Mr. Reed was a pioneer on rock’s frontier with the avant-garde, translating lessons he learned at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the disruptive innovations of the Beat writers — Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. (“Last Exit to Brooklyn”) — to the realm of popular music. He not only embraced their adversarial stance toward society and transgressive subject matter (in songs like “Street Hassle” and “Heroin”) but also developed his own version of their raw, vernacular language, while adding a physical third dimension with guitars and drums. His early songs for the Velvet Underground — delivered in his intimate, conversational sing-speak — still sound so astonishingly inventive and new that it’s hard to remember they were written nearly half a century ago.

If Mr. Reed provided a literary bridge to the Beats (and through them, back to the Modernists, and the French “decadents” Rimbaud and Verlaine, and even Poe, the subject of his 2003 project “The Raven”), he also created a bridge forward to punk and to glam, indie, new wave and noise rock. He would become a formative influence on musicians like Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Roxy Music, R.E.M., the Sex Pistols, Sonic Youth, the Strokes, Pixies, and Antony and the Johnsons. As his friend the artist Clifford Ross observed, “Lou was the great transmitter” — of ideas, language and innovation.

What gave Mr. Reed such a broad artistic wingspan was the extraordinary emotional and sonic range of his work: his access to both the sunlit and darkly shadowed parts of his psyche, his magpie’s love of so many genres of music and his willful determination to continually experiment. His music from album to album (sometimes from track to track) often seemed deliberately to subvert expectations. His 1972 album, “Transformer” — which mixed rough street reportage with playful, trippy musings in classics like “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Perfect Day” and “Satellite of Love” — was followed by his dark, ambitious song cycle “Berlin,” and a few years later by the deliberately difficult “Metal Machine Music” (1975), a howling hour-plus-long barrage of feedback and electronic noise.

“It’s not that he didn’t care what people thought,” his longtime producer and collaborator Hal Willner said last week. “He cared. But it wasn’t going to change what he did.”