One Note on Six Strings: Lou Reed, Died 27 October 2013, and the Budget-Label Trick That Became Drone Rock

Lou Reed died on 27 October 2013 at his home in East Hampton, New York. He was 71 and had received a liver transplant earlier that year. The obituaries reached for the usual list: the Velvet Underground, “Walk on the Wild Side”, the songs about New York. Less often they mentioned the guitar trick that sits underneath all of it, and which he came up with while trying to write a novelty record.

A Job Writing Fake Hits

In 1964 Reed moved to New York to work as a staff songwriter for Pickwick Records, a budget label that turned out cheap imitations of whatever was selling. One assignment was “The Ostrich”, a parody of the dance-craze singles of the day. To promote it, Pickwick put together a studio group called the Primitives: Reed on vocals, John Cale on bass, Tony Conrad on guitar and Walter De Maria on percussion. Sources date the sessions to 1964 and the single, backed with “Sneaky Pete”, to 1965.

The song’s gimmick was its tuning. Reed set every string of the guitar to the same note, commonly D, so the instrument played one pitch spread across several octaves. Accounts say he told Cale it would make the song easy to learn. It also made the guitar ring like a small organ, with the strings beating against each other in a thick, shimmering chorus.

Two Musicians Who Recognized the Sound

Cale and Conrad had already been playing in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, a group built on sustained drones and just intonation. They heard something familiar in the unison tuning and understood what Reed had stumbled onto: a rock guitar that behaved like a drone instrument. The name “ostrich tuning” comes from the song, and the idea carried over when Reed and Cale formed the Velvet Underground.

A guitar tuned this way cannot play ordinary chords. Everything becomes a single sustained wall of one note, which is exactly why it suited a band that wanted to leave the pop songbook behind.

What It Sounds Like on Record

The tuning surfaces twice on The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967: at the end of “Venus in Furs” and on “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, where Cale’s viola adds a second layer of drone. According to drummer Moe Tucker, the guitar Reed used for it had its frets removed and was stolen soon after the album sessions.

The thread runs on through later Reed. In 1975 RCA released Metal Machine Music, a double album of modulated feedback and guitar effects. Rolling Stone called it the “tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator”, and copies were reportedly returned to shops in large numbers. Reed insisted it was a serious piece inspired by La Monte Young’s drone music, and the ostrich guitar shows he had meant that for more than a decade.

Try It at Home

If you play guitar, the experiment takes five minutes. Tune all six strings to D, which means lowering the first, third and sixth strings and raising the second, then leave the fourth where it is and drop the fifth. Strum an open chord and listen to the beating between strings. Add a bit of distortion or a long reverb and you have the raw material of a hundred stoner, shoegaze and drone records.

That is the quiet legacy of 27 October. Reed is remembered for the songs, but one of his most influential contributions was a tuning invented as a joke for a label that wanted to sell a dance craze. It handed rock a way to stay on one note and make that note enormous.