Lou Reed: The King of New York Will Hermes
Rock’s poet of the shadow self
“King of New York” was the epithet given to Lou Reed by David Bowie, an obsessive Velvet Underground 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.
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 a 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.