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The Freak
Here's something almost nobody knows about Lou Reed: before he wrote "Walk on the Wild Side" or made his deal with the devil in Berlin, he spent a chunk of the early 1960s trying to get an entire generation to do a very strange thing with their bodies.
It didn't work. But the story of why he tried—and what this says about the man—is worth your time.
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Thecollegekid with a crazy idea
Reed was twenty-something, still grinding through college at Syracuse, when the idea hit him. He'd been writing songs already, playing in little bands, dreaming about something bigger. But one day he started fixating on a different question: why did dancing have to be so... polite?
The twist dances of the era—the Twist, the Mashed Potato, the Swim—were fun, sure. But they were also pretty choreographed, pretty safe. Kids were wearing them like costumes, performing approved moves. Reed looked at that and saw something repressive hiding inside a party.
So he did what Lou Reed did best: he went the opposite direction.
He called his dance "The Freak." And he meant it.
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How do you even describe a dance that's supposed to be about breaking rules?
This is where the story gets weird.
Reed wrote out an entire instructional manual—diagrams, step-by-step sequences, the whole thing. He imagined groups of kids in gymnasiums learning the moves, internalizing the philosophy. The dance itself was supposed to be jerky, angular, deliberately uncomfortable. You'd flail a bit. You'd look foolish doing it. That's kind of the point.
Because "The Freak" wasn't really about steps. It was about what happened when you stopped caring how you looked. The alienation, the counterculture energy, the whole "we're-not-like-you" spirit of early 60s youth—Reed wanted to crystallize all of that into physical movement.
It's ambitious. It's probably too ambitious. And it definitely never caught on.
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Where it all went
Here's the thing: the early 1960s weren't ready for this. The counterculture was still brewing underground. Most kids were doing the Pony around this time, not ready to embrace something that openly rejected respectability.
Reed, to his credit, moved on. He found his real weapon wasn't choreography—it was the microphone, the band, the lyrics. By the time The Velvet Underground exploded, "The Freak" was already ancient history, a footnote in his personal archive.
But here's what I keep thinking about: you can hear echoes of it in everything that came after.
The rejection of mainstream polish. The glorification of the weird, the alienated, the broken. The Velvet Underground didn't try to make you comfortable—and neither did "The Freak." It's the same DNA, just expressed through different bodies.
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The part that really gets me
In a world drowning in content—toes in the water, dance challenges on TikTok, AI-generated choreography tutorials—there's something almost touching about a twenty-year-old Lou Reed, by himself, meticulously diagramming a dance he believed could change how a generation moved through the world.
He was delusional. It was never going to happen. But he tried anyway.
That unreformed willingness to bet on a crazy idea—in retrospect, it's the throughline. Reed spent his whole career being the guy who went left when everyone else went right. The Freak was his first experiment in that direction, even if nobody ever did the steps.
Maybe that's the real lesson here. Not every wild idea becomes history. But the ones worth having are the ones you'd still chase even knowing they'd probably fail.
