Lou Reed said “The Beatles were garbage” and The Doors were “stupid”
There are few joys more pure than Lou Reed giving an interview while fully in his misanthropic, chain-smoking, “fuck you, I’m Lou Reed” mode.
The man could weaponise a shrug. Reed didn’t do pleasantries. He didn’t do reverence. He did disdain, precision-engineered and aimed like a sniper. Especially when the topic was fellow rock stars, God help you if you were wearing rose-colored glasses—Lou would rip them off your face, crush them under a boot heel, and hand them back to you in a paper bag marked “reality”.
So in 1987, when Lou sat down for an interview and started verbally curb-stomping sacred cows like the Beatles and the Doors, nobody should’ve been surprised. Reed wasn’t there to play nice or pat the past on the back; he was there to reiterate the gospel of the Velvet Underground, a band that, in his mind, didn’t just change music. They invented the only version of it that was worth a damn. Reed was already half myth by then, and every time he opened his mouth, he seemed to be building a church with himself as the altar.
For, you see, the Velvets were out to “elevate the rock and roll song and take it where it hadn’t been taken before”. (Sure, the Beatles didn’t have anything like that on their resumé.)
So when he calls out Jim Morrison and the Doors, Reed was drawing a bloodline between what he considered authentic art and what he saw as theatrical nonsense. The Velvets trafficked in junkies, street hustlers, feedback, drone, and brutal honesty. The Doors? To Lou, they were leather pants and bad poetry—overwrought, oversexed, and overdressed. “Painfully stupid and pretentious,” he says, like it’s a diagnosis.
In a particularly damning bit, Reed shits on Morrison’s legendary and influential outfit: “From my point of view … the other stuff couldn’t come up to our ankles, not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level we were on, compared to everybody else. I mean they were just painfully stupid and pretentious, and when they did try to get, in quotes, ‘arty,’ it was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by ‘stupid,’ I mean, like, the Doors.”
Reed’s scorn for Morrison probably had less to do with the actual music and more to do with myth-making. Reed loathed rock stars pretending to be shamans. Theatrics disguised as insight made his skin crawl. When he heard Morrison muttering about snakes and fire and ancient souls, he didn’t hear depth—he heard a frat boy with a library card and too much incense. And nothing insulted Lou more than someone faking the darkness he actually lived through.
The Doors were a great band, but anyone who had a Doors-obsessed roommate in college will understand where Reed’s coming from here.
And then there’s the Beatles. Reed didn’t just dislike them—he dismissed them like a cockroach on his shoe. “Garbage,” he said flatly. “I liked nobody.”
“I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage. If you say, ‘Who did you like?’ I liked nobody.”
Lou Reed
It wasn’t just that the Beatles made pop music—it was that they represented a world of optimism, sing-alongs, and cheery British wit. Reed wasn’t interested in holding hands or yellow submarines. He wanted feedback, nihilism, and the scummy truth of the city at 3am. When he looked at John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he saw tunesmiths. When he looked at himself, he saw a prophet with a guitar.
Of course, Lou could be generous and even kind when he wanted to be. He respected Bob Dylan. He admired Ornette Coleman. But that wasn’t the Lou Reed on display here. In this moment, he wasn’t a former junkie turned elder statesman; he was still the guy in sunglasses at midnight, carving his initials into the side of rock history with a knife. You might not agree with him. But you’ll damn well remember what he said.
I’m sure on other occasions Reed showed more respect for the creativity of others, but not on this day…