Was Lou Reed actually the least cool member of the Velvet Underground?

Was Lou Reed actually the least cool member of the Velvet Underground?

i know this is bait but come on. john cale has such an awful haircut in this pic, its not even funny.

Yes. In terms of coolness:
Mo Tucker > John Cale > Sterling > Lou

It's not his fault, I don't think he's ever had a haircut that suited him. Anyway, Lou might have looked the coolest, but he wasn't the coolest.

There's always Doug.

Come on now

Lou was the epitome of coolness.

Doug doesn't count

What did Sterling actually contribute creatively?

fair enough, in terms of overall persona john was pretty cool. still though, lou did some pretty cool career moves (excluding his s/t)

He was lead guitarist, so I'd imagine a bit. Also, Lou was stingy with the songwriting credits, so the others contributed more than their credited with:
>Lou really did want to have a whole lot of credit for the songs, so on nearly all of the albums we gave it to him. It kept him happy. He got the rights to all the songs on Loaded so now he's credited for being the absolute and singular genius of the Underground, which is not true. There are a lot of songs I should have coauthorship on, and the same holds true for John Cale. The publishing company was called Three Prong because there were three of us involved. I'm the last person to deny Lou's immense contribution and he's the best songwriter of the three of us. But he wanted all the credit, he wanted it more than we did, and he got it, to keep the peace.
Insisting on full songwriting credits for songs your bandmates (co)wrote is uncool

Nah. They were a band of exceptionally cool people, but Sterling and Moe didn't have long careers during which they could do cool things and Lou/Cale kept doing cool shit after they left The Velvets.

I liked the pink hair he had going for a while. It didn't look great, but at least it was self consciously awkward looking.

True

Women can be fun, sweet, and pleasant but they can’t be cool.

> not mentioning that he literally played the same note for ten hours straight for La Monte Young one time

Both Sterling and Moe did pretty cool stuff after the Velvets though. Sterling packed it in to be a tugboat captain, which is pretty neat desu, lowkey kind of cool, while Moe had her own lowkey career which she self-financed by working at Wal-Mart, and she also hung out and did stuff with Half Japanese and Sun City Girls and the like, which is really cool, I bet they were chuffed to bits about it.

explain paris 1919 then. in fact, let me do it for you: he tried to go the same route as lou and failed miserably. he probably thought about nico while recording his boring folk stuff, while lou fucked nico.

He contributed a decent amount to three records under their name. Granted, Squeeze is a fucking abomination and Loaded was the band selling out (though not a band record overall) but still he definitely did enough to count.
He was there about as long as Cale was.

Moe could. The Velvets had a "no chicks in the band" policy, but they let Moe in because Moe was cool.

Yeah, you're right. I was only saying he doesn't count because I forget him, and he's obviously the least cool member.

so anything you want to stuck your dick in cannot be cool?

That is pretty cool. But you've got to weight that up against Lou putting out Metal Machine Music, Berlin, Transformer, Lulu(which is hella cool because of how much of a fuck you to his fans it is), etc.
and Cale putting out Paris 1919, Fear and then producing on a fucking stupid number of classic records.

delete this

Kevin Ayers was cooler than all of them
>fucked Nico
>cucked Lou Reed
>cucked John Cale then had him play with him the following night
Awful opinion