The Lou Reed album his family hates

Lou Reed : Think It Over

[Purchase]

In April of 1980, the newly-married Lou Reed released Growing Up in Public and some members of his family never quite got over it.  Before we get knee deep in the hoopla, as one famous band put it, let's take a moment to consider "Think It Over", one of Sweet Lou's sweetest songs. Written specifically for Sylvia Morales whom he married on Valentine's Day, this is a proposal in song.

 Of course even a Lou Reed love song is going to have a little edge. She responds 

"And we really must watch what we say /

Because when you ask for someone's heart /

You must know that you're smart/ 

Smart enough to care for it."

Sylvia encouraged Lou to clean up his act so the recording of this album, at George Martin's AIR Studios on the island of Montserrat became one big goodbye party to his old ways. On hand there weren't so many drugs as alcohol. Mai tais were the cocktails of choice.

The alcohol inspired the only light hearted song on the album. Had I known about "The Power of Positive Drinking" in college in New Orleans, I would have definitely added it to my radio show playlist:

They say, candy is dandy but liquor makes quipsters /

And I don't like mixers, or sippers or sob sisters

Rolling Stone's Mikal Gilmore wrote :

On its most immediate level, the new record is a polished package of bombastic rock and  roll — indeed, probably Reed’s best commercial shot since his 1974 Top Ten anomaly, Sally Can’t Dance. 

False. It was not a hit. Growing Up was his lowest charting album outside Metal Machine Music and the debut. And then there is the rest of the album, filled with mostly bitter lyrics about his parents. I mean, Lou just got ugly.

The opening track,"How Do You Speak To An Angel", has such a happy, upbeat intro you half expect a muppet to start singing . Instead, it's Lou opening with:

A son who is cursed with a harridan mother 

Or a weak simpering father at best 

Is raised to play out the timeless classical motives 

Of filial love and incest

He's not done. In the next song, "My Old Man", he sings:

I didn't want to be like my father anymore 
I was sick of his bullying 
And having to hide under a desk on the floor 
And when he beat my mother 
It made me so mad I could choke

In "Standing On Ceremony", Lou sings about his dead mother.

Reed would admit his father never beat his mother who was very much alive. But these hostile lyrics --which sounded so autobiographical --upset everyone in his family. After Lou's death in 2013 his sister Merrill would write :

The stories (Lou) related  – of being hit, of being treated like an inanimate object  – seemed total fantasy to me. I must say that I never saw my father raise a hand to anyone, certainly not to us and never to my mother. Nor did I see a lack of love for his son during our childhood. Like his son, my father could be a verbal bully but he was loving and inordinately proud of Lou and bragged about him in later life to anyone who would listen.

Lester Bangs Top 10 Albums of 1979

Lester Bangs : Let It Blurt

[Purchase]

In 1979 rock critic Lester Bangs released a single he recorded in 1977 with Jay Dee Daugherty of the Patti Smith Group, Robert Quine of Richard Hell and the Voidoids and two members of the Contortions. It's too derivative of the Richard Hell sound for me to take too seriously.

Here are his Top 10 albums of 1979 according to a list he made for the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics Poll. It's odd to see Wavelength top his list because his Rolling Stone review for the Van Morrison album was hardly a rave :

Wavelength is a very nice record. I’m sure all the people at Warner Bros. are pleased with it. Ditto the DJs. It probably would also be really groovy for somebody’s idea of a wine-and-joints, Renaissance-fair garden party. It makes a lovely sound, breaks no rules and keeps its grimy snout (or, rather, that of its maker) out of the dark places that mainstreams step correctly over. Rigid. The singer has a nifty little band here, what with Bobby Tench, Peter Bardens from the original Them and even great googamoogah Garth Hudson sittin’ in on various instruments. Well, take me back to Orpheus!

Van Morrison: Into the Music (Warner Bros.) 25; 
Marianne Faithfull: Broken English (Island) 20;
 The Clash (Epic) 20;
 Talking Heads: Fear of Music (Sire) 5;

"The closer you get to whatever it is you’re terrified of, the more it and the dread of it begin to seem like old friends, ergo you become progressively less terrified. As a second Dark Ages seems to loom over us, David Byrne strolls right down its maw, placid and bemused, humming little tunes to himself. Sometimes I think Fear of Music is one of the best comedy albums I’ve ever heard. Which doesn’t mean he makes you forget the fear is real. He just reminds you that it’s something you’re going to have to live with, so you might as well get a kick out of it while you can."


