TRANSFORMER

Rating:
Summary: Don't buy
Review: Don't buy this book. It is a complete waste of money and an even bigger waste of time. It made me wonder why Bockris wasted his time writing a 400+ page book about someone he obviously doesn't like. The only thing this book does is make Lou look like a jerk, and the only subjects it touches on is how he was taking drugs, and how he hated his parents, and how bad he was treating his first wife Betty, and then Sylvia. His music is never even mentioned. I wonder how much of this book was really true, because Bockris never interviewed Lou, Mrs. Reed, or anybody else for the book. In fact, if I remember correctly, my Velvet Underground Companion book had an article from back when Bockris was writing this book, Lou was against it, but Bockris said he was going to write this with or without Lou's cooperation. The only reason Lou cooperated, was because Sterling Morrison convinced him to go along with it. This makes me wonder if that had anything to do about the way Lou is portrayed in this book. Bottom line: don't waste your money, because all this book is is a bunch of gossip, and it doesn't do his music justice.

Rating:
Summary: Padded, akward, and pretty dull.
Review: Here is one thing that will tell you about all you need to know about Brockris' biography of Lou Reed. Throughout the book, Brockris quotes those he interviews at length. Then, in the next chapter he presents one line verbatum from the interview, unatributed, usually in a context that makes the statement appear to be his own insight. I guess he figured that his readers, being rock and roll fans, don't have short term memory. I don't doubt that Lou Reed is a control freak and part-time jerk, but the only sure thing that I got from "Transformer" is that Brockris is a hack.

Rating:
Summary: I couldn't put it down
Review: 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.