moving this over here since it is not about drummers
I've read Edie maybe 50 times over the course of my life since I was a kid.. one of my favorite books of all time..
Love that 74 performance
havent read the bio.. you recommend?
I would say it's valuable because it's old enough of a book to have captured many of the folks that were there at the time.
My impression right after finishing it -
Transformer by Victor Bockris
The first three-quarters is pretty bitchy, psychoanalyzing and calling Lou Reed every name in the book, while giving plenty of detail but also some clearly guessed-at stuff from his earliest days to about 1980. Billy Name, Gerard Malanga, lots on John Cale, what you would expect; the author doesn't manage to track down Reed's girlfriend Rachel to get any quotes about their time together, which Lou later basically disavowed. The copy I read was the revised edition, so the final quarter is almost the opposite, all about how the VU is so revered and all the money Lou made around the time of the New York album onwards. No chance I will seek out an early edition without the added revisions. Bockris has written a lot about the Velvets so I guess this is 'essential' but I rarely read about rock history so not sure how this compares with others. It's over 400pp! B-
