“When all is said and done, there was no reason for Lou not to graduate. He went to class and he was very smart,” said Reed’s friend Richard Mishkin, per Rolling Stone. Similarly, it is tempting to imagine that Reed’s undeniable talent meant that achieving musical success was an inevitability — that, in a word, he had it easy. But by merely scratching the surface of his early life, we can see that Reed had much to contend with in terms of both his mental health and how his problems were dealt with using the treatments of the day.

Following Reed’s death in 2013, many obituaries, including that in The Guardian, noted that Reed had been treated from the age of 11 with electroconvulsive therapy, a brutal procedure intended to alter the patient’s brain chemistry which, per the Mayo Clinic, was originally performed without anesthetic. The New York Times describes how the therapy left Reed with a feeling of “incredible rage” towards his parents, who had reportedly sought treatment to combat Reed’s adolescent anxiety, antisocial behavior, and, possibly, homosexual urges (though Reed’s sister later denied this, per the same source).

The picture that emerges, in any case, is of Reed as a tortured youth, who, suffering mental health issues and the trauma of his treatment, turned to drugs at an early age; NME reports that, alongside marijuana and LSD, Reed began injecting heroin while still at university.

“It was like his life was over,” says Lou Reed’s friend from the Warhol scene, the writer Glenn O’Brien, according to The Independent. That the shock-rocker and New York music scene darling had effectively retired from his hard-partying life and found solace in suburbia with his parents was a source of deep embarrassment, for Reed himself but also for many of the flighty and fickle friends he had met in New York. Reed delved deeper into conventional poetry, vowing, per the same source, never to play rock ‘n’ roll again.

However, despite Reed’s disappointment with the final Velvet Underground release, “Loaded” saw rising British rockstar David Bowie “beating a path to [Reed’s] door,” as The Independent puts it. Reed finally returned to music in 1971, when he signed a deal with RCA records as a solo artist, according to All Music. And just as Andy Warhol had helped to shape The Velvet Underground, in the early 70s Reed’s friendship with Bowie saw his solo career — after a disappointing debut album — hit its creative peak with the Bowie-produced 1972 album “Transformer,” featuring Reed’s most famous songs: “Walk On The Wild Side” and “Perfect Day.” Bowie would remain a friend and admirer of Reed throughout his life.

When Lou Reed died in 2013, Bowie led the tributes to his former collaborator. “He was a master,” said Bowie, per the BBC.

With the help of David Bowie, “Transformer” was an international hit which rode the glam rock wave of the early seventies while showcasing Reed’s idiosyncratic songwriting. The album lived up to its name by altering Reed’s career and sending him into the rock ‘n’ roll stratosphere overnight.

But, in a turn of events that would become the usual mode throughout Reed’s patchwork career, the unadulterated acclaim was not to last. Ever looking to experiment, Reed followed “Transformer” with 1973’s “Berlin,” a double album chronicling the dissolution of a marriage (Reed’s own marriage was also breaking apart at the time, per The Guardian). The bleak record was a commercial flop, though, per Pitchfork, Reed’s audience returned for his highly successful live album, 1974’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal,” and a follow-up studio album “Sally Can’t Dance.”

However, 1975’s “Metal Machine Music,” a sprawling double album of noise and distortion — with no actual songs or any vocals, as noted by the BBC – was received so badly that many assumed it was a joke. Rumors circulated that the album had been made so Reed could get out of his recording contract, or that it was intended as a direct attack on his fans. However, as Pitchfork notes, “Metal Machine Music” serves as a “logical endpoint” of the drone music that he began experimenting with using the ostrich guitar. “The truth is that I really, really, really loved it,” Reed told Pitchfork in 2007.

Though “Metal Machine Music” represented such a critical and commercial nadir at the time of its release that many believed it capable of destroying Lou Reed’s entire career, the singer, who had already been through numerous disappointments, managed once more to find himself an audience. Beginning his recovery with “Coney Island Baby” later in 1975, Reed continued to release music prolifically, finding his commercial heights in 1989 with the album “New York,” Reed’s only certified gold record, according to Pitchfork. Per the same source, what characterizes Reed’s career throughout his life is the unpredictability of his releases; just as the popular hit “Transformer” was followed by the high-concept bomb “Berlin,” Reed worked with no sense that he should ever fulfil the expectations of either fans or critics.

And nothing demonstrated this aspect of Reed’s personality more than his final album, 2011’s “Lulu,” a collaboration with heavy metal outfit Metallica. Per the NME, “Lulu” has become known as “one of the worst reviewed albums ever,” with contemporary music critics railing against the perceived mismatch of Reed’s woozy and subtle narrative lyrics with Metallica’s sledgehammer instrumentation.

However, as with seemingly all of Reed’s output, years after his death “Lulu” has received some positive reappraisal, with Louder, in an article titled “In defense of Lulu,” describing Reed’s final project as “misunderstood.”

Lou Reed’s death sparked an outpouring of effusive tributes from his many collaborators, friends, and admirers, with fellow Velvet Underground founder John Cale saying (per The Guardian): “The world has lost a fine songwriter and poet … I’ve lost my school-yard buddy,” while fans such as Ricky Gervais took to social media to express the impact Reed had on their lives, with the music journalist Charles Shaar Murray claiming that Reed “completely changed the cultural landscape we inhabit,” per the BBC.

However, Murray also added that Reed “was not considered a likeable man, except by his closest friends,” and, in the years following his death, accounts of his abusive behavior and difficult personality have been hard to ignore. According to The New York Times, a 2015 book by Howard Sounes pulled no punches in its portrayal of Reed as an aggressive and abusive artist, who freely used racial slurs and violence throughout his career. 

But while scrutiny of Reed has increased as the portrait of the man has grown clearer, his artistic achievements and lasting influence have never been in doubt. As Bill Wyman stated in a piece for Vulture: “For better or worse, Lou Reed was always Lou Reed: a self-sabotaging, widely disliked man who gave voice to the unwanted and despised.”