The early indicators on this book were not that good. It has been given some low ratings on Amazon (and who hasn't) and then one sees that Mick Wall's previous books have been on Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Metallica, Bono and the like. But one can get it inexpensively and there must be quite a story to read. And there is.
In the early chapters I wondered how far Wall's hipster argot would interfere with the story. Whether it is used to reflect the New York scene in the 60's, ot Wall gradually dropped the habit as he wrote or if I became acclimatised to it, I don't know, but it wasn't a problem. Like Lou himself, it seems, this book kept overcoming setbacks, many that might have been self-imposed, and came out in the end as quite a success.
Wall is no apologist for Lou and at various stages one wonders if anybody really could be. There is plenty of background to the 'difficult' personality and one can see how tiresome it would have been to friends and associates while just about seeing how it came about. At every opportuinty of proper commercial success, Lou seems to deliberately throw it away - after the Velvet Underground, after Transformer and onwards.
One never really leaves behind one's first 'influences' and Lou's first work in the hit factory, writing generic pop songs for cheap supermarket labels, came from his interest in doo-wop. His collaboration with John Cale, a trained musician and avant-gardiste, was thus fruitful but a meeting of two dissimilar types. Much of Lou's self-destruction, in the artistic sense at least, seems to have been due to not reconciling the impulseto pop and to something more outre.
Most remarkably, after the Velvets he goes back and lives with his parents and gets a typing job. Having re-launched tentatively as a solo artist, it is very much down to David Bowie to come and retreive him, though - much more than I had imagined. Certainly Bowie took ideas from Lou but the major beneficiary was Lou, not that in the long run he was all that gracious about it. Bowie's first meeting with Lou wasn't quite what it seemed. He got himself backstage with the Velvet Underground's singer and spent ten minutes talking to Doug Yule without being any the wiser.
But the plan seems to be to ruin one's chances of big stardom as soon as it becomes available by following up Transformer with Berlin, or Coney Island Baby with Metal Machine Music. He was never averse to the idea of a number one hit single or making well-crafted mainstream records but he did insist on punctuating them with unsaleable self-indulgence.
How ironic, then, that he ended his life as the husband of Laurie Anderson who did have a no. 1 hit with perhaps the most avant-garde single ever to reach the hit parade.
It is surprising how much of his creative life was spent not as a highly-regarded icon. I hadn't realized quite how forgotten he had become because I didn't imagine anybody as legendary as a Velvet Underground member with later Bowie connections could have anything but a reputation in safe-keeping. But he was also, apparently, much more his own worst enemy than I ever realized, who really believed he needed the drugs, and was highly dependant on others.
He was surrounded most of the time by musicians better than him and eschewed his own guitar-playing at various stages, clearly aware of the situation. He was the poet but not the musician or businessman and was also some kind of confused purist who had little time for some of his more successful contemporaries who really had no more talent than he did. One can get too far into one's own mythology on some of those chemicals.
And so it is by some sort of miracle that he lasts long enough, through a series of spectacular but usually difficult personal relationships, to eventually gain acceptance as a legend, much of that down to the fact that critical and public taste finally realized the worth of the Velvet Underground. And Lou's last years were his happiest, by all accounts, with Laurie, some successful albums (Magic & Loss, New York) and belated recognition of what had been previously scorned.
He had always seemed okay to me but then I didn't have to deal with just one more screwed-up junk fiend, which is what that stuff will do to anybody no matter who you are when you start out. This is a good story and Mick Wall has told it economically enough without too much laborious fan data and sufficient well-chosen anecdotes to provide just the right account of it for the interested but non-avid admirer. I imagine the low markings on Amazon are from devotees who can't accept anything but their own preferred version and that is going to be inevitable with a figure like Lou, who gave both his admirers and detractors plenty of material to work with
