Mike from Matawan, NjThere's no contest. Jim from Long Beach, Cathis sog is so ahead of it's time. 
Rick from Brooklyn, Ny, NyJim jims in this town might/might not be a reference to African Americans. Check out the two on 1969: Live, the one on Bataclan 72, the one on the Bootleg Series, the two on Caught Between the Twisted Stars, the one at La Cave 1968, and the one on Live MCMXCIII, as well as the one at the Springfield concert (pardon the quality), and of course both the mono and stereo versions of the studio recording. Derek from Pittsburgh, PaThe live versions of these songs are amazing. Part of the heroin dive is picking up, navigating the underbelly, and it’s dishonest creatures. Thomas from New Zealand Jim-Jim’s are simply hustlers/con artists. Brian from EnglandThis is just a song about heroin, a dramatic short story set to music, part of Reed's pen-portraits of life on the streets.Īs he once said, just because I write a song about heroin, doesn't mean I'm an addict, in the same way that a novelist would write about any subject without necessarily experiencing it first-hand.Īs far as I'm aware, Reed wasn't a heroin user the song's pace more accurately reflects the effects of amphetamine, which Reed used in abundance (Remember "My day beats your year"). The screeching at the end of the song symbolises the heroin taking over his body as he is about to die. Jim from BelfastFor me the song is about someone who is committing suicide via a heroin overdose. 
Maureen Tucker even taps her drum rims at certain moments and she is obviously using her mallets. Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison both played their electric guitars and neither "Heroin" nor "Sister Ray" feature a bass guitar.
David Harvey from AustraliaJohn Cale says that he actually used mandolin and guitar strings on his viola, including mandola strings at some point, and his so-called "electric viola" was in fact, a standard classical acoustic viola restrung with mandolin and guitar strings as well as obviously having some sort of amplification pickups. But I don't think that anymore it's really too awful a thing to consider." For a while, I was even thinking that some of my songs might have contributed formatively to the consciousness of all these addictions and things going down with the kids today. Because, like, people would come up and say, 'I shot up to 'Heroin,' things like that. 
But when I saw how people were responding to them, it was disturbing. In many of his songs, we have cases where Lou Reed kept the focus on providing an objective description of the topic without taking a moral stance on the matter.įor the record, Reed spoke of the meaning of some of his songs in a 1971 interview with Creem magazine: "I meant those songs to sort of exorcise the darkness, or the self-destructive element in me, and hoped other people would take them the same way.
It might have been done merely for shock value, or because Reed liked gritty subjects, or as a dark poem of addiction the beauty of this song is that it works on all of these levels, and many more, at the same time. While there are many alternative interpretations of this song, it seems to be the case that Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed was merely describing the effects of the drug, while neither condemning it nor condoning it.
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