One of rock's most enigmatic and confounding artists is revealed as never before through the lens of his most extreme and misunderstood work, the 1975 double album Metal Machine Music.

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 so doing, he positions Metal Machine Music as a deeply serious, talismanic work that is unique in rock n roll. Lou Reed: Metal Machine Mystic is the first book to focus on the album as the key to understanding the methods, motivations, and mind of its creator. Constructed, like the original album, in four (almost) equal parts, it unearths the secrets of the record s creation, its true purpose, its immediate aftermath, and its subsequent astonishing rehabilitation.