Lou Reed: The King of New York

by Will Hermes

The most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.

Since his death ten years ago, Lou Reed’s living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou The King of New York , Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed’s life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed’s complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage he took from his mentor Delmore Schwartz.

As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the landmark status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library’s much-publicized Reed archive, Hermes employs the library collections, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews to give us a new Lou Reed―a pioneer in living and writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Art, Queer, New York

529 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 2023

About the author

Hi there. I write about music and popular culture for Rolling Stone, The New York Times and other outlets, and am a regular contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." I co-edited "SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music" with my pal Sia Michel.

Reviews

[Bonnie G.]

Calling this with no star rating at page 95. This is really well done but the level of detail is just more than I want to know about Lou Reed. I am a Lou Reed fan of long-standing (my life was actually saved by rock n roll!), and three of my favorite NYC moments involve him. (IRL friends, ask me about finding myself talking to Lou's sister Meryl, Iggy Pop's bass player, and an A&R woman from the 60's who did mescaline with Janis Joplin when I was at the launch party for the Reed archive at the Library for the Performing Arts. And that was only the start of the evening!) Even for me though, this is too much info. That means it's a great bio and I am the wrong reader. I didn't even really make it out of Syracuse.

[Sarah Paolantonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this book. I had been waiting ten years for it. Well...almost ten years.

In 2014 Will Hermes came to speak at my graduate program. And because my nonfiction writing journey started because of music writing and music journalism, I was the only person, somehow, who knew who he was. I jumped at the opportunity and interviewed him for our literary magazine online. He is extremely smart, friendly, polite, encouraging, and thoughtful. On the sly he told me he was working on a new book--a biography of Lou Reed. A few months later he paid me to transcribe some Lou Reed Interviews. The recordings filled me with life, to be a part of this even though it was so small. I don't remember where the interviews were from or who was interviewing Lou; Lou was so hopped up on speed I had to slow them down just to get the words on the page. Time passed, life happened, and I waited. I knew it took Hermes seven years to write his previous book, Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: How Five Years In New York Changed Music Forever. I had devoured that one too; I highly recommend it. I had read a few books he listed in the index, including Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris & Gerard Malanga. And back in college I had read the definitive punk history, Please Kill Me, by Legs McNeil--it started with The Velvets, my first Velvets history. (I also went through a biography phase in college and Bockris' Warhol biography is a touchstone of my early adulthood reading memories, along with Robert Greenfield's Tim Leary bio.) I've also seen Todd Haynes' 2021 documentary about the band. So Lou's life wasn't new to me when I started reading The King of New York. Not to mention I've been listening to The Velvets' and Lou's solo records all my life. (Bless my dad's best friend who gave me all his Lou Reed records on vinyl because "my wife can't take it anymore; she says no more Lou Reed before noon.") I have the pink Loaded clouds tattooed on my shoulder. To say that The Velvets mean something to me is an understatement. I was waiting for this book.

And then, sometime last calendar year Hermes announced his book would be out in October of 2023. Here we are, folks.

This book is a wonderful accomplishment. It is not the first Lou Reed book (but it might be the last). Hermes used the Lou Reed archives at the NY Public Library, in addition to conducting years of interviews and deep research in and around Lou's circles. Laurie Anderson put them in the public view, in the Library Archives, so anyone could see just how great, and not great, Lou was all his life. It is neat and tidy with a wonderful point of view and thesis: Lou was the King Of New York--or so said David Bowie, as Bowie introduced him at his 50th birthday party at MSG. Lou is the glue of the NYC music scene, doing it all before anyone else, marrying the upset and the vulgar, treating music like poetry, writing novels in his songs. If you've come this far in this review, you must love and know Lou's music, and you get it. The King Of New York is a through-line biography of Lou Reed starting at the beginning and going right through to the end, hopping from one island of New York to another.

I predict Hermes will win a prize for this book. If he doesn't, fuck them, as Lou would say. It is easy to read, stocked and stacked with information, direct quotes, little smirks of lyrics, and lines up all the right moments of history that were happening around Lou's life showing us just how ahead of his time Lou was, doing it first, not caring what anyone said, having the rights, making the money (or not) and making sure people knew what he stood for. The King Of New York would've delivered to Lou the praise and solid stance as The First, The Beginning, The One, ...well, The King...that recognition Lou was always craving for his hard work, for his life...but never seemed to see. The King Of New York solidifies Lou Reed as just that. There will never be anyone else like him. You can hear it on his records and read it in these pages.

