Why is Lou Reed so often referred to as the Godfather of Punk?

That said, I really cannot concieve of the Ramones or the Dolls w/o Lou.

Unless Lou Reed fronted some girl groups I'm unaware of, try a little harder.

Without even getting into the more daring, dissonant aspects of their music (or their sartorial aesthetic), the Velvets were completley against the conventional grain (i.e. Punk)

Which is pretty fucking punk.

weird x-post.

Having Andy Warhol produce and bankroll said album /= punk. Or does it?

not much different than having malcolm mclaren do it, is it? (and andy's art was totally punk rock!)

I don't get it either.

Apparently you aren't familiar with Sweet Jane, Rock & Roll, Temptation Inside Your Heart, I Can't Stand It, We're Going to Have a Real Good Time Together, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

Not necessarily.

Sidenote: Victor Bockris was on the People's Court yesterday getting sued by the co-author of the Patti Smith bio. She won.

DAMN! I would kill to see this! Or is this some kind of ILM joke?

"Dr. Robert" - copping dope
"Rocky Raccoon" - death

Yewww! Yuck-o! Oh, you mean her show.

Not heroin.

"Rocky Raccoon" - death

No, "Rocky Racoon" is about a jilted lover's quest for justice. And it's a crap song.

"Run For Your Life" is about death

No, it's about jealousy.

"Black Angel Death Song" is about death.

http://www.nypost.com/gossip/38375.htm

(x-post)

x-post

How about that hat?

xpost

Right. And obviously New York punks were significant in the development of punk in the '70s.

that hat
Somehow it reminds of the one John Osbourne had when he was a nipper.

duh, they were punx!

1966 and 1967 and 1969 were the same year?

The Doors and their bloated ilk started the need for fucking punk rawk

if you actually remember that they were different years, then you obviously weren't there, as they say!

they didn't start out bloated!!!! they had to sit in the tub for a while. doors were hawwwwwwt!!

Dead cats, dead rats, did you see what they were at, alright
Dead cat in a tophat

Sucking on a young man's blood
Wishing he would come, yeah
Sucking on a soldier's brain
Wishing it would be the same

Dead cat, dead rat, did you see what they were at
Fat cat in a tophat
Thinks he's an aristocrat
Thinks he can kill and slaughter
Thinks he can shoot my daughter

Yeah, right...oh yeah...alright...yeah
Dead cats, dead rats, think you're an aristocrat
Crap...ah, that's crap

All I know is, I've had discussions with drunk people about where punk came from and as hard as I try to be reasonable and light-hearted about the whole damned thing, it always ends up with my girlfriend having to tell the other guy's girlfriend that I'm really a nice guy, so I tend to avoid such conversations. I do know that I don't think Lou Reed is the godfather of punk, and that I never listen to Lou Reed these days, never. I haven't listened to any of those VU albums in years, in fact I do not own any of them at this point. I've heard the Ramones plenty but have never owned a Ramones album I can remember. I probably like the Vibrators better. I'm just as comfortable saying that "Wooly Bully" or "Diddy Wa Diddy" (however one spells that) by Capt. Beefheart is the origin of punk. I like the Adverts quite a lot, Liliput ever better, "I'm Stranded" a lot. This has been a long post to say that I try not to think about it, but of course I end up doing it just the same.

Really dig this statement Ken L., you made my day:

The Age when the Doors Were "Hawwwt" recedes further and further back into the mists of time, and is now almost lost, like the Age When Buddy Bolden Charmed All of Storyville With His Horn.

And really, I admit I don't exactly have affinities with anything like "punk" too much, you know, I'm obviously just another vicarious liver who'd much rather groove to the Dramatics or the Detroit Emeralds than listen to most of it.

As for Sister Ray, I thought of whole new question worth our puzzlement -- Who insulted Ray Charles more? The VU, Elvis Costello, or Jamie Foxx?

It's not that Drugs & Death are a "key part" of the definition of punk, it's that the Velvets were completely shunning convention by exploring lyrical/conceptual territory normally verboten in conventional pop/rock. That they were concentrating on more girtty topics (though not exclusively) when the rest of the world was wearing Nehru jackets and singing about flower power, THAT'S what makes them "punk".

