BOOK REVIEW: Lou Reed – The Life by Mick Wall

Shane | 10 January 2014

BOOK REVIEW: Lou Reed – The Life by Mick Wall
Hachette Australia, rrp $32.99
10 December 2013
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
8.5/10

Coming so soon after the late October death of the former Velvet Underground leader and rock n’ roll innovator, there’s a temptation to think this might be some kind of hatchet job knocked off the wrist to cash in – and in a lesser writer’s hands, that is exactly what it might have been.

Instead, Mick Wall – author of many books including W.A.R.: The Unauthorised Biography of W Axl Rose, When Giants Walked The Earth: A Biography Of Led Zeppelin, Enter Night: Metallica – The Biography and Black Sabbath: Symptom Of The Universe – has crafted an almost Kerouac-ian stream of conciousness narrative that chronologically disects the life of one of rock n’ roll’s true individuals.

Lou Reed was a man whose greatest triumphs seemed to come from his lowest times, a man who was so in turmoil inside his own mind that he strived more for self sabotage and self destruction – often in the name of art – than for success.

From his teenage bisexual awareness and subsequent electro shock therapy courtesy of his parents, through debilitating booze and drug use, his often violent dalliances with lovers of both sexes, insecurities and doomed-from-the-start collaborations, every Sweet Jane, Walk On The Wild Side or Dirty Boulevard was matched with a nihilistic, vitriolic kick against the pricks – in Lou’s eyes, EVERYONE – such as the blood and despair soaked anti-commercial masterpiece Berlin, the unlistenable Metal Machine Music, or the ‘What The Fuck?’ that was Lulu, his collaboration with Metallica.

Wall peels back the layers of this controversial, outspoken and misunderstood legend to provide a glimpse not only into the machinations inside and around Reed as he made a succession of critically and/or commercially lauded or reviled albums, but also their impact culturally and artistically. There was no middle ground with Reed – he was either very up, or downer than down in all respects, and The Life captures the essence of the man without wasting a word, even though Wall’s assertion that Lulu is a masterpiece should probably be taken with a grain of salt.