On the evening of January 13, 1966, the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry held its annual dinner at a hotel on Park Avenue. The menu included string beans, roast beef and potatoes. The entertainment was less conventional: a local artist named Andy Warhol was invited to say a few words, but instead gave a multimedia performance with the band he led. The Velvet Underground and Nico turned up the volume and played Heroin (“Cause when the blow starts flowing, I really don’t care anymore”) and Venus in Furs (“Kiss the boot of shiny shiny leather… tongue the flip-flops”) as 300 medical professionals and their spouses looked on in tuxedos and gowns. “I guess you could call this meeting a spontaneous outburst of identity,” a doctor who fled the scene told reporters that Warhol was stationed in the lobby; another said: “it was as if the entire prison unit had escaped.”
That wasn’t completely wrong; Edie Sedgwick, Warhol’s “superstar” who writhed onstage, was once institutionalized by her wealthy parents (at the hospital she met Barbara Rubin, another scenester who filmed part of the evening). And the band’s lynchpin and songwriter Lou Reed had been given electroconvulsive therapy in his late teens to treat suspected schizophrenia (he later claimed it had been to “discourage homosexual feelings”).
But while the event itself brazenly drew attention in true Warhol style — and allowed some participants to act out a revenge fantasy on their psychiatric tormentors — it represented more than that. The Velvet Underground wasn’t just a “happening,” an art gimmick put together 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 greatest love songs of the 1960s, I’ll Be Your Mirror), and the start of a career that would see him transform into a world-famous avatar of the dark side of human nature, of addiction, despair and excess.
“King of New York” was the nickname given to him by David Bowie, an obsessive Velvets fan who saved Reed’s lackluster solo career by producing Transformer, which spawned his biggest hit Walk on the Wild Side. It’s also the title of Will Hermes’ meticulous but lively new biography, the first based 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 musical landscape in the mid-1970s, Hermes skillfully conjures the various scenes Reed inhabited, placing him among a rich cast of collaborators, friends and loved ones are placed.
There’s a sense that he’s updating Reed for a new generation, especially as a prophet of queer liberation and gender nonconformity. This is not difficult: one of his best songs, Candy Says from 1969, is a painfully poignant evocation of gender dysphoria, among other things. On 1972’s Make Up, three years after the Stonewall riots, he exclaimed, “Now we’re coming out of the closet / On the streets.” From 1974 to 1977, his partner was trans woman Rachel Humphreys, and there was nothing secretive about their relationship. But occasionally it feels like Hermes is going out of its way to earn its favorite progressive brownie points from the rock god. Was his notoriously unlistenable album of guitar feedback Metal Machine Music really a “radical queer art statement, its wordless bellow a halt to homophobic interrogations”? If you say so.
Because Reed is nothing if not a complicated figure, a very uncomfortable idol. As Hermes charts his progress from Long Island suburbia to the downtown avant-garde, via Syracuse University and the tutelage of roué poet Delmore Schwartz, he also charts not the cure but the exacerbation of Already mapped out psychological wounds and deficiencies. John Cale, the Velvet Underground’s other musical genius, thought his often abhorrent behavior was rooted in “the fear of [his] mental health” that drove him to be “purposeful.” [try] his damnedest to confuse people. That made him feel in control, instead of living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. [He was] constantly seeking some kind of advantage for themselves by bringing out the worst in people.”
At a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, he was confronted by an addict who shouted, “How dare you be here – you’re the reason I took heroin!”
The same insecurity that gave him a relentless professional drive – to prove he was a great poet to Schwartz, to leave rivals in the dust, to show his parents that he was not the man 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 important to him as an arm or a leg, and would be treated with as much respect and mistreatment as he treated himself.” Reed composed the incomparable Perfect Day about a date they had: Hermes accurately describes it as a sketch of an “unsettled blissful scene flickering with self-loathing.” Band members also bore the brunt, and few of his collaborations lasted long. (Decades later, The Onion would address his reputation in a piece related to a transplant due to a worsening of hepatitis: “New Liver Complains of Difficulty Working with Lou Reed” was the headline. “It’s Real hard to get along with Lou – one minute he’s your best friend and the next minute he’s downright abusive,” the vital said.)
Self-medication was perhaps inevitable in this context, and Hermes describes some chilling 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 boosted productivity – at least until it didn’t. Either way, the paranoia and degradation it caused spilled straight into his writing. After all, his “guiding light idea,” as he put it, was “to make rock & roll, the pop format, for adults.” With the subject of adults.” Thus we have the excruciating anthem of withdrawal, Waves of Fear; Street Hassle, in which the grim story of an overdose is transformed into a mesmerizing string ostinato – and of course Heroin itself. When he finally got clean (mostly), Reed went to Narcotics Anonymous. At a meeting in New York, Hermes writes, he was confronted by an addict who shouted: “How dare you be here – you are the reason I used heroin!”
Because while Reed may not have had much commercial or critical success, he at least managed to influence people in the beginning. The story of the Velvet Underground is almost exclusively a story of post-breakup influences, as Hermes shows in his roll call of artists inspired by them, from Patti Smith to Talking Heads to Blondie, hero-worshipping Reed while pursuing just a handful of CBGBs. from years later. This near-instant mythologization of lost bands and vaporized scenes may be an enduring feature of music culture, but Reed and the Velvets were its primary beneficiaries. (Even the mythologizing 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 pot. Hermes talks diligently about making albums in the ’80s, ’90s and beyond, even as the checks for using his old songs in samples and ads poured in, making him a rich man. His biggest release late in his career, New York, took an unflinching look at his hometown, railing against poverty and prejudice, and mocking a hopeful poem about the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I will piss on them.”
But if he made his name as a rock poet of the shadow self, either his own or society’s, it was in the service of a truer 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’m so sensitive to beauty right now,” he said, as friends played the Shangri-Las, Nina Simone, Frank Ocean and Radiohead for him as 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.