And the sunglasses.

xxpost:
Now that I think of it, I have heard Steve Jones say several times on his radio show that he was inspired to be a musician when he saw the New York Dolls and that the way he learned to play guitar was by playing along to the first Stooges record and the two Dolls records, playing them over and over again. He has also said that his favorite guitar player is Mick Ronson, and, as everybody knows, a lot of the Pistols equipment was stuff Steve stole from the Spiders From Mars, especially after "the last show they ever did." After Johnny Ramone passed away, Jonesy's Jukebox replayed an interview with Johnny and Steve asked him if he ever went to see the Dolls and Johnny said, "Oh yeah, I went every time. I used to see Johnny and Jerry around town and they looked so cool. Then I heard they were in a band, but Tommy Ramone told me 'Yeah, but they're no good.' But I went anyway, because how could they be bad if they looked so cool."

Anyway, I don't know how this exactly answers the original question, I'm just trying to say that the canonical punk lineage isn't just an invention, although it was probably a simplification. In this version of the story Lou enters through the sidedoor of the Bowie connection and through John Cale producing the Stooges album. I'm still trying to think how the Lou/Jonathan Richman thing fits in here. Maybe Lou is actually the Godfather of New Wave, through the Modern Lovers alumni.

Indie Rock's roots = Punk Rock.

Why is everyone hung up on the notion that "Punk" has to be fast and stupid?

but if Television, Suicide, Patti Smith, and even the Dolls are punk you're crazy to slight him.

Well then you're simply just wrong. Those bands were Punks back when Joe Strummer was still calling himself "Woody".

Even if you were to count Television and suicide as punk rock, it seems you'd still have to recognize that they represent a wing that's somewhat removed from the mainstream or majority of what is generally considered punk. Even in Patti, I hear more Stones, Doors, and Stooges than VU FWIW.

It's not that they represent a "wing," it's that they PRE-DATE that which "is generally considered punk". It wasn't until the rise of BRITISH Punk Rock (i.e. after New York Punk Rock) that the parameters started being inforced. New York Punk was everything from the buzzsaw assault of the Ramones through the almost-proggy guitar noodling of Television (i.e. a wider umbrella of a term, rather than a strict stipulation-ridden code).

And I HATE Patti Smith.

All songs by British bands, proving that punk would never have been "punk" without the Limeys.

"Rock and Roll Animal" (from 1974) is routinely cited as a punk influence, but that's more due to the image overhaul that Lou Reed went through at the time, going from a relatively normal looking person to an emaciated freak seemingly overnight. At this point, he didn't play guitar when performing live either -- I think he was going through an Iggy worship phase and wanted to strut around the stage instead of burden himself with an instrument.

exactly ... the only way it could've been even more masturbatory would be if lou had hired rick wakeman to play synth.

He was blown out of his mind on more amphetamines than is humanly possible to ingest. I don't think Iggy had anything to do with it.

The Doors as punk: If they were so punk, hows come they let the label force them to change the lyric to “Mother, I want to murphhhharghhhhh you!”?

Punk’s roots also have a lot to do with rock-a-billy, too, methinks.

"Scientists today dug up the remains of musician Lou Reed and viewed some molecules under a megasupermicroscope. What they found were traces of a substance quite remarkably rare in the universe: punk. Physicists are mystified by this new development in the theory of the universe, however all the mathematical ramifications have not been investigated as yet."

That said, the actual playing on Rock'n'Roll Animal is steeped in the very sort've masturbatory excess that Punk Rock was supposedly railing against in the first place, so go know.

All the way down to the string section, laser show and giant UFO landing on stage.

Anyway, Pere Ubu was the mother of punk rock.
And the Electric Eels were the crazy uncle.

Nancy was always having to say that about Sid, too.

funny, most of the conversations I've had like that have been with English guys. "Hey, so you're into music...what do ya like then?"
"Oh, everything, been listenin' to this great tape of those Cleveland bands late '70s, y'know like 'Jaguar Ride' and that stuff."
"So you think that's punk do you?"
"Yeah I guess it is."
"Well it's not--LOU REED is the godfather of punk, there would be no punk rock without that first bloody Velvets album!"
"Yeah, they were punk rock with a viola player, I guess so."
"What do you mean you guess so! Lou Reed started the whole thing...unless you think it was the Ramones..."
"Well, yeah, maybe it was the Ramones."
"Lou was the first to sing about how tough it is in the streets! And drugs. The Ramones were wankers."
"I like the Chocolate Watch Band, and bubblegum music, a lot of that is about as stupid as the best punk. Those Sun Records guys were pretty much punks even though they were rednecks...I really like Pat Hare, 'I'm Gonna Murder My Baby,' which is like, 1905 or something, early..."
"No, no, as a DEFINED AESTHETIC punk starts in 1966 and the Velvets, those earlier performers didn't have the right attitude at all, and you can't be a punk and be from Memphis."
"Have you not read interviews with Lou Reed? You need to. "
"I've read 'em. Lou did it all--rock, art rock, Delmore Schwartz, Brinsley Schwartz, I even think Rick Wakeman was on one of his albums, and he went '70s on 'Rock and Roll Animal,' that long intro thing to 'Sweet Jane' is pretty much like something Yes would've done except fewer chords, I like that OK."
(Followed by twenty minutes of useless and thinly-veiled-hostile conversation in which I vainly try to just make a joke out of the whole thing, bringing in the Sir Douglas Quintet as Englishmen, the contribution of Graham Gouldman to the Ohio Express, Darby Crash and speaking in tongues, etc.) Then I end up having to buy the last round because everyone's so sick of the whole thing, and go home and listen to bossa nova records.

