Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Lou Reed

The best way to understand Bob Dylan is through his music, but even then, he still magnificently blurs the line between authenticity and mystery. Since arriving in Greenwich Village and developing a new enigmatic image while romancing Suze Rotolo, the singer-songwriter has kept the public guessing. However, one topic that Dylan speaks with candour about is his love of music and the artists that inspire him the most. Most notably, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams moulded him from a musical perspective, teaching him the key structures of songwriting. Nevertheless, they were from a different generation to Dylan. Hank Williams passed away at just 29 in 1953. Fortunately, Dylan met Guthrie in 1961, and he also inspired the first song he ever wrote, ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie.’ Another early hero of Dylan’s was Buddy Holly, despite their musical differences. When Bob Dylan was Robert Zimmerman, he was another teenager, awe-struck by the magnificence of Buddy Holly and The Crickets. 

Despite having a tragically short career due to his sad passing at 22, Holly’s impact changed the music industry forever. Alongside fellow forebearers such as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, Holly helped bring rock ‘n’ roll into the mainstream, allowing it to take over in the 1960s. While Dylan had folk leanings rather than rock ‘n’ roll, he admired Buddy Holly greatly. If Dylan could have rocked out like Holly, he would have done. Instead, he knew that his musical instincts lay elsewhere, and if he tried to replicate his brilliance, it would have been an inauthentic impression of his idol. They may have had different backgrounds, but few made an impression on Dylan as Holly did upon witnessing him perform in concert. During his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dylan paid tribute to his first idol, who walked so he could run, explaining, “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18, and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues.” 

As Buddy Holly was only a few years older than Dylan, the singer-songwriter felt a strong connection to the star. The concert occurred on January 31st, 1959, when an 18-year-old Dylan saw him perform in Duluth, Minnesota. Heartbreakingly, it would be one of the final times Buddy Holly would ever play rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s an evening which has lived long in Dylan’s memory. Dylan continued: “Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before.” After winning the Grammy for ‘Album of the Year’ with Time Out Of Mind in 1998, Dylan recalled the life-changing concert in his acceptance speech and explained how it inspired his award-winning album: “When I was 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don’t know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.” Every music lover has a specific gig from their teenage years that stands out for sentimental reasons, and for Dylan, it was Buddy Holly in Duluth. From that moment on, he channelled Buddy Holly’s spirit into his craft by carving out his own archetype, just like his hero did.

The late Lou Reed is remembered for many things. After all, he pioneered fusing the avant-garde with popular music, was one of the first transgressives in songwriting, and was a key figure in the avant-garde rock genre. While the New Yorker was synonymous with a certain degree of discomfort musically and theme-wise, this mirrored his nature as a human being and that he was, by most accounts, a misanthrope. Outside of his music, Reed did his bit to prop up this character. This included making it clear that he hated other prominent artists, such as The Doors, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa, and his constant dismissal of journalists. Andy Warhol was angry when Reed fired him as the band’s manager. And at some point later they must have fallen out even further, as a cassette recently turned up of demos Reed had written about Warhol in 1975. In one song he criticised Warhol for his lukewarm attitude toward the death of Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Andrea Feldman and Eric Emerson. In another song demo, Reed expressed the wish that Warhol had actually died in 1968. Of course Reed tried to put these ill-harboured and mixed feelings right when he wrote Songs for Drella with John Cale in 1990. 

Laurie Anderson on Lou Reed: "Sometimes we argued about things. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together. When you marry your best friend of many years, it's really special. But the thing that surprised me about getting married to Lou was the way it altered time. And also the way it added a tenderness that was somehow completely new. To paraphrase the great Willie Nelson: “So many people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that’s what makes the jukebox spin.” Lou’s jukebox spun for love and many other things, too: beauty, pain, courage, history, and mystery. Lou was a prince, and a fighter." Anthony DeCurtis: "With Lou Reed, there was this leather‑clad invulnerability that I think he tried to convey, but there was a lot of insecurity underneath that. He was a very private guy; he would never have wanted me to write a book. He had a very complicated relationship with his often contradictory feelings." Bettye Kronstad: “Lou had become abusive with everybody on our last US tour. He almost gave me a black eye after hitting my sunglasses,” Kronstad wrote. “Then I gave him two black eyes, and that stopped him from being violent. Everybody knew he was abusive with his drinking, his drugs, his emotions. He was incredibly self-destructive then.” The problem Reed had finishing Berlin, Bettye sarcastically explained, “might have had something to do with all the fucking drugs and drinking he was doing. With Lou, people that he loved became part of him, so I got to be part of that incredible self-destructiveness.”

Things had gotten so bad that Kronstad flew to Santo Domingo to get a 24-hour divorce from Reed. The legal standing of such a divorce was complicated, and Kronstad demanded alimony for 5 years plus a settlement for her work as assistant at the Morgan studios in London. Kronstad remained in their apartment and Reed moved out. “I don’t know where,” she said. Then, one night, Reed called her from a local restaurant that had been one of their favourites, the Duck Joint, on First Avenue between 73rd and 74th Streets. “He asked ‘Can you meet me here?’” Kronstad wrote. “I was in a pretty good mood so I went. He said, ‘I’ve stopped. I’ve quit it. I won’t do that stuff. I’ll play it straight. We can do this. I need you. Can I just come over and talk about it?’” Kronstad let herself believe in him again. “I had invested a great deal of my life in him, so I guess there was a part of me that wanted to be convinced.” Talking about the character of Caroline, Bettye noted, “I think Nico is in there. Lou had loved her and she was German. Someone once said that Caroline was a combination of all the women in Lou’s life, and I think to a certain extent that’s true.” But even when Reed finally did complete writing the album’s 10 songs, things didn’t get easier. “I remember the morning I woke up and found him in the living room next to a consumed bottle of Johnnie Walker Red,” she wrote. “It was 8.30 in the morning and I became very upset. His drinking didn’t usually begin until at least the afternoon.” 

In Perfect Day, Bettye looks back on their initially idyllic life together on the Upper East Side; Lou’s struggle to launch a solo career after leaving perhaps the most influential rock band of all time; his work and friendships with fellow stars David Bowie and Iggy Pop; and his descent into alcohol and drug abuse following the success of Transformer, which sent him spinning out from gentle soul to rock’n’roll animal and brought a swift and calamitous end to their relationship. The result is a poignant meditation on love, loss, writing, and music. Bettye Kronstad was a teacher, freelance editor, and theater professional. She attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, studying with Sanford Meisner and Bill Esper of William Esper Studios in New York City. She attended Iona College for her master’s degree in English education. For twenty years she taught English and theater in inner-city public high schools in the Bronx and Harlem, New York; Minneapolis, Minnesota; New Mexico; and Texas. Widowed, she moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with her two daughters, the loves of her life. Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk