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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY REED, LO. | 31330009389200 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | B/REED | 33934004699840 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | BIOG/REED | 31480011717987 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | B REED, LOU | 30470002138989 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | BIOG/REED L | 31479007652125 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | 921 REED, LOU | 32122003057381 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | B REED 2023 | 32124002147320 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | B REED, L. | 31548003507176 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | BIOGRAPHY REED L | 32128004224474 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | B REED | 32129002607868 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Topsfield Town Library | BIO REED | 32133002713494 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.Since his death ten years ago, Lou Reed's living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou Reed: The King of New York, Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed's life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed's complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage he took from his mentor Delmore Schwartz.As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the landmark status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library's much-publicized Reed archive, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews, Hermes gives us a new Lou Reed - a pioneer in living and writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this magisterial account, Rolling Stone senior critic Hermes (Love Goes to Buildings on Fire) delves into the mind and music of the Velvet Underground's front man. Growing up on Long Island in the 1940s and '50s, Reed "fell in love with rock 'n' roll and New York City doo-wop" early on (he recorded his first single in the latter style in high school). After graduating from college, Reed joined with John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Angus MacLise to form the Velvet Underground in 1965. He left five years later to start a solo career. Though the band skirted fame in its brief run, it exerted outsize influence on punk and "alternative/college rock" of the 1980s, according to Hermes, who puts Reed's legacy as both a rocker and lyricist front and center. Contending that his jubject's "guiding-light idea" was to "take rock 'n' roll, the pop format, and make it for adults," Hermes notes that even Reed's early songs dealt with "buying and using drugs, the psychology of addiction... intimate-partner violence, BDSM relationships" at a time when discussing such topics in music was rare. Throughout, Hermes weaves in small, resonant details that make achingly plain the fragile, complicated psyche beneath Reed's too-cool persona. At one point, a friend recalls seeing Reed after he underwent electroconvulsive therapy at 18, possibly as a treatment for depression: "He seemed the same... a little more shaky than usual. And he had a little quiver in his voice sometimes." This stands as the definitive biography of one of rock's most enigmatic personalities. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
On the evening of 13 January 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 conventional - a local artist named Andy Warhol had been invited to say a few words, but instead put on a multimedia performance with the band he was managing. The Velvet Underground and Nico cranked up the volume and played Heroin ("Because when the smack begins to flow, I really don't care any more") and Venus in Furs ("Kiss the boot of shiny shiny leather ¿ tongue the thongs") while 300 medical professionals and their spouses looked on in tuxedos and gowns. "I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id," one doctor fleeing the scene told the reporters that Warhol had stationed in the lobby; another said "it was like the whole prison ward had escaped". That wasn't totally wide of the mark; Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol "superstar" writhing on stage had once been institutionalised by her wealthy parents (while in hospital she met Barbara Rubin, another scenester who filmed part of the evening). And the band's linchpin and songwriter Lou Reed had, in his late teens, been given electroconvulsive therapy to treat suspected schizophrenia (he claimed later it had been to "discourage homosexual feelings"). But though the event itself was brattishly attention-seeking 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 wasn't just a "happening", an art-gimmick assembled for shock value. 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 1960s' greatest love songs, I'll Be Your Mirror), and the beginning of a career that 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 lacklustre 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 yet vivid new biography, the first to draw on the archive 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 conjures 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 isn't a stretch: one of his best songs, 1969's Candy Says, is an achingly poignant evocation of gender dysphoria, among other things. On 1972's Make Up, three years after the Stonewall riots, he proclaimed "Now we're coming out, out of our closets / Out on the streets". From 1974 to 1977 his partner was the trans woman Rachel Humphreys, and there was nothing closeted about their relationship. Occasionally, though, it feels as if Hermes is straining to earn his favourite rock-god progressive brownie points. Was his notoriously unlistenable album of guitar feedback Metal Machine Music really a "radical queer art statement, its wordless roar a shutdown of homophobic interrogation"? If you say so. Because Reed is nothing if not a complicated figure, a deeply awkward idol. As Hermes charts his progress from suburban Long Island to the downtown avant garde, via Syracuse University and the tutelage of the roué poet Delmore Schwartz, he also charts not the healing, but the exacerbation of Reed's psychic wounds and flaws. John Cale, the Velvet Underground's other musical genius, thought his often appalling behaviour was rooted in "fears about [his] sanity" that drove him to "purposefully [try] his darnedest to set people off. That made him feel he was in control, rather than living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. [He was] perpetually seeking a kind of advantage for himself by bringing out the worst in people." At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting he was confronted by an addict who shouted: 'How dare you be here - you're the reason I took heroin!' The same insecurity that gave him relentless professional drive - to prove himself a great poet to Schwartz, to leave rivals in the dust, to show his parents that he wasn't the basket case they feared - also made him selfish and even violent. "If you were the woman in his life," wrote his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, "you were as integral to him as an arm or a leg, and would be treated with as much respect and abuse as he treated himself". Reed composed the peerless Perfect Day about a date they went on: Hermes describes it accurately as sketching an "unsteadily blissful scene that flickered with