This book is for any fan of music, of NYC, of punk music, of anyone looking to further to piece together queer history and queer history's place in popular culture. Hermes takes care of people and their pronouns. The King Of New York is smooth and entertaining, heartbreaking at times, loving, shocking, and consuming. I plowed this book and am still stuck inside Lou's New York. Hopefully I'll always be there; but if I lose my way, there are the albums (many of which I need to discover, anew and again). Cheers to Hermes. Thank you for writing this book.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good bio from a writer and critic who is definitely a Lou Reed person, unlike several prior biographers. Manages to show the artist's many faces while resisting coming down on him too hard; Hermes' empathy and compassion serve the subject well. He's also heavily invested in claiming Reed space as a queer artist, and while this is indeed an exemplary goal, it sometimes results in some awkward overreaching, as when he posits that "Metal Machine Music" might be a shriek of protest against "homophobic interrogation." Um, not so much, I believe.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading about Lou Reed is a lot like reading biographies of other notoriously unreliable narrators (Houdini, Kurt Cobain): the narrative is slippery and open to negotiation. Will Hermes has his interpretations about Lou Reed that didn't always make sense to me, but that doesn't mean he didn't write a heck of a good bio. Like, I’m not a lyrics guy but Hermes totally is, so we understand songs on entirely different levels. Goes to show that good music works on multiple levels.

What isn’t subject to interpretation is that Lou Reed was intelligent and funny and a top-tier musical savant, but was also cranky, selfish, and difficult. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have his caring and thoughtful moments…at least once in a while.

Hermes documents the full run, from birth to death, leaning heavily on the Reed Archives at the NYPL. I don’t think I could ask for a more thorough treatment, although I think he also had moments of such adoration for Lou that he glossed over some truly crummy behavior towards bandmates, friends, spouses/partners. But he’s also sympathetic about Lou’s struggles with his mental health and sexuality. As a teenager he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy, which almost certainly did more harm than good. Hermes theorizes that some of Reed’s antics could be traced back to those experiences, that if he could control situations and disarm people around him through chaos and boundary-pushing, he didn’t have to be scared about his own sanity or potential further treatment.

There’s a lot packed into 440 pages. Various things that stuck with me:

* I loved these early stories about Lou working for Pickwick records, which churned out bargain-bin fodder. He’d be told to make a bunch of surf songs (or whatever the kids were into that week) and they’d bang ‘em out. So there are a few of these oldies around with Lou crooning on some doo-wop and other miscellany. Somehow they still sort sound Velvet Underground-ish.

* While early Velvet Underground generated dozens of approachable, melodic songs, they also had noise experiments like “Sister Ray,” 17 minutes of improvised musical nonsense overlaying a story about what Reed calls “total debauchery and decay.” Hermes describes early band shows that are so painfully loud and disharmonic they could only be considered an aural assault on the audience. (Man, I would’ve *hated* them.) There’s no real defending this as music or art, the whole idea is to satisfy an audience craving punishing sensory overload. But it arose out of the whole Warhol factory scene, which was of course wild x 1000, pushing the boundaries of how many and what kinds of drugs people could take, the sale of which basically funded the whole operation.

* As soon as their third album Lou was trying earnestly to make (and sell) holistically good records but they weren’t catching on. I can’t get over this story of how Lou left the band after recording Loaded, and moved back home. As the record came out he was temping as a typist at his dad’s business! And at least in the short term he probably made more money doing that. (Though through ongoing connections he did gather himself enough to make his first solo record. Then early VU supporter David Bowie was willing to produce his second album, and Lou really never had to worry about underexposure ever again.)

