by On the evening of January 13, 1966, the New York Society of Clinical Psychiatry held its annual dinner at a Park Avenue hotel. On the menu were green beans, roast beef and baby potatoes. The entertainment was less conventional: a local artist named Andy Warhol had been invited to say a few words, but instead he gave a multimedia performance with the band he led. The Velvet Underground and Nico turned up the volume and played Heroine (“‘Cause when the hit starts flowing, I really don’t care anymore”) and Venus in Furs (“Kiss the shiny shiny leather boot…tongue the thongs”) while 300 Medical professionals and their spouses looked on dressed in tuxedos and gowns. “I guess you could call this meeting a spontaneous eruption of the id,” a doctor who fled the spot Warhol had staked out in the lobby told reporters; another said “it was like the entire prison room had escaped.”
That wasn’t totally out of character; Edie Sedgwick, Warhol’s stage-writhing “superstar,” had been institutionalized by her wealthy parents (while she was in the hospital she met Barbara Rubin, another set designer who filmed part of the evening). And the band’s lynchpin and songwriter Lou Reed, as a teenager, had received electroconvulsive therapy to treat suspected schizophrenia (he later claimed it had been to “discourage homosexual feelings”).
But while the event itself shamelessly sought attention in true Warhol style (and allowed some of the participants to act out a revenge fantasy against their psychiatric tormentors), it represented more than that. The Velvet Underground was not just a “happening”, an artistic trick created to shock. It was the first real platform for Reed’s talents as a musician and lyricist (three months later the band would record one of the best love songs of the ’60s, I’ll Be Your Mirror), and the beginning of a career that would see him would see him become a world-famous avatar of the dark side of human nature, of addiction, desperation and excess.
“King of New York” was the epithet given to him by David Bowie, an obsessive Velvets fan who rescued Reed’s lackluster solo career by producing Transformer, which spawned his biggest hit, Walk on the Wild Side. It’s also the title of Will Hermes’s meticulous but vivid new biography, the first to be based on the archive donated to the New York Public Library by Reed’s widow, Laurie Anderson. As in his 2011 book Love Goes to Burning Buildings, about the city’s mid-’70s musical landscape, Hermes expertly evokes the different scenes Reed inhabited, placing him amid a rich cast of collaborators. , friends and lovers.
There’s a sense that he’s updating Reed for a new generation, particularly as a prophet of queer liberation and gender nonconformity. This is no exaggeration: one of his best songs, 1969’s Candy Says, is a painfully moving evocation of gender dysphoria, among other things. In 1972’s Make Up, three years after the Stonewall riots, he proclaimed “Now we’re coming out, out of our closets / Into the streets.” From 1974 to 1977 his partner was trans woman Rachel Humphreys, and he had nothing secretive about their relationship. From time to time, however, he feels like Hermes is trying hard to earn his favorite prog brownie points from the rock god. Was his notoriously unlistenable guitar commentary album Metal Machine Music really a “radical queer art statement, his wordless roar a closing homophobic interrogation”? If you say so.
Because Reed is nothing more than a complicated figure, a deeply uncomfortable idol. As Hermes charts his progress from the suburbs of Long Island to the avant-garde of downtown, through Syracuse University and the tutelage of the libertine poet Delmore Schwartz, he also charts not the healing but the exacerbation of Reed’s wounds and psychic defects. . John Cale, the Velvet Underground’s other musical genius, thought their often atrocious behavior was rooted in “fears about [his] sanity” that led him to “intentionally [try] everything possible to make people angry. It made her feel like she was in control, rather than living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. [He was] “perpetually seeking some kind of advantage for himself by bringing out the worst in people.”
At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting he was confronted by an addict who yelled at him: ‘How dare you be here? You’re the reason I did heroin!’
The same insecurity that gave him a relentless professional drive—proving to Schwartz that he was a great poet, outrunning his rivals, showing his parents that he wasn’t the basket case they feared—also made him selfish and even violent. “If you were the woman of his life,” wrote his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, “you would be as integral to him as an arm or a leg, and you would be treated with as much respect and abuse as he treated himself.” ”. Reed composed the incomparable Perfect Day about a date they had: Hermes accurately describes it as a sketch of an “unsettled, happy scene flickering with self-loathing.” His bandmates were also the most affected and few of his collaborations lasted long. (Decades later, The Onion would mock his reputation in an article linked to a transplant caused by worsening hepatitis: “New Liver Complaints Over Difficulty Working With Lou Reed” was the headline. “‘It’s Really Hard getting along with Lou… one minute he’s your best friend and the next he’s downright abusive,’ said the vital organ.”)
Self-medication was perhaps inevitable in this context, and Hermes describes some grisly scenes of drug use. Despite being known for the song Heroin, Reed was more consistently a speed freak, partly because he was readily available at doctors and diet clinics, and partly because he encouraged productivity, at least until he stopped. do it. In any case, the paranoia and degradation he caused were directly reflected in his writings. After all, his “guiding idea,” as he put it, was “to take the rock & roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With the theme for adults.” Thus, we have the unbearable anthem of withdrawal, Waves of Fear; Street Hassle, which tells the grim story of an overdose of a fascinating string ostinato and, of course, heroin itself. When he finally got (mostly) clean, Reed attended Narcotics Anonymous. At a meeting in New York, Hermes writes, he was confronted by an addict who yelled at him: “How dare you be here? You’re the reason I used heroin!”
Because while Reed may not have enjoyed much commercial or critical success, at least at first, he managed to influence people. The Velvet Underground’s history is almost entirely a post-breakup influence, as evidenced by Hermes in his list of artists inspired by them, from Patti Smith to Talking Heads to Blondie, and the hero-worshipping Reed as he stalked a handful from CBGB. of years later. This almost instantaneous mythologizing of lost bands and evaporated scenes may be a perennial feature of musical culture, but Reed and the Velvets were the main beneficiaries of it. (Even mythologizing is subject to mythology: for example, who really said “The Velvet Underground’s first album didn’t sell many copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band”? Okay, it was Brian Eno, more or less. )
It’s not that Reed simply sat back and watched his reputation grow, simmered by success like the proverbial frog in a pot. Hermes diligently chronicles the creation of albums throughout the ’80s, ’90s and beyond, even as scrutiny began to come over the use of his old songs in samples and advertisements, making him a wealthy man. His biggest release late in his career, New York, cast an unwavering gaze on his hometown, criticizing poverty and prejudice, mocking a hopeful poem about the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your hunger, your tiredness, your poor , I will urinate on you.” about them”.
But if he made a name for himself as the poet of rock’s shadow self, whether his own or society’s, it was in the service of a truer beauty. In his moving final chapter and epilogue, Hermes describes Reed’s final days in 2013: his body had rejected the transplanted liver and he knew he was dying. “I’m very susceptible to beauty right now,” he said, as his friends played Shangri-Las, Nina Simone, Frank Ocean and Radiohead while he floated in their heated pool. Actually, he always was.
• Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes is published by Penguin (£25). To support The Guardian and The Observer, purchase a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping charges may apply.
