Lou Reed made it his mission to rub people the wrong way, whether it
was with the noise rock he produced with the Velvet Underground in
the late 1960s or his polarizing work with Metallica that would prove
to be his swan song. On a personal level, too, he seemed to take
pleasure in insulting everyone who crossed his path. How did this
Jewish boy from Long Island, an adolescent doo-wop singer, rise to
the status of Godfather of Punk? And how did he maintain that status
for decades?
Dirty Blvd.--the first new biography of Reed since his death
in 2013--digs deep to answer those questions. And along the way it
shows us the tender side of his prickly personality.
Born in Brooklyn, Reed was the son of an accountant and a former
beauty queen, but he took the road less traveled, trading literary
promise for an entry-level job as a budget-label songwriter and
founding the Velvet Underground under the aegis of Andy Warhol. The
cult of personality surrounding his transformation from downtown
agent provocateur to Phantom of Rock and finally to patron saint of
the avant-garde was legendary, but there was more to his artistic
evolution than his abrasive public persona. The lives of many
American rock stars have had no second act, but Reed's did.
Dirty Blvd. not only covers the highlights of Reed's career
but also explores lesser-known facets of his work, such as his first
recordings with doo-wop group the Jades, his key literary influences
and the impact of Judaism upon his work, and his engagement with the
LGBT movement. Drawing from new interviews with many of his artistic
collaborators, friends, and romantic partners, as well as from
archival material, concert footage, and unreleased bootlegs of live
performances, author Aidan Levy paints an intimate portrait of the
notoriously uncompromising rock poet who wrote "Heroin,"
"Sweet Jane," "Walk on the Wild Side," and
"Street Hassle"--songs that transcended their genre and
established Lou Reed as one of the most influential and enigmatic
American artists of the past half-century.