* I had a similar thought about Lou and the VU that I did when I read the Nirvana book (and maybe every rock book), about how weird it is that music journalists want these teens and twenty-somethings to provide sage commentary on their cultural impact. These kids do not know the answers to these questions or how to deal with the pressure being a performer creates. Lou wrote about this once (by the way, he was also a published essayist and poet): “At the age when identity is a problem some people join rock and roll bands and perform for other people who share the same difficulties. The age difference between performer and beholder in rock is not large. But, unfortunately, those in the fourth tier assume those on stage know something they don’t. Which is not true…The singer has a soul but feels he isn’t loved off stage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only on stage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia. But we are all as common as snowflakes, aren’t we?”

* Lou was a devout drug user from his teens onward, but it dominated his life once he was involved with the Factory scene. If you can think of a drug, Lou Reed took it prodigiously. We’re all lucky he made it out of the ‘70s, truly. It caused enough physical and monetary problems that he was aware it was out of control. He came to see wild drug-fueled rock ’n’ roll Lou Reed as a separate entity that he was expected to maintain. (He even got into a drunken fight with David Bowie once, and that was probably the point where I disliked Lou the most.) He wasn’t really able to move past it until he decided he didn’t need “that guy” anymore.

* I liked learning about his later life and solo records, and to experience him growing into a much more stable middle age and early senior-hood (he died at 71). He still had his ugly moments, like sabotaging a VU reunion over his own ego. Other times he’d license his songs to causes he liked for free. (Pigeonhole Lou and fail.) I’m listening through his solo catalog now—he steadily produced into this century. I’ve been digging Hudson River Wind Meditations, which was just re-issued this month.

[Joseph Kinsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure we need another biography of Lou Reed, since Anthony DeCurtis just published an excellent one about 6 years ago. Despite the much-touted access to the Lou Reed Archive at NYPL, there is very little new information in the Hermes book.

On top of that, Hermes' writing style is a bit strange, occasionally veering into weird colloquialisms ("bromance," really?). I also found that Hermes' interpetations of Reed's lyrics and albums were a bit questionable at times. One salient example is regarding Metal Machine Music: "It might even be read as a radical queer art statement, its wordless roar a shutdown of homophobic interrogation." While it's admirable that Hermes is trying to examine Reed's life and art through the lens of gender, the author leans a little too heavily on this angle throughout the book, often shoehorning these interpretations where they don't really seem to fit.

I would recommend the DeCurtis biography instead of this one.

[Sarah Schulman]

Enjoyed it- especially about his early life and career.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A big, definitive, and well researched book about one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century and a man well ahead of his time both musically and socially. My only quibble is that the stories at times lacked a personal feel. Understandable, since Lou preferred to play the Lou Reed character over being the person he was, at least in public. He burned enough bridges with friends and collaborators, and his crew lived fast and hard enough that many are no longer alive, so few knew him well for decades at a time, or at least few included in the book. Quotes from important folks from his life (John Cale and Laurie Anderson, for example) are taken from other sources, not fresh material. Still Hermes does a great job stitching it all together and I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the rabbit hole of Velvet Underground/Lou Reed music that it took me down.

[orpheuus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lou Reed remarked in his essay “Fallen Knights and Fallen Ladies” from the book, No One Waved Goodbye: A Casualty Report On Rock and Roll that “the singer has a soul, but feels he isn’t loved off stage. Or, perhaps worse, feels he shines only on stage and off is wilted, a shell as common as the garden gardenia.”



It is a thesis to his life in a way; a life spent as a mirror of all things rock and roll including the excess, and fighting with his critics and pushing back against journalists and finding some way for the general public to embrace his art. In some cases he was successful, the Velvet Underground grew in notoriety over the years and his Transformer album made with the deft hands of David Bowie landed him his first hit, and in others he was not with the provocative nature of his lyrical content being heavily controversial at the time ensuring that the many record labels he signed himself to would be unable to fully sell his work to the populace. However, Lou Reed was unapologetic in his art portraying the gruesome side of city life and its inhabitants without the moralistic judgment that was so common of the time and instead took his muses, many Warhol denizens, as the human beings that they were and wrote with almost heart rendering empathy.



As someone categorized as Gen Z, I did not grow up with Lou Reed or the Velvets. It was not until I heard “Brooklyn Baby” by Lana Del Rey and the story behind the song in which I began my trajectory into the fan I am today. That is why I decided to pick up this book and start my year with it. It was a difficult tome to read through, as one reviewer stated, “He (Hermes) was very thorough” but, I do not regret my time spent with it.



