Who sang hot rod lincoln song12/23/2023 There’s the extraterrestrial David Bowie. There’s the punk upstarts Patti Smith, Television, and Talking Heads. There’s the underground ferment of Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Barbara Rubin, and the New York School poets. (There’s a distant echo of that song’s “wah wah wah” chorus in the “doo do doo” refrain on Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” from 1972.) As the decades progress in Hermes’s book, the various milieus Reed inhabited flash by like tinseled mile markers. The first single Reed ever bought, “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino, released in 1949, is considered one of the earliest rock records. Not a psychological profile, then, but surely a window into sentimental Reed lyrics like “the glory of love might see you through.”įarrar, Straus, and Giroux, 560 pp., $35.00īecause Reed’s life overlaps with the development of rock and roll, Hermes’s book is also a cultural history of the genre. And yet the biography, all 560 pages, presents a Reed ravenous for adoration: from his mentor, the boozehound writer Delmore Schwartz from his onetime manager and muse, Andy Warhol and from an ensemble of star-crossed lovers, confidants, and rivals. “If you’re hoping for some neat totalizing statement or psychological profile to explain Reed, to fix him like a butterfly specimen, you won’t find it here,” Hermes cautions early, conceding from the outset the foolhardiness of synthesizing such an unruly artist. Making sense of Reed’s multitudes, and cutting through the mythology that enshrined him as some kind of junkie savant, is the task Will Hermes sets himself in Lou Reed: The King of New York. He could berate anyone-“you’re a fucking moron,” he once barked at a 22-year-old interviewer-but he could also charm a room. The three versions had an uneasy coexistence, as indicated by Reed’s famously volatile temperament. (This same Reed licensed songs to The Simpsons and Beverly Hills 90210, and appeared in ads for American Express.) Then, beginning in the 1990s, there was Reed the patron saint of downtown New York, as much an acknowledgment of the city’s millennial sterility as a tribute to Reed’s genius. Then came Reed the freelance auteur, churning out spotty solo albums and delivering gnomic anti-interviews to the press. First and most enduring was the front man of the Velvet Underground, the greaser poet from Long Island who had a cabbie’s voice and a knack for writing songs about drugs and sex and salvation that sounded like the gutter side of 1960s rock.
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