In good conscience, we can credit Reed with maybe 20 really terrific songs. That's no brilliant career. The mark he leaves on us is, rather, about coolness. He's so cool. Him in those sunglasses in the Velvets; him in S/M gear in the '70s; him in the '80s saying "Take it, Lou" before playing his solo on "Beginning of a Great Adventure"; him in the '90s taking Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the Knitting Factory to see John Zorn.

Nastiness constituted a large chunk of his charm. He would curse at his audiences, curse at the critics -- he once mortified band mates with a Stalinist salute to a crowd in Europe. All this only confirms that we insist on seeing genius in an artist's hatred of us, or perhaps in our own loving of an artist hating us. And there's his perseverance, too: We adore the tenacity of an artist who continues to drag out this terrific rock clichi year after year, sneer after sneer.

Like the best coolnesses, Reed's layers vanity and indignation with a kind of innocence too simple for layers in the first place. It's a leather jacket in the summer; it's chain smoking cigarettes he didn't pay for. And just when you're ready to roll your eyes, he knocks you over with an earnestness that makes you want to give him more cigarettes.

Along the way, the coolness rose to the level of Importance. Whereas his early enthusiasm for heroin was briefly radical, it was his subtler message about sexuality that continued to stand out: Elton John might've made it OK to be a gay musician, and maybe David Bowie made it cool, but Reed said faggy could be tough. He took all the machismo of simple, fuzz-toned power chords and mixed them with mascara. And the mascara didn't say, "Accept me." -- it said, "Go to hell."

Maybe more than with any other musician, Reed's image is inseparable from his music. The same art/macho creation, the same white-hot frigidity we see in his posturing comes through every note of a Velvet Underground album. The songs are tough and loud, vocals clipping every other verse and guitars seldom in tune. Like Reed, they offer the illusion of not caring; in reality, he and his music are carefully crafted.

Reed is a charming bully. Like the wrong song and you're a fool; ask about the meaning of some lyrics and he'll end the conversation. The Velvets played with a similar brazenness. Listen to "What Goes On": The chords D, C and G form a song in the key of G, meaning that resolution to the progression comes only with the G chord. But the band doesn't play it that way. Through sheer insistence -- emphasizing the D rather than the G -- they force the resolution in the wrong place. And it works; somehow, the song doesn't sound odd at all, and in fact is a real toe-tapper. It was a strange power the Velvets had over their listeners.

But such technical trivia generally remains the domain of more musically sophisticated acts like Steely Dan or Led Zeppelin; VU fans, for the most part, respond to the words. Like Bob Dylan, Reed is often regarded as a poet who happens to play guitar. As chief lyricist, he always claimed that his lyrics neither endorsed nor rejected any particular notion. "Heroin," the song most picked on by prudish critics, supposedly didn't encourage use of the drug, only stated that this was simply a fact of life for some.

Much is said about the VU's ability to put a bony finger on such unsung tropes as grit, hopelessness and confusion. This is a miscalculation. Johnny Cash and B.B. King knew of bleakness when Reed was still trying on sunglasses. What distinguishes the Velvets here is, rather, their approach to these themes: Where those other songwriters arrived at bleakness over the course of a song, this was a foregone conclusion for the VU; their albums began on the edge and simply proceeded to crawl around the other side for the next 45 minutes.

Herein lies the appeal. Listen to VU fans -- they are legion at this point and always outspoken -- explain the phenomenon of first hearing the band play. Consistently, they refer to a revolutionary honesty within the lyrics. Cale once described the effect:

"All Bob Dylan was singing was questions -- how many miles? and all that. I didn't want to hear any more questions," Cale said. "Give me some tough social situations and show that answers are possible. And sure enough, 'Heroin' was one of them. It wasn't sorry for itself."

More fiercely than in any other art, rock stars jockey for the distinction of telling it like it is. There's no room for plurality, for saying, well, Dylan tells it like this and Reed tells it like that. There's only one It in the business, and everything else necessarily falls short.

Reed's raw brand of poetry has been permanently yoked, in rock history consciousness, with such characterizations as honest, direct, open and, most troubling, authentic. Grit, these characterizations insist, is somehow more "real" than prettiness. Such unexamined distinctions inform a fascinating perspective on the cultural moment the VU flagged: The Doors, Simon & Garfunkel, Dylan, the Beatles -- these guys weren't doing it for everybody, and the VU picked up where they left off.

These ideas about truth and authenticity helped shove the Velvet Underground into the realm of high art. Warhol contributed light shows and the contagious conviction that this was the new new thing. At Factory happenings, it became clear that the Velvets were on some sort of vanguard. Their reputation among the un-hip for being vulgar -- born largely of their rumored penchant for sexual deviation -- only confirmed their art-noise value.

In "Duck Soup," Groucho Marx says, "He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." Similarly, the small-but-intense infatuation with the Velvets' newness occasionally obscured the fact that the music was really good. Tucker pounded out a spare, rocking rhythm; Morrison, Cale and Reed played great, fuzzed-out, thin guitar lines and Cale's electric viola and organ buoyed the music with a trance-like drone. The songs were hypnotically simple. For a while, the band even held a ban on bluesy riffs; anyone who introduced one had to pay a fine.

Behind the music, things weren't so fluid. The success had surprised everyone, and personalities clashed. Reed, it's said, could fill an auditorium with his ego. Though Cale had far more training as a musician, Reed generally set the tone. The charming bully could also just be a bully. The story is familiar: creative differences, personality conflicts and different ideas about direction. In 1968, after the release of the second album, "White Light/White Heat," Reed called a meeting with Morrison and Tucker to announce his firing of Cale.

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