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

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

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How about that hat?

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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.

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...