On the Velvet Underground official bootleg “Live at Max’s Kansas City,” recorded on August 23, 1970, you can, at one point, hear the author and downtown face Jim Carroll, in the audience, asking someone to go fetch him a “double Pernod,” and then interacting with a passing drug dealer. “You got a down?” he says. “What is it? A Tuinal? Gimme it immediately.” That night, the band’s set list included songs called “New Age” and “Beginning to See the Light,” but no one could have mistaken their etiolated din for the sweet harmonies and sweeter optimism of the nineteen-sixties. In this grimy oubliette, sex, drugs, and rock and roll do not herald the dawn of some airy utopia; the mood is new, and dark. Breakdown. Atomization. Serious narcotics. “Live at Max’s” was recorded by Brigid Berlin, a onetime receptionist for Andy Warhol whose father was the president of the Hearst Corporation. Her Warhol family name was Brigid Polk, granted for her habit of randomly poking people with an amphetamine-filled syringe.
That mingling of high and low society, penthouse and pavement, was a distinguishing mark of the surrounding scene, where there was a self-conscious glorying in things sleazy. “Scum” and “punk” were terms of approbation. Values upended, à la Genet: what straight society considers irredeemably low, raised on high. People disporting themselves like minor French nobility in the Versailles of Louis XVI, against a backdrop of shooting galleries and cruising strips. In the summer of 1970, the ambisexual look and sybaritic morals of this particular underground were set to go mainstream, to be hailed as something called glam rock. And Lou Reed was its ambiguous sovereign.
He was born in Brooklyn but brought up in Freeport, Long Island. He had one sister, Margaret Ellen, who would later become a family therapist and change her name to Merrill. His parents, Toby and Sidney, were the children of Jewish immigrants who fled Eastern European antisemitism. Sidney’s original surname was Rabinowitz; he changed it to Reed after being questioned by the F.B.I. about a union that he’d done some accounting work for. Lou, according to everyone except himself, had a basically normal and happy childhood up until his teens, or thereabouts. He was bar mitzvahed. He was popular at school, fond of sports and jukebox pop, and known as something of a makeout Don Juan.
Reed’s single pop hit, “Walk on the Wild Side”—No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, in 1973—is all about people making a pilgrim’s leap into New York to claim the lives they so far carry only in their heads. “A hustle here and a hustle there / New York city is the place where . . .” He made his own abbreviated version of this journey in his early twenties, eventually settling in a loft at 56 Ludlow Street, where he roomed with another beady émigré, from farther away: the saturnine, classically trained Welshman John Cale. Cale had arrived in America the year before, to study at the Tanglewood Music Center under the composer Aaron Copland. He had his fingers in various avant-garde pies, and he introduced Reed to the left-field music of John Cage and La Monte Young, plus off-piste filmmakers such as Piero Heliczer and Jack Smith.
The Velvet Underground—Reed, Cale, the drummer Moe Tucker, and the guitarist Sterling Morrison, later supplemented with the German singer Nico—became the house band for a scene that coalesced around Warhol, the band’s de-facto manager: a jittery montage of experimental-film archivists and conceptual artists, hustlers and dealers, professional talkers, opera obsessives. Many hangers-on were so hip that the famous artists imitated them, not the other way around.
In performance, the Velvet Underground abided by tenets then unfamiliar to rock and roll. Don’t look like you’re trying too hard. Don’t look like you’re wearing stage clothes. Don’t look as if you care whether your audience goes away impressed. Reed sang about scoring drugs and sexual experimentation, and his lyrics dealt in sharp detail, not blurry generalization, a technique he picked up from some of his favorite authors: William S. Burroughs, John Rechy, Hubert Selby. He also imbibed the spiky vernacular of Lenny Bruce, and found a mentor of sorts in the doomed New York poet Delmore Schwartz. (He and Schwartz first met in a bar; Reed later signed up for Schwartz’s literature classes at Syracuse. Schwartz died in 1966, at the age of fifty-two, in a hotel in Times Square.) Songs like “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and “Venus in Furs” were celebrated for being more “real” than rock had ever dared to be.
