credit: Moe Tucker
On what would have been the singer’s 76th birthday, Anthology Editions announces the forthcoming release of a book of Lou Reed’s poetry. Do Angels Need Haircuts, slated for publication this April, collects verse penned by Reed in the year’s immediately following his exit from the Velvet Underground in August 1970, alongside photographs and ephemera and a new afterword by Laurie Anderson.
After leaving the Velvets and before setting down to record Transformer, Reed spent months in isolation, reading, writing, and publicly vowing never to play rock ‘n’ roll music ever again. "I’m a poet," he would announce from the pulpit of St. Mark’s Church, New York, in March of 1971. Do Angels Need Haircuts, the first publication from the Lou Reed Archives, promises "an extraordinary snapshot of this turning point in Reed’s career."
"It wasn’t until a lot later that I fell in love with the young bad boy Lou," Laurie Anderson writes in her afterword. "He was dead by then and I read his poems. Now he is my muse. What a complicated situation! The bad boy who could see right inside of others."
Listen, below, to Reed reading from his own poetry at St. Mark’s Church in 1971.
“Lipstick" from Do Angels Need Haircuts? published by Anthology Editions, Copyright 2018 Canal Street Communications
Do Angels Need Haircuts? by Lou Reed will be published by Anthology Editions in April 2018.
