Victor Bockris

Patti Smith was a poet, a punk prophet, a feminist icon, a living work of art and the first woman rock-outsider to come from the New York underground and become a star.

During the 1960s, Dennis Hopper carried a camera everywhere—on film sets and locations, at parties, in diners, bars and galleries, driving on freeways and walking on political marches. He photographed movie idols, pop stars, writers, artists, girlfriends, and complete strangers. Along the way he captured some of the most intriguing moments of his generation with a keen and intuitive eye. A reluctant icon at the epicenter of that decade’s cultural upheaval, Hopper documented the likes of Tina Turner in the studio, Andy Warhol at his first West Coast show, Paul Newman on set, and Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. From a selection of photographs compiled by Hopper and gallerist Tony Shafrazi, this extensive volume, finally back in print in a new edition, distills the essence of Hopper’s prodigious photographic career. Also included are introductory essays by Shafrazi and legendary West Coast art pioneer Walter Hopps, as well as an extensive biography and new afterword by journalist Jessica Hundley. With excerpts from Victor Bockris’s interviews of Hopper’s famous subjects, friends, and family, this volume revives an unprecedented exploration of the life and mind of one of America’s most fascinating personalities.

‘A triumph’ – Time Out Transformer is the only complete and comprehensive telling of the Lou Reed story. Legendary songwriter and guitarist Lou Reed passed away on the 27th October 2013, but his musical influence is assured. Now discover the true story of the Velvet Underground pioneer in this update of Bockris’s classic biography. Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story follows the great songwriter and singer through the series of transformations that define each period of his fifty year career. It opens with the teenage electroshock treatments that dominated his memories of childhood and never stops revealing layer after layer of this complex and often anguished artist and man. Transformer is based on Lou’s collaborations with the hardest and most romantic artists of his times, from John Cale, Andy Warhol, and Nico, through David Bowie, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson and the ghost of Edgar Alan Poe. Rippling underneath everything he did are Lou’s relationships with his various muses, from his college sweetheart to his three wives (and one drag queen). Leading Lou Reed biographer, Victor Bockris – who knew Lou throughout the Rachel Years, from Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal to the Bells – updates his original biography in the wake of Lou’s death. Through new interviews and photos, he reveals the many transformations of this larger-than-life character, including his final shift from Rock Monster to the Prince Charming he had always wanted to be in the twenty years he spent with the love of his life, Laurie Anderson . Except with Lou, you could never really know what might happen next… Including previously unseen photographs and contributions from Lou’s innermost circle and collaborators that include similarly esteemed artists such as Andy Warhol and David Bowie, Transformer is as captivating and vivid a read as befits an American master.

Victor Bockris's much admired biography of Keith Richards has been constantly revised since its original publication, now with an additional 12,000 words for a new edition of the Omnibus Press paperback that brings the story up to the present day. First published in eight countries in 1992, at that time Keith Richrds had stood in the shadow of Mick Jagger for thirty years. Then, as a result of Victor Bockris biography, Richards was put in the spotlight and emerged as the power behind the throne, the creator, the backbone, and the soul of the Rolling Stones. Here are the true facts behind Richards' battles with his demons: the women, the drugs and the love-hate-relationship with Jagger. His struggle with heroin and his status as the rock star most likely to die in the 1970s. His scarcely believable rebirth as a family man in the 1980s. Illuminated with revealing quotes and thoughtful insights into the man behind the band that goes on forever.

'The man who has no imagination Stands on earth He has no wings He cannot fly' Muhammad Ali Just off Highway 61 in northern Pennsylvania, up the dirt drive of a wooded hill lay a place called Fighter's Heaven. This was once the training camp of the 'greatest of all times'. From early '73 through the summer of '74 Victor Bockris visited Muhammad Ali, while Ali was preparing for his epic battle in Zaire to regain the World Heavyweight crown from the fearsome George Foreman. Bockris, who was later to write about people like William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Lou Reed was less interested in his subject's boxing career and ambitions than in his extraordinary gifts as a poet, preacher and performer. As Muhammad Ali said himself of this book, 'These are some of the things I don't reveal to the public too much'.

Keith Richards är en av rockhistoriens störste rumlare och samtidigt en stilbildande gitarrist och Rolling Stones hjärta och själ. Victor Bockris klassiska biografi presenterar världens mest elegant nergångna människa och är baserad på exklusiva intervjuer med Keith Richards och personer i hans absoluta närhet. Här får vi full inblick de stormiga kvinnoaffärerna, sprit- och heroinmissbruket, livet med familjen och maktkampen och turbulensen inom Rolling Stones. Här passerar även stjärnorna revy, alla från Marlon Brando och Tom Waits till Gram Parsons och Chuck Berry.

The Velvet Underground is arguably one of the most influential American rock bands ever. Based on interviews with former members Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison, as well as others from Andy Warhol's circle of artistic collaborators, Up-Tight is the definitive oral and visual history of the band and its revolutionary, often avant-garde music. Bockris and Malanga's intelligent and entertaining approach-which does not shy away from the drugs, sleaze, and controversy that enveloped the band seemingly from its inception-provides compulsive reading.

Here, accompanied by dozens of unique photographs, are the very best of Victor Bockris's infamous interviews, essays, and observations on the stars of downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s. The internationally acclaimed biographer Bockris was there as a witness, friend, collabourator, and co-conspirator. Some of the stars were founding members of Beat or Punk, others were just passing through. But all of them,rockers, rebels, artists, and intellectuals,revealed more to Bockris than they did to any other writer: Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Debbie Harry, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Terry Southern, Martin Amis, and Susan Sontag. Bockris's conclusion,that Punk owed the Beats a big debt and that the Beats were in turn re-animated by the Punks,is argued from the perspective of someone who was in the thick of it, and who loved every minute of it.

Burroughs, the eccentric, brilliant artist who burned the bridge with logic and wrote the classic Naked Lunch, has a court recorder in Victor Bockris. Bockris has collected into a cogent whole the man's most brilliant moments of conversation, thinking, and interview repartee. This fascinating material, gleaned from the fertile time at Burroughs's New York headquarters, the Bunker (which was located on the Bowery, three blocks from CBGB), encompasses the years 1974 to 1980, and also includes a 1991 Burroughs interview from Interview magazine. The Beats' devotion to subjective experience has left readers with a profound amount of objective material to analyze and debate. Choice public and private utterances, hallucinatory and prescient diatribes such as these, remain rich sources of literary history. As Americans we find the Beats' approach to life romantic, even heroic. Tearing the walls down in the name of freedom and spirituality strikes a particularly pilgrimesque chord. With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker is a fascinating compendium of Burroughs-speak, so complete it can be considered a credo.