Lou Reed: The King of New York Audiobook

This program is read by the author. "There have been many biographies of Lou Reed, but Will Hermes has written the definitive life . . . He has brought to the assignment a sharp eye, a clear head, a lucid prose style, and a determination to let Lou be Lou, without judgment." —Lucy Sante, author of Low Life The most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year. Since his death ten years ago, Lou Reed’s living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou Reed: The King of New York, Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed’s life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed’s complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage he took from his mentor Delmore Schwartz. As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the landmark status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library’s much-publicized Reed archive, Hermes employs the library collections, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews to give us a new Lou Reed—a pioneer in living and writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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"Ezra Pound said that artists are the antennae of the race. Voilà: Lou Reed. Will Hermes gives us Reed in his full charismatic whiplashing complexity—sexy, surly, song-mad, vulnerable, shape-shifting, omnivorous, alert, brilliantly generative, creating and thriving in several musical and artistic ecologies over decades. This riveting, sensitive biography is everywhere underwritten by Hermes’s grasp of late twentieth-century New York, throughlines of American music, and his own antennae for musical and cultural scenes and specificities. Hermes offers a profound reckoning unburdened by hagiography yet unembarrassed to celebrate. This will surely be the definitive biography of Reed for decades—for fans, friends, the curious, the indifferent, and even enemies. As Reed’s beloved teacher Delmore Schwartz wrote, 'Time is the fire in which we burn.' As Hermes shows, Lou Reed was both the fire and the burnt."

— Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets