Lou Reed’s Pre-Fame Quest to Create a National Dance Craze

“What, no elevator?” You will never forget the first words that Lou Reed said to you, and Reed’s future archivist, Don Fleming, heard them through an intercom in a recording studio on a three-floor walkup.

“The first time I met Lou was when I was recording with Moe Tucker, and he came to add a guitar part,” Fleming tells PopMatters. “He carried his guitar and small amp up the three flights of stairs to the studio. I asked him to autograph my eight-track tapes of Metal Machine Music and Berlin, which he found amusing. He was very sweet with Moe.”

(When PopMatters spoke to him in 2007 regarding a German noise act’s cover of Metal Machine Music and asked if he was surprised by its legacy, Reed’s first words to us were, “Never in my wildest dreams.”)

For fellow archivist Jason Stern, his memories with Reed are more varied: “25-year-old me started working at Lou’s Sister Ray Enterprises office in 2011 so I spent about two years seeing or speaking with him almost daily.”

These two men have been tasked with helping preserve Reed’s legacy following his passing in 2013. The “Lou Reed Archive Series” of releases has veered wildly between his early rarities (like with 2022’s Words & Music, May 1965) and his more obscure works (a re-release of his 2007 ambient record Hudson River Wind Meditations). In partnership with Light in the Attic Records, 2024’s archival release is one that Reed fans have been waiting for years: a retrospective of his works at Pickwick Records.

Before Lou Reed formed the incalculably influential art-rock outfit the Velvet Underground, he played for doo-wop outfits in junior high school. After trying out multiple musical curiosities during his time at Syracuse University, he eventually moved to New York City in 1964 and landed a gig as an in-house songwriter at Pickwick Records. The label made cheap “soundalike” tracks of current pop hits, keeping costs low and recouping their investments via budget-bin one-offs. As overtly commercial as the product was, it became a training ground for Reed, forcing him to collaborate with other musicians and try out a panoply of styles: some in his wheelhouse, some that were very much stretches.

Why Don’t You Smile Now: Lou Reed at Pickwick Records 1964​-​65 is a dynamite compilation that features tracks Reed wrote, played on, or even sang lead for. Painstakingly researched and remastered, this feels like a goldmine for even casual Velvet Underground fans, and the lineage between this and the Velvets’ final 1970 album, Loaded, is clear as crystal. Even if these were quickly written and cheaply made, they serve as a dynamite snapshot of pop music in flux, a dirty funhouse mirror for rock ‘n’ roll to stare at itself in and marvel at what strange new form it has become.

The lead single from the set is perhaps one of Lou Reed’s most famous pre-Velvet Underground songs: “The Ostrich”. Recorded with cacophonous sound and via a bizarre new guitar tuning where every string is set to the same note (itself spawning the phrase “ostrich tuning”, of which future Reed collaborator John Cale was an immediate fan upon touring in a swiftly-assembled Pickwick group), the song was designed to imitate the instructional dance craze songs of the day. As close to nonsensical as the best pop music can get (“Take this forward and step on your head!” Reed instructs), it soon became a dynamite collector’s curio among rock literati.

“I had heard it on different bootlegs over the years, but I think it was quite a long time before I realized that it was a special tuning,” notes Fleming.

Stern expands this further: “Whenever it was that I first came upon ‘The Ostrich’, it seemed to be the most well-known reference point for Lou’s pre-VU recordings that were out there. It was pretty much the rest of this compilation that came as a much bigger surprise to me.”

None of the Pickwick songs are credited to Lou Reed, but instead, artists like the Hi-Lifes, Ronnie Dickerson, and (of course) Spongy and the Dolls. Most of these acts went nowhere, but any purchase of these musicians’ one-off tracks counted for something, which was the very nature of Pickwick’s aesthetic.

“Pickwick was a low-budget record label that serviced retail stores with cheaply priced albums that were either licensed tracks of known artists or sound-like recordings that were made at Pickwick,” Fleming notes. “They did licensing deals with Capitol Records, RCA, Motown, and others. Terry Phillips, who brought Lou in, did try to push the boundaries of the label, using Lou as a frontman, but in the end, Pickwick stuck to its formula.'”

“Terry Philips had some degree of autonomy within his production unit under the greater Pickwick umbrella, and he had his own ideas about the boundaries of the label’s output. However, at the end of the day, Pickwick was a larger operation than what Philips was getting up to in his office,” Stern tells us.

According to Richie Unterberger’s liner notes, Lou Reed would sometimes be put in an office with other songwriters and, given a style or a theme, forced to come up with a song on a tight deadline. Reed played along nice, but according to a 1986 Rolling Stone interview that Unterberger cites, he was playing a different endgame: “The other guys, I think, wanted to have a future in making pop records. Meanwhile, I had my own songs I was writing.”

Some of those label guys appear on the album’s beautifully strange cover shot, which features a young Reed in a Bob Dylan-esque coat holding up a card that reads “Let’s Not Die of Improvement”. “File this one under ‘what you see is what you get,” jokes Stern when asked to explain the context, “but what we do know is that Lou’s fellow collaborators on most of this material, Jerry Vance and Terry Philips, are there in the shot.”

Also in the background of that shot was the cover of a record by the Kirby Stone Four, whose song “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads” later got immortalized by Ol’ Blue Eyes himself. “The album just over Lou’s shoulder is a reissue of Gene Pitney’s Spotlight on Gene Pitney & the Newcastle Trio, which came out on Pickwick’s Design label,” Fleming explains. “The Kirby Stone Four self-titled album came out on Pickwick’s Golden Tone label. This would have been way after the ‘Four’ had their heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s at Columbia. This was a cheap knock-off with tracks they had licensed, sold in department stores for cut-rate prices. Another perfect Pickwick product.”

