THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 23, 1995 TAG: 9508230032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY RICKEY WRIGHT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
THE MAN WHO wrote the line ``Vicious, you hit me with a flower'' has notched one of the most fascinating lives in all of rock. Unfortunately, the latest attempt at explicating the meaning of that life, Victor Bockris' ``Transformer: The Lou Reed Story'' (Simon & Schuster, 446 pp., $25), doesn't make it.
The doo wop-loving Reed, born in Brooklyn in 1942 and raised on Long Island, channeled his early aggression and literary bent into songs for the Velvet Underground, the seminal band whose music (heard in innumerable concerts and on four albums issued between 1966 and 1970) managed to alienate a large portion of the small set that heard it. The Velvets liberated any number of taboos from the list of rock no-nos. Wrote critic Lester Bangs: ``Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock and roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide.''
Before that, however, Reed was brutally tortured by the parents and society at which he thumbed his nose. Prescribed electroshock therapy at 17 for homosexual tendencies and mood swings - an experience he would recall on one of his early post-Velvets solo LPs in the song ``Kill Your Sons'' - he soon escaped Long Island and entered college. At Syracuse University, he encountered poet Delmore Schwartz, who quickly became one of his greatest influences.
From there, Reed was hired in 1964 as a songwriter and performer for Pickwick International, a cheesy outfit noted for budget repackages of old material and cashing in on current trends. While the company wasn't eager to foist the already-written ``Heroin'' on its teenage public, it did encourage Reed to churn out endless prefabricated junk like ``Cycle Annie,'' by ``the Beachnuts.''
Shortly after Reed formed the Velvets with avant-garde music student John Cale, the group fell into the orbit of Andy Warhol's Factory. Warhol and Reed moved in and out of each other's life until the pop artist's 1987 death; Reed never seemed quite able to use up Warhol as he had other associates. (Reed and Cale reunited in 1990 on ``Songs for Drella,'' an album-length remembrance of Warhol.)
Bockris has enough material here for several books, much of it scrounged from previously published sources, the same method he used with his 1993 Keith Richards biography. Indeed, a number of works about the Velvet Underground years, including Bockris' own ``Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story,'' exist. Unfortunately, the author piles up information without bringing much of a viewpoint to it beyond a general ``gee whiz.''
Bockris writes clumsily, sometimes failing to integrate his borrowed anecdotes and opinions into a cohesive narrative flow. He gives a thumbs-down to Reed's last Velvets album, ``Loaded,'' on the basis of one ancient quote from the man himself - although Reed's performance is one of the most joyous tours de force of rock 'n' roll singing and writing.
Several interview transcripts, including an uneventful meeting of the minds among Reed, Bockris and poet William Burroughs, are tacked on to the book for no apparent reason beyond the fact that Bockris possesses the tapes. His non sequiturs don't stop there. A paragraph that begins with a mention of the 1976 Reed record ``Coney Island Baby'' in the out-of-the-closet context of the era ends with a mention that ``Frank Zappa's `Apostrophe' and the Rolling Stones' `Black and Blue' were other gold records that year.'' Huh?
``Transformer'' barely gets at how, much less why, Reed's persona has traveled from that of poet to nihilist to, by the mid-'80s, social activist and endorser of Madison Avenue checks for motorbike commercials. At that stage, Reed was married and had taken to denying his affairs with men. In his book of collected lyrics, ``Beyond Thought and Expression,'' he even excised some gay-specific lines from the classic song ``Street Hassle.'' Bockris doesn't mention this, probably because it was little-noted in the press. It's that sort of laziness that points up why ``Transformer,'' while diverting, is not a great Lou Reed biography. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Lou Reed channeled his literary bent into songs for the Velvet
Underground.
by CNB