Early in the movie Almost Famous, the gruff journalist Lester Bangs sizes up the young music writer William Miller with a litmus test: “And you like Lou Reed?”

William, at once cocky and nervous, stumbles as he tries to impress his elder. He tells Bangs he’s into “the early stuff” but that these days (the 1970s), Reed is trying to be David Bowie. Wrong! Bangs proceeds to school William, and perhaps the film’s audience: It’s Bowie who’s “doing Lou.” William is a fictional character based on the filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s teenage self, but Bangs was a real music critic, and he was very much obsessed with Reed, putting him on a pedestal not unlike the way others deified Bob Dylan.

Bangs wasn’t the only one to recognize Reed’s genius. Nevertheless, Reed and his former band, the Velvet Underground, have never fully penetrated the casual music fan’s mind. The Velvets are perpetually shirked or misunderstood—more “heard of” than heard.

Certain bands, such as the Beatles, eventually come for us all, but you have to go out and find the Velvet Underground. Some of their most famous songs—“Sweet Jane,” “I’m Waiting for the Man”—are blips compared with jukebox staples from the Rolling Stones, the Who, or Led Zeppelin. Exploring this band, and Reed’s solo work, is often a surrender to obsession. It makes for a dizzying, hypnotic, enthralling, and, if we’re being honest, occasionally frustrating listening experience. Although many songs are a mix of melodic and mysterious, others are simply inaccessible. Still, the journey pays dividends. Working your way through their catalog will yield a sharper understanding of countless other acts you may already love. To study Lou Reed’s songwriting and to listen to the Velvet Underground—really listen—is to learn rock’s secret handshake.

Maybe you’ve heard that last part before, and maybe you’ve rolled your eyes at it. Perhaps you’re vaguely aware of Reed’s messy reputation for being awful to all manner of people—women, restaurant workers, music journalists. Although he’s been dead for 10 years, Reed remains a polarizing figure, even among his fans. He’s alternately cast as the hero, the antihero, or the villain of the Velvets. I can’t say I’ve ever admired Reed, the man, so much as I’ve long found his songs addictive. Possibly because of his offstage life, he hasn’t quite enjoyed the valorization Bowie has received since his death or ascended to the same level of global iconography. Still, his influence has never waned. Once you detect Reed’s fingerprints somewhere, you start to see them everywhere. Sometimes, you don’t even have to look.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a bar when I opened Lou Reed: The King of New York, a layered, nuanced biography by the journalist Will Hermes, a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone, NPR, and elsewhere. (Though I briefly worked at Rolling Stone as politics editor, Hermes and I never crossed paths.) As I read literally the first sentence of the book’s preface, “Someday” by the Strokes came on over the bar’s soundsystem. That 2002 platinum hit probably wouldn’t exist had the Velvet Underground never existed. Nearly everything about the Strokes, from their fuzzy vintage sound to their studied New York cool, is rooted in the Velvets. Like Reed, the lead singer Julian Casablancas presents as jaded, pouty, and aloof, with eyes that toggle between stoned and puppy dog. (Casablancas’s cover of “Run Run Run,” an underrated bop from 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, practically eliminates any sonic distance between the two singers.) One of the intriguing things about the Velvet Underground is that so many of the artists they’ve inspired went on to become exponentially more successful than the Velvets themselves. Reed and his former bandmates, despite their ambitions, seem forever destined to linger in semi-obscurity, a “somewhere over there” corner of rock. Can anything ever change that? Should anything ever change that?

Lou Reed, as a book, is not concerned with lionizing or demolishing its principal subject. Instead, it sets out to tell the story of the artist’s up-and-down career and complicated personal life, giving equal weight to each. Hermes quickly establishes that “Lou Reed” was a character creation of Lewis Allan Reed, an insecure kid from Freeport, Long Island. Reed’s life, like a lot of lives, was punctuated by moments of transcendence between pronounced periods of muck. He wanted to write hit songs, and he desperately wanted to be famous. But he was also drawn to challenging, experimental art. He made some of his best work alongside the classically trained musician John Cale, one of many people who helped him blossom in New York City. Across more than 400 pages, readers come to know them all.

Fans will likely devour many of these stories and want to live inside of them. (Many will probably also dream of living inside Cale’s $25-a-month Lower East Side loft, but those were different times.) The book almost molds to the shape of Reed’s music. Like Reed as a songwriter, Hermes is savvy, empathetic, and, crucially, not afraid to deliver occasional indictments. He memorably describes Reed as having “a literal and spiritual resting bitch face.” Yet throughout the book, Reed also comes across as tender. This sweet-and-sour juxtaposition was the bedrock of his art; it’s partly what continues to crack something open in people. Soulful, acerbic, funny, bleak: Reed’s output was never an either/or, always a both.

[Read: Lou Reed never compromised]

Hermes traces the imperfect arc of Reed’s life, sometimes week by week, bender by bender. Early Velvets gigs are rendered vividly. Jackie Kennedy, Salvador Dalí, Allen Ginsberg, Sammy Davis Jr., and Walter Cronkite all showed up to experience the band’s residency at an East Village club called the Dom, with, as Hermes writes, “limos pulling to the curb.” Hermes makes the case that Reed was probably threatened by his onetime Velvets bandmate Nico, whom he first saw in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. During Nico’s stint in the group, Reed would sometimes prank her by cutting off her microphone at rehearsals and intentionally smothering her vocals with guitar noise. Reed comes off as a poet, a prophet, and—how many ways can you say this?—a dick.