 Lou Reed: The Bells (Arista) 5;

Lou Reed is a prick and a jerkoff who regularly commits the ultimate sin of treating his audience with contempt. He’s also a person with deep compassion for a great many other people about whom almost nobody else gives a shit. I won’t say who they are, because I don’t want to get too schmaltzy, except to emphasize that there’s always been more to this than drugs and fashionable kinks, and to point out that suffering, loneliness and psychic/spiritual exile are great levelers. The Bells isn’t merely Lou Reed’s best solo LP, it’s great art.


 Neil Young + Crazy Horse: Live Rust (Warner Bros.) 5;
 Charles Mingus: Mingus at Antibes (Atlantic) 5; 

Miles Davis: Circle in the Round (Columbia) 5;
 Heartbreakers: Live at Max's Kansas City (Max's Kansas City) 5;
 Patti Smith Group: Wave (Arista) 5.

Sez one fan:
 My one enduring memory of (Lester Bangs) is from a New York Rocker Christmas party (1979) that took place in some squat on the lower, lower east side. I heard PIL's Metal Box blasting from one of the rooms, and there was Lester, doing some insane bat dance to the music. Everyone was just watching as he spun around with whatever girlfriend he was with at the time. I mean, how in the hell do you dance to a song like "Poptones"?

To Play Without a Paracute

Lou Reed : The Bells

[Purchase]

In April of 1979, Lou Reed released The Bells, an album that "dropped into a dark well" as Reed himself said. I'm only listening to it for the first time this month, egged on by an ecstatic contemporaneous review by Lester Bangs in his last ever for Rolling Stone:

The Bells isn’t merely Lou Reed’s best solo LP, it’s great art. Everybody made a fuss over Street Hassle, but too many reviewers overlooked the fact that it was basically a sound album: brilliant layers of live and studio work in a deep wash of bass-obsessive noise. Most of the songs were old, and not very good, with a lot of the same old cheap shots...all through (The Bells), Reed plays the best guitar anyone’s heard from him in ages. As for the lyrics — well, people tend to forget that in numbers like “Candy Says,” “Sunday Morning” and “Oh! Sweet Nothing,” Lou Reed wrote some of the most compassionate songs ever recorded.

I'm now halfway through the album and I'm not hearing the brilliance Lester Bangs is celebrating. In fact, I've never heard Reed sing like this. So hyper on some of these tracks.  He sounds like the comedian John Mulvaney imitating himself as a kid.

The Bells is a strange collection with three songs written in a short partnership with Crazy Horse's Nils Lofgren ("City Lights", "Stupid Man", "With You") who did not play on the album. Jazz trumpeter Don Cherry joined the sessions and can be heard on the nine minute title track, one of Reed's all time favorite recordings. What is it about? Reed said the lyrics came as he sang them and every time he hears "The Bells" it means something different. 

Another notable track is "Disco Mystic", which Bangs thought should have been a hit. Arista Records' Clive Davis didn't hear a single. The label didn't support the album, which peaked at 130 on Billboard's Top 200 Album chart. Reed would release only one album for Arista  before he'd have to go label shopping again. 

On the bright side, Reed was living in Blairstown New Jersey outside the city and reportedly weaning himself off of drugs. He and Sylvia Morales had an 18 acre wooded property where Reed would shoot baskets and snack on fruits and nuts.

"I really love it. It smells great. Even if you wanted to do something there's nothing here. It's appalling how much sleep I get."

In 1980 Lou and Sylvia would get married.

O.K., I've listened to the whole album and I think the best cut is "Families", which sounds like an honest assessment of his relationship with his mom, dad and kid sister. They apparently weren't all that happy with the song.

Who D'Ya Think I Am, Henny Youngman ?