Warhol gifted his coterie of self-identified “superstars”—Ondine, Ultra Violet, Candy Darling—a form of open-access stardom that was slippery, frail, volatile. Satellites from a different star system, orbiting his dry, dead moon. Add serious collective drug abuse into the mix and everyone’s life tended to become a ragged, 24/7 acting-out. An existential dare—cool as a matter of life and death.
What happens when mythmaking becomes part of your daily life? The difficulty for any Lou Reed biographer—including the latest, the rock critic Will Hermes, the author of a bulky new chronicle called “Lou Reed: The King of New York”—is that sometimes Reed embraced his persona, and took it as far as it would go, and sometimes he talked as though he were merely its pained victim. In the seventies, coverage of Reed swung between binaries, sometimes in the same article: serious artist vs. sleazy hustler, brave truthteller vs. sly put-on merchant. “I mimic me probably better than anybody,” he told Lenny Kaye, in 1975, adding, “I created Lou Reed. I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well.” Keith Richards has described Mick Jagger as a “nice bunch of guys”—updating a quip that the sax player Zoot Sims once made about Stan Getz—but Jagger was a determined social gadfly with his eye on very specific prizes. It’s unclear, by contrast, just how much control Reed exerted over his own game of thrones, and how happy or unhappy it ever made him.
How to get a critical bead on someone who could go from the delicately variegated “Berlin,” in 1973, to the scabrous live set “Take No Prisoners” five years later, or release the inhuman “Metal Machine Music” and the tender “Coney Island Baby” in the same year, 1975? For obsessives, such as the music writer Lester Bangs, Reed was half prophet, half clown. Bangs devoted a series of articles to Reed, and, whatever their flaws—including some remarkably offensive remarks about Rachel Humphreys, the trans woman with whom Reed lived and worked from 1973 to 1978—they offer a feel for the man that no one else has come near. Bangs paints a portrait of speed-freak jive in excelsis: three different justifications for one course of action may be proffered in a single night, each believed in the moment it’s delivered. Were Reed’s addictions fuelling the spiel, or was he madly doping himself to live up to the myth? One of the reasons his fans worshipped him was precisely this: that the gap between private self and projected image dissolved like pills in a spoon.
Most of the iconic images of Reed frame a certain unvarying look: his big, blank, granite face; leather; shades. Is this someone who can’t feel, or who is frightened of feeling too much? Badass stare, or narcotized indifference? He was one of those people who carry the air of a child hurt so bad he never quite recovered. Always testing the bona fides of friends, like the hipster equivalent of a polygraph. The eggshells they once walked on they now make other people tread.
Reed’s relationship with his father seems to have been key. Alas, in the biography, his childhood goes by in a blur—before we know it, he’s dating girls, forming groups, scoring drugs. Right on the cusp of his eighteenth birthday, he suffers a major breakdown, which his parents are persuaded to treat with electroconvulsive therapy. Hermes’s handling of this episode is a bit too wary; he lets a long quote from “The Bell Jar” do a lot of heavy lifting. Reed later claimed that the aim of the ECT was to “cure” him of being gay, but his sister, who seems like one of the more reliable witnesses here, denies this, and there’s no evidence to support it. Whatever the reasoning, the treatment became a defining moment in his life. Hermes describes it as “part of Reed’s mythology.” Merrill, in an essay published in 2015, wrote, “Our family was torn apart the day they began those wretched treatments.”
Song is a gift for the stifled child, somewhere he can let emotions fly free. Rock and roll was born as explosive catharsis, but it also allowed something else, something new: young men, often from modest backgrounds, conjuring beauty out of thin air, tones mingled, harmonies askew. The crucible bond of Reed and Cale echoes other male partnerships of the period, including Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Brian Wilson and his brothers, all the different voices of the Band. Reed’s first musical love was doo-wop; as a teen-ager, he recorded with a nascent group called the Shades, playing guitar and singing backup. Doo-wop groups were often Black or Latino, and frequently all-women; the genre gloried in otherwise marginalized voices, its unique aesthetic equal parts sacred and profane. It was the opposite of braggadocio, a kind of brief, spectral reverie on 45. A key lesson for Reed, the aspirant songwriter, was that the softest song in the world might easily suggest the harshest truths.
