Lou Reed: The King of New York

Calling this with no star rating at page 95. This is really well done but the level of detail is just more than I want to know about Lou Reed. I am a Lou Reed fan of long-standing (my life was actually saved by rock n roll!), and three of my favorite NYC moments involve him. (IRL friends, ask me about finding myself talking to Lou's sister Meryl, Iggy Pop's bass player, and an A&R woman from the 60's who did mescaline with Janis Joplin when I was at the launch party for the Reed archive at the Library for the Performing Arts. And that was only the start of the evening!) Even for me though, this is too much info. That means it's a great bio and I am the wrong reader. I didn't even really make it out of Syracuse.

Being the life of the rock legend, chronicled in exhaustive manner by a talented author with more than a bit of logorrhea. This is the third biography of Reed that I've read, and although I enjoyed every minute of it, I'm not sure that it's the best choice for someone who's not a Reed obsessive like myself. I could foresee a more general reader getting frustrated by the book's innumerable tangents; does one pick up a biography of Lou Reed to read about the musical philosophies of LaMonte Young, or the career arc of Delmore Schwartz, or the address and current use of seemingly every recording studio or drag club Reed walked into during the 1970's? And while I appreciate Reed's reinvention of himself in late life in non-rock fields, show more musical and otherwise, this denouement might prove tiresome to most readers who have no experience of any of it all. An excellent book, but not really any better than previous efforts. show less