[In a new biography, the Velvet Underground front man embodies a
New York that exists only in memory. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE CANONIZATION OF LOU REED  
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Jeremy Lybarger
October 17, 2023
The New Republic
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_ In a new biography, the Velvet Underground front man embodies a New
York that exists only in memory. _

,

 

_Lou Reed: The King of New York_
Will Hermes
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374193393

There were at least three Lou Reeds. First and most enduring was the
front man of the Velvet Underground, the greaser poet from Long Island
who had a cabbie’s voice and a knack for writing songs about drugs
and sex and salvation that sounded like the gutter side of 1960s rock.
Then came Reed the freelance auteur, churning out spotty solo albums
and delivering gnomic anti-interviews to the press. (This same Reed
licensed songs to _The Simpsons_ and _Beverly Hills 90210_, and
appeared in ads for American Express.) Then, beginning in the 1990s,
there was Reed the patron saint of downtown New York, as much an
acknowledgment of the city’s millennial sterility as a tribute to
Reed’s genius.

The three versions had an uneasy coexistence, as indicated by Reed’s
famously volatile temperament. He could berate anyone—“you’re a
fucking moron,” he once barked at a 22-year-old interviewer—but he
could also charm a room. Making sense of Reed’s multitudes, and
cutting through the mythology that enshrined him as some kind of
junkie savant, is the task Will Hermes sets himself
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in _Lou Reed: The King of New York_. “If you’re hoping for some
neat totalizing statement or psychological profile to explain Reed, to
fix him like a butterfly specimen, you won’t find it here,” Hermes
cautions early, conceding from the outset the foolhardiness of
synthesizing such an unruly artist. And yet the biography, all 560
pages, presents a Reed ravenous for adoration: from his mentor, the
boozehound writer Delmore Schwartz; from his onetime manager and muse,
Andy Warhol; and from an ensemble of star-crossed lovers, confidants,
and rivals. Not a psychological profile, then, but surely a window
into sentimental Reed lyrics like “the glory of love might see you
through.”

 

Because Reed’s life overlaps with the development of rock and roll,
Hermes’s book is also a cultural history of the genre. The first
single Reed ever bought [[link removed]],
“The Fat Man” by Fats Domino, released in 1949, is considered one
of the earliest rock records. (There’s a distant echo of that
song’s “wah wah wah” chorus in the “doo do doo” refrain on
Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” from 1972.) As the decades
progress in Hermes’s book, the various milieus Reed inhabited flash
by like tinseled mile markers. There’s the underground ferment of
Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Barbara Rubin, and the New York School poets.
There’s CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. There’s the punk upstarts
Patti Smith, Television, and Talking Heads. There’s the
extraterrestrial David Bowie. There’s Metallica, regrettably
[[link removed]]. By
the final page, Hermes has traced rock’s trajectory from teenage
talisman to corporate cash cow to something approaching monumentality:
the soundtrack of what used to be called the American Century.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Reed was also a divining rod for
New York, tracking and manifesting the city’s raw energies. One
subtext—which Hermes mostly avoids—is the evaporation of New
York’s counterculture in the wake of tangled -_tions_ and -_isms_:
gentrification, corporatization, conglomeration, rank careerism, and
the ne plus ultra, the internet. Reed’s career arguably parallels
the city’s ruthless professionalization—a cultural mode that
shifted its calculus from DIY to ROI, from collectivity to the
singular. A hefty biography of Lou Reed is well-timed for an audience
now slouching toward Medicare, and their offspring, all basking in
nostalgia. He’s a taste of something—leather, maybe—plausibly
more authentic than anything in the air these days.

 

 
Lewis Allan Reed was born in 1942. His father was a certified public
accountant who later became treasurer of a company that manufactured
potato chip bags. His mother was a homemaker so pretty she’d once
been crowned “Queen of the Stenographers of NYC.” The family lived
on the South Shore of Long Island, in the village of Freeport—“the
most boring place on earth,” according to Reed— where the local
celebrity was “Mr. New Year’s Eve”: the mawkish bandleader Guy
Lombardo.

Reed put together his first band as a junior in high school, initially
with the ambition of performing a Little Richard tribute act in the
school’s annual variety show. A neighbor in the audience was so
impressed that he introduced the boys to a rep from the fledgling Time
Records. The Shades, as the trio was christened, recorded their debut
single in the summer of 1958, with Reed on guitar and backing vocals.
“We’d open supermarkets, shopping centers, things like that. We
had glitter jackets,” recalls one of Reed’s bandmates. Although
the record deal ended there, it encouraged Reed enough that he
continued to play music and even assembled a new band, the Valets
(their business card read HERE TO SERVE YOU AND YOURS). Reed
handpicked all the covers: songs by Ray Charles, the Cadillacs, and
the Isley Brothers, among others.
 

But Freeport was no place for an aspiring menace to society. Reed
enrolled at NYU, where he and a friend started a campus radio program
called _Happy Art and Precocious Lou’s Hour of Joy and Rebellion_.
The weekly show was introduced by “Up Broadway,” a song
[[link removed]] by the blind New York
street performer Moondog, whose style [[link removed]]
Hermes describes as “unconventional, sophisticated, kooky yet
inviting, a mix of found sound, European chamber music, spoken word
and global folk.” Throw in the free jazz improvisations of Ornette
Coleman, whom Reed also revered at that time, and such eclecticism
could just as well be the template for the Velvet Underground.

During his freshman year, Reed suffered an “emotional breakdown”
that led to his withdrawal from college. He returned to Freeport,
where a doctor advised him to undergo electroconvulsive therapy.
“They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your
tongue and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was
recommended in Rockland County then to discourage homosexual
feelings,” Reed later told a journalist. Hermes notes that it was
rare to prescribe ECT as a sexual corrective, but the experience was
vital to Reed’s own mythmaking and was the first marker of his
outlaw status. He memorialized the ordeal in “Kill Your Sons,” a
barbed track [[link removed]] from his
1974 album, _Sally Can’t Dance_:

All your two-bit psychiatrists are giving you electric shock
they said they’d let you live at home with mom and dad
instead of mental hospitals
but every time you tried to read a book
you couldn’t get to page 17
’cause you forgot where you were
so you couldn’t even read.

Whatever the rationale for Reed’s ECT, his relationship to
homosexuality was often ambiguous. He patronized the Hayloft, a gay
bar on Long Island that was also the hangout of future Warhol
superstar Candy Darling, but an acquaintance doesn’t recall Reed
cruising for sex there: He was “just fascinated with gay culture.”
And although Reed proclaimed himself gay from “top to bottom,” he
also once declared that he’d “rather have cancer than be a
faggot.” Such provocations weren’t unusual for him (a song on his
1978 album, _Street Hassle_, is titled
[[link removed]] “I Wanna Be Black”),
but his flippancy suggests discomfort with certain queer stereotypes.
“It’s just that my gay people don’t lisp,” he explained to a
journalist. “They’re not any more affected than the straight
world.”

Reed’s lyrics feature characters who, in the parlance of the time,
were cross-dressers, and in “Some Kinda Love,” from the Velvet
Underground’s eponymous 1969 album, he declares
[[link removed]], “no kinds of love /
are better than others.” His relationship with the
gender-nonconforming Rachel Humphreys, whom he met in 1974 at a
Greenwich Village show bar for drag and trans performers, personalized
this adage. “It was a public romance largely unprecedented in
mainstream pop culture, and their matter-of-factly out-of-the-closet
attitude was not without risk. Yet both came off, at least for a time,
as fearless,” Hermes writes. Still, Reed didn’t have public
romances with men, and in the 1980s and ’90s, as he campaigned on
behalf of various social causes, including performing at Farm Aid, he
was conspicuously absent from AIDS activism.

The other event that was central to his early self-conception was his
return to college in 1960, to Syracuse University this time, where he
met the writer Delmore Schwartz. Best known for writing the story
collection
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_In Dreams Begin Responsibilities_, which made him a literary darling
at 25, the middle-aged Schwartz had entered a long tailspin.
Frequently drunk, hooked on amphetamines, and in and out of
institutions, he was nonetheless idolized by the young Reed, who
called him “the greatest man I ever met.” Schwartz urged Reed to
think of himself seriously as a writer. “To cultivate an
appreciation for [James] Joyce’s mastery of realism, Schwartz
suggested that his students simply walk around Syracuse and observe
the details. He laid out the idea that art combined lived experience
with the fabricated,” Hermes writes. This method became Reed’s
approach to songwriting. “Dirty Blvd.,” from his 1989 album, _New
York_, for example, combines
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imagined vignettes of the urban underbelly. A young boy named Pedro
lives in a hotel with his abusive father and nine siblings. At night,
he works the streets: “a small kid stands by the Lincoln Tunnel /
he’s selling plastic roses for a buck / the traffic’s backed up to
39th Street / the TV whores are calling the cops out for a suck.”

