Making sense of Reed’s multitudes, and cutting through the mythology that enshrined him as some kind of junkie savant, is the task Will Hermes sets himself in Lou Reed: The King of New York. He could berate anyone-“you’re a fucking moron,” he once barked at a 22-year-old interviewer-but he could also charm a room. The three versions had an uneasy coexistence, as indicated by Reed’s famously volatile temperament. (This same Reed licensed songs to The Simpsons and Beverly Hills 90210, and appeared in ads for American Express.) Then, beginning in the 1990s, there was Reed the patron saint of downtown New York, as much an acknowledgment of the city’s millennial sterility as a tribute to Reed’s genius.

Then came Reed the freelance auteur, churning out spotty solo albums and delivering gnomic anti-interviews to the press.

First and most enduring was the front man of the Velvet Underground, the greaser poet from Long Island who had a cabbie’s voice and a knack for writing songs about drugs and sex and salvation that sounded like the gutter side of 1960s rock.