Customer Reviews

Transformer: The Lou Reed Story

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Like its subject, Bockris's book is flawed and fascinating. Bockris is obviously a huge fan of the Velvet Underground and much of Reed's solo work, and his book covers seemingly every aspect of Reed's life. A couple dozen people, not including Reed but including many people who knew him well, were interviewed for this book. Every album and every available detail, lurid or otherwise, about Reed's personal life gets written up. The Lou Reed that emerges is not a pleasant person, but a fascinating and brilliant one nevertheless. With all that said, the book's flaws are many. Bockris, like Reed, seems to be an extremely perverse individual, which perhaps explains his fascination with Reed. His misstatements of fact are frequent (he says Brian Jones was murdered, and that Peter Laughner was the lead singer of Pere Ubu), leading one to suspect that many of the details he provides about Reed are not quite true either. At occasional junctures he says things that he seems not to really mean -- for example, that John Cale's solo albums are a better body of work than Reed's, or that Albert Goldman was the leading American rock critic of the 1970s -- probably just for the sake of being perverse. Still, for longtime followers of Reed's career, the book is riveting; and as a full-length biography of Reed, it has no substitute.

Lou Reed has used his songwriting and sociopathic P.R. persona to tell the world more than anyone could have wanted to know about a middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island who just happened to revolutionize rock'n'roll. So why does the world need another soon-to-be remaindered rock-bio?

Two reasons. One: Reed changed his personalities more often than his underwear, contradicting himself and opening as many mysteries as he solved. Two: Victor Bockris has done a damn fine job of playing Boswell to Reed's drugged-out bisexual Dr. Johnson. Collating endless reviews, interviews, and other views of Reed's life and work, Bockris has used his considerable literary skill to form a coherent, insightful narrative from Reed's often incoherent chaos of a life.

Bockris has an authorial voice that's lively yet restrained; his writing takes a back seat to the biography, but his brisk style and intelligence are worthy of Reed, America's most literary rock star. Rock journalism needs a Victor Bockris almost as much as rock music needs a Lou Reed.

This book is far superior to Doggett's "Growing up in Public". I recently read them both. Just wanted to help out if anyone was deciding between the two.

Seriously. Reed sounds like a nasty, destructive, poor excuse for a human being. At least in this biography. Thank god I haven't met him in person.

This remains the best bio of Reed. Don't be discouraged by the three-star average rating, which is simply the result of fans' resentment at a critical examination of their hero.

This book view of Lou Reed is not pretty, but is unsurprising to anyone familiar with his history and his own account of himself in interviews, where he regularly appeared as self-aggrandising and insecure (although without seeming to realise it ...)

Anyway, his character deficiencies needn't undermine your appreciation of his music.

The book has some marvellous anecdotes and insights, for example, relating to the woman who inspired several classic VU songs and an amusing attempted interview by Lou Reed of Vaclav Havel. (Clue: the rock star thought himself more important than a mere head of government. Havel terminated the interview as Lou was clearly too incompetent to perform it.)

great inside in who is lou reed, the hard copy is a great product and not very expensive, is a really joy to read the book , it starts from lou child hood to almos 2005 i think

It's unfortunate that a really good biography of Lou Reed hasn't been written, since that means fans are left with meanspirited revenge peaces like this one. Not that it doesn't have a lot of good information, but it's interwoven with the author's unmasked hatred, repeatedly calling his subject names ("lizard-like" stands out). I mean, is it really so difficult to understand why even as an adult somebody still might be a bit upset with his parents about subjecting him to intensive and damaging electroshock treatments to "cure" antisocial and homosexual tendencies, no matter how "well-intentioned" they were? I mean, considering that Bockris has written his own "Mommy Dearest," apparently because a rock star was somewhat dismissive of him in an interview (dutifully excerpted in the book, as if in explanation of all that preceded it), I don't know how he can possible fault anyone else's resentment.

And, apparently, he's written a similar hatchet job on Patti Smith (though his biography of Keith Richards was, I must admit, pretty good. Perhaps Keef shared his drugs with poor Victor?)

A good biography provides insight into its subject and how that person became who he or she is or was. A good biography gives the reader a sense of the time and place in which its subject lived and worked, and how those things influenced the individual and his or her work. Bockris' book accomplishes very little of this, and is primarily a compendium of select gossip arranged in chronological order: no research is evident beyond endnote references to (not citations of) previously published articles and interviews, various unnamed sources, and quotations that may or may not have come from discussions the author had with the speakers; the lack of annotations further diminishes Bockris' credibility. This doesn't make it a "bad" book, but anyone about to invest the time to trot through the book's 400+ pages deserves to know what they're in for. Which is...

...an account of Lou Reed that deliberately and cloyingly focuses on and emphasizes the most lurid details of the man's existence: dope, a nasty personality, a wildly inconsistent career, and his sexuality. To be fair to Bockris, he does seem truly to admire Lou Reed and his music, but apparently realized he needed to have some angle for his book to help it sell--too bad he took the easy way out. To be fair to the reader, Bockris' writing is often tedious and repetitive, and rife with plain, old-fashioned factual errors.

My two primary frustrations with the book are these: Reed is presented as a one-dimensional nasty, immature, and selfish character--so what? Most rock stars are probably the same; most ordinary folk too. There simply has to be a lot more to Lou Reed than this, and I wish I knew what. Secondly, Bockris presents Reed as a dope fueled, speed freak from the mid-60s through the 1970s. The problem with this assessment--however accurate it may be--is that the Velvet Underground produced at least two of the 60s' most important records, and Reed as a solo musician created AT LEAST three or four of the most important rock albums of the 70s. Quantitatively, that puts Reed up there, arguably, with only the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the Stones--not bad company! (A qualitative assessment of 60s and 70s bands would be much more inclusive, but that's not the issue at hand). Additionally, Reed toured every year from '72-'78. Again, there's got to be a whole lot more to the man than personlity crises, speed-injected veins, and a wavering sexual orientation.

Ultimately, reading the biography was like reading a cheap celebrity magazine (or a "dirty French novel"!): our desire for dirty details is gratified tremendously, but any hope to understand the person is sorely disappointed.

Its an excellent in depth study of someone I'd always admired, and knew so little about.

It really gives insight into the personae of one of our most underrated, great musician/poets of the late 20th century.

The author reveals Reed's genious and character flaws in personal relationships. It gives insight into his approach to music and relationships with his band members and life style.

Reed is revealed as a rather dark character, with a real romantic soul.

Victor Bockris' exhaustive (and exhausting) book on Lou Reed takes 400+ pages to paint a portrait of someone who seems basically unknowable. Like most of rock's private geniuses, Lou has a flair for lying, and a knack for being all things to all people at all times. The overlying theme seems to be that Reed is an insecure jerk who chews up people and spits them out. THe fact of the matter is.... So What. Bockris didn't do much interviewing of Lou to inform his book. (Not that the cryptic, game playing Lou would ever give you a straight interview) For those of us who love his music the book is a shallow reference point. We hear about a jerk, but are given no insight as to how his life and lifestyles reflected in the work he produced. Bockris is not a rock critic, and seems not to base his opinions of the music on what other have said. What we are left with is 400 pages describing the unsavory people Lou hung out with and how he treated them. The booklets that came with Lou's boxed set and the VU boxed sets were more enlightening. Save your money and buy those instead.