Everyone's favorite grumpy rocker Lou Reed turns 71 years young today! Reed has had a long and storied career, starting out as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records before forming (arguably) the greatest NYC band, the Velvet Underground, in the mid-60s. We particularly love it when Reed is posing for ridiculous photos with the likes of Moby, Bono and his dog—above, you can see 21 such examples of that.
We love Reed as much when he was skronking on "Sister Ray" as when he was embracing noise on Metal Machine Music; we love Reed as much when he was terrifying reporters as when he was reading NSFW porn descriptions.
We love Rock And Roll Animal, which we listened to in high school on long drives to the beach. We love the intricate guitar work on The Blue Mask. We love his most underrated album, the romantic Coney Island Baby, which has long been our favorite album to wash the dishes to.
We love his epics like "Street Hassle" and lesser-known modern classics like Ecstasy. We love the absolutely devastating Magic and Loss record, which gave us one of our favorite quotes of all time: "There's a bit of magic in everything/ and then some loss to even things out."
Besides his collaboration with Metallica, we really have a place in our hearts for almost everything Reed has produced throughout his long, sometimes uncomfortable, always uncompromising career—who else could write an album called New York in the dreaded '80s and come out with one of his masterpieces, as pure a distillation of the city as "Take The 'A' Train" or "New York Groove"?
Oh yeah, it's also Jon Bon Jovi's birthday today, but, um...yeah!
