Words & Music, May 1965

In May 1965, Lou Reed was a 23-year-old staff songwriter and session musician for Pickwick Records in New York, churning out doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll “soundalike” singles to be sold in drugstores. There he was introduced to his future Velvet Underground bandmate, the Welsh-born John Cale, when the label put the two of them together for a house band called The Primitives. (They would go on to make the jokey novelty song “The Ostrich”.) Reed could write teen pop hits at a rapid clip, but his real creative focus essentially starts with this foundational document, Words & Music, May 1965, which he made with Cale and which includes the first known recordings of some of the Velvets’ most well-known songs. There’s almost nothing thematically linking his former dime-store hits-for-hire and these strands of The Velvet Underground’s underbelly-surveying DNA. But the collection (the first in a series of archival releases) does highlight the songwriting discipline and rigour that would see Reed through countless stylistic changes and a 50-plus-year career as one of America’s most important artists. After he made these recordings, Reed mailed the original reel-to-reel tapes to himself, and they remained unopened until four years after his death in 2013, when his wife, artist Laurie Anderson, gave them to the New York Public Library as part of an archival exhibition. They reveal a lot. Even just their existence suggests that Reed was protective of his intellectual property and took his day job as a songwriter seriously: The package's seals and postmarks served as an ad hoc copyright (should anyone have questioned the songs' provenance), and he introduces each song here by its title and the boilerplate verbiage “words and music, Lou Reed”. Much more importantly, though, the recordings not only unearth the root structure of one of American music’s most quietly influential bands, but they lay bare some unexpected inspirations along the way, while offering all kinds of surprises in