Katharine Barr was the head of WAER when a scruffy Lou Reed approached, begged and pleaded her to have his own program on the station

Barr, a 1961 SU alumna, said she knew the program was going to have some kind of jazz. At the time, she said, the station played a lot of classical music and some Broadway.

“I knew I was in trouble from this part when instead of it being ‘The Lou Reed Show’ or ‘Lou Reed Jazz’ or whatever, he called the program ‘Excursions on a Wobbly Rail,’” Barr said.

They were still on the “cusp of the Eisenhower era,” she said. The United States wasn’t in the middle of a war. There were very few demonstrations on campus. Girls wore skirts and dresses to class. The guys had clean haircuts and no facial hair.

Reed’s hair, she said, was all over the place. He was doing “70s and 80s stuff” in the 1960s. Syracuse “wasn’t ready for him.”

“It wasn’t too long until the wrath of the faculty and administration rained down on me,” she said. “And I had no choice but to let him go.”