Lou Reed: Metal Machine Mystic

One of rock music's most enigmatic and confounding artists is here revealed as never before through the murky prism of his most extreme and polarising work: Metal Machine Music, a double album of vocal-free, unrelentingly shocking noise.Initially dismissed on its release in 1975 as an avant-garde prank or an act of career suicide (or both), the album has acquired a growing number of admirers over the subsequent half-century, along the way to becoming a kind of secret handshake of hipness. Through his work both in The Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, Reed is one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the rock era, yet he remains a defiantly inscrutable figure.Drawing on extensive research and exclusive interviews with more than sixty friends, collaborators, and admirers, David Holzer reveals him anew as a spiritual seeker with a deep interest in the esoteric practices of Alice Bailey and others, and a man with a profound belief in the power of one's inner spirit.In s