Uncle Lou, my friend and I used to call him — it seemed right to think of him this way, because he was nobody’s dad and “friend” seemed like a stretch. But an intimate, still. Or the illusion of one.
The great virtue of “Lou Reed: The King of New York,” the new and very fine biography by Will Hermes, is that it’s really two biographies: of a bored and in some respects ordinary suburban teenage boy, typical of postwar America, and of his alter ego — the louche, urbane, ambi-poly decadent forever trembling at the absolute limit of Experience — brought into existence by his lonely daydreaming.
The first verges on stereotype: Dad a tax accountant, Mom a homemaker; a single-story, stand-alone brick house in the suburbs on Long Island; playing stickball until dark, back in time for a home-cooked meal. He went to college and wept when President Kennedy died. But the mid-century demanded a normalcy of Lewis Reed that he was unable to supply. Here was a fragile kid, maybe dyslexic, definitely depressed, sexually attracted to both men and women. Hence, Lou Reed, and his very urgent need to make rock and roll.
How dead do you have to be inside not to feel some nostalgia for this part of a rock biography? Pre-internet, pre-Spotify, music sneaking up on you in a darkened bedroom via samizdat radio waves. For Reed, curiously, it was not rhythm and blues or Elvis that most turned him on, but doo-wop. The Solitaires, the Chantels, the El Dorados — this dreamy catalogue of the now-half-forgotten taught Reed a critical life lesson: You only need four chords.
One second Reed is an artsy little goofball noodling on his guitar, the next his high school band, the Jades, is recording for an offshoot of Mercury Records. They flamed out quickly, but the experience gave Reed some necessary seasoning as a musician and frontman. He attended New York University for a spell, then Syracuse, where he met one of the two decisive influences on his creative life: the poet, short-story writer and legendary burnout Delmore Schwartz.
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Reed already had a counter-canon (Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” J.D. Salinger’s Glass stories, Ornette Coleman) ringing in his head, but there’s no substitute for heroism in the flesh. Schwartz gave Reed the enduring model of the writer as anti-commercial holdout and martyr to his art. Pushing against this, soon enough, came graduation and the need to eat. Reed took a job at a cheapie label that retailed its knockoff rock-and-roll records at Woolworth’s, a gig that forced him to write songs, by the bushelful and on a tight deadline.
This combination of relentless songwriting churn and the midday barfly gloom of Schwartz served Reed well for the next three decades, starting, of course, with the Velvet Underground. Here Hermes is masterful, recounting the various unlikely elements that came together: Andy Warhol, Reed’s other great influence and the band’s Svengali, who grew up even more bored and lonely than Reed and who, having moved to New York, still bored and lonely, created the city of Reed’s dreams; Nico, the German ice goddess forced on the band by Warhol, whose ethereal singsong somehow did Reed’s melodies justice.
And most of all, John Cale. Two frenemies, a couple of guitars, looks and chops a must, etc. — it feels familiar, given the Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards archetype, though maybe it shouldn’t. The Beatles and the Stones arose out of the love and rivalry inherent in any early friendship, while the Velvets represented the brief coincidence, in space and time, of two relatively mature, and utterly conflicting, musical visions.
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Cale was a bona fide member of New York’s European-ish avant-garde; he played the viola and, like those of his own hero, the composer Le Monte Young, his tastes trended in the direction of the monotonal dirge. Reed, meanwhile, was a writer of catchy four-chord jingles. Oh, the weird kismet that ensued. The crude thump-thump beat — is that the drummer or your neighbor telling you to turn it down? — so foursquare and menacing; lyrics that gesture to some taboo sacrament. The cold venomous cunning of it; to this day, it’s forever new.
The Velvets’ debut release of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” preceded the Beatles’ “Revolver” by a month. Very few people understood what they were hearing — but the right ones did, including a young, not-yet-famous David Bowie. “I was hearing a degree of cool that I had no idea was humanly sustainable,” Bowie would recall of “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” the band’s first album. “Ravishing. One after another, tracks squirmed and slid their tentacles around my mind.” At the center of it all, when Nico ceded the mic, was the singing-nonsinging of its lead singer-nonsinger.
Hermes’s previous book, “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever,” was a love-poem-cum-ethnography of the New York music scene of the 1970s, in all its wild cross-pollinating eclecticism. To Reed, Hermes brings his same unique blend of rhapsody and scholarly dispassion, of love and skepticism that defines the very best criticism. Plenty has been written about Reed, but only Hermes, to my mind, has gotten Reed’s peculiar balance, of person and poseur, exactly right.
And only someone with a perilously fragile sense of self could have created a persona this robust. If Reed wrote indelible songs, he crafted an equally indelible alter ego: part de Sade, part Lenny Bruce, all collegiate literatus; hip, ironic, detached, with a dash of schmaltz. As the man himself acknowledged, “Lou Reed” is more an idea than an actual person. “I created Lou Reed,” Hermes quotes his subject saying. “I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well. Really well.”
Hence my favorite detail from the whole book: Burned out on drugs and rivalry (not to mention lack of sales), and having quit the band, the notoriously decadent lead singer brought to his final Velvets show — his mom and dad, Sid and Toby? Come again? As Hermes says, the ’60s were petering out, Reed was approaching 30, and he hadn’t achieved rock stardom. When “Loaded,” the Velvets’ final record, and bearer of what Hermes and I regard as the finest rock-and-roll song of all time, “Sweet Jane,” came out, Reed was living in his childhood bedroom and working at his dad’s firm as a typist.
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But Bowie, now world-devouringly famous, never forgot the revelation of those Velvets records. He picked Reed off the discard pile and produced his second solo record, “Transformer.” “Walk on the Wild Side,” with its earwormy opening riff, featuring two harmonizing bass guitars, and its equally unforgettable roster of genderqueer castaways, became the signature hit that had evaded the Velvets. Reed now had what every would-be rock star secretly dreams of: an unkillable brand.
And unkill it he did, for the next 40 or so years. This biography is as beautifully researched as it is written; thorough, smart, conscientious and an absolute delight to simmer in. But it suffers in its final third from being about Lou Reed, living totem of authenticity. As Hermes says, “His work with the Velvets coined New York’s rock sensibility: lyrically and musically confrontational, intellectual, smart-ass, unabashedly romantic.” Perfectly said and true. Still, about the last thing we owe such a figure is a political deference.
With some lovely exceptions, Reed’s solo records were too often pretentious throwaways, attitudinizing with a thin veneer of originality slapped on. Worse, he became, from the evidence of Hermes’s extensive reporting, just another celebrity who threw the epic hissy fit when he didn’t get his way, in the studio or the bistro. In the spirit of the man himself, am I allowed to say that I often found this person so pathetically ugly? And may I add as a coda: Thank you, Uncle Lou, for teaching me to speak my mind this way. I love and miss you.
Stephen Metcalf is a writer and host of the “Slate Culture Gabfest,” a podcast.
Lou Reed
The King of New York
By Will Hermes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 560 pp. $35
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly said that "Transformer" was Lou Reed's first solo record. It was his second solo record. The article has been corrected.
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