Lou Reed : Sweet Jane

[Purchase]

In November of 1978 Lou Reed released the double live album Take No Prisoners. Recorded in May of 1978 at New York's Bottom Line in front of a hometown crowd, Reed spends the album breaking up his songs with quips like "Are you political, Lou? Political about what? Give me an issue and I'll give you a tissue. You can wipe my ass with it."  He also insults the audience, Patti Smith, Robert Christgau, and Barbara Streisand.

 Many are the diversions so you get an 11-minute version of "Sweet Jane",  a 14-minute version of "I'm Waiting For My Man", and a 17 minute version of "Walk On the Wild Side". Some people say it's a serious candidate for the worst live album of all time. But it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than Metal Machine Music.

By the way, Christgau got revenge by giving the album a C+ review, writing:

Partly because your humble servant is attacked by name (along with John Rockwell) on what is essentially a comedy record, a few colleagues have rushed in with Don Rickles analogies, but that's not fair. Lenny Bruce is the obvious influence. Me, I don't play my greatest comedy albums, not even the real Lenny Bruce ones, as much as I do Rock n Roll Animal. I've heard Lou do two very different concerts during his Arista period that I'd love to check out again--Palladium November '76 and Bottom Line May '77. I'm sorry this isn't either. And I thank Lou for pronouncing my name right.

Queen For a Day

Lou Reed : Street Hassle

[Purchase]

In February of 1978, Lou Reed released his first album for Arista, Street Hassle. It came out as Reed was being celebrated as the godfather of punk, and around the time he told Lenny Kaye he was putting the life he shared with his transsexual lover, Rachel, behind him.

"No more bullshit, dyed hair, faggot junkie trip," is the line he uttered, quoted in Anthony DeCurtis's biography.

The repudiation shows up in the very first song on the album, "Gimmie Some Good Times", where Reed the artist (performing "Sweet Jane") is confronted by Reed the fan:

Hey, if that ain't the rock'n'roll animal himself, what you doing bro. 

(Standing on the corner) 

Well, I can see that, what you got in your hand

 (Suitcase in my hand) 

No, shit, what's this 

(Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest)  

Fucking faggot Johnson 

(Jack, sweet Jane, I'm in a rock'n'roll band)  

Well, I can see that 

Despite its one time five star rating in the second edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, multiple listenings have convinced me this is not the great return to form that it's reputed to be. We all wanted to believe the Rolling Stone magazine review, declaring Street Hassle “a stunning incandescent triumph”. Or, as Mikal Gilmore called the album in a 1979 Rolling Stone article,  "a jolting statement of self affirmation. But Robert Christgau was probably being kind with his B+ rating when he wrote 

 I know Lou worked his ass off on this one, but he worked his ass off on Berlin, too--like so many of his contemporaries, maybe he's better off not aiming for masterpieces. The title sequence honors Eros as much as Thanatos, a heartening development, and I'm a belated convert to "I Wanna Be Black," which treats racism as a stupid joke and gets away with it. But the production is muddled and the self-consciousness self-serving. 

  

40 years later, it is the 11 minute title cut that stands the test of time. Lou Reed once described it as an answer to the question "What would happen if Raymond Chandler wrote a rock 'n' roll song?"

The song is broken up in three spoken word parts, including a harrowing tale of a drug overdose, welded together by a beautiful string section engineer Rod O'Brien singled out from the session. With Reed in the room, O'Brien built the song.

In his article for Uncut Magazine on the making if Street Hassle, Damien Love quotes O'Brien :

“We sat there working on it then for two-and-a-half, three days. And then Lou discovered that I had kept all three of his vocal pieces. And he’s like: ‘Oh, that’s fantastic. Okay. Let’s do it in this order. No, no, let’s move this bit to here…’ And so we had to figure it out, how to get from the acapella of the girls, to the bass riff, how to make all these sections and stories come together. And in those days, there was no computer, you literally had to cut tape, put it together, cross-fade it with two machines and then…‘Ah, nah, that’s not working.’ And then try it again. It was two-and-a-half or three days of this kind of stuff, where we just kept trying to make things gel and flow. And I think it came out pretty good. It was pretty bizarre. And at the very end of it, Lou paid me a very nice compliment. He said, ‘Y’know, you wrote this song as much as I did.’”