Lou Reed was a complicated man, unpleasant to his bandmates, abusive to his lovers and friends (the story of his fight with Bowie was especially eyebrow raising), and a tyrant to his collaborators fueled by an unhealthy amount of heroin, speed and alcohol. While reading, I wondered also how much was attributed to his inferiority complex, rampant anxiety and depression, losses of friends over the years, and the electroshock therapy unfairly administered upon him as a teen.



With the man no longer with us, we cannot know, and that also made this a tough read. Can one fully separate the art from the artist when so much of his art was fueled by his own life and people who were frescoed upon his lyrics’ canvas? In his later years, lovingly transcribed by the ones who sat at his side, Lou was a different man, from the one who spent the 60s through the 80s causing havoc, as he engulfed himself in Buddhist doctrine and martial arts, even taking a back seat during concerts for his protégé ANOHNI. A redemption of sorts that I wonder what would have happened if he was still with us, singing his arias. What art he would have made for the 2010s as Bowie had done with his last album BlackStar before he also tragically passed.



“They opened wounds worth opening, without apology, cutting across the grain, gritty, urbanic and in their search for the kingdom, for laughter, for salvation, they explored the darkest areas of the psyche.” -Patti Smith

[Chad Alexander Guarino da Verona · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's not much I can say about Lou that hasn't already been said better a thousand times over, but he's a mythological creature and his artistic output shaped my musical taste arguably more than any other person or band. As cliché as it may now be to say, the Velvet Underground & Nico changed my life when I first heard it, and every time I listen to it, it still sounds as new, challenging, and exciting as it did the first time.

Will Hermes tackles Lou's life and legacy in this tome of a biography, and readers better be prepared to learn about everything and everyone from Lou's life. This book is nearly 600 pages, and it does not spare many details. For some it may be too much, but for superfans it's a treasure and a look at the man in a different light, from his noted and highly public flaws to his exploration of gender identity and sexuality in a very different time.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley*

[Corto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. Absolute banger. Great tribute to Lou, warts and all. What sets this apart is not only do we get to hear some really fantastic stories (my favorite was the Lou Reed/David Bowie slap-fight, followed by David rampaging through Lou’s hotel at night, banging on doors and shouting, “Come out and fight like a man!” - or something like that), but Hermes does a fantastic job of analyzing Lou’s music on technical (not *too* technical), literary (I’d heard Lou say his catalog was his “great American novel before, but Hermes comes with the receipts and ties it all together), and artistic levels. Full disclosure: I listened to it on Audible (very well done). If you’re a Lou Reed fan, you’ll absolutely love and adore this book.

[Iza Cupial · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5/5

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best biography of Lou Reed that I've read! The retelling of his introductions to Nico, Cale, Tucker and Morrison are in depth and enjoyable, with the analysis of the early 1960s NYC Avant Garde, embodied by Andy Warhol and his factory acolytes, and its influence on Reed's art, is fascinating. It's almost impossible to comprehend just how outrageous some of their output, particularly the films produced, must have been to a nation which had only just emerged from that most conservative of American decades, the 1950s.
The short-lived career of the Velvet Underground and the changes in line-up are brilliantly told with in depth analyses of key songs. In addition, Reed's complex relationships with key players, such as John Cale, and, in later years, David Bowie, his various managers and producers, and (again), Andy Warhol are a sad, frustrating tale of wasted opportunities and explosive fallings-out. Lou Reed's legendarily fierce reputation is more than adequately illustrated by Will Hermes.
As with many other musical legends of the 1960s, Reed's post-VU career is patchy, to say the least, but the author's detailed analysis of his albums has piqued my interest and I will no doubt search out those I haven't heard which get Hermes' recommendation for further exploration, though I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to listen to his final album, 'Lulu', just as I'm unlikely to ever watch 'Salo' - the likely emotional pulverisation being perhaps too much for this sensitive soul!
The last sections of the book, in which Reed meets and marries his 'soul mate', Laurie Anderson, are beautifully written.!
Overall, an excellent bio of a most singular artist. Recommended!