Or something.

Proof that it's punk.

xpost:
I'm enjoying the non-eddie on the thread, including some of the cracks wise on the meaning of the word "godfather" from Dadaismus and snappyDancer, but yeah, that was another great post from eddie hurt.

Welcome to my world.

Among the many threads that came together establish the sound and look identified as punk rock in the mid 1970s was a liberal dose of the same visual and sonic “separatism” that Lou Reed Velvet Underground forged in the mid 1960s.

I'm very drunk. I've tried to read the thread through to check if anybody has picked this up. But you do realise that this is a song about A FUCKING SERIAL KILLER, don't you?

they owe their existence to the Descendents, Buzzcocks, and Ramones.

Robert Quine is someone I'd like to know a little more about, myself. I have the Quine Tapes CD and consider it an interesting foray into VU even if it doesn't match the Live 1969 stuff.

Haha, yeah. And the Rolling Stones example chosen doesn't work either - "Let's Spend The Night Together" was dangerous man, they had to change it to "Let's Spend Some Time Together" on Ed Sullivan.

Anyway, there were tons of bands writing songs about stuff as shocking as anything on the VU albums, they just didn't deal with it as explicitly (or as DO YOU SEE?) as Reed did, they worked around it (I guess you'd have to go outside the confines of anglo-american pop to find stuff that dealt with those themes as explictly as Reed - though Scott Walker's Brel translations might do the trick.) But by 1976, was that even an issue anymore? Ppl had been saying pretty much whatever the fuck they wanted on record since at least the early 70's, and that had a lot more to do with Jagger and Morrison and Townshend (and the whole trope of The Artist's Emancipation From The Restrictions Of The Pop Biz) than it did with Reed. If taboo subject matter is Reed's biggest contribuiton to Punk, at best most groups got it second-hand from Bowie or summat.

VU's sonic influence is something different - no, I don't hear any of it in Britpunk or The Ramones or any of the other stuff that I cut my teeth on most punkwise, but for most of the NYC tradition, sure, they're big. I'm kinda with Sundar here, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that Television, Patti Smith, etc. weren't Punk - I just see them as a sort of marginal sub-sect (this = not a judgement of their actual music); I freely admit that my vision might be too tainted by brit-crit PISTOLS/CLASH/RAMONES orthodoxy here tho.

Haha, Vu on Post-Punk, there's something that you could write a lot about. Now I wonder if it was just a case of Punk bands getting bored with the three chord formula and deciding to get out their old VU albums, or Punk bands slowly discovering the VU albums, or Punk bands getting out albums by others that were influenced by VU.

Rather than looking back to Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran, an exercise which is so, so boring (and which Lester Bangs did a nice job making fun of somewhere), all you have to do is look forward.

Richard Hell?

Flipper?

The friggin' noisy, textural guitars of Fugazi?

Some of the above descriptions of what "punk" is sound like they're from some horrible rock documentary.

yeah, let's talk about fugazi. that won't be boring.

Actually, I don't hear that much Velvets per se in Punk. I mean if anyone can hears the Velvets in, say, the Ramones, then they must have much sharper ears than I do.

"Why Were Velvet Underground one of the first bands considered punk?"

Some great insights, for example:

I don't kniow but they're too slow and borring for me. I try to listen to em but theyre nothing special. They influenced punks because there were nho other good bands back in the 70s [sic] to be influenced by

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3zuyy25qM1qltmimo1_500.jpg

Oh man, checkout the Lou Zoom on that card

check out

Did Lou's Man take American Express, I wonder?

lou wasn't *really* punk until last year IMO

when does Re-Lulu come out anyway?

Jack is in his corset Jane is in her vest
Lou is hawking scooters and American Express

Visa Says

lol

wild guess:

the WHO + 1,000 american garage bands = godfathers of punk.

Between thought and Express lies a lifetime...