught up in the tale – it was dangerous, exhilarating, somewhat exotic, just like in the movies. Yet ironically, the person it came to annoy the most as the decades wore on was the man himself, who first spouted the web of lies.
Basically, like any master wheeler-dealer, Reed passed all the blame for his penchant for untruths on to Andy Warhol, as he claimed that he was only following advice the iconic artist had given him once. When being asked questions he didn’t necessarily want to answer, Reed alleged that Warhol told him: “You’re not going to tell the truth, are you? You know you don’t have to tell the truth. You can say anything you want,” and as such, “that’s what I did for years,” the musician said.
However, the most frustrating thing about your own exorbitant opines is that other people just won’t tend to let them go, as if they actually got taken in by the story – silly bastards. This is something Reed realised would catch up to him rather quickly. “Unfortunately, I’m still haunted by those lies,” he sighed as he spoke to the LA Times in 1992. “People continue to ask, ‘Did you really put a rifle to a guy’s head?’ and ‘Do you really have a degree in music from Harvard?’”
As it turns out, the answer to all of those things, not least the rifle incident, was a hard and fast no. But no matter how much he eventually shut down the rumours, they always plagued Reed for the rest of his days, and that’s something you can’t help but feel was deserving to rest on his own shoulders. It all came down to the fact that the Reed seen on stage was most definitely not the one that existed behind closed doors, which he even admitted was out of “protection”.
Even if Reed was nothing more than an image or a mirage, there’s a timelessness to his stories to the spirit of rock and roll, whether they were actually really true or not. Trying to decipher the man was all part of the allure, and there was probably a little bit of him that quite liked the fact that he lived his whole life without that mask ever fully being unveiled.
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