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.
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.