The Year Lou Reed Gave Up on Music

“Loaded,” the Velvet Underground album Reed had been working on, was released in late September, and he was startled when he heard it. There had been some changes from what he’d recalled as the final recordings. The incantatory coda to “New Age” had been shortened, and the bridge to “Sweet Jane” had been cut entirely, the song ending in a radio-friendly fade at 3:15.

In its original versions, “Sweet Jane” hinged on that bridge — the “heavenly wine and roses” section — which amplified the song’s self-consciousness with flowery phrases that sound lifted from a greeting card, followed by a string of sing-along-ready la-la-la’s. Anyone who “ever played a part,” posited Reed in the song, wouldn’t “turn around and hate it.” He might’ve been referring to his own performance as “Lou Reed,” rock star.

Reed would rail at these edits, which he claimed were released without his consent, although the bassist Doug Yule would maintain that Reed made them himself. “He edited it. You have to understand, at the time, the motivation,” Yule said. “Lou was, and all of us were, intent on one thing: to be successful.… You had to have a hit, and a hit had to be up-tempo, short, with no digressions … you wanted a hook and something to feed the hook and that was it.”

“Loaded” was released to little fanfare. Label promotion was minimal, unsurprising for a band whose frontman and primary songwriter had just quit. There were no hits, as the issuing of singles was halfhearted. By November, Reed’s bandmates were back at the Atlantic Records studios, working on a new “Velvet Underground” album.

Reed, meanwhile, recorded demos in his childhood bedroom. He was also thinking about roads less traveled. Earlier that year, the University of Chicago Press published “Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz,” a volume that the author, Reed’s mentor at Syracuse University, had begun compiling in his final years. Schwartz had pushed Reed, his star student, to be a “real” writer, telling him pop-song lyrics were worthless. Schwartz’s words stuck with him. Reed was also thinking about Shelley Albin. He called her, wanting to reconnect. When she heard his voice on the line, she was in a room with her new baby and her family.