Word: reed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...quality of the lyrics is what makes the book such a tour de force. Most surprising are the prose-poems "The Gift," "The Murder Mystery" and "A Dream," each of which works through Reed's personal debts to Delmore Schwarz, John Cale and Andy Warhol while it confronts the grand masters of modernism: Baudelaire, Mallarme and Joyce...
Organized roughly chronologically, the lyrics fall into four periods. During the first, with the Velvets, Reed tells stories about the Factory scene (the albums from VU and Nico to Loaded). In the second, the early solo years, Reed comes to terms with his family and drug problems (from Transformer to Legendary Hearts). During the third, he redirects his energies into brutally personalized social commentary (from New Sensations to New York). In the final period, Reed emphasizes reassessment and revaluation, which includes Songs for 'Drella, Magic and Loss (his new album), and this book...
...York songs--Reed includes all 14 of them--are followed by the material from Songs for 'Drella a tribute to Warhol that Reed and John Cale created, in which Reed again crawls into Warhol's head like it was his second home...
...book concludes with two interviews conducted by Reed--one with Vaclav Havel, the playwright-president of Czechoslovakia. The other is with Hubert Selby, author of Last Exit to Brooklyn and similarly gritty urban prose...
Havel reveals rather muscularly the importance of the Velvet Underground and Reed's lyrics to the formation of Charter 77 and the (not entirely uncoincidental) Velvet Revolution; and Selby scatters his explanation of the transition of Last Exitfrom book to film in between cascades of "fuckin...