I had just turned 10 years old when The Beatles popped up on Ed Sullivan and from that moment forward, I was tuned to the major rock and roll acts of the 1960’s. The Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Doors, Jimi, Led Zep, Cream, Traffic, Motown, with a little Bob Dylan thrown in here and there and all the Top 40 stuff. By the time the early 1970s rolled around, not much had changed except by then I was big into The Allman Brothers, Van Morrison and some of the intricate prog rock stuff like Yes and early Genesis. I dug Rory Gallagher (still do). And the arrival of punk got me enthused all over again by Ramones, The Clash, The Jam, Television, and many others. When it came to following rock and roll, I was Captain Obvious.
I’ve been a big music fan for sixty years, but I never quite understood The Velvet Underground. Sure I knew some of the early material. I bought ‘Live 1969’ because of that tantalizing (ahem) cover. And I knew some of Lou Reed’s later hits and I knew his reputation as irascible but I didn’t quite understand the fit in the history of rock and roll narrative or the tsunami of bands and artists that The Velvets inspired. And who was this Nico? And how did Andy Warhol fit into this whole scene, why was he a force?
Thanks to Will Hermes, I’m now dialed in.
Lou Reed: The King of New York not only makes it clear how important and influential The Velvet Underground were during their somewhat brief run, but also goes on to track Reed’s spotty but no less fascinating solo career.
Lou Reed never stopped putting out art. Sure, there were lulls here and there. But Lou Reed took an early interest in poetry and music, learned how to perform, learned how to perform with a band, and then started writing songs in a way that allowed individual personality and point of view to infuse the tunes in a raw, hearfelt way that was being produced at the time. If there was a debut album recorded in 1966 with two more different songs than “Sunday Morning” and “Heroin,” let me know. (The album wasn’t released until 1967.)
So what you need to do is read Hermes’ brilliant 14-page preface to Lou Reed: The King of New York and you’ll be intrigued, enticed. Reed’s early songs dealt with “buying and using drugs, the psychology of addiction, of gender, of intimate-partner violence, of BDSM relationships. This was radical and groundbreaking in 1966, when his band recorded their debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico. Nowadays, when such topics make the pop charts (see Rhianna’s ‘S&M’ et al.), it’s maybe hard to imagine how unprecedented Reed’s ‘guiding-light idea’ was to ‘take rock & roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With the subject matter for adults, written so adults, like myself, could listen to it.’”
Hermes’ preface runs through all the ways the Velvets influenced music and the other forms of art, from fiction writer Denis Johnson to R.E.M to Cowboy Junkies to Tribe Called Quest and all the touchstone ways that the Velvets remain relevant and referenced to this day.
The highly detailed biography, told with a calm style, follows Reed step by step through high school and college as he endures electroshock therapy, starts absorbing the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, forms bands, listens to jazz, listens to doo-wop, explores the avant-garde arts community, and befriends Andy Warhol. “Aesthetically,” writes Hermes, “Warhol surely confirmed, and likely amplified, Reed’s notions about finding beauty in the ugly, banal, reviled, and despised, just as he mirrored Reed’s taste for repetition, noise, distortion, cultural provocation, and periodic arcs toward transcendence.”
To me, that’s the theme. Reed turned himself inside out for art and music. And he frequently did it for cultural provocation. He struggled with commercialism, but commercialism ultimately bailed him out. He struggled with professional jealousy and envy, but was ultimately revered.
Were others doing the same thing as Lou, too? Sure, Bob Dylan’s lyrics were equally personal. There were many others, too. But Billboard’s top singles for 1966 were melodic candy from The Mamas & the Papas (“California Dreamin”), ? and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”), and The Monkees (“Last Train to Clarksville”). And then there was Lou Reed and the Velvets recording a song for their first album about scoring heroin in Harlem (“I’m Waiting For My Man”). Yes, recorded in 1966.
That first album “sat in the can,” according to Hermes, until a “viable single” could be written and Warhol suggested that Reed write something about paranoia. The result was “Sunday Morning,” a song that is the Velvets’ second most popular song of all time (behind “Pale Blue Eyes,” if you believe data from one of the popular streaming services). A song about paranoia.