Something else happened at Syracuse that proved formative for Reed and
his legacy. At some point during his senior year, he began shooting
heroin. The details are murky, but the outcome was real enough: Reed
contracted hepatitis from sharing needles. He also hit upon the
material that inspired two of his seminal songs: “Heroin” and
“I’m Waiting for the Man.” The former
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seven-minutes-plus fusillade that mimics the rush and comedown of a
fix, and it contains some of Reed’s most evocative imagery:

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I’d sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that<
On a sailor’s suit and cap
<
Away from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don’t known
Oh, and I guess that I just don’t know

“I’m Waiting for the Man” is a variation
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to an incongruously frisky beat and conveying Reed’s state of mind,
if not his daily routine:

I’m waiting for my man
26 dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington 1-2-5
Feel sick and dirty
more dead than alive
I’m waiting for my man

By the time he graduated from college in 1964, Reed had
everything—the trauma of mental illness, the fascination with sexual
otherness, the mystique of drugs, the poetic sensibility, and the
streetwise mouth—that fueled the rest of his creative life.

The Velvet Underground was named after a cheap paperback, a
sociological quickie that documented stories of “spouse-swapping,
orgies, queer sex, bondage, and S&M play,” Hermes writes. It was an
appropriate namesake for a band whose catalog features just such
perversions. Consisting of the guitarist Sterling Morrison, the
drummer Moe Tucker (who replaced the short-tenured Angus MacLise), the
multi-instrumentalist John Cale, and Reed, the group caught the
attention of Andy Warhol, who first heard them perform
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at Cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village. “Their music was beyond the
pale—way too loud and insane for any tourist coffeehouse
clientele,” Warhol wrote in his memoir. “People would leave
looking dazed and damaged.” As someone accustomed to alienating
audiences, Warhol saw potential and offered to manage the group.
 

His first innovation, suggested by the director and Factory adjutant
Paul Morrissey, was to add the German chanteuse Nico to the Velvets’
lineup. A chilled blonde fashion model turned actress and singer, Nico
had met Warhol in a Paris nightclub in 1965. She was everything Reed
wasn’t: glossy, chic, palpably exotic, and naturally charismatic
onstage. Warhol booked the full group to play the Exploding Plastic
Inevitable, his new multimedia
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“happening” on the Lower East Side. Underground filmmakers
projected their work (or abstracted images) onto the whitewashed walls
while the Velvets provided dissonant or droning accompaniment. Strobes
and a mirror ball added a touch of synesthesia. As Hermes notes, the
extravaganza drew a mix of celebrities—Jackie Kennedy, Salvador
Dalí, Sammy Davis Jr.—and literati such as the poet John Ashbery,
who, having never attended such a spectacle, “was so overloaded by
the sensory barrage he burst into tears, exclaiming, ‘I don’t
understand this at all!’” Factory habitués tunneled through the
crowd injecting partygoers with speed.

Over four days in 1967, the Velvets and Nico recorded their debut LP,
simply titled _The Velvet Underground and Nico_. It peaked at number
171 on the _Billboard _chart and spawned no hits—only successive
generations of imitators and superfans, and arguably the most
recognizable album cover in history. Perhaps the most astute piece
ever written about the band was by the _New Yorker_ music critic Ellen
Willis, who identified
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their psycho-spiritual impetus:

The point was not to glorify the punk, or even to say _fuck you_ to
the world, but to be honest about the strategies people adopt in a
desperate situation. The Velvets were not nihilists but moralists. In
their universe nihilism regularly appears as a vivid but unholy
temptation, love and its attendant vulnerability as scary and poignant
imperatives. Though Lou Reed rejected optimism, he was enough of his
time to crave transcendence.
 

