Lou Reed Major Accomplishments

Lou Reed was many things, a visionary, a musician, a revolutionary, and a beacon of hope to outcasts everywhere, but much of this was masked in an image that he created for fans of a hardcore, off-the-rails rocker. He was the first to make the image of an urban New Yorker cool. The creation of this image came from a culmination of bits and pieces of every place he went and every person he met. Much this inspiration was drawn from where he grew up in Brooklyn, Syracuse University, Andy Warhol, and New York City. His long battle with drug and alcohol abuse also affected his behavior and music.
Lou Reed, born Lewis Reed, grew up in a Jewish household just outside of Brooklyn New York (Bio.com). He was born on March 2nd 1942, if one were to hold stock in astrology, this would make him a pices, a person guided by their feelings and emotions rather than facts. As a preteen and teenager he began to develop mood swings going from one extreme of the spectrum to the other(Bockris, 1). He also began to show feminine characteristics and proclaimed to his family and friends that he was
gay (Bockris, 2). His parents became extremely distressed and consulted the family doctor and eventually a psychologist who advised them to put Lou through a series of electroshock treatments three times a week for eight weeks (Bockris, 2). During this period of time physicians had not yet figured out that the voltage administered to each patient should be adjusted for size and medical condition, so each patient was given the same high dosage(Bockris, 4). After the first treatment, Lou awoke to find that his memory was completely gone, eventually it would return, but later in life he would continue to claim that his memory was never really the same (Bockris, 5). In many ways these treatments did more to harm him than help him, Lou would always hold on to the feeling that his parents had betrayed him, allowing strangers to permanently damage his brain (Bockris, 6).
His night mares-----in text-----
The area in which he lived affected him as well.
The town of Freeport was considered “suburban utopia” (Bockris, 7). If you can imagine the young, budding rocker growing up within the confines of this area, not being able to escape the squeaky clean image of it all, you can begin to see why he would rebel so extremely against it. The town began to stand for the establishment he hated. It was almost disturbing to him that he had been forced to grow up with his shy and boring father in a stereotypically middle class fashion(Bockris, 8). Although his dad was shy and without much of a personality, he did have a dry and biting sense of Yiddish humor, “A Yiddish compliment is a smack, a backhand. It’s always got a little touch of mean” (Bockris, 9). This didn’t come off as humor to Lou so much as personal attacks and began to turn his emotions inward as he developed a vivid interior world (Bockris,
11). When it was time for college, Reed first attended New York University but decided quickly after his first year there that it was most definitely not the proper environment for him (Bockris, 18). Eventually, his best friend from childhood, Allen Hyman, convinced his to transfer to Syracuse University, the college he had originally intended on attending(Bockris). Reed found his niche with the students on the fringe Syracuse, the writers and musicians(Bockris). The school itself seemed to be a perfect match for Reed’s dark overtones
It’s buildings resembled Gothic mansions from a screenwriter’s imagination. Indeed, the scriptwriter of The Addams Family TV show of the 1960s, who attended the university at the same time as Lou, used the classically Gothic Hall of Languages as the cassis for The Addams Family mansion. (Bockris, 21)
Another extremely important part of Reed’s development as a writer and as a person was there at Syracuse University, the poet Delmore Schwartz. Reed looked to Schwartz as a mentor and guide, sitting in cafes for long hours as they discussed literature and writing. It could definitely be said that without Schwartz, there would be no Lou Reed as we know him. He helped Reed to refine his style into the cutting and witty lyrics we now know today.