Walk on the bile side
Undertaking research for his latest book, British journalist and biographer Howard Sounes found himself being warned off by Andy Warhol’s filmmaking collaborator Paul Morrissey.
“Do you think people want to read about the life of Lou Reed?” asked Morrissey. “You need a good title like ‘The Hateful Bitch’ or ‘The Worst Person Who Ever Lived’. Something that says this isn’t the biography of a great human being, because he was not. He was a stupid, disgusting, awful human being.”
Undeterred, Sounes conducted around 140 interviews with Reed’s family, bandmates, wives, lovers, school friends, college contemporaries, drug buddies, business associates, employers and employees, as well as drawing on published articles and several previous biographies of the notorious rock star. And while it would be unfair to suggest that no one has a good word to say about Lou Reed, several words do crop up repeatedly: “nasty,” “mean” and “prick.”
Shelley Albin, his first great love, immortalized in the Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes, recalls their introduction by a fellow student on campus at Syracuse University, New York, in 1961: “This is Lou Reed. He’s really evil.”
Other adjectives used to describe him include “narcissistic,” “misogynistic,” “weird,” “loathsome,” “obnoxious,” “poisonous,” “pedantic,” “cranky,” “manic” and “unlikable.”
Albin agrees: “He could be a prick even with someone he loved madly. I was crazy about him.”
Reading this compelling yet depressing book is a reminder of how tolerant we can be of bad behaviour in the brilliant and famous.
I was among many rock journalists who vainly struggled to get to the bottom of Reed during his lifetime, interviewing him three times. In the first decades of his career, fuelled by hard drugs and alcohol, he was an entertainingly unreliable narrator of his own tale.
Following his death in October 2013, rock journalist Mick Wall rushed out a cut-and-paste job (Lou Reed: the Life) that attempted to make up in stylistic energy what it lacked in research. Sounes has gone entirely the other way, with a dry tome that establishes the facts of Reed’s life and lets them speak for themselves. Sounes takes pride in carefully debunking the myths that have crept in from Reed’s own fictionalizations.
Reed never wrote his own autobiography. “Why would I?” he snapped in 2013. “Write about myself? Set the record straight? There’s no record to set straight. I am what I am. It is what it is, and f--you.” In a strange way, even with the facts so well marshalled by Sounes, Reed remains an enigma, who took his secrets to the grave, which is surely what he would have wanted.