Drugs play a big role in Lou Reed: The King of New York. As with a lot of these rock and roll biographies and memoirs, it’s hard (um, impossible) for an amateur like me to fathom the sheer volume of drugs that were consumed as well as the energy and effort (and money) that went into securing the needed substance du jour. Sex and relationships also play a big role here, not only Reed’s many romantic partners (male and female) but his manifold business relationships, too—nothing very stable for very long until the last chapter of his life with the singer Laurie Anderson (they were together for 21 years).
As a longtime Coloradoan, I loved coming across the tidbit that Reed and Anderson married in Boulder in 2008, with E-Town host and musician Nick Forster performing the ceremony.
Reed’s many girlfriends come and go, wives (total of three) come and go, relationships come and go, business partners come and go. Reed is the definition of tortured, restless, and unsettled. He shapeshifted between albums and phases of his career. Stretches of stability in his personal life were far and few between. He could be incredibly rough on those around him.
But Reed also comes across, over and over, as an observer of himself and the world around him. He was a big fan of other musicians, too, from Doc Pomus to Ornette Coleman to John Zorn. And he inspired, as noted, so many others. It’s pretty easy to make a case that without Lou Reed, no David Bowie (at least the David Bowie that he became) and probably no Jonathan Richman, not to mention the hundreds (probably thousands) of bands that wanted to emulate that signature minimalist sound—droning, grooving, pounding, jamming, soaring, and street-level real.
This all makes it sound as if Lou Reed: The King of New York is only about Lou. Remarkably, Hermes keeps plenty of others in the narrative mix as well, including Moe Tucker, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, Doug Yule, Robert Quine, and the many others with whom Lou Reed collaborated through good times and bad. And that list is seriously incomplete.
Reed was an innovator and he loved pushing boundaries. As Laurie Anderson said in her speech to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when Reed was inducted (in 2015, three years after Reed’s death), the song “Junior Dad” from Lulu (the opera Reed produced in collaboration with Metallica), is the sound of a song “being torn out of a body.”
In that speech, Anderson talked about how about Reed knew both pain and beauty. “And he knew that these two are often intertwined, and that was what energized them and made them vibrate.”
That comes through, loud and clear, in Hermes’ brilliant and thoughtful biography. And if you’re like me, you’ll get a better grip on when rock and roll really changed. Maybe it happened behind the scenes, for those of us not entirely plugged into the New York scene at the time, too absorbed with with Sgt. Pepper or Are You Experienced?, but Lou and the Velvets changed rock and roll for the better and they changed it forever.
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Final note: I listened to this on audio and Hermes’ narration of his own writing was fantastic. Next, I bought myself a hardback. It’s a thing of beauty.
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Final, final note: I live in the small town of Mancos, Colorado. It’s about 25 miles west of Durango in the Four Corners region. There’s a ton of live music in this area. Recently I started talking to a fellow musician and fantastic guitar player. He’s 26. (I am not!) He mentioned he always wanted to put together a band based around the songs of The Velvet Underground. I perked right up. He brought in a fellow guitar player. The second guitar player is 67. (I’m even older.) And then I found a young woman in town who happened to be just learning drums and was dying to get into a band. Her name was, yes, Mo. She was younger than the first guitar player. Said she loved the Velvets. We started practicing in January. And the more you dig into Lou Reed’s writing and the structure of these songs, the more impressive they get. Satellite of Love. Story of My Life. Pale Blue Eyes. Femme Fatale. Foggy Notion. What Goes On. (On and on…) It’s all amazing stuff. We called the band Midnight Cowboy. Here’s a clip from our first brief gig. It was this music project that sent me back down the Lou Reed / Velvets rabbit hole, trying to figure out what I’d missed and how much I missed. Why had I never stopped to think about the brilliance of “I’m Waiting For My Man”?
Linger on, you Velvets. Linger on.
Don't Need A Diagram 