Lou Reed’s death in 2013 marked the loss of one of rock music’s great sphinxes. His public and musical personae were as much stumbled into as cultivated — certain producers, or patrons, or lovers, or drugs could push him in certain directions, and he often demonstrated little concern about what the market might make of wherever he went. (In the case of Reed’s 1975 album, Metal Machine Music, a two-LP blast of raw noise, active defiance of the market was largely the point.) Reed was famous — his work with the Velvet Underground became iconic, and he could deliver an occasional hit single like 1972’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” But success also seemed to eat at him: Watch the video for his 1986 single “No Money Down” in which the head of an animatronic Reed is torn to shreds (perhaps by Reed’s own hands?) and you get a sense of his internal discomfort.
So making sense of Reed is a tall order — he was as mercurial a person as he was a musician — but Will Hermes’ Lou Reed: The King of New York is largely up to the task. Chronicling how he channeled his early love of rock music and poetry into a role as the prime mover of the Velvets and unsteady captain of a messy solo career, Hermes settles on a couple of organizing principles to give Reed’s life a sensible shape. First and most prominently is Reed’s sexuality. His most enduring partners were women, whom he praised in song repeatedly, but his sexuality was always fluid, and he found himself drawn to gay havens — a rare, commercially risky thing even in New York in the 50s and 60s. As part of Andy Warhol’s Factory demimonde, he found a measure of liberation. But he also saw his sexuality as a burden. “From age 12 on I could have been having a ball and not even thought about this shit,” he once said. “If the forbidden thing is love, then you spend most of your life playing with that.”
That tension, in Hermes’ reckoning, in large part inspired the brilliant transgressiveness of the Velvets — the driving ambivalence of “Heroin” and harrowing racket of “Sister Ray” was doing battle with the lucid storytelling and graceful melodies of “Sweet Jane” and “Sunday Morning.” When he’d signed on with Warhol, Reed was knocking out pop songs for a low-rent record company while also befriending Warhol superstars like the transgender actress Candy Darling at the Velvets’ ongoing Factory-fueled residencies. Like Warhol, Hermes argues, Reed was figuring out how to navigate a semi-closeted world, blending leather and streetwise posturing and sexual vulnerability.
All of it gave him a measure of fame, but it was a liminal place to be, both financially and psychologically. When the Velvets broke up, for a time Reed was compelled to work as a typist at his father’s accounting firm, and for years he seemed unsure whether he needed to escape his old band’s legacy or embrace it. (His 1974 live album, Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, was a modest hit and a major milestone in his career, but it was also all Velvets tracks.) For a time, he thought he’d be a poet, and though Transformer and its producer, David Bowie — another sphinx — would pull him back into music, he was navigating a rock culture that paid lip service to rebellion but was still mired in homophobia. Nick Tosches, reviewing Transformer, advised him to “forget this artsyfartsy kind of homo stuff.” A profile in Creem captioned a photo saying Reed was a wanted man “for transforming a whole generation of young Americans into faggot junkies.”
By the mid to late 70s, he’d hit bottom, both in terms of his addictions and creatively — disappointed by the tepid response to his ambitious 1973 album, Berlin, he seemed to spend the rest of his career alternately undermining his identity, embracing it, and pursuing new ones. Hermes, perhaps sensibly, avoids playing armchair psychiatrist about his motivations and frustrations throughout. (He’ll occasionally overreach: Was Metal Machine Music, for all its abrasiveness, really “a radical queer art statement, its wordless roar a shutdown of homophobic interrogation”?) Whatever happened, it bore fruit. In the 80s, he reached some creative high points — most notably 1982’s The Blue Mask and 1989’s New York. And he’d gotten clean, though even there he couldn’t escape his past: Hermes reports that Reed was once accosted at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting by someone who told him: “How dare you be here — you’re the reason I took heroin!”
How did he get there, exactly? Hermes doesn’t offer a clear psychological arc. Rather, he suggests that Reed’s life was shaped and redeemed by particular partnerships. Hermes will often introduce a musical, creative, or romantic partner through the lens of what their common ground was — not a small thing for an artist with whom common ground was hard to find. He and his Velvets bandmate John Cale “shared ideas, intoxicants, illness, hypodermics, eventually hepatitis.” Both he and Warhol “made queer-themed art at a time when that was considered beyond the pale, if not illegal.” He and record executive Clive Davis were “Brooklyn-born, middle-class, college-educated, ambitious Jewish men in the music industry.” And he and his final life partner, the experimental musician Laurie Anderson, “interrogated and played with gender roles … Both Anderson and Reed had complicated relationships with family; neither had children.”
But common ground wasn’t always enough, and even the people he would find the most support from — like Warhol or his 80s collaborator Robert Quine — found themselves frozen out. In Hermes’ telling, some of this was part of a desperate search for cash or esteem at a time when few were clamoring for Reed albums. (Hermes delivers a thorough accounting of how well Reed was paid for licensing songs to advertisers.) But much of it was a function of Reed never quite sorting out what his musical direction was. To the end, he was playing with pop music but undermining it (he impossibly insisted that his song “Sex With Your Parents [Motherfucker], Part II” be released as a single), or pursuing high-concept ideas that left even his collaborators baffled, as Metallica was with 2011’s Lulu.
“He’d always say he didn’t remember the past,” one of Reed’s publicists told Hermes. “I think it was just that a lot of the past was painful to him.” Understandable: Hermes recalls Reed’s early experience with electroshock therapy, drug use, a pervasive sense of writerly failure, and sexual uncertainty. No question, there was a lot of pain. Hermes’ biography is a well-told story about how Reed, somehow, annealed all of that into lasting art, even if that “somehow” leaves many questions open and unsatisfyingly answered.
Still, it’s not to diminish Hermes’ writing and research to note that one of the most poignant parts of the book isn’t his prose but a photograph, an Annie Liebovitz image of Reed and Anderson on a park bench at Coney Island in 1995. His hair tossed by the ocean breeze, he casually holds a cigarette between his fingers, and stares at the camera with a Mona Lisa smile. You can see the years of hard experience in his face, but also the suggestion that he’s found a way to carry them lightly. And the reason why is next to him: Anderson leans lovingly against him, eyes shut, smirking but relaxed. They know they’re being watched and unconcerned with how they’re seen — finally, a perfect partnership, a perfect peace.
[Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 3, 2023, 558 pages, $35.00 US hardcover]