In the end, the story of the Velvet Underground is like the story of
any band that briefly bottled lightning only to discover mortality
after all. Egos swelled. Love affairs intruded. Tensions turned
vindictive. There were defections and shake-ups. The band released
three more albums—none quite matching the cagey sublimity of the
first—before calling it quits. Reed announced he was giving up music
to become a poet. Such a transition seemed perfectly reasonable in New
York then.

 

 
In fact, poetry and rock music were not at odds, as Reed and his
contemporaries—Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young—had
demonstrated. “I am a writer,” Reed insisted to Schwartz years
before. “I’m just going to use music.” And so his nearly
unclassifiable and inexhaustible solo act was of a piece with his
literary calling. His 20 albums range from glam rock forerunner
(_Transformer_, produced
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Bowie) to tragic rock opera (_Berlin_) to instrumental saw blade and
dial tone (_Metal Machine Music_) to sincere pop schmaltz (_Set the
Twilight Reeling_). Several of these records garnered negative or
mixed reviews, and they typically didn’t sell as well as Reed
wanted.

Post-Velvets, Hermes’s book is often a slalom of embittered funks
and sluggish returns. _Lou Reed_, the self-titled debut, “was
released … to lukewarm reviews.” _Transformer_ “didn’t
immediately transform Reed’s career.” _Berlin_ “was not
universally heralded as the work of a great dramatic poet.” _Sally
Can’t Dance_, although commercially successful, had “an
unappealing whiff of cynicism” about it. Critics “ran hot and
cold” about _Coney Island Baby_. Even Warhol tendered a harsh
judgment of his former protégé: “When John Cale and Lou were the
Velvets, they really had a style, but when Lou went solo he got
bad.”

But the book’s final stretch is also the story of how Reed mellowed.
In 2008, he married the artist and musician Laurie Anderson. They
bought a house in the Hamptons. Reed practiced tai chi every day.
Accolades poured in; he was twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall
of Fame. His final album, _Hudson River Wind Meditations_, is a
collection [[link removed]] of wordless
relaxation tracks. When Reed died in Anderson’s arms on a Sunday
morning in 2013, his last words were so poignant they could have been
scripted: “Take me into the light.”

Time has redeemed many of Reed’s supposed misfires, particularly
_Transformer,_ _Berlin_, and _Metal Machine Music._ We can now see
where he fits on the continuum of punk, post-punk, and New Wave, as
well as in the larger sweep of New York’s avant-­garde. In his 1975
_Rolling Stone_ review of _Metal Machine Music_, James Wolcott
memorably skewered
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the album as sounding “like the tubular groaning of a galactic
refrigerator”—a sentiment most of his fellow critics echoed. Four
decades later, Mark Richardson, writing in Pitchfork, hailed the album
as “exhilarating” and “beautiful.” What explains this
about-face?

As Brian Eno supposedly quipped, the first Velvet Underground album
initially sold only 10,000 copies in its first five years, but
everyone who bought a copy started a band. And so Reed’s influence
as both a figurehead and a solo act diffused across
generations—through Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, and the
New York Dolls, on through to Sonic Youth and R.E.M. and the Cowboy
Junkies, to, more recently, the Killers and (most self-consciously)
the Strokes. As I write this, Al Green has just released
[[link removed]] a cover of “Perfect
Day,” a beloved Reed standard from 1972. When Reed performed at the
White House in 1998, he was something of an elder statesman himself, a
rock veteran who had grown up alongside the genre and harassed it into
his own abrasive, literate image. His best music is “a perfect
balance between rock ’n’ roll’s unhinged id and its intellectual
superego,” Hermes writes, and so Reed became synonymous with a style
of rock that was at least nominally “pure,” whatever its corporate
imprimatur.

One other thing Reed has come to embody: a New York that exists only
in memory, a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze, “something
like a circus or a sewer,” as he sang. He connects us to a place
where degradation was currency but redemption always in the
offing—by some measures, the recipe for a perfect rock song. New
York ain’t what it used to be. But as long as we pretend otherwise,
Lou Reed will be its mirror.
 

 

Jeremy Lybarger is the features editor at the Poetry Foundation. His
work has appeared in _The New Yorker, Art in America, The Nation, The
New York Review of Books, _and more.

 

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* 1960s
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* 1960s Counterculture
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* artist's biographies
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