Manuel Vilas

An unusual book by a magnificent author.

Lou Reed Was Spanish is both a travel book and a memoir. It is a believable and wildly imaginative reconstruction of biographical episodes from the life of a rock star, and also a tender, approximate reconstruction of moments from the life of a poetry star. It is prose poem and musical prose; guitar and high-proof literature. Two vital destinies that never met, yet were kindred. It is a long love letter from a cosmopolitan writer who understands that the Spanish mythology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is shaped as much by Luis Buñuel as by Jim Morrison, as much by Pablo Picasso as by Lou Reed. That literature is life, tradition, and rock and roll. Let the party begin—its abysmal sadness, its Dionysian joy—this journey.

Welcome to the marvelous world of Manuel Vilas. And welcome, in parallel, to Lou Reed’s hallucinatory journeys through Spain. For this book is two books, spliced together like a single film: on one side, a young Manuel Vilas in his native Barbastro, in the Francoist 1970s, hearing the voice of the American rock star and experiencing a revelation, an epiphany; on the other, Lou Reed himself, traveling through Spain to offer his concerts and to discover a country both dark and luminous.