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

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.