Three times a week, for eight weeks, Reed went to the Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital for his dose of high voltage. The treatment is deadening. "You can't read a book because you get to Page 17 and you have to go right back to Page 1 again," Reed once recalled. "If you walked around the block, you forgot where you were."

More than 40 years later, one looks at the life-as-art rock star, and that singular, imploring, reptilian look in his eye -- he has said no one does Lou Reed like Lou Reed -- and one wonders if 24 sessions was enough.

We take Lou Reed for a god. Not a benevolent one, necessarily -- maybe not even a musical one. But look at how he stands there, in his black T-shirt and black jeans and wire-rim glasses and ugly snarl. Didn't the Greeks have a god of attitude? The one who flew too close to the sun but then, instead of falling to the sea, flew even closer because he didn't give a fuck? The 57-year-old founder of the Velvet Underground would have us believe no less.

The world first heard of Reed in the late '60s, in connection with the Velvet Underground, the band the world had never heard of anyway. In the years since their quiet disintegration in 1970, the Velvets assumed a mythology that easily made up for the legions of fans they never had in their non-heyday. Reed and his former band mates -- John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker -- inspired the kinds of legends even the Beatles couldn't hope for: They were the greatest rock stars whom no one ever listened to, the most popular group that never sold a record and, famously, the band that had only 500 fans, but from whom 500 new bands sprung.

Thirty-six years after the first gig, these legends are more than hokey -- they're immaterial. Not only have the Velvets secured their spot in rock history, they've grabbed such a prominent one that we can barely imagine the days of their famous obscurity. "Sweet Jane," "Pale Blue Eyes," "Heroin," "Femme Fatale," "I'm Waiting for the Man" -- these VU originals passed through the realm of classics long ago, and have drifted almost irretrievably into the land of the overplayed, overcovered and overremembered.

Reed doesn't care. If the world never spoke of the Velvets again, he would probably be happy. Or mad. Or uptight. Or indifferent. Whatever it is that he already is. This is the problem with Reed, and has been since the electroshock therapy days: No one really knows what to do with him. At once pretentious and humble, uncaring and epiphanic, faggy and rough, rock 'n' roll's most famous junkie keeps breaking molds.

That's not hot air. He was an iconoclast as early as college, from 1960 to 1964 -- as an undergrad at Syracuse University, he wrote "Heroin," maybe the Velvets' greatest song -- and only proceeded to get farther out. Later, once the band was together, he began putting together material that turned rock 'n' roll on its ear. Over spare melodies but full sound, he sung/spoke/muttered about drugs, S&M, transvestism and other aspects of his Lower East Side life. They were often banalities -- the walk up the stairs to meet the dealer; the name of the street so-and-so had to run down -- but they were banalities that rang with religiosity. It's nothing short of euphoria when he meets his dealer, gets the heroin and heads back downtown. Not since has anyone made euphoria sound so good and so lonely.

The Velvet Underground played some great songs. They occasionally relied on the kindness of spaced-out strangers -- now and then, it took patience to invest in the requisite VU trance -- but even then, it was good music. But they were not the Beatles, not the Stones, not even the little finger of the Beatles or the Stones. As good and new as their songs could be, it was hardly their material alone that brought them fame. The Velvets had a patron who could do P.R. tricks in his sleep.

It was the last night of the band's first regular gig when Andy Warhol strolled into the Greenwich Village tourist bar where they were playing. As out-of-towners politely sipped umbrella drinks, Reed sang about masochism and overdoses. Warhol swooned. Soon the conceptual artist had a band to manage, and the band had an image to cultivate.

Plus money. Warhol's success as a commercial artist meant the Velvets had electricity for their amps and a ready-made stable of potential fans. With Warhol came the Factory, which in turn brought clout. The Union Square loft where Warhol's art was mass-produced was already the center of the universe. The artsy, the hip and the strung-out all mingled in frenetic orbit around the Factory and its joyful contempt for bourgeois culture -- to be at the center of a Factory happening was to be made, coronated. These recluses with cheap guitars and a drummer who played standing up -- they were now Art.

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