self-loathing". Bandmates also bore the brunt, and few of his collaborations lasted long. (Decades later, the Onion would riff on his reputation in a piece pegged to a transplant occasioned by worsening hepatitis: "New Liver Complains of Difficulty Working with Lou Reed" was the headline. "'It's really hard to get along with Lou - one minute he's your best friend and the next he's outright abusive,' said the vital organ".) Self-medication was perhaps inevitable in this context, and Hermes describes some hair-raising scenes of drug use. Despite being known for the song Heroin, Reed was more consistently a speed freak, partly because it was easily available from doctors and diet clinics, and partly because it spurred productivity - at least until it didn't. In any case, the paranoia and degradation it wreaked went straight into his writing. After all, his "guiding light idea" as he put it, was "to take rock & roll, the pop format, and make it for adults. With the subject matter for adults." Thus, we have the excruciating anthem of withdrawal, Waves of Fear; Street Hassle, which sets the grim story of an overdose to a mesmerising string ostinato - and, of course, Heroin itself. When he finally got (mostly) clean, Reed attended Narcotics Anonymous. At one meeting in New York, Hermes writes, he was confronted by an addict who shouted: "How dare you be here - you're the reason I took heroin!" Because while Reed may not have enjoyed much commercial or critical success, at least at first, he did succeed in influencing people. The story of the Velvet Underground is almost entirely one of post-breakup influence, as Hermes demonstrates in his roll-call of artists inspired by them, from Patti Smith to Talking Heads to Blondie, hero-worshipping Reed as he stalked CBGBs a mere handful of years later. This near-instantaneous mythologising of lost bands and evaporated scenes may be a perennial feature of musical culture, but Reed and the Velvets were prime beneficiaries of it. (Even the mythologising is subject to mythology: for example, who really said "The first Velvet Underground album didn't sell many copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band"? OK, it was Brian Eno, sort of.) Not that Reed just sat back and watched his reputation grow - slow-cooked by success like the proverbial frog in a saucepan. Hermes diligently recounts the creation of albums through the 80s, 90s and beyond, even as the cheques for use of his old songs in samples and ads started to roll in, making him a wealthy man. His greatest late-career release, New York, turned an unflinching eye on his hometown, railing against poverty and prejudice, mocking a hopeful poem about the statue of liberty: "Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I'll piss on 'em." But if he made his name as rock's poet of the shadow self, whether his own or society's, it was in the service of a more truthful 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 am so susceptible to beauty right now," he said, as friends played him the Shangri-Las, Nina Simone, Frank Ocean and Radiohead while he floated in his heated pool. In reality, he always was.
Kirkus Review
The mercurial life and career of the singularly talented rock artist Lou Reed (1942-2013). In the decade following his death, Reed's legacy has generated considerable attention, fueling further interest and debate about this legendary performer's artistic stature. In addition to Anthony DeCurtis' recent biography, Todd Haynes' acclaimed 2021 documentary on the Velvet Underground introduced Reed to younger audiences. Rolling Stone contributor Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, covers a good amount of familiar territory. He traces Reed's early writing and musical roots, from his performing in high school bands on Long Island to studying poetry at Syracuse with early mentor Delmore Schwartz to his formation of the Velvet Underground in 1965 with John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Angus MacLise. With Reed serving as the band's principal songwriter, singer, and guitarist, they caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who for two years would become their manager. Reed quit the band in 1970 and launched a successful solo career, continuing for several decades. Hermes shrewdly probes Reed's complex personal and professional life and his frequently erratic behavior; his struggles with mental illness and depression; drug and alcohol abuse; intimate relationships with women and men and his self-identifying queer or nonbinary sexuality; partnerships with David Bowie, Warhol, and Laurie Anderson; and his influence on performers including Patti Smith and the Talking Heads. The author interviewed many of Reed's closest friends and relations and, unlike previous biographers, accessed the New York Public Library's recently acquired Reed archives. Hermes' strength is in identifying and articulating the transformational brilliance of Reed's songwriting and performances within the context of the 1960s and '70s music scene. Reverent about his artistry, he's also discerningly cognizant of Reed's temperamental shortcomings. "Tales of his rudeness were legion," writes the author, and he had "a privileged celebrity's sense of entitlement. Reed craved the freedom of anonymity, but still wanted his perks." An engrossing, fully dimensional portrait of an influential yet elusive performer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A Long Islander by birth and upbringing, Lou Reed became famous in Manhattan. In fact, to many people, Lou Reed was New York. Reed was known for many things--his coolness, his random cruelty, his very Lou Reedness--and for avoiding the media. As Rolling Stone contributor Hermes notes, Reed loathed press interviews. He felt his work should speak for itself. Most of all, Reed "wanted to control his own narrative." Still, previous biographers accepted the challenge, and now Hermes, a superb writer, does poetic justice to the complicated life of his difficult subject. As Hermes details, a raft of current singers claim debt to Reed, from Courtney Barnett and St. Vincent to Sharon Van Etten and Kurt Vile, as well as creatives in television, art, and fashion. Hermes offers a fresh and deep immersion in Reed's world in all of its weird and wonderful, curmudgeonly glory, from Andy Warhol's Factory and the Velvet Underground to days and nights of rock 'n' roll decadence and his final moments surrounded by family and friends. Reed was influenced by many people over the years, including Delmore Schwartz and Bob Dylan, but none more so than his third wife, multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, who is a big part of this powerful story, this biographical magnum opus.
Table of Contents
| Preface | ix |
| Notes on Process, Myth Parsing, and Pronouns | xxiii |
| Introduction | 3 |
| 1 Brooklyn > Long Island > The Bronx | 5 |
| 2 Long Island > Upstate | 30 |
| 3 Long Island > Queens (Commuting) > Lower East Side | 58 |
| 4 Lower East Side | 102 |
| 5 Lower East Side > Upper East Side > Los Angeles > Boston | 138 |
| 6 NYC > San Francisco > Max's Kansas City > Long Island | 167 |
| 7 Long Island > London > Upper East Side | 201 |
| 8 Upper East Side > West Village | 245 |
| 9 New Jersey > Upper West Side | 311 |
| 10 Upper West Side > West Village | 355 |
| 11 West Village > Long Island | 396 |
| Epilogue | 434 |
| Notes | 445 |
| Acknowledgments | 499 |
| Index | 503 |