by On the evening of January 13, 1966, the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry held its annual dinner at a hotel on Park Avenue. On the menu were string beans, roast beef and baby potatoes. The entertainment was less traditional – a local artist called Andy Warhol was invited to say a few words, but instead put on a multimedia performance with the band he was managing. The Velvet Underground and Nico hung up the volume and played Heroine (“Because when the smack starts flowing, I don’t care anymore”) and Venus in Fur (“Kiss the boot of shiny shiny leather … the tongue of the waves ” ) and watched by 300 medical professionals and their spouses in tuxedos and gowns. “You could probably call this meeting a spontaneous eruption of recognition,” one doctor fleeing the scene told reporters that Warhol was stationed in the lobby; another said “it was like the whole prison ward had escaped”.
That was not too broad; Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol “superstar” who was once writing on the institutional stage, had her wealthy parents (while in the hospital she met Barbara Rubin, another scene who filmed part of the evening). And the band’s linchpin and songwriter Lou Reed was given electroconvulsive therapy in his late teens to treat suspected schizophrenia (he later claimed it was to “dissuade homosexual feeling”).
But while the event itself was very attention-grabbing in true Warhol style – and allowed some of the participants to take fantasy revenge against their psychiatric tormentors – it was about more than that. . The Velvet Underground was not a mere “happening”, an artistic gimmick put together for shock value. It was the first serious stage for Reed’s talents as a musician and lyricist (three months later the band would record one of the greatest love songs of the 1960s, I’ll Be Your Mirror), and launched a career that ‘would cause him to succeed. a world-renowned avatar of the dark side of human nature, of addiction, despair and excess.
Dubbed the “King of New York” by David Bowie, an obsessive Velvets fan who saved Reed’s scarce solo career by producing Transformer, his biggest hit, Walk on the Wild Side. It is also the title of a vivid new biography of Will Hermes, the first to draw on the archives donated to the New York Public Library by Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson. As in his 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, about the city’s mid-70s musical landscape, Hermes expertly combs through the various scenes in which Reed lived, placing him among a rich cast of collaborators, friends and lovers.
There’s a sense that he’s updating Reed for a new generation, especially as a prophet of queer liberation and gender nonconformity. This is not a stretch: one of his best songs, 1969’s Candy Says, is a very poignant take on gender discourse, among other things. On 1972’s Makeover, three years after the Stonewall riots, he announced “Now we’re coming out, out of our closets / Out into the streets”. From 1974 to 1977 the trans woman Rachel Humphreys was his partner, and there was nothing hidden about their relationship. Occasionally, though, it feels like Hermes is straining to earn his favorite progressive rock god brownie points. Was his album of unlistenable guitar feedback, Metal Machine Music really, a “radical statement of queer art, a wordless roar extinguished by homophobic questioning”? If you say so.
Because Reed is nothing if not a complex figure, a very awkward idol. As Hermes charts his progress from suburban Long Island to the avant garde in the center, through Syracuse University and the tutelage of poet Roué Delmore Schwartz, he also traces not the healing, but the deepening of Reed’s psychological wounds and weaknesses. . John Cale, another musical superhero of the Velvet Underground, thought that his shockingly horrible behavior was rooted in “fear of [his] sanity” drove at him “on purpose [try] he tried to put people off. So he felt in control, rather than living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. [He was] constantly seeking a kind of advantage for himself by bringing out the worst.”
At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting an addict confronted him and shouted: ‘How dare you be here – you’re the reason I took heroin!’
The same insecurity that gave him a relentless professional drive – to prove himself as a great poet to Schwartz, to leave rivals in the dust, to show his parents that he is not the basket case they feared – made him selfish and even violent. “If you were the woman in his life,” wrote his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, “you were as central to him as an arm or a leg, and he would be treated with as much respect and abuse as he treated himself.” Reed composed the ageless Perfect Day about a date they went on: Hermes aptly describes it as sketching “a restlessly joyful scene tinged with self-loathing”. The pressure was on the bandmates too, and many of his collaborators did not last long. (Twenty years later, the Onion would make a big dent in his reputation in a piece linked to a transplant due to worsening hepatitis: “New Liver Complains of Difficulty Working with Lou Reed” headlined. one minute he’s your best friend and the next he’s all insulting,’ said the vital organ”.)
Self-medication was perhaps inevitable in this context, and Hermes describes several scenes involving the use of drugs to raise hair. Despite being known for the heroin song, Reed was a more consistent speed freak, partly because it was readily available from doctors and diet clinics, and partly because it encouraged productivity – at least until until it wasn’t. In any case, the resulting paranoia and degradation seeped directly into his writing. After all, his “light guiding idea” was as he put it, “to take rock & roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With the adult content.” Therefore, the song is excruciating withdrawal, Waves of Fear; Street Hassle, which sets the grim story of the overdose to a mesmerizing string ostinato – and, of course, Heron himself. When he finally got (mostly) clean, Reed attended Narcotics Anonymous. At one meeting in New York, Hermes wrote, there was an addict in front of him who shouted: “How dare you be here – you are the reason I took heroin!”
Because Reed may not have achieved much commercial or critical success, at least initially, he managed to make an impact on people. The story of the Velvet Underground is almost entirely one of post-breakup influence, as Hermes shows in his roll call of artists inspired by them, from Patti Smith to Talking Heads to Blondie, hero-worshipping Reed as he sought out a handful of CBGBs. years later. This little mythology of lost bands and evaporated scenes may be a perennial feature of music culture, but its main beneficiaries were Reed and the Velvets. (Even mythology is subject to mythology: for example, who actually said “The Velvet Underground’s first album didn’t sell many copies, but everyone who bought it started a band”? Okay, it was Brian Eno, sort of.)
Not that Reed sat back and watched his fame grow – slowly cooking him to success like the proverbial frog in a saucepan. Hermes painstakingly recounts the creation of albums in the 80s, 90s and beyond, even as the checks on the use of his old songs in samples and advertisements began to roll in, making him a rich man. New York turned a restless eye on his hometown, railing against poverty and prejudice, humming an optimistic poem about the statue of liberty: “Give me your hunger, your tiredness, your poverty, I’ll laugh. on them.”
But if he made his name as a poet of the rock of the shadow itself, whether his own or society, he was in the service of a truer beauty. In his final chapter and epilogue, Hermes describes Reed’s final days in 2013 – his body rejected the transplanted liver, and he knew he was dying. “I’m so susceptible to beauty right now,” he said, as friends played the Shangri-Las, Nina Simone, Frank Ocean and Radiohead while floating in his heated pool. Actually, it always was.
• Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes is published by Penguin (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
