The American rock musician Lou Reed, a member of the Velvet Underground, visited his friend Václav Havel several times. The last time was in 2009 when he performed at the Prague Crossroads concert “It’s Here at Last”. The concert was organized by the late president, VIZE 97 Foundation, Forum 2000, and the Václav Havel Library, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Revolution. Lou Reed performed together with Joan Baez, Jiří Bělohlávek, Renée Fleming, Jiří Stivín, Suzanne Vega, and the Prague Philharmonia.
Lou Reed also played for Václav Havel at a White House Dinner in 1998. The president then wished that Lou Reed be accompanied by the musician Mejla Hlavsa, one of the deceased members of the band The Plastic People of the Universe, who travelled along with the official presidential delegation.
The two friends met officially for the first time in 1990 when the musician came to the Castle to do an interview with the president for Rolling Stone magazine. The interview was translated into Czech and was published in a 1997 collection of Reed’s texts called “Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed”. There, he writes about his first visit to Prague as well as his first concert among Mr Havel’s friends:
“Many people told me they recited my lyrics for inspiration and comfort when in jail. Some had remembered a line I had written in an essay 15 years ago, ‘Everybody should die for the music.’ It was very much a dream for me and well beyond my wildest expectations. When I had gotten out of college and helped from the V[elvet] U[nderground], I had been concerned with, among other things, demonstrating how much more a song could be about than what was currently being written. So the VU albums and my own are implicitly about freedom of expression, freedom to write about what you please and in any way you please. And that music found a home here in Czechoslovakia.” (p. 161)
Lou Reed died on 27 October 2013. His songs inspired the name and music of The Plastic People of the Universe which started as an opening act, not only for Velvet Underground, but also for The Doors and Frank Zappa.