Music producer Brian Eno once summed up the influence of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground by saying: "The first Velvet album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band."
Though hugely popular in the mid- to late-1970s, the Ninth Circle on 139 West 10th Street in New York's Greenwich Village defied the era's common gay-bar markets: leather men or clones. Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Edward Albee, Wayne County and Robert Mapplethorpe all sought shelter there.
Possibly Lou Reed's biggest hit, "Walk on the Wild Side," was inspired by an assignment from Joe Papp's Public Theater to create a musical score based on the Nelson Algren novel (1956) of the same name. Reed discusses this at length on his loquacious Live Take No Prisoners album. The musical never happened, but Reed rewrote the original lyrics and came up with the song for which he is most likely to be remembered.