“Reed’s supreme muse was New York City: its wild, cacophonous beauty; its lures and dangers; its millions of stories.” So writes veteran music journalist Will Hermes early in his excellent Lou Reed: The King of New York (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 3). The same could be said of Thurston Moore, frontman for Sonic Youth, the author of a new memoir, Sonic Life: A Memoir (Doubleday, Oct. 24). Both books, which received starred reviews, serve as vital portraits of a bygone era of New York City cultural life, a roiling cauldron of rock, punk, dingy clubs, hard drugs, and invigorating musical exploration.
Hermes, a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, the Believer, and other publications, is the author of one of my favorite music books of the last 15 years, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever. The author’s Reed bio covers much of the same fertile musical ground, bringing to vivid life the fascinating 1970s cultural milieu.
“The author interviewed many of Reed’s closest friends and relations and, unlike previous biographers, accessed the New York Public Library’s recently acquired Reed archives,” notes our reviewer. “Hermes’ strength is in identifying and articulating the transformational brilliance of Reed’s songwriting and performances within the context of the 1960s and ’70s music scene.” The book is a must-read for fans of Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Television, the Talking Heads, and all the other bands pioneering a new sound from the 1960s through the ’80s. (For more on the Velvet Underground as a whole, check out Dylan Jones’ Loaded, which Grand Central will publish on Dec. 5.)
Moore proves to be as interesting and thoughtful on the page as he has been in his decadeslong musical career. When he founded Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo in 1981, few observers would have expected the band to become such a powerful cultural force, leading the NYC no wave art and music scene before moving into noisier yet no less intriguing territory. “The art-school nerds who had been cued off by Talking Heads moved further into disjointed pop experimentation,” writes the author about the fluid music scene. “No wave bands were becoming far more formidable than their off-the-wall craziness might have first suggested.”
Moore’s memoir is “a literate, absorbing account of life in the New York of CBGB, no wave, and affordable spaces for artists.” The author charts his early musical influences (David Bowie and Patti Smith, among others), as well as the band’s evolving sound and the many familiar ups and downs of life on the road. He is also candid about his messy breakup with Gordon and the lurking dangers haunting downtown NYC at the time. For all the Sonic Youth fans who were disappointed by David Browne’s 2008 biography, Goodbye 20th Century (“overwritten yet strangely dispassionate sound and fury, signifying far less than Sonic Youth’s ardent, explosive music” said our reviewer), Moore’s book will be a welcome rejoinder and update, straight from the artist who experienced it all.
Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.
