Lou Reed:
The King of New York
Will Hermes
Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, $35
Lou Reed was the white light and the black hole. Reed, who departed just over 10 years ago, left us with some of the most sublimely beautiful music in the rock ‘n’ roll canon, along with some of its most extremely abrasive examples; this was, after all, the artist who created “Pale Blue Eyes” as well as Metal Machine Music. Within his songs themselves, too, the paradox was just as strong, just as extreme: Witness the moving melody of “Caroline Says” laid over its hopelessly bleak lyrics of drug addiction and domestic abuse, from the tragic, epic tale that plays out across the heartbreaking song cycle of Reed’s 1973 album Berlin. But this barely scratches the surface of the nearly 60-year career oeuvre of this influential icon. Reed was a distinctly complicated personality, and he made no apologies for his provocative, taboo-trashing behavior, be it within his art or within his day-to-day existence. Accordingly, in Lou Reed: The King of New York, noted New Paltz music critic and NPR contributor Will Hermes’s outstanding biography of the founding Velvet Underground frontman, the author examines the pioneering musician’s life with an eye that’s informed, unflinching, and unapologeticโjust the way its subject no doubt would’ve wanted it.
At this point, there’s already a raft of Reed books out there, as well as several stand-alone Velvets volumes. But Hermes’s 550-page opus makes outmoded mincemeat of them all. What puts it so far above and beyond prior Reed-related tomesโbesides the Queens-born writer’s intimate familiarity with Reed’s beloved New York and his own sensitive, highly context-conscious writing style; he also wrote 2011’s acclaimed Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Foreverโis the fact that Hermes is the first Reed biographer to have access to the vast personal archive that was donated to the New York Public Library by the rocker’s estate. Drawing on these previously withheld materials, along with his own knowledge, copious interviews, and other sources, Hermes compassionately constructs a riveting, revelation-rife narrative that follows Reed from his troubled Long Island suburban origins to his novice time as an aspiring staff songwriter at Pickwick Records, Velvet years, glam rock ascendance, punk elder-statesman status, eventual lionization as a street poet for the ages and singular American musical force, and spiritually redemptive final decades with his divinely matched artist-muse Laurie Anderson at his side.
The gender-snubbing Reed was a key cultural groundbreaker in the realm of queer identity, a firebrand who, through his music and the example of how he presented himself, empowered isolated LGBTQ individuals and other outsiders far beyond his mentor Andy Warhol’s Factory milieu to be themselves, the world they were born into be damned. In the book, the transgressive sides of Reed’s life are chronicled matter-of-factly and without sensation, on equal footing with the music that influenced his own music; all part of the makeup (pardon the pun, glitter kids) of the artist himself. Likewise, Hermes shines an empathetic, impartial light to get at the inner pain and consequent drug use that fueled each other, along with much of Reed’s uncompromising music, to give a better understanding into his, to put it mildly, often surly and self-destructive personality.
The makings of landmark albums like The Velvet Underground and Nico, Transformer, Street Hassle, The Blue Mask, New York, et al., are explored in fly-on-the-studio-wall detail and within the vivid context of Reed’s personal life and the greater contemporary sphere when he was writing and recording them. Also examined are the dynamic collaborative relationships he had with such crucial figures as Warhol, Anderson, David Bowie, and John Cale, and Rachel Humphreys, Reed’s trans partner for three chaotic years in the 1970s.
Little had been written before about the enigmatic Humphreys, who was buried in a mass grave for AIDS victims after she died in 1990, and, given the profound effect she’s long known to have had on Reed, it’s particularly intriguing to find out more about her. “If there are any lessons to be learned from Reed’s work and life, any core morality,” Hermes writes, “it’s that everyone deserves the dignity of self-definition.”
Accompanied by a clutch of never-before-seen photos, it all adds up to a fascinating and more complete picture of the singer-songwriter as both an artist and a human being. The King of New York is the last word on Lou.
This article appears in January 2024.