The third section ,"Slipaway", features an Bruce Springsteen reading the line "tramps like us, we were born to pay". Springsteen has been in another studio at The Record Plant, working on Darkness on the Edge of Town. Reed wanted to make sure it was okay with Springsteen that he use the line and then just asked Springsteen to read it. Springsteen agreed, as long as he wouldn't be credited. He'd had enough of lawyers to last a lifetime.

The most important lines of the song reference Rachel:

Love has gone away
And there's no one here now
And there's nothing left to say
But oh how I miss him, baby ...
Took the rings off my fingers
And there's nothing left to say


"That person really did exist," Reed would say later. "He did take the rings right off my fingers, and I do miss him".

40 Year Itch : I Guess I'm Just Dumb

Lou Reed : Rock and Roll Heart

[Purchase]

One of 1976's most disappointing albums has to be Lou Reed's first recording for Clive Davis's Arista Records. And wouldn't you know the critics pounced. Nick Kent of New Musical Express wrote "Certainly don't bother with this record unless, that is, you're the kind of person that gets off on watching paint dry. Come to think of it, Rock and Roll Heart would make the perfect background music for that."

Reed said he had a great tune making the record, on which he played an electric guitar for the first time since the Velvet Underground broke up: "On other albums I let other people do what they liked; this time I got serious and played what I liked. Every track. There's lots of dumb rock-and-roll songs on it, but then I like dumb rock and roll. It's very hard to find a dumb guitar player and a dumb piano player, everyone's so much into being technically together. But I fit the bill because I play very stupid."

40 Year Itch : Those Suit and Tie Johns

Lou Reed : Crazy Feeling

[Purchase]

   After sleepwalking through the recording of his only Top 10 album, Sally Can't Dance, and then giving the world the finger with Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed was in trouble. He owed RCA $600,000. He was in the middle of three lawsuits. He was now entering his fourth year of abusing amphetamines.  He had lost a lot of weight and was often losing his temper. Lou Reed was not just the smartest guy in the room, but the biggest prick as well. 

   If there was a bright spot in his life, it came in the form of a tall, exotic, half Mexican drag queen named Rachel. She would be his muse, his nurse, his companion and, yes, his lover throughout these difficult years. He would dedicate the title cut of his next album to her. 

    Owing RCA a commercial album, Lou moved into the Gramercy Park Hotel with Rachel.He played monopoly, listened to Richard Pryor records and wrote some of the warmest songs of his career. Recorded over a four day stretch with ex Velvet bandmate Doug Yule, and with a slower version of the VU tune "She's My Best Friend", Coney Island Baby is Lou's album of renewal:

"All the albums I put out after this are gonna be the things I want to put out," Lou said. "No more bullshit, no more dyed-hair, faggot-junkie trip. I mimic me better than anyone else, so if everyone else is making money ripping me off , I figure I better get on it. Why not? I created Lou Reed. I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy but I can play him well--really well."

   Critically acclaimed, Coney Island Baby sold well. And yet, Lou would soon owe RCA $700,000. That's when Clive Davis and Arista came calling. By now Lou and Rachel were living in the same Upper East side apartment building as Greta Garbo and Lou could be seen walking his miniature dachshund, The Baron.

40 Year Itch: Rock's Greatest F-U

Still from Criminally Insane ( 1975)



[Purchase]

"As a statement it's great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity—a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless." 

                                   ~Lester Bangs

 Released in July of 1975, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music consists of four sides of ear-splitting guitar feedback. Was it a joke? A fuck you to everyone? The result of some kind of record company dispute? Or Lou Reed's response to getting caught up in the "star maker machinery behind the popular song"?

I think we'll go with the "fuck you". 

Reed himself said: 

It was a giant fuck you. I put out Metal Machine Music out to clear the air and get rid of all the fucking assholes who show up at the gigs and yell for "Vicious" and "Walk on the Wild Side". 

Despite all the intellectual suggestions that the album anticipated industrial music, noise rock,  and the punk attitude ( Creem Magazine readers voted Lou "Punk of theYear" in 1975) MMM is unlistenable. Still, thanks probably to its awesome cover and curiosity, it sold 100,000 copies. Reed was unapologetic.

I don't care