![\"Lou](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Lou-Reed-Musician-2000s-Guitarist-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n
Fri 10 October 2025 20:27, UK <\/p>\n
When you\u2019ve written a masterpiece like Loaded and it has sold so few copies that it can\u2019t even be ranked by the charts, it is perhaps understandable that a bit of bitterness built up inside Lou Reed<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n While much has been said about the motives behind and causes of his barbed public persona, the simple fact of repeatedly undeserved commercial failures that befell the Velvet Underground surely stirred up a lot of vitriol. Having said that, the \u2018Sweet Jane\u2019 singer also once punched David Bowie in the face, and he was a friend.<\/p>\n With this in mind, when the entire world is your enemy, it makes it all the more interesting to think of the bands that Reed selected to stick on the end of his spear of spite as the peak of his ire. His bashing of The Beatles is understandable as a ploy, his run-ins with Frank Zappa seemed to be assuaged in later years, but which band did he hate most of all until the end?<\/p>\n When I recently interviewed Mick Harvey of The Birthday Party<\/a> and subsequently The Bad Seeds, he mused over the pivotal influences on punk and opined, \u201cAnd The Doors, everyone always forgets to mention The Doors. They were really quite pivotal to most things, actually.\u201d From punk to prog, Harvey noted that their darkness, poetry and police attention was seminal to what followed in a lot of rock.<\/p>\n Reed didn\u2019t quite share that opinion. In fact, he loathed what they represented. \u201cWe had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene. It\u2019s just tedious, a lie and untalented,\u201d Reed asserted in a 1970s magazine feature, somewhat clobbering in the otherwise distinctive Doors with the Summer of Love movement in the Golden Gate City. <\/p>\n However, he wasn\u2019t prepared to give the band some ambiguous leeway, aiming more directly at Jim Morrison and his cronies in the next beat, \u201cThey can\u2019t play, and they certainly can\u2019t write,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 1987, he doubled down on this criticism, opining in a PBS interview that the Los Angeles band represented everything that was wrong with the 1960s, their eerie influence thereafter proving deeply lamentable. Regarding many of the counterculture favourites, he explained that they \u201cwere just painfully stupid and pretentious, and when they did try to get, \u2018arty,\u2019 it was worse than stupid rock and roll.\u201d He then asserted, \u201cWhat I mean by \u2018stupid,\u2019 I mean, like, The Doors.\u201d<\/p>\n Why did he hate them so much, you wonder? Well, in many ways, they were the inverse of his output. Although Reed and Morrison both looked to get \u2018poetic\u2019 with their songwriting, their styles therein stood in direct opposition to each other. For instance, take the wild contrast between these two verses:<\/p>\n Jim Morrison \u2013 \u2018Ghost Song\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cShake dreams from your hair, my pretty child, my sweet one. Lou Reed \u2013 \u2018Street Hassle\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cShe creamed in her jeans as he picked up her means Both, in truth, are utterly amazing songs, and the lyrics in each offer a decidedly elevated twist to the typical platitudes of a pop song, but while Morrison\u2019s poetry is Byronic by nature, Reed\u2019s is very much in the gutter of New York\u2019s vernacular<\/a>. And in 1970, when Reed first waged war against The Doors, one had received far more praise than the other, so perhaps his attack on his peer was a simple attempt to strong-arm some attention towards a punkier style of songwriting that he would finally benefit from in due course.<\/p>\n
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day the day\u2019s divinity.\u201d<\/p>\n
From off of the formica topped bar.\u201d<\/p>\n