“I Heard Her Call My Name”, which starts as a fairly straightforward rock song, with catchy backing vocals, has one of the loudest, weirdest and most aggressive solos in any Velvet Underground song. Maybe in any rock song up to that point. The atonal, feedback-filled solo is said to have been influenced by the Free-Jazz of Ornette Coleman. Reed said in 1989:

There were two sides of the coin for me. R&B, doo-wop, rockabilly. And then Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, stuff like that. When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it “Excursion on a Wobbly Rail”, after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.”

This song shows both sides of that coin pretty well.

Lyrically, the narrator being crippled (disabled or damaged because of drug use), he has illusions of and hears the voice of his dead lover (or maybe his mother) calling his name. Knowing she’s long dead and gone, Lou gets his mind “split open” which may resemble the fact he can’t get his mind around the idea of him hearing his dead lover once again or a lobotomy because of the signs of a mental illness (schizophrenia). Maybe a ghost or maybe a hallucination.