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.”
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.
• 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.
