So many books and stories abound about Lou Reed that you’d be forgiven for believing that nothing else could be said about him. With this biography, Lou Reed: The King of New York, however, Will Hermes has offered what is probably the best, most vivid portrait of the musician.
Sprawling yet concise, epic yet intimate, The King of New York is the story of the Velvet Underground co-founder and solo artist who passed away in 2013 at age 71. In the book, Hermes shows the man in full, with all of his vices and virtues and his complex dealings with fans, music critics, and fellow musicians.
If there were somebody to tackle such a project, it’s Hermes. A native New Yorker and seasoned music journalist who has covered a variety of bands, Hermes holds a particular admiration for the Velvet Underground, the rock band Reed started in 1964 with multi-instrumentalist John Cale and whose initial lineup featured Sterling Morrison on guitar and Moe Tucker on drums.
“When I was in college in the ‘80s, I discovered the Velvets album in my college radio station,” Hermes told Straus News, referring to the band’s 1967 debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico.
“But, strictly speaking, I guess it was hearing the Lou Reed live album, Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, in the ‘70s on rock radio growing up in Queens because the highlights of that record are the Velvet Underground songs.”
In the preface to The King of New York, Hermes writes that he considers “the Velvet Underground to be one of the world’s greatest rock bands alongside” the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
As he shows in the pages that follow, however, the Velvets always did things a bit differently, a bit more subversively, in no small part due to Reed.
The Brooklyn-born son descended from Russian-Jewish immigrants, Reed grew up in Freeport, LI, and gravitated toward the arts.
He proceeded to make some of the most affecting, prescient, and enduring rock music. He’s the man who sang, Walk on the Wild Side, Candy Says, Street Hassle, and many other tracks. Enigmatic like almost no other rocker, Reed was also something of a myth.
With deep nuance and sensitivity, Hermes unravels the myth and portrays the man, in all of his messy brilliance. The musician had figured in Hermes’s previous book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (2011), about the 1970s music scene in New York, but is front and center in The King of New York.
Speaking about the seed of the book, which took about a decade to write and made several best-of-the-year lists, Hermes says, “The Lou Reed persona: I was primed for somebody who was kind of menacing, really kind of into probing the dark areas of experience and his own psyche from that Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal album.
“And what I discovered in the Velvets was that, but also this remarkably tender side, a beautiful master songwriting side, and just a body of work that was very little known.
“The great bands of the ‘60s were the Beatles, the Stones . . . . The Velvet Underground was right up there with them, but nobody knew about them, really, at the time.
“It was just kind of like a shared secret, as many people have said. And so I liked that part, too, being a guy who was sort of interested in fringe culture, not kind of a knee-jerk rejecter of the mainstream in a lot of ways, and so the Velvets scratched that itch, too, so it was kind of the whole package.
“And all of these young bands that I loved—the fact that they were tapping into the sound made the Velvets even more compelling. So I wanted to know more about them. I pretty much followed Reed, but the Velvets were kind of my North Star, musically, in a lot of ways.”
Hermes tells plenty about the Velvets in his book, from their inauspicious first show at Summit High School to their mesmerizing performances at Andy Warhol’s multimedia events, but Reed is his focus.
“Lou Reed’s life was so rich in terms of being a New York story, being a postwar New York story that intersected with all of these artistic movements, all of these social histories, that it just seemed that I could tell a really big story through the lens of his life,” Hermes says.
Throughout The King of New York, Reed is writing in Freeport, busking in Manhattan, playing with the Velvets at Max’s Kansas City, and eventually performing internationally as a solo artist.
Underpinning it all, from his immersion in the ‘60s avant-garde scene to his presence over the nascent ‘70s punk scene and then his godfather-like status to countless artists, is Reed’s mastery of poetry. He wrote some of the most moving lines ever set to music.
“And what costume shall the poor girl wear, / To all tomorrow’s parties?” goes one song off The Velvet Underground & Nico. “A hand-me-down dress from who knows where, / To all tomorrow’s parties, / And where will she go and what shall she do, / When midnight comes around?”
Among many other songs, Reed also wrote Candy Says, which is about the transgender Warhol superstar Candy Darling, and which goes, “Candy says I’ve come to hate my body, /And all that it requires in this world.”
In The King of New York, Hermes paraphrases that line when, about Reed’s liver ailment toward the end of his life, he writes that he had to deal with his aging “body” and all that it required.
But Reed didn’t die alone. Surrounded by his wife, Laurie Anderson, close friends, and songs playing in the air, the musician passed on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013.
“As a human being, there were a lot of fantastic, beautiful, positive attributes that Reed had,” Hermes says. “And there was a darker side. Trying to present both sides without it being unqualified praise or a hatchet job.
“It just showed how both those sides lived in the life of somebody who was a lot of different things that maybe it’s instructive that most people have the light and the dark inside themselves and maybe can see that in the story.”
“Maybe it’s instructive that most people have the light and the dark inside themselves and maybe can see that in the [Lou Reed] story.” — author Will Hermes