HUMORIST WILL CUPPY once wrote, "Great writers should be read, not met." (He made the observation in the course of a piece on Frederick the Great and the lengthy, increasingly awkward visit Voltaire made to the Prussian court.)
Lou Reed was one of the greatest American songwriters of the post-WW II era, I would say, surpassed only by Dylan (n.b., Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young are Canadian), but he was perhaps better listened to than met. He could be curt, dismissive, insulting, and downright cruel to friends, family, partners, and bandmates, to say nothing of journalists, whom he often treated to unalloyed vituperation.
Hermes is eloquent and insightful about the power of Reed's writing and musicianship. What we now call indie rock would probably not exist, or would be unrecognizably different, without what Reed wrote and performed in the Velvet Underground. Hermes is also informative about and properly appreciative of the highlights of Reed's solo years: Transformer, The Blue Mask, New York, Magic and Loss. Hermes even plucks a true gem, "Junior Dad," from sprawl of Lulu, Reed's widely-dismissed collaboration with Metallica. Hermes also made me resolve to listen to Metal Machine Music all the way through from beginning to end at least once, although I have yet to follow up on that resolution.
In between explications of Reed's music, though, we get story after story of Reed being mostly unpleasant to mostly everyone. These stories do not diminish Reed's accomplishments as a songwriter, but they do leave a sour aftertaste. In the latter part of Reed's life, at least, his marriage to Laurie Anderson and the gradually growing public recognition of his greatness make for a happy-enough ending.
The book's highlight, I think, is the digging Hermes did into the pre-Warhol years, Reed as a high school rocker and a protégé of Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse. Reed was not exactly a nicer person in those days, and his great accomplishments were still in the future, but Hermes does a brilliant job of conjuring up for readers the genius-in-embryo that Reed was.
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