[William (Bill) Fluke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fan of Lou Reed’s music , both with VU and his solo work, but not enough to want to know this much about him. I had forgotten how many different solo albums he made ( most not worth listening) and conclude he should have stuck with VU longer. The biography does a good job of describing what a jerk he could be and how much his sexual and illicit drug appetite fueled his life. A biography only fir the die hard Lou Reed fan.

[Monique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quantas emoções lendo esse livro.. Um dos artistas do século, em todos os sentidos.

[Romane Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

severe brain glitch moment reading about how lou reed binged orange is the new black in the hospital and died listening to frank ocean

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is probably the only biography you will need to read to get to know what can be known about Lou Reed's life. It felt like 500 pages was more than enough to paint the picture, and it isn't a very pretty picture. Reed didn't play well with others, was insecure, could be petty, had a chip on his shoulder, was talented and driven but did not have a great voice or a great talent as a guitarist. Like Bob Dylan, he was driven to succeed and that success depended on his creating a persona that his audience would identify with and admire. Having attracted a small but loyal following around his sensitive junkie persona, it must have been hard to leave that Lou Reed behind. Maybe much of his life was a back and forth dance between presenting a persona and revealing himself, always in the search for acceptance and love.

But what do I know about any of that? What really lies in the heart of an artist? When a person dies, any person, they are gone and most of what they were is lost forever. Questions you never thought to ask will now never be answered. Lou Reed worried he was being erased. After you die, if you are remembered at all, you will become something used by others to tell their own stories. Like Warhol's portraits of Monroe and Mao, Lou Reed from now on is at the mercy of those who knew him. Poor Lou, I knew him well.

The last word here is Laurie Anderson's story of Lou's death in her arms. Anderson says, "As meditators, we had prepared for this--how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart and out through the head. I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid." Is that how it was, really? "Water flowing 21-form tai chi?" The image here is sort of like La Pieta with Reed sprawled like Jesus in Anderson's arms.

That is just what we do to the dead. We fit them to our story. Right after Anderson gives us her final take on Lou, you have Lou's sister doing the same for their mother. The mother was "unresponsive" and close to death but actually died ten days after Lou did, prompting Lou's sister to say of their mother, "She knew [Lou had died]--and she left to join him." We make of them what we will and they can do nothing about it.

Average Guy
Song by Lou Reed

I ain't no Christian or no born again saint
I ain't no cowboy or Marxist D.A.
I ain't no criminal or Reverend Cripple from the right
I am just your average guy, trying to do what's right
I'm just your average guy, an average guy
I am just an average guy, I'm just your average guy
Average guy, I'm just your average guy
I'm average looking and I'm average inside
I'm an average lover and I live in an average place
You wouldn't know me if you met me face to face
I'm just your average guy, average guy
Average guy, I'm just an average guy
I worry about money and taxes and such
I worry that my liver's big and it hurts to the touch
I worry about my health and bowels
And the crime waves in the street
I'm really just your average guy
Trying to stand on his own two feet
I'm just your average guy, I'm just your average guy
I'm just your average guy, average guy
Average looks, average taste, average height
An average waist, average in everything I do
My temperature is 98.2
I'm just your average guy, an average guy, average guy
I'm just an average guy, average guy
I'm just your average guy...average

[Alberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s my non-exhaustive playlist of music mentioned in the book → https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1c1...

[Cait]

Only cried three times

[Alek Fleury · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third one of these that I’ve read and if anyone wanted a Lou biography I’d probably send them here. Done lots of thinking about why Lou has been a love since I was 16. Listened to all of the albums and learned to love all of them. This seems to be the only bio so far to center his queerness (queer icon status). All others take him at his word in the 80s when he famously kind of says “I’m straight now” which is a mistake. Hermes is also a fantastic writer and put this book together with a lot of research and love that holds treasures for everyone, even the real heads out there.

Anyways, I’m still waiting for the Lou book that just skips all the Velvets stuff. I love them as much, but it’s such well trodden ground. Give me a magisterial 500 page Lou Reed tome from year 35 and on. That’s what I want. 50 pages on the Bells alone.

