What Lou Reed was like before he was The King of New York

Author Will Hermes and his new book

I was hooked into reading Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes, a few pages in when he wrote that Reed’s best music is “a perfect balance between rock 'n’ roll’s unhinged id and its intellectual super-ego.” That just felt very right, in line with the mindset I seem to have always had about what I like most in pop culture. Add in his bisexuality - “I have such a heavy resentment thing because of all the prejudices against me being gay … How can anybody gay keep their sanity?” - and we have a fascinating subject to explore, with this book being perhaps the most I’ve ever looked forward to of all the Lou Reed stuff I’ve read over the years. 

Hermes says he wrote it as a way to re-engage with Reed’s body of solo work. And I’m doing the same as I read the book, listening to an expansive collection that reminds me why I put the artist in the very top echelon of my favorite rockers. The music is so intelligent, with poetic storytelling, raunchy sounds clearly capturing the New York City of those decades, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes rocking. It’s got it all. 

Here is what I learned in the opening of the book:

• Reed never liked writers and journalists writing about his life. But ironically, he took journalism and creative writing classes as an undergrad at Syracuse University, led a literary zine, and shopped a poetry book deal while trying to figure out what to do after his Velvet Underground broke up in the early 1970s and he was considering career options.
• Don Fleming, who curated Reed’s archives for the New York Public Library, is, incidentally, a rock hero of mine. You should check out his band Gumball’s albums.
• Of course much of Reed’s music was political in nature, but he actually performed at the Clinton White House when Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel, a huge fan, visited. Playing “Dirty Blvd.” - off possibly Reed’s very best album New York - with its lyrics about the “statue of bigotry” pissing on the hungry, sick, and poor. It could have been nastier. He could have played “Sick of You,” off that release, which roasts mayoral hopeful Rudy Giuliani and imagines a sick world that worships the Trumps.
• But back to the beginning, Reed was born on Long Island, just past the tip of Brooklyn. His family had changed its name from Rabinowitz to Reed after arriving from Eastern Europe in order to avoid anti-Semitism.
• Growing up in Freeport, music was really the thing that caught young Lou’s attention, and the first record he purchased was by Fats Domino. He was recruited by the high school marching band but “he would never have been involved in an organized group like that.” He loved sports also, but not in a team setting.
• Lou was picked on and bullied a little through middle school, but he also won a few fights. He had panic attacks and would hide in his room sometimes when guests came to the house. And his dyslexia made it tough for him to read anything with long paragraphs. These shortcomings may have contributed to his lifelong temper and frequent withdrawal.
• One of his biggest early influences was watching The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which had a musical segment at the end with a guy named James Burton doing guitar solos that Lou would try to emulate. And he actually went into the recording studio at age 16 with his first band, the Jades, which played a sort of Ink Spots-like doo-wop. They had glitter jackets and would do shows opening places like shopping centers and supermarkets.
• Reed was known to be reckless in high school and he once drove the family car into a tollbooth and fought with his parents about his habit of carousing throughout New York City all hours of the night, but he also had good witty discussions with his father over dinner and voraciously read, especially Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

• 

  Lou at Syracuse

  Lou visited Syracuse University with his dad and a friend during the fall of his senior year. He and the friend hooked up with some girls who were also visiting and they decided that being so far away from parents was going to be the way to go. But then his anxiety may have gotten the better of him and he decided instead to start at NYU in 1959, where he soon started a radio show on WNYU, spinning his own records. But he was apparently dealing with personal demons his freshman year and, after an awful required military reserve training class, in which he apparently joked about threatening to shoot an officer, he had an emotional breakdown and was kicked out.
• Doctors claimed Lou’s condition was partly because of a lack of emotional warmth from his family and they started him on electrotherapy. It may have damaged his short-term memory and given him lifelong recall problems.
• He did end up transferring to Syracuse for his sophomore year, but had to actually start over as a freshman. It was not a great fit because of the party, fraternity culture. Reed wrote to a friend that most of the kids were “patriotic” and “not generally bright.” Syracuse, bitter rivals to my beloved Georgetown, was known as “The Jewish Harvard” and many Jewish students from downstate attended there because of anti-Semitic admission policies at the Ivy League schools.
• Lou excelled in religion, filmmaking, and literature classes. He basically took the influence of Beats like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and even J.D. Salinger and claimed that if you put their kind of writing on paper and added music to it, you would have perfect art. He didn’t do so well in his journalism class, got fired from the radio station, and showed up at a fraternity belligerent and dressed like a dirty slob. He did however get accepted into the creative writing program and created an alternative journal to the official program one that he thought was too slick. 
• That summer, back in Long Island, he got his first real girlfriend, Shelley Albin, whom he would date for a year-and-a-half. 
• The author Delmore Schwartz came to teach at Syracuse while Lou was there and the two, although decades apart in age, became drinking buddies. He took several of Schwartz’s classes, which often consisted of the professor beautifully reading James Joyce out loud and coming up with assignments such as having the students walk around the campus to observe the details and make art that “combined lived experiences with the fabricated.”
• In November 1963, Reed saw Bob Dylan for the first time. The folk star hit Syracuse on his tour. And John F. Kennedy was also assassinated, sending Lou and his friends into a tailspin, as they all thought JFK was a bright shining light for the nation’s future. Two months later, at a local bar, Reed would hear The Beatles for the first time and he kept putting money in the jukebox to hear “I Want to Hold Your Hand” over and over again. Even Schwartz - “the pop hater” - couldn’t get enough of the band.
• Nobody really knows why Lou, already a few years’ in as a weed dealer, apparently started using heroin during his senior year at Syracuse. Some think maybe the 1962 release of Burrough’s Naked Lunch, which dissected the use of heroin, was a likely inspiration. He contracted hepatitis from a needle. He somewhat improbably ended up graduating that spring, and even more improbably making the dean’s list, all while supposedly skipping graduation because the police were on his trail in the small town.

Syracuse couldn’t hold Lou Reed, and it was time now for the big city.