Lou Reed: A Life

by Anthony DeCurtis

Overview

The essential biography of one of music's most influential icons: Lou Reed.

As lead singer and songwriter for the Velvet Underground and a renowned solo artist, Lou Reed invented alternative rock. His music, at once a source of transcendent beauty and coruscating noise, violated all definitions of genre while speaking to millions of fans and inspiring generations of musicians.

But while his iconic status may be fixed, the man himself was anything but. Lou Reed's life was a transformer's odyssey. Eternally restless and endlessly hungry for new experiences, Reed reinvented his persona, his sound, even his sexuality time and again. A man of contradictions and extremes, he was fiercely independent yet afraid of being alone, artistically fearless yet deeply paranoid, eager for commercial success yet disdainful of his own triumphs. Channeling his jagged energy and literary sensibility into classic songs - like "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Sweet Jane" - and radically experimental albums alike, Reed remained desperately true to his artistic vision, wherever it led him.

Now, just a few years after Reed's death, Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis, who knew Reed and interviewed him extensively, tells the provocative story of his complex and chameleonic life. With unparalleled access to dozens of Reed's friends, family, and collaborators, DeCurtis tracks Reed's five-decade career through the accounts of those who knew him and through Reed's most revealing testimony, his music. We travel deep into his defiantly subterranean world, enter the studio as the Velvet Underground record their groundbreaking work, and revel in Reed's relationships with such legendary figures as Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Laurie Anderson. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Lou Reed is an illuminating tribute to one of the most incendiary artists of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316376563
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/23/2018
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	248,189
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, where his work has appeared for more than thirty-five years, and a distinguished lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of In Other Words and Rocking My Life Away and co-wrote Clive Davis's autobiography, The Soundtrack of My Life, a New York Times bestseller.

DeCurtis is a Grammy Award winner and has served as a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee for twenty-five years.He holds a PhD in American literature and lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

"If the goal of a biography is to bring its subject back to life, Lou Reed, DeCurtis's sympathetic but never fawning book, succeeds...Carefully researched and thoughtfully written, Lou Reed is the best Reed biography to date."—New York Times Book Review


"DeCurtis has given us a thorough and vivid portrait of an artist who, he shows us, was even darker than we knew."—The New York Review of Books

"Anthony DeCurtis was one of the few music critics Lou Reed read and whose company he enjoyed. After reading this sublime and subtle book, the mystery of Lou's respect for Anthony is revealed. Anthony is a great story teller, a writer's writer, turning pain into beauty the way Lou did in his songs."—Bono

"I am personally familiar with the depth, seriousness and sensitivity of Anthony DeCurtis's writing, and, of course, knew Lou Reed and felt the impact of his coruscating work. A brilliant artist has found a biographer with the insight to, as Lou said, "pass through fire" and be a definitive interpreter of both his music and his life."—Sting

"Lou Reed is Lou Reed!" —Iggy Pop

"An eloquent account of a harrowing life transformed by love in the end. Anthony DeCurtis does a brilliant job of synthesizing the disparate parts of Lou Reed's life into an insightful, moving narrative. I highly recommend it."—Suzanne Vega

"When most people think of Lou Reed, they picture the black, rotting heart of rock and roll, full of dissonance, decadence and decay. But as Anthony DeCurtis makes clear in his new book, behind the image and the rumors, Lou was one thing: a writer, a man who spent his life telling the absolute, painful truth in his songs - the truth about himself, the scenes he observed, and the world at large. His words were so powerful that the Velvet Underground had to invent a new musical language to match them. I'm not the first musician to pledge allegiance to Lou and the Velvets, and I won't be the last. Read this book, and explore the f*cking genius that was Lou Reed."—Peter Buck, co-founder and lead guitarist of R.E.M.

"Anthony DeCurtis captures the soul and the essence of Lou Reed in his terrific new biography of the brilliant, culture-shaping musician. DeCurtis' great gift of storytelling gives fascinating insight and perspective to Reed's complex personality and cutting-edge musical talent. This is a must read."—Clive Davis


"The Reed of DeCurtis' exhaustively reported book is a brilliant artist who helped define hipness and the outer limits of rock for generations."—Rolling Stone

"How did a middle-class suburban boy grow up to be king of Manhattan's wild side? Thanks to this groundbreaking biography, now we know. Anthony DeCurtis handles Reed's often-misunderstood bisexuality and curiosity about transsexualism with particular sensitivity, candor, and sophistication. A must-read for fans of rock and roll, New York City, or sex."—Ada Calhoun, author of St.Marks Is Dead


"DeCurtis' biography makes a case for Reed's influence that's as durable as black leather."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Lou Reed was one of music's most brilliant and complicated figures-an explorer, a provocateur, and always a true artist. With grace and grit, Anthony DeCurtis has delivered a revelatory and insightful chronicle of this most challenging rock & roll icon, and Lou Reed gets the biographer he deserves."—Alan Light, author of The Holy or the Broken


"A
fascinating portrait. The unsurpassed voice of New York has found a worthy biographer."—Philip Norman, New York TimesBestselling author of Paul McCartney andJohn Lennon

"Focusing on the music as much as the singer's often dissolute lifestyle and controversial opinions, the author makes a good case for Reed's lasting significance. ... A well-written, valuable document of a major figure in the American rock scene, putting a human face on a man who often seemed impossibly remote. Essential reading for Reed fans and strongly recommended for anyone interested in rock as art."—Kirkus (Starred Review)

"Even though he counted Reed among his friends in the music business, DeCurtis pulls no punches; for example, he talks about Reed's early sexual promiscuity in highly critical terms and is equally frank in discussing Reed's drug and alcohol abuse. This is a rough-edged, straight-talking biography of a man who became a legend as much for his offstage life as for his musical skills."—Booklist

"Among the first ambitious posthumous biographies of the sexually fluid queer icon, who died in 2013 at the age of 71. DeCurtis strives to take Reed's deep flaws into account along with his transgressive genius."—W Magazine


"An absorbing read, full of new insights delivered masterfully by DeCurtis."—Pitchfork

"A Life is comprehensive and sympathetic... For Mr. DeCurtis, Reed's biographical Rosebud was homosexual shame deriving from his upbringing. In the end, he didn't want to be the first gay rock star."—Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

To those of us who spent our college years debating whether we should stick the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat on the turntable one more time or spare our dorm-mates the 2 a.m. noise by just melting down the vinyl and ingesting it -- sure that VU front man Lou Reed would approve -- it's still something of a surprise, albeit a welcome one, that Reed had an old age at all. In 1973 or so, he took second place in a music magazine poll naming the rock star most likely to croak soon. Even Reed probably knew that nobody was going to beat Keith Richards in that showdown. Nonetheless, the Lou Reed of the 1970s, who was the Lou Reed my generational cohort got scalded by, was an ongoing reminder that "wasted" can have more than one meaning.

Often cynically, but sometimes wrenchingly, he spent much of the decade treating his genius, which the Velvets' largely posthumous legend had enshrined beyond his solo career's ability to measure up, as just another monkey on his back. Reading Anthony DeCurtis's Lou Reed: A Life can sometimes give you the feeling that the author can't wait for the absurd to quit courting the vulgar, but DeCurtis -- a longtime MVP of the Rolling Stone writers' stable -- knows he can't completely gloss over the seamy, abrasive, riveting spectacle Reed made of himself in those early post- VU years. His gross and hardly secret drug and alcohol abuse, bizarre behavior, and alarming physical mutations from boozy Pillsbury doughboy to strung-out ectomorph never stopped playing monster-mash hopscotch with his truculent interviews, hostile and often downright adversarial concerts, and well-advertised sexual envelope-pushing.

At least in public, his fellow propagandist for perviness David Bowie mostly just talked -- and dressed -- a good game. Reed, by contrast, spent three years flaunting his relationship with a striking-looking transsexual known only as Rachel before dumping her for his second wife, Sylvia Morales, and penning Reagan-era odes to heterosexual bliss. (Then again, one intimate claims that "Reed first encountered Sylvia at a meeting of the Eulenspiegel Society, the BDSM support group" -- so deviancy's honor was saved after all.) During that time, he also released a slew of albums -- twelve total between 1972 and 1979, including three live ones -- that ranged from the fey, sometimes strained wit of Transformer, his Bowie-produced solo breakthrough, and the metal move of Rock N Roll Animal to Berlin's cesspool idyll, Metal Machine Music's unlistenable rejection of stardom, Sally Can't Dance's bitterness, the bittersweetness of Coney Island Baby, and the self-conscious art move of Street Hassle. Anticipating the man's next record could give you a case of pre-traumatic stress disorder.

Once Reed married Morales and got sober, he turned maturity from an enemy into an ally. Beginning with 1982's The Blue Mask, his music stopped casting about for outré alternatives to the Velvets' indelibility -- hey, what about making my jazz move next? -- and settled into accepting his old band's signature sound as the bedrock ensuring that his latter-day innovations and variations on it wouldn't sound random. That was due in large part to kindred-spirit guitarist (and onetime VU obsessive) Robert Quine, at least until Reed got fed up with Quine getting so much of the credit for his renascence. As DeCurtis notes, this was a recurring pattern: "Reed was happy to collaborate until the goal of the collaboration was achieved. Then every collaborator became a competitor and needed to be cast aside."

Both with and without Quine, Reed's albums of the '80s and early '90s generally qualify as "better" records than his erratic Me Decade output. They're more poised and surer of the true nature of his gifts. But with the partial exception of 1989's New York, which added a stab at literal- minded topicality to the Velvets' bleak projection of a permanent present tense, they also largely abandoned Reed's old job of playing the zeitgeist's most disconcerting and venomous pied piper. This was durable music for relieved longtime fans to admire and enjoy, not an assault on conventional preconceptions of good taste, artistic cred, and sexual or psychological waywardness.

In other words, Sane Lou wasn't as culturally consequential as Warped Lou had been, a vexing conundrum -- who'd have wished more substance abuse and emotional ravage on him? -- that DeCurtis mostly ignores. He's clearly happiest with his subject once Reed is safely ensconced as one of New York's grand old men, resting on his laurels and contentedly married to performance artist Laurie Anderson after Sylvia Morales went the way of all lifesavers. For one thing, that's when DeCurtis got to know him, and you can hardly blame the biographer for including fond reminiscences of their bantering encounters in Reed's later years. But since he values his equanimity as much or more than his acquaintance with the man, maybe it's just as well that DeCurtis apparently never came face to skeletal, snarling face with Warped Lou back in, say, 1974.



On the plus side, DeCurtis has put in commendable spadework, exhuming everything he can about Reed's early years, from his simultaneously impudent, sitcom-esque, and damaged midcentury Long Island adolescence to the embryonic but recognizable Lou Reed his college pals and early girlfriend Shelley Albin recall, as well as the stint as a tyro songwriter for cheapjack Pickwick Records that fortuitously introduced him to future VU co-founder John Cale. Notoriously, Reed's parents were so unnerved by their firstborn's odder tics -- glaring hints of then taboo homosexuality included -- that he wound up suffering the electroshock treatments that provide the overt subject for his song "Kill Your Sons" and the subtext of his recurring portraits of father figures much more monstrous than the real Sid Reed apparently was. Add in the search for a nurturing, nonjudgmental mother that DeCurtis convincingly identifies as Reed's default romantic mode (Rachel too? Yes, Rachel too), and the diagram's Oedipal banality is offset only by the original uses Reed's creative temperament put it to.

At Syracuse University, Reed encountered his first artistic role model-cum-substitute dad: poet Delmore Schwartz, who was an alcoholic, paranoid wreck by then. But still a charismatic conversationalist, apparently, at least if his campus acolytes were bombed too. "Delmore was not half as interesting or magical to me as he was to the people who were drinking around him," Shelley Albin says, and let's count our blessings. If she'd confessed that to Lou back in '63, he might not have written "Pale Blue Eyes" about her in 1969.

Perhaps because Schwartz was accommodatingly dead by the time the Velvets' first album came out, he was the only mentor Reed never felt compelled to disown, harping on instead about "Delmore's" example for the rest of his life. While DeCurtis is shrewd enough to recognize that Reed's "version of Schwartz was, in part, his own invention," he never notes the fatuity of Reed's oft-stated ambition to raise rock 'n' roll to the level of literature. Considering how much he did to redefine rock as an art form in its own right, his persistence in trying to upgrade its -- and his -- status by playing the Joyce-and-Shakespeare card was always wince- worthy.

Once Reed had left Schwartz, Syracuse, and then Pickwick hackwork behind, next up for the mentor slot was, of course, Andy Warhol. Warhol and his Factory factotum Paul Morrissey recruited the then barely germinal Velvet Underground -- they'd played only a handful of gigs -- for the multimedia show they dubbed the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and took on tour in 1966. The Warhol association would have guaranteed the Velvets fleeting pop world notoriety even if they'd stunk, but as the world now knows, they didn't.

Nonetheless, the world might have stayed unsuspecting if, to Reed's annoyance, Warhol and Morrissey -- "visual artists, after all, not musical ones," DeCurtis notes -- hadn't insisted on adding tall, glacial German fashion model Nico to the lineup as the group's somnambulist chanteuse. That guaranteed photographers would have something more glamorous to shoot than a quartet of Lower East Side oddballs: Reed, classically trained Welsh expat Cale, Reed's Syracuse buddy Sterling Morrison, and Maureen "Moe" Tucker, an unlikely -- but who wouldn't have been? -- candidate to become the first important woman drummer in rock history.

Minus Nico, DeCurtis speculates, the band might never have gotten a record deal, but they did. Hence The Velvet Underground & Nico, perhaps the only album of 1967 that rivals Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in influence -- even though the Beatles' influence was immediate and the Velvets' long delayed. Hence Brian Eno's famous quote about how everyone who bought The Velvet Underground & Nico ended up forming a band. Hence, back at the time, Reed's irritated decision to get the hell rid of Nico -- and, eventually, Warhol and then Cale, two other collaborators who'd outlived their usefulness. As his future collaborator David Bowie might have -- and in fact, did -- put it, only then did Reed become "the special man / Then we were Ziggy's band."

A writer who's prone to donning surgical gloves when he's confronted with sleaze, DeCurtis isn't wowed by the echt-'60s flash and filigree of the band's Warhol period. Besides providing the material for 1972's "A Walk on the Wild Side," the only Top 20 hit Reed ever had, the Factory's lowlife-gone-highlife cast of transvestites, junkies, misfit society gals, and rent-boy riffraff certainly crystallized his fascination with extreme demimondes. But if part of his interest was journalistic, he was clearly more than just a notepad-toting observer of other people's kinks. Here and elsewhere, Victor Bockris's sloppier but more flavorful and astute Reed bio, Transformer, is at home with dirt in a way that underlines how anodyne DeCurtis can be.



Even so, scenesters-by-proxy will no doubt find the Factory era -- Edie Sedgwick! Jackie Kennedy! -- the most interesting part of the book. But the edition of the Velvets that fans are most likely to dote on today is the post-Warhol, post-Cale VU of their third album, titled simply The Velvet Underground. After the frantic assertiveness of the debut, whose most "daring" tracks haven't aged too well -- its haunting chorus aside, "Venus in Furs" is a post-collegiate showoff's rubbishy notion of perturbing S & M -- and the breakneck brain-melt of White Light/White Heat, Reed opted to seek out forms of beauty he didn't feel compelled to be ironic and/or distant about. Grasping that those two attitudes aren't necessarily synonymous may be the key to the album's idiosyncratic, unmistakably Velvets-y compassion.

That era was also when the band, besides recording any number of unreleased-at-the-time nuggets that went on resurfacing -- in distinctly subpar versions -- on Reed's solo albums for years, played the club dates preserved on 1969 Velvet Underground Live and, much later, the three-CD boxed set most often known as The Quine Tapes. (Reed's future Blue Mask Jiminy Cricket had been no garden-variety obsessive in his apprentice years.) To any VU devotee faced with the waking-up-with-the-house-on-fire dilemma, grabbing either one might make more sense than trying to choose among their four official studio albums. Nowhere else can you hear the disjunctive phases of their eclectic career reconciled into a harmonious and cohesive whole, because they sound like a great band at work in a way that resolves every inner contradiction of their -- the right word, for once -- oeuvre.

Because the Velvets have inspired more exegetes than you can shake a Ph.D. at, it's no surprise DeCurtis doesn't provide much that's fresh in the way of (cough, cough) rock criticism. Virtually his only departure from orthodoxy -- and it's not even that big a departure anymore - - is his view of the band's valedictory album, Loaded, as a market-friendly sheep in masterpiece's clothing. Not that he comes out and says so; he just praises "Sweet Jane" and "Rock and Roll," Loaded's two most famous songs, while keeping mostly mum about the drivel surrounding them. The lone potential exception, "New Age," is so much better in its Live 1969 version that Robert Mitchum would weep.

