10 Urban Legends About Popular Songs

The Kids – Lou Reed

The theory around this song is that producer Bob Ezrin made his own young children scream at the end of the song because he told them their mother had just been killed. Of course, there are other variations of the tale actually say that he physically hit them.

However, the truth is that Ezrin didn’t abuse his kids at all, but he simply recorded them while they were trying to resist bedtime one night. Then, the studio magician treated those screams with compression and distortion, pushing the wailing way up in the mix.

Ezrin even noted in the liner notes for the 1992 box set “Between Thought and Expression: The Lou Reed Anthology”, how “unbelievable is that emotional people accused me of beating my kids.”