Yet after all these years, that dirty sound of “The Ostrich” couldn’t be salvaged by remastering? “Ha, no, that’s just the way it sounds,” laughs Fleming. “It was very overdriven, and we had no intention of using any tricks to clean that up.

Stern goes one step further: “I’m going to directly quote Lou’s boss and collaborator at Pickwick, Terry Philips: ‘It wasn’t a studio, it was an office. No isolation. The mic was on a stand in the middle of the room, and we had a one-track Ampex.'”

Yet as Lou Reed riffs on surf rock (The Beachnuts’ “I’ve Got a Tiger in My Tank”), Brill Building balladeering (Robertha Williams’ “Maybe Tomorrow”), and about as proto-rock as you could get for the era (“Teardrop in the Sand” by the Hollywoods), his songwriting voice becomes more and more apparent. It was the best kind of boot camp any aspiring songwriter could ever ask for.

“I feel like Lou learned a lot from the experience of just being thrown into this environment of having to come up with songs on demand in different genres in different styles,” notes Fleming. “One of the highlights for me is ‘Sneaky Pete’ by the Primitives, which I feel sounds more like things Lou did later on. ‘Sneaky Pete’ has this sort of party atmosphere in the background, and ‘Wild One’ by Terry Phillips also has the same sound. They both remind me of the Velvet Underground song ‘Temptation Inside Your Heart’ and also Lou Reed’s song ‘All Through the Night’ from The Bells.”

“I think it’s a sizable songbook for such a short period of time!” exclaims Stern. “What we get to hear in this collection is some of the breadth of Lou’s musical reference points being laid out side by side rather than mixed together. You get to hear some soul/R&B, Brill Building pop, doo-wop, blues-rock, and proto-proto-punk in a very partitioned way. It’s like a recipe for Lou but only a partial list of ingredients, if my simile is making any sense here.

“I was very taken with ‘Johnny Won’t Surf No More’ early on,” Stern continues, “as this kind of humorously morbid ballad sung from a woman’s perspective about how Johnny died surfing the waves while trying to show off for her. The vocal harmonies on the chorus tip me off to a certain dark sense of humor that I find to be very Lou.”

Yet, for being a cheapie label, did Pickwick make any hits? Was “The Ostrich” an actual craze or just famous later on due to the Reed connection?

“I’m not sure that Pickwick’s financial records are floating around anywhere today,” explains Stern, “but the lengths to which the label went in promoting that song (as in, recruiting some plausible fellows to portray The Primitives on a promotional tour) seem unique to ‘The Ostrich’ as far as this collection of songs go. But look to the various versions of ‘Why Don’t You Smile’ that have come out over the years, and if Pickwick were collecting anything on the publishing side, then perhaps it’s that one.

Fleming doubles down on this notion: “‘Why Don’t You Smile’ has had the most long-term reach. After the All Night Workers’ original release, it was covered by the Downliners Sect in 1966 and Spiritualized in 1991. Several other artists have covered it as well, including Moe Tucker.”

Given that all Pickwick churned out was short little bops that rarely crested over a 2:30 runtime, finding these rare songs, much less anything close to an original pressing or acetate, was always going to be the real challenge for the Light in the Attic staff.

“Light in the Attic used several people, including Pat Thomas and Richie Unterberger, to track down the best sources of all the songs,” Fleming explains. “We not only found everything we were looking for, but also Matt Sullivan at the label tracked down an acetate of the song ‘Sad, Lonely, Orphan Boy’, which came from the collection of Martin Christoph. A song we knew about but had not been released or available as a bootleg.”

With so much material finally assembled, how does one begin constructing these songs in a meaningful way?

“We threw chronological order out the window right away,” Stern recalls. “After spending some time absorbing the whole collection of songs, it became obvious to us that it was important to sequence the album in the right way for a straight-through listen. We sought out a real flow from top to bottom, as well as the individual sides (on the LP version). It’s not just a song library; it’s an album!”

Don finishes that thought: “We wanted to start with one that Lou sang, and ‘The Ostrich’ was his big moment as a performer for the label, so that seemed like the best way to lead it off. We had more songs than we could fit on one LP, and Matt suggested that we have a second disc so that we could include everything. We were agonizing over getting it all on one LP!”

So for these friends and collaborators of Reed to be trusted with this rare gift of an assignment, having already proven themselves with other collections like I’m So Free 1971 RCA Demos and the box set for his legendary 1989 comeback album New York, were there any surprises to be found in this collection of pre-fame recordings by one of the most celebrated rock musicians of all time?

“The Ronnie Dickerson / Robertha Williams tracks were so great to hear for the first time – truly highlights of the album,” Stern swoons. “To hear Lou Reed write songs in the style of the 1960s girl groups he was fond of was mind-blowing. And then it turns out that Ronnie and Robertha are the same person! More on that in Richie Unterberger’s liner notes.”

As for Fleming, the other players in the cast sparked his interest the most. “I liked learning more about the artists who played on all these songs that Lou co-wrote. Richie’s notes are a very deep dive into the label and the artists. I loved hearing Lou pop up in the tracks, sometimes singing the lead or doing backing vocals, and hearing his distinctive guitar sound, like at the end of the Hi-Lifes’ ‘Soul City’. The most distinct fact about Lou’s time as a songwriter at Pickwick is how he and John Cale first met, played together, and wrote music together—and within a few months, they were the Velvet Underground.”

Why Don’t You Smile Now is more than just a set for completionists: it’s a remarkable and little-read prologue for one of the most critical moments of rock history. Or, to borrow a phrase from Fleming: “Another perfect Pickwick product.”