Skip to content

Lou Reed

LOU REED

YEAR

2015

INDUCTED BY

Patti Smith

CATEGORY

Performers

Frank, brutal and brilliant.

Lou Reed had everything you could want in a rockstar: boundary-smashing guitar solos, a dry, combative voice and a tough as nails persona that never impeded his vulnerable songwriting.

Lou Reed

Lou Reed

HALL OF FAME
ESSAY

By Anthony DeCurtis

Lou Reed’s songs, both with the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, constitute a body of work that ranks with Dylan and Lennon-McCartney as among the most significant and influential songwriting catalogues of the twentieth century.

Reed was both an artistic exhibitionist and an intensely private man; a restless experimental soul and an ardent fan dedicated to the most elemental, even conservative, principles of rock & roll; a writer with the highest literary aspirations and a guitarist with a boundless love of distortion and noise.

Read More
Class of 2015
He was the friend of New York City.
Patti Smith
More from the class of 2015
%post_title%

Bill Withers