The only Lou Reed bio you need to read

NOTE: This article is a republication- Source: The Washington Post (by Stephen Metcalf).

Uncle Lou, my friend and I used to call him — it seemed right to think of him this way, because he was nobody’s dad and “friend” seemed like a stretch. But an intimate, still. Or the illusion of one.

The great virtue of “Lou Reed: The King of New York,” the new and very fine biography by Will Hermes, is that it’s really two biographies: of a bored and in some respects ordinary suburban teenage boy, typical of postwar America, and of his alter ego — the louche, urbane, ambi-poly decadent forever trembling at the absolute limit of Experience — brought into existence by his lonely daydreaming.