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Walk on the Wild Side We're all walking on the wild side now.

[Snip] Yes, we've lost some already. On top of the icons who died horribly young decades ago — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon — there's the litany of legends felled by illness, drugs, and just plain old age in more recent years: George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty. Those losses have been painful. But it's nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come. The grief and nostalgia will wash over us all. Yes, the Boomers left alive will take it...

Forever a Beatle, Starr will enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist on Saturday, inducted along with an eclectic class of musicians. Starr, who was previously enshrined with the Beatles in 1988, will be honored along with pop punks Green Day, soul singer-songwriter Bill Withers, underground-rock icon Lou Reed, bluesy guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Joan Jett and The Blackhearts, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and The "5" Royales. When the Beatles split at the height of their fame, Starr decided to take a shot at being a frontman and surprisingly flourished with...

Green Day, Lou Reed, Joan Jett, Ringo Starr Lead 2015 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

While rock 'n' roll is necessarily classified as a form of pop music, it is actually an idiom whose radical, destructive primitivism established a new type of socio-cultural disorder. It's about rejection of the status quo and celebration of the dis-imprisonment it instills. Always exploited for profit, rock's unmanageable aspects have been steadily diluted by a sinister, commercially driven course of revisionist myth-making. There is no acceptable role in the marketplace for radicals like Charlie Feathers, Poly Styrene, Lux Interior or Roky Erickson, but there's always room for the homogeneous, money-hungry, play-it-safe phonies on this list. These douchebags all have...

Lou Reed, the frontman of the rock band the Velvet Underground, has died at age 71, according to a report from Rolling Stone magazine. The Velvet Underground became one of the most influential bands in rock music by fusing art and music through its collaboration with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, Reuters reports. The magazine did not say how Reed died and his representatives could not immediately be reached.

Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.

Velvet Underground legend Lou Reed holds a rare press conference at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where he voices his concern about the NSA's surveillance methods as revealed by the Guardian. He also discusses the financial challenges for musicians in an era of free downloads and streaming services

Lou Reed, the US songwriter, poet and vocalist with the Velvet Underground, had a liver transplant last month, according to his wife, the musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson. “It’s as serious as it gets. He was dying. You don’t get it for fun,” said Anderson, who added that her husband was now on the road to recovery following the life-saving surgery. Reed, 71, canceled a number of concerts in April and had surgery in Cleveland rather than in his native New York due to what Anderson described as the “dysfunctional” hospitals in his home town. …

The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City, initially active from 1965 to 1973. The best-known members were Lou Reed and John Cale, who both went on to find success as solo artists- the legendary Andy Warhol also manged them for three years. Although never commercially successful, the band is often cited by many critics as one of the most important and influential groups of the 60s- trailblazers well-ahead of their time. The Velvet Underground first gained a degree of fame and in 1966 Manhattan when they were selected as the house band for Andy...

Sydney Opera House will be reaching out to an entirely new audience demographic next month when it stages a musical event aimed at canine listeners. The performance, which will take place on the northern boardwalk outside the venue, is the work of New York wife and husband team Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. The music stems from works that Anderson has been writing over the last 11 years for her rat terrier named Lollabelle. Most of the pitches will be too high for the dogs’ owners to hear, but they will be able to monitor the sounds on meters and,...

It’s a special thing when artists who’ve achieved greatness in their own right join forces to create a new musical entity. We’ve been blessed with a number of these “supergroups”: Blind Faith, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Velvet Revolver and Golden Smog, to name just a few. When a supergroup clicks, it can be magical. But when they don’t work…look out. The Million Dollar Quintet It’s a little-known fact that the Million Dollar Quartet —Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins— was originally a quintet. The fifth member of this historic December 4, 1956, Sun Studios jam...

How an Original Velvet Underground Acetate Wound Up in Portland (And Could Be the Most Expensive Record in the World!) Yard sales are like junior high dances. You show up full of anticipation, bump into a lot of people, and then leave disappointed. But in both cases, an ineffable sense of possibility spawns return, over and over. Maybe this time I'll slow dance with Tiffany Pfeiffer. Maybe this time I'll find a first edition of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Maybe my life will change within the hour. And so earlier this year, with flickering expectation, Warren Hill...

President Bush was denounced as an 'evil f---' at a fundraiser this week for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry. The event, held at Manhattan's Intrepid's Sea-Air-Space Museum Thursday night, featured a vulgarity laced performance by techno-rocker Moby, who invited Kerry onstage for a sing-along tribute to punk rock godfather Lou Reed. As the duo perfomed Reed's classic "Walk on the Wild Side," Kerry "froze," according to the New York Daily News, when Moby reached one particularly obscene portion of the song. Then, after the song ended, Moby denounced Bush to the crowd of Kerry-backers as "an evil f---," the...