Anyways, I don’t have any answers for why Lou is the guy for me. But if anyone was curious on how to fall in love with him, I’d send them first to the Velvet reunion performance of Heroin (https://youtu.be/qTgDgYPnToo?si=OzHiR...), then to Caroline Says II live off Berlin which was a maligned album at the time but in this string of concerts he sort of reclaimed it and sang it all the way through live for the first time (https://youtu.be/PwCXoAuV_zE?si=5idVE...), then Rock Minuet live which is just idk incredible in every way (https://youtu.be/RwNzMgZnI4A?si=7IiGZ...) then finishing off with Coney Island Baby which is the song that made me fall in love at 16 (https://youtu.be/1SHCsgqZvQM?si=2seJ3...)

Then Junior Dad off LuLu, his album with Metallica. Every single person in the world hated this album in 2011. The snot brained pretentious rats at Pitchfork famously gave it a 1/10 at the time. But don’t listen to any of em, they’re all stupid. Junior Dad is the last song on the album therefore the last piece of recorded music he ever put out. Devastatingly vulnerable it’s nearly embarrassing but so so beautiful, from the point of view of a son who’s drowning looking up at his dad who’s in the boat, asking him please to pull him up. I’ll just copy and paste those lyrics here because I won’t do them any justice.

https://youtu.be/9a9SXxocnSw?si=rs1Th...

Would you come to me
If I was half drowning
An arm above the last wave

Would you come to me
Would you pull me up
Would the effort really hurt you
Is it unfair to ask you
To help pull me up

The window broke the silence of the matches
The smoke effortlessly floating

Pull me up
Would you be my lord and savior
Pull me up by my hair
Now would you kiss me, on my lips

Burning fever burning on my forehead
The brain that once was listening now
Shoots out its tiresome message

Won't you pull me up
Scalding, my dead father
Has the motor and he's driving towards
An island of lost souls

Sunny, a monkey then to monkey
I will teach you meanness, fear and blindness
No social redeeming kindness
Or oh, state of grace

Would you pull me up
Would you drop the mental bullet
Would you pull me by the arm up
Would you still kiss my lips
Hiccup, the dream is over
Get the coffee, turn the lights on
Say hello to junior dad
The greatest disappointment
Age withered him and changed him
Into junior dad
Psychic savagery

The greatest disappointment
The greatest disappointment
Age withered him and changed him
Into junior dad






I love him in all his crazy moods and I love rock music because of him.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proud, angry, brutal, mean, mercurial, and New York; Lou Reed contained multitudes, and it's almost impossible to consider any biography being able to convey that. But I've read three such books over the years since I first got into the Velvet Underground: Victor Bockris' "Transformer," Anthony DeCurtis' masterful 2017 "Lou Reed: A Life," and this most recent effort from Will Hermes. All are worthy of your time if you love Lou's music and want to know more about his life.

"Lou Reed: The King of New York" centers itself around the notion of Reed's queer identity, in a way that even the previously cited books don't quite manage (though they do address such topics). At a time in our country when being gay was a crime, Reed walked the line between the genders and straddled our notions of a definite preference one way or another with a wink and a sneer that said "are you sure about that?" Never one to settle for the accepted answer, Reed showed throughout his life a sense that being true to one's self would piss off all the right people. Hermes goes through Reed's life, focusing mostly on the early years, the time with the Velvets, and his solo career in the Seventies, and while he doesn't say anything that other writers haven't already said in relation to the history of that time, Hermes does excel in putting that into context with Reed's conflicted sexuality and how it affected his art.

This is a warm, moving portrait of a contradictory figure in American popular music who never compromised even when he sold out to get his songs in commercials. Learning at the feet of provocative Andy Warhol, Lou Reed played the game his own way. And the book does a wonderful job of conveying not just the highs and lows of such an approach but also what such rule-breaking meant for the LGTBQ+ world as a whole. "Lou Reed: The King of New York" is, alongside the work of Bockris and DeCurtis, absolutely essential to putting Lou Reed front and center in the discussion of the great American rock artists.

