Arts I Entertainment

ou'd think, at some point, life
would slow down for Lou Reed _ .
At 58, he has led a famous
band, battled drug and alcohol
addiction, created a social and
musical phenomenon and re-cre-
ated his image time and again.
While many musicians of his era have either over-
dosed or disappeared into obscurity along with the genre
that made them famous, Reed continues to thrive.
This year alone, he accelerated his professional
photography career with an upcoming exhibit in
France and published a 456-page volume of his lyrics
dating back to his Velvet Underground days.
The black-clad rocker with the weathered, craggy
face also collaborated on a theatrical work, Poe try,
about Edgar Allen Poe. Plus, he's just released a cele-
brated new album, Ecstasy, and has been on an exten-
=sive European and American tour to promote it,
including a stop at Detroit's State Theater on
Thursday, June 15.
But the energy — some would say anger — that
drives him started at a young age. Lewis Allen Reed
was born March 2, 1942, in Brooklyn, the son of
Sidney and Toby Reed. His father — an accountant
who changed his last name from Rabinowitz —
moved the family in 1953 from an apartment in the
city to a contemporary ranch home in the upper-
middle class, bucolic town of Freeport, Long Island.
It was a place then populated by a large number of
Jewish families as well as musicians and actors.
His neighbors included many celebrities, includ-
ing June Lockhart of Lassie
and Lost in Space; Leo
Lou Reed: "I've got a
Carillo, who played
hole in my heart the
Pancho on The Cisco Kid;
size of a truck," sings
Reed on "Like a
and Xavier Cugat's lead
Possum," an 18
marimba player.
minute track from his
"The inside of their
new album, "Ecstasy"
house was '50s modern. ...
At least from sixth grade
on, my view of his upbringing was very, very subur-
ban middle class," said Reed's childhood best friend,
Allen Hyman, in the book Transformer: The Lou Reed

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Story.
As he grew up, Reed began to resent his father's
sense of humor and perceived picking on Lou's
mother.
"Lou's father is a wonderful wit, very dry. He's a
match for Lou's wit," a family friend recalled for the
book. "That's a Yiddish sense of humor, it's very
much a put-down humor. A Yiddish compliment is a
smack, a backhand. It's always got a little touch of
mean."
Reed's mother, on the other hand, was described
as sweet, beautiful, if a bit smothering in her atten-
tion to him.
"I think his mother was fairly overbearing. Just in
the way he talked about her. She was like a protective
Jewish mother. She wanted him to get better grades
and be a doctor," recalled another friend in the book.
This relationship intensified when Reed entered
adolescence. To his parents' horror, he decided not
only to become a rock star but also to become a
homosexual rock star. So sure were thEy that some-
thing was organically wrong with their unrepentantly

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