Although best known for mapping extreme human states, some of Reed’s most beloved songs—“I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Candy Says,” “Perfect Day,” “Berlin”—are about as un-rock and roll as it is possible to be. They brush against your listening mood like a rueful ghost; they feel, at times, almost like prayer. Take “Perfect Day,” from the 1972 album “Transformer.” Gentle, hovering, entrancingly ambiguous, it could be about heroin addiction or domestic contentment or spoiled dreams or something else altogether. And it is all the more devastating for being delivered in something like a crooner’s lilt from another era. (The precise and celestial arrangement by the English musician Mick Ronson helps.) Reed wrote it with Bettye Kronstad, whom he’d met in 1968, when she was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at Columbia. (They married and divorced the year after “Transformer” was released.) At first, the song was called “Just a Summer’s Day,” but Reed’s haunting coda, “You’re going to reap / Just what you sow,” turns it into something far more unnerving. Reed had a saving economy with words; he often wrote like he was sending telegrams to a new lover.
And yet, the one time I saw him perform live, in 1979, he reduced all those magical songs to a soulless workout—slick, armored, bombastic, and so overamplified the night became a grim endurance test. It felt unpleasant, like a private exercise in contempt and control. It was as if he didn’t want us to receive any pleasure from his art.
The next year, Reed released an album called “Growing Up in Public,” something he had been doing for a while, at a time when the music business had no notion of anything like a “duty of care.” Self-medication is the phrase we now use for how people react to unbearable pressures, imposed both from within and without. (Bangs died from an apparently accidental overdose of pills, in 1982.) Hermes is vague on the extent to which Reed, for all his midlife attendance at A.A. meetings, did finally get clean and sober; late in the book, he notes, with jarring casualness, that Reed “still drank on occasion.”
Reed’s private life is spangled with contradictions, but one thing is clear: he never wanted to be a father. There was no desire to recast the family life he sprang from. (“But, Papa, I know that this visit’s a mistake / There’s nothing here we have in common, except our name,” he sings on “Families,” one of the great underrated Reed songs, from the 1979 album “The Bells.”) That he was dead set on not being a parent might warrant some reflection, but Hermes more or less dispenses with the fact in a half-joking aside about how Reed preferred to have pets. And you get only the faintest sense from the book of why anyone would put up with Reed as a domestic partner. Glimpses of life with Lou before his late-life marriage to the artist and musician Laurie Anderson: sullen, glowering, irascible, passed-out drunk or shooting up.
Both Kronstad and Humphreys, the romantic partner who succeeded her, feel more alive on the page than Reed, who, against their discernible human qualities, remains a locked trunk. To Hermes’s credit, the section on Humphreys is one of the most vivid of the book. Reed was silent about why their relationship ended, but her desire to fully transition may have been decisive. Hermes doesn’t dig too deep when it comes to Reed’s sexuality, which is perhaps understandable; speculation about the intimate lives of others is difficult to pull off without undue prurience. But the book’s reliance on more au-courant terms, such as “gender fluid” and “nonbinary,” can feel like decals applied to an opaque surface, with none of the silt or soil of real life. Reed claimed, at one point, that he was “one hundred per cent gay,” and, in a 1978 interview, he asserted, with seemingly deliberate innuendo, that he was gay from “top to bottom.” What he didn’t mention was that he was then cohabiting with Sylvia Morales, who was about to become his second wife.
Hermes describes that interview on page 304, about two thirds of the way through the book. I made a worried notation in the margin: “We’re still only in 1978.” The logging of details from the sixties and seventies takes up much of the biography, and that ground has been covered in other books—some of them very good, including Mary Woronov’s “Swimming Underground” and Cale’s memoir “What’s Welsh for Zen.” Hermes quotes liberally from these and other works, and also from many other rock writers; it’s generous but can give his own writing a slightly impersonal feel. The marshalling of facts that is de rigeur in this sort of biography is perhaps redundant in the age of Wikipedia, when set lists and equipment details and capsule bios of bit players can all be found online. Hermes builds a solid thoroughfare, but mysterious hollows in the passing landscape remain unexplored.