He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his previous book England is Mine as "surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written." Greil Marcus said that even the "merely superb" passages of that book read like "intellectual sunrises," calling the work "intoxicated...