The band’s knotty relationship with their nominal producer Andy Warhol makes for fascinating pages—you can practically hear the dissonance inside Warhol’s famed studio, the Factory. Warhol first saw the Velvets during their run at Cafe Bizarre, a downtown coffeehouse with the spooky kitsch of a Spirit Halloween store. Whereas rock and roll during the first half of the ’60s largely circled the theme of teenage love, Reed’s lyrics went deeper and darker. On “Heroin,” he sang of putting “a spike” into his vein, of “closing in on death,” of feeling like “Jesus’ son,” the latter phrase of which the writer Denis Johnson would use as the title of his acclaimed short-story collection. Warhol liked how the Velvets freaked people out. For a time, the group became the Factory’s “house band.”

Later stories, particularly in the second half of Reed’s life, may test the mileage of even die-hard fans. Hermes occasionally leans on hypothetical asides, such as Reed sitting in his apartment on a Sunday afternoon reading a New York Times Magazine feature about his deceased friend and mentor Delmore Schwartz. These writerly flourishes—signposted with phrases such as “one imagines”—took me out of a story that otherwise kept me rapt. But that’s a minor quibble: Lou Reed is a doorstop book that doesn’t feel like homework.

The Velvets disintegrated after just four studio albums and multiple lineup shuffles. (Needless to say, they were not among the ’60s artists who played Woodstock.) Reed famously kicked Cale, probably the most competent musician among them, out of the band. And Reed’s solo career may never have materialized at all were it not for Bowie, who produced Reed’s 1972 record, Transformer, which featured such canonical songs as “Satellite of Love” and “Walk on the Wild Side”—the latter being the closest thing Reed ever got to an everyone-knows-it hit. The song’s hook, later the backbone of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?,” has become one of the most recognizable bass lines in all of rock and roll. Tragically, that’s probably where many music fans begin and end their relationship with Reed.

Throughout the text, Hermes explores Reed’s sexuality at length, though not in a manner that reads as tawdry or invasive. Reed was married three times and, in the book, comes off as sexually fluid. As a college freshman, Reed had a nervous breakdown and was forced into electroshock therapy by his parents. But, as Hermes writes, “Reed suggested that his treatment was to ‘cure’ his attraction to men.” One of Reed’s partners, Rachel Humphreys, a transgender woman, ended up in a story by Lester Bangs, who so dehumanized her that Reed never spoke to the rock journalist again.

How do you fully explain the psychic space that Reed and the Velvets occupy among fans? It’s not like the communal carnival of the Grateful Dead. Nor did Reed have Bruce Springsteen’s everyman appeal, or the second-coming-of-Jesus thing that haunts Dylan, or, to use a more recent example, the frenetic decoding of clues among obsessive Swifties. Reed doesn’t exactly come off as a warm friend the way other songwriters do—perhaps an obvious statement. Rather, he shows you the complete spectrum of life, including the ugly parts. The Velvets offer an escape into a world that seems thrilling and dangerous, simultaneously welcoming and off-limits. They are poppy and avant-garde, uptown and downtown, New York City and the roads that lead you there.

Much of Hermes’s reporting seems to have taken place after Reed’s death, though that doesn’t prove to be much of a hindrance. Reed’s archive, including a collection of his personal letters, is now housed in the New York Public Library. Hermes was able to make smart use of this material. Last year, a collection of never-before-heard demo tapes surfaced for public consumption after being stowed away for half a century. Listening to the tracks now is a wild experience.

[Read: Lou Reed made Generation X]

In May 1965, Reed and Cale recorded skeletal versions of what would become some of the Velvets’ strongest songs. Although “Heroin” contains the gradual build to intensity of the eventual studio track, “I’m Waiting for the Man”—what I consider to be Reed’s magnum opus—sounds altogether new. In the song, Reed describes a character’s ritual of going to East Harlem to score drugs, though, notably, drugs are never explicitly mentioned in the song. The album version is swaggering, thanks to Moe Tucker’s propulsive drumming, but the demo is marked by sadness and a bluesy harmonica solo. Reed’s voice suggests that his character is sauntering rather than racing “up to a Brownstone, up three flights of stairs.” He sounds less like a streetwise punk and more like the country crooner Roger Miller singing “Oo-De-Lally” in Disney’s Robin Hood. Hearing these tapes and learning more about their backstory may reshape your perception of Reed altogether.

Reed’s final years, marked by his marriage to Laurie Anderson, are among the most moving parts of the story, a model for how to age gracefully after growing up torrentially. The process of maturing and letting go unfurls as a major theme in the book. Anderson’s revelations about Reed’s final days are particularly memorable: He faced death wide-eyed, back in his birthplace of Long Island. Though only 71, he had lasted much longer than the semi-autobiographical characters he sang about.

Recently, as I was rounding the bend on the final chapters, I sat on a bench in Lower Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, listening to a young band play a free show. At first, they seemed to be channeling the Strokes. Then, along with a handful of originals, they did a rather innocent cover of “Sweet Jane.” Charmingly, they felt the need to identify who wrote the song after they finished.