For someone whose life was saved by The Velvet Underground, it is sometimes difficult to understand that many people hardly know the rock band. In the 1960s, the Velvets hardly sold any records – too raw, too dark, too experimental – and Lou Reed’s solo records never became bestsellers. But the band’s influence is enormous. You hear the chopping guitar noise and the sneering mumble again and again in punk, indie and art rock, with artists such as Bowie, The Sonic Youth, the Strokes. Lou Reed, who died ten years ago, lives on, with or without his name.
Will Hermes is certainly not the first biographer of Lou Reed, but he is the most complete. For Lou Reed The King of New York he was the first to have access to his archive, which contained his letters. Hermes also received full cooperation from the widow Laurie Anderson, so that the book contains, among other things, a unique, moving description of Lou Reed’s last days, hours and minutes.
Lou Reed, the nerdy accountant’s son from the sleepy town of Freeport, suffered from dyslexia and an anxiety disorder. He found liberation in speed, smack, gay bars and rock ‘n’ roll. With minimalist violist John Cale he formed a wonderful rock band that combined catchy pop songs with gritty lo-fi rock and avant-garde noise. Visual artist Andy Warhol took the band under his arm and designed the famous LP cover with the banana for them. After the band broke up, Lou Reed created an impressive solo oeuvre that wavered between infectious pop rock (Transformer) and experimental noise (Metal Machine Music).
Reed, who wanted to combine poetry with rock ‘n’ roll, tackled dark subjects never before found in pop music. About heroin happiness, BDSM, anxiety attacks, domestic violence, dying in a hospital bed, crematorium visits. According to Hermes, the influence of the rock poet goes beyond pop music. Lou Reed sang about the mean streets of New York with a focus on artistic gays, trans people and crossdressers whom he met in the nightclubs and in Warhol’s open studio The Factory. A well-known example is his only hit ‘Walk on The Wild Side’.
Nonbinary partner
Initially, the colorful figures were seen as part of Reed’s black-romantic sketch of the big city in decline. Queers were equated with junkies and sex workers. Now Hermes points out that Lou Reed was the first rock singer to sing about the New York gay and trans scene at all and thus brought it into the sunlight. ‘Candy Says’, for example, is a moving portrait of trans woman Candy Darling. Reed laments befriended AIDS victims in ‘Halloween Parade’. In ‘Some Kinds of Love’ he states: ‘No kinds of love are better than others.’ Lou Reed as a pioneer of queer emancipation.
Reed lived openly with nonbinary Rachel Humphreys in the 1970s. The rock press treated his partner rudely or overlooked him. Hermes still gives the young-deceased Humphreys a place in Reed’s life story. Hermes: ‘Reed looked beyond – and lived outside a society that is stuck in a simplistic, binary hetero-gay division. Every queer kid of the 21st century should be grateful to him.”
Previous biographers depicted Lou Reed as an out-of-class bastard, but Hermes is having none of that. He even included a disclaimer in the foreword: okay, Lou Reed could be unpleasant, but that was also his defense, much needed on the streets of New York. Moreover, he argues, Reed suffered a lot of pain: anxiety, mood swings, liver failure and diabetes. Above all, Hermes does not want to judge and finds the image of the bastard too limited. Behind his ‘resting bitch face‘ Lou Reed hid a sensitive, insecure man full of doubts, who could be sweet and caring, and who cared so much about his art. ‘He cared so much.’ Hermes’ plea for a value-free view of humanity did not help Lou Reed, the reviewer of The Atlantic summarized the biography as: “A poet, a prophet, a dick”.