Compiled from archival ephemera, unpublished photographs, films, album covers, posters, fanzines, letters, testimonies, and poems, this monograph gathers anew the Velvet Underground Experience exhibition that opened in Paris in 2016 for a US audience, recreating the sound, visual, and emotional experiences of the underground scenes in New York, where extravagances were always allowed.

**** COMPELLING - The Sunday Telegraph CONTROVERSIAL ... Sounes' book pushes the standard Reed narrative - The New York Times Lou Reed, who died in 2013, was best known to the general public as the grumpy New Yorker in black who sang 'Walk on the Wild Side'. To his dedicated admirers, however, he was one of the most innovative and intelligent American songwriters of modern times, a natural outsider who lived a tumultuous and tortured life. In this in-depth, meticulously researched and very entertaining biography, respected biographer Howard Sounes examines the life and work of this fascinating man, from birth to death, including his time as the leader of The Velvet Underground - one of the most important bands in rock'n'roll. Written with a deep knowledge and understanding of the music, Sounes also sheds entirely new light on the artist's creative process, his mental health problems, his bisexuality, his three marriages, and his addictions to drugs and alcohol. In the course of his research, Sounes has interviewed over 140 people from every part of Lou Reed's life - some of whom have not spoken publicly about him before - including music industry figures, band members, fellow celebrities, family members, former wives and lovers. This book brings Lou Reed and his world alive.

Swingers and swappers, strippers and streetwalkers, sadists, masochists, and sexual mavericks of every persuasion; all are documented in The Velvet Underground, a legendary exposé of the diseased underbelly of ’60s American society. The book that lent its name to the seminal New York rock’n’roll group, whose songs were to mirror its themes of depravity and social malaise. Welcome to the sexual twilight zone...

“Not only a rock memoir and recipe book but also a poignant work of personal self-discovery and the challenges yet joys of parenting.” —Huffington Post Part memoir, part cookbook, and all rock and roll, Red Velvet Underground tells the story of how musician Freda Love Smith’s indie-rock past grew into her family—and food-centric present. Smith, born in Nashville and raised in Indiana, is best known as the drummer and co-founder of bands such as the Boston-based Blake Babies, Antenna, and the Mysteries of Life. Red Velvet Underground is loosely framed around cooking lessons Smith gave to her eldest son, Jonah, before he left for college. Smith compares her son’s experiences to her own—meeting Juliana Hatfield and starting the Blake Babies, touring in Evan Dando’s hand-me-down station wagon, and crashing with Henry Rollins, who introduced the band to local California fare—all while plumbing the deeper meanings behind the role of food, cooking, and family. Interspersed throughout these stories are forty-five flexitarian recipes—mostly, but not exclusively, vegetarian—such as red pepper-cashew spread, spinach and brazil nut pesto, and vegan strawberry-cream scones. Throughout the book, Smith reveals how food, in addition to music, has evolved into an important means for creativity and improvisation. Red Velvet Underground is an engaging exploration of the ways food and music have informed identity through every stage of one woman’s life. “These are sweet, unsentimental scenes from the ever-evolving life of a woman of many shifting and balancing roles: mother, wife, drummer, student, teacher, friend, daughter, food enthusiast. It’s all tied together with tantalizing recipes that have been lovingly improvised and tweaked into a life-affirming doneness.” —Juliana Hatfield, musician

An account of the rock group Velvet Underground, tracing the band's history from its formation by John Cale and Lou Reed in the mid-1960s to its notoriety after being adopted by Andy Warhol to its ignominious end.

Music.

The essential biography of one of music's most influential icons: Lou Reed As lead singer and songwriter for the Velvet Underground and a renowned solo artist, Lou Reed invented alternative rock. His music, at once a source of transcendent beauty and coruscating noise, violated all definitions of genre while speaking to millions of fans and inspiring generations of musicians. But while his iconic status may be fixed, the man himself was anything but. Lou Reed's life was a transformer's odyssey. Eternally restless and endlessly hungry for new experiences, Reed reinvented his persona, his sound, even his sexuality time and again. A man of contradictions and extremes, he was fiercely independent yet afraid of being alone, artistically fearless yet deeply paranoid, eager for commercial success yet disdainful of his own triumphs. Channeling his jagged energy and literary sensibility into classic songs - like "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Sweet Jane" - and radically experimental albums alike, Reed remained desperately true to his artistic vision, wherever it led him. Now, just a few years after Reed's death, Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis, who knew Reed and interviewed him extensively, tells the provocative story of his complex and chameleonic life. With unparalleled access to dozens of Reed's friends, family, and collaborators, DeCurtis tracks Reed's five-decade career through the accounts of those who knew him and through Reed's most revealing testimony, his music. We travel deep into his defiantly subterranean world, enter the studio as the Velvet Underground record their groundbreaking work, and revel in Reed's relationships with such legendary figures as Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Laurie Anderson. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Lou Reed is an illuminating tribute to one of the most incendiary artists of our time.