Lewis Allan “Lou” Reed was an American singer/songwriter and musician, best known for being associated with the band Velvet Underground. He was born on the 2nd of March, 1942 and was dead on the October of 2013, at the age of 71. Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York City, United States of America as the son of a musician father named Sidney Joseph Reed, and his mother Toby, worked as an accountant. His family was Jewish and has eastern European ancestry, and regarding his religious view, he said in an interview, “My God is rock’n’roll. It’s an obscure power that can change your life. The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.” He first attended the Atkinson Elementary School in Freeport and later changed to study at the Freeport Junior High School. He was very paranoid as a teenager, and suffered mostly from panic attacks. Known for his ill temper, he used to stay isolated and focus on music, and learned to play guitar by listening to the radio. An American by nationality, he belonged to white ethnicity.
Lewis had an average height of about 178 cm, which measures about 5 feet and 10 inches tall. He had a body weight of about 80 kg, and has a well-shaped body. Not a regular exerciser, he used to spend most of his time composing music, and writing songs. He began his musical journey in 1964, after he moved to New York and started working with Pickwick Records. After recognizing his potential to become a singer, he was promoted and soon formed a group named “The Primitives”, which included some amateur musician with fine skills. The band started to perform gigs around the Broadway and soon caught eye of artist Andy Warhol, who later joined the band and renamed it to Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Then the fourth member of the band, who was a European singer named Nico joined in and it was then that The Velvet Underground & Nico was formed. Although Reed left the band in 1970, but a reunion was made in 1990 which saw all the previous artist work together.
Reed had been married a couple of times, and also divorced many times. He had a list of dating and his girlfriends included: Nico, Sylvia Morales, Betty and Laurie Anderson. He is also believed to have had affairs with David Bowie and Mick Ronson, which raised questions about him being a gay. He was first married in 1973 to his Betty Reed and divorced 6 years later. His second wife was whom he married in 1980 and lived together for 14 years. After that relationship, he was with Laurie Anderson from 2008 till his death in 2013. It looks like he didn’t have any children from all of those affairs.
He had released about 50 albums, some individually and others with his band. In his career of almost 50 years, he has many hot songs and some of them are: Walk on the Wild Side, Perfect Day, Berlin, Vicious and many others. In order to know more about him, you can read his biography that is available in sites like IMDB and Wikipedia. You can also stay close to him, by following him in his social site accounts like Twitter and also check his pictures out in his official Instagram page. By 2015, his estimated net worth is about $15 million US dollars.