DeCurtis's most fruitful insight is his guess that the reason Loaded didn't gel wasn't so much the presence of Cale's much blander replacement, Doug Yule -- who virtually took over in the studio once Reed lost interest, and who usually gets the blame for the album's pasteurized sound -- as the absence of Moe Tucker, who was pregnant at the time and got replaced by a hodgepodge of session drummers. It wasn't only that Tucker's musical idiosyncrasies had always prevented the band from sounding conventional even when they wanted to be. As DeCurtis explains, "Every band that manages to stay together for any length of time has a member who serves as its glue."

Why he doesn't follow up that observation by mentioning that one of the very few songs Reed wrote for Tucker to sing actually includes the line "I'm made out of glue" beats me. Maybe working for Jann Wenner trained him to avoid anything resembling wit. DeCurtis also didn't interview Tucker herself, who's still with us -- albeit a bit daffily -- and the VU's only surviving member besides Cale. Ironically duplicating Tucker's MIA status on Loaded, she's one of the two female voices most prominently -- and puzzlingly -- missing from Lou Reed: A Life. As rock biographers go, DeCurtis may have more Doug Yule in him than he realizes.



The other glaring absentee -- particularly as Reed's other two wives, Morales and Berlin's reluctant anti-heroine, Bettye Kronstad, did give DeCurtis their side of the story -- is Laurie Anderson. The lack of firsthand testimony from Rachel is more understandable; hands-down this book's saddest supporting player, she drifted into such obscurity that no one knows for sure how or when she died. However, Anderson seems to have captivated Reed more successfully than any of his previous romantic partners, simply because she refused to play mommy to him. Unlike her predecessos, she had her own work to do, and even Reed had to accept that it was as important as his.

Interestingly, the John-and-Yoko parallels, which the couple can hardly have been unconscious of, aren't the only way Reed's life can be seen as New Yorky, much artier (and more depraved) parody of John Lennon's -- including, of course, the tantalizing glimpse of what Lennon's later years might have been like if he'd lived. Even though the Beatles conquered the world and the Velvets only conquered the future, both men led 1960s bands so consequential that their 1970s solo work amounted to a series of hectic attempts to dodge, displace, and sometimes flat-out piss on a mythic status they were simultaneously capitalizing on to guarantee the audience's continued -- if often exasperated -- attention. Then, at age forty, they both arrived at a fragile but promising tranquility: Lennon with Double Fantasy, Reed with The Blue Mask.

The problem with this equation is that using Lennon as the point of comparison shrivels Reed into insignificance as the coterie artist of the two. (Sorry, fellow Velvets fans, but pop outreach does count for a lot.) No doubt that's why DeCurtis doesn't explore it. But he doesn't explore much else, either. While he's skillful at assembling the biographical building blocks that reward interest at a casual level, his book isn't just short on dirt. It's short on resonance, advocacy, identification, deep-dive cultural spelunking, provocative arguments, nuance, fervor, and everything else that sums up the difference between perspective and an actual point of view, particularly when the subject is an artist as gnarly and passion-provoking as Lou Reed.

Tellingly, the figure in Reed's life to whom DeCurtis is most openly hostile is rock critic Lester Bangs, who epitomized the ardent, unruly -- and sometimes loutish -- engagement with Reed's music and persona a book like Lou Reed: A Life eschews. As addled, self-promoting, and occasionally tiresome as Bangs's obsession with Reed was, it did have a dimension that's painfully absent from DeCurtis's biography: the beauty, ugliness, and zest of true fanhood, dramatized without any self-censorship by a writer whose thrashing White Whale style could never be mistaken for anyone else's.

By contrast, if there's an interestingly phrased sentence anywhere in DeCurtis's book, good luck finding it. As usual, he's capable, intelligent, suave, informed, readable -- and bloodless. His book is sure to strike lots of people as the Lou Reed biography simply because it's the classy one, but there can be an awfully big gap between "classy" and "definitive," especially when we're talking about a reprobate genius like Reed. Just because he's now venerated, that doesn't mean biographers do him any justice by taking a walk on the tame side.

A two-time National Magazine Award winner during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist, Tom Carson is currently a columnist at GQ. He is the author of Gilligan's Wake (2003), a novel.