[Haymone Neto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este livro é uma biografia muito longa, profunda e detalhada de Lou Reed. É um trabalho de muito fôlego, que dificilmente será superado. Toda biografia parte de algum lugar; esta claramente, para mim, está mais interessada no Lou Reed queer e em seus relacionamentos, em especial com Andy Warhol. Do mesmo modo, toda biografia tem um público majoritário em mente; esta claramente, para mim, parece orbitar em torno dos novaiorquinos e adjacentes. E ainda, toda biografia tem um modo preponderante de enfocar o biografado; esta busca o caminho da empatia. Minha conexão com Lou Reed vem da música e da poesia, e eu vivo no Nordeste do Brasil, então muitas vezes me senti meio que “peru de fora” lendo este livro. Mas tudo bem. O que me incomodou de verdade foi que, em alguns momentos, em nome da “empatia”, este livro mais pareceu uma biografia autorizada (ou seja: passou pano), em que pese o aparente esforço do autor no sentido contrário. Em todo caso, reforço, talvez seja a leitura definitiva sobre a vida de Lou Reed, e isso faz o livro valer muito a pena.

Antes de terminar, não posso deixar de comentar a questão da tradução. Não sei que condições (de prazo, de remuneração etc.) os profissionais de tradução e revisão tiveram para trabalhar na obra. Mas um livro dessa relevância, numa editora do porte da Record/Best Seller, merecia uma atenção maior. Em especial com os termos musicais (e estamos falando da biografia de um músico!). Ninguém no meio fala em “cencerro”: é cowbell mesmo. Do mesmo modo, não se usa “címbalo”: é chimbal. Uma “tuba bass line” não é uma “linha de baixo tuba”, assim como uma “guitar band” não é uma “banda de guitarras” etc. E ainda: na edição kindle, as notas estão postas em lugares no mínimo estranhos, antecipando informações que sequer apareceram no texto principal. Enfim, espero que, se houver novas edições, esses erros sejam revistos. Lou Reed merece.

[Brian Hutzell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never been much of a Lou Reed fan, though in the past few years I’ve found myself listening fairly frequently to the Velvet Underground’s debut album (“With Nico”). I bought this book because I’d enjoyed author Will Hermes’s Love Goes Into Buildings On Fire so much. (It was through that book that I discovered the amazing Arthur Russell.) Also because I knew Laurire Anderson, whom I admire very much, would have to make an appearance. She figures prominently in the last 60 or so pages of the book.

For the most part, I liked Lou Reed less and less the more I read about him, both as an artist and as a person. I know plenty of Reed fanatics will disagree with me, but I’m just not impressed. There are several points in the book where it feels like Hermes himself isn’t that impressed. At times he seems desperate to find more depth and poetry in Reed’s lyrics than are actually present.

As a record of Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, and the musical climate of the past few decades, Lou Reed: The King Of New York makes an entertaining, well-researched, and insightful…er…read. I recommend it even for those who, like myself, do not find themselves bowing at the altar of Lou Reed.

[Carolyn Whitzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ok biography of one of my favourite artists. A bit like the Paul Simon biography I read a few months ago, I’m struck by how unpopular my favourite of his albums were. I think Magic and Loss is a magnificent album about death. It tanked. So did Songs for Drella, the song cycle biography of Andy Warhol he did with his frequent collaborator frenemy, John Cale. But then again, most of his music, from the Velvet Underground onwards, didn’t sell much. Again like Paul Simon, Reed was a cranky perfectionist who was clearly a hard person to stay friends with. Will Hermes is workmanlike rather than lyrical in a very long book.

[Christopher Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hero that doesn’t wear a cape, but has major attitude. Lou Reed had the soul of a writer and was the epitome of rock ‘n’ roll with all of its illicit tropes, egotism, sound and love. A very insightful book on a life that has many layers.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

meticulously researched and thoroughly detailed about every corner of lou’s complicated life. i appreciated the emphasis on queerness and gender especially as a kind of corrective to the erasing or fetishizing way that gay and trans identities are often discussed in rock histories.

[Scott Hanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As good as Love Goes to Buildings on Fire was, Mr. Hermes’ biography of Lou Reed is even better. Five stars!

[Christopher McQuain · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Ira A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative.

[KlusMitroh]

Kurde, zapomniałem, żeby tu aktualizować swoje czytelnictwo XD Już jakoś ze trzy tygodnie temu to skończyłem.

9/10. Więcej niż chcielibyście wiedzieć o Lou Reedzie. Za dwa tygodnie długi tekst o tym w Czasie Kultury

[Evan Oicle]

didn't finish cause i didnt want to keep reading and the library wouldnt let me renew any longer. goes into way too much detail for me!