Reviewer: Tom Carson

The Barnes & Noble Review

If the goal of a biography is to bring its subject back to life…DeCurtis's sympathetic but never fawning book, succeeds…Carefully researched and thoughtfully written, Lou Reed: A Life is the best Reed biography to date and probably its author's greatest achievement.

The New York Times Book Review - Evelyn McDonnell

07/10/2017
In this engaging yet uneven biography, Rolling Stone contributing editor DeCurtis (In Other Words) explores the life of a troubled kid from Long Island who transformed American music. A child of postwar suburbia, Lou Reed embraced rock and roll and the low life in his teens, and these two obsessions would fuel his career. In college, a close friendship with poet Delmore Schwartz marked his rejection of the mainstream. While songwriting at Pickwick Records not long after graduating, he met avant-garde Welsh musician John Cale and together they formed the Velvet Underground. Adopted by Warhol as the house band for his Factory, the Velvet Underground failed commercially even as they were creating a new musical paradigm. After leaving the band, Reed scored an unlikely hit with “Walk on the Wild Side,” but his uneven solo output and louche proclivities kept him from stardom. Nevertheless, before his death in 2013 Reed was celebrated as godfather of rock’s underground and had found domestic contentment with artist Laurie Anderson. While DeCurtis touches on Reed’s violent behavior, substance abuse, and complex sexuality, the icon remains distinct but quite distant, and DeCurtis’s takes on Reed’s musical output are equally lacking. The 500-plus pages pass swiftly but leave the impression that when it comes to Reed, much remains to be said. Agent: Sarah Lazin, Sarah Lazin Books. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 08/01/2017
Beginning with the Velvet Underground in the mid-1960s and continuing with a four-decade solo career that ended with his death in 2013, Lou Reed consistently broke boundaries in rock, melding lyrics that ventured into relationships, drugs, sexuality, and politics with music that ranged from garage rock to avant-garde explorations. In this comprehensive biography, Rolling Stone writer and author DeCurtis (In Other Words) gives Reed's life its due, chronicling his growing up and early life, artistic collaborations with Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Metallica, among others, while looking at both his triumphs and faults with concise and readable prose. DeCurtis, who interviewed Reed himself over the years, also talked to various associates, friends, and musicians for this book. He presents a balanced consideration of Reed, spending equal time on the totality of his music and not just the well-known highlights, detailing the recording of specific albums and lyrics and their meaning and place in Reed's life at the time. VERDICT Reed's art (and life) were often groundbreaking, occasionally maddening, and consistently fascinating, and this volume captures all of those aspects, joining recent works by Aidan Levy and Howard Sounes in creating a thorough portrait of a man who profoundly influenced rock. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]—James Collins, MorristownMorris Twp. P.L., NJ

Library Journal

★ 2017-07-17
A full-length portrait of legendary musician Lou Reed (1942-2013).Rolling Stone contributing editor DeCurtis (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work, 2005, etc.), who followed Reed's career closely over the years, claims to be one of the few rock writers Reed respected. Focusing on the music as much as the singer's often dissolute lifestyle and controversial opinions, the author makes a good case for Reed's lasting significance. Born in Brooklyn, he moved with his middle-class Jewish family to Long Island when he was a young boy. A rebellious teenager, he began playing in bands early on. At Syracuse University, he came under the influence of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who encouraged him to take writing seriously—and served as a model of the bohemian lifestyle. Moving to New York City, he soon joined up with the future members of the Velvet Underground, who gained cachet by being "adopted" by Andy Warhol. But the band set another pattern that would dominate Reed's career: an inability to share credit. Singer Nico, installed by Warhol to give the band glamour, and John Cale, who co-wrote many of the band's songs, were both bones of contention. Reed embarked on a long solo career, marked by alternating flashes of brilliance and gestures that seemed deliberate self-sabotage. DeCurtis faithfully chronicles all of them, with detailed information on recording sessions and Reed's musical collaborators. He also gives illuminating background information, often drawn from Reed's personal experiences, on what led to some of the compositions. Despite a flamboyant lifestyle in the gay culture of the day, Reed was an intensely private person, but the author has made every effort to interview those who knew him best. While his assessment of Reed's importance seems slightly overblown, the book is a well-written, valuable document of a major figure in the American rock scene, putting a human face on a man who often seemed impossibly remote. Essential reading for Reed fans and strongly recommended for anyone interested in rock as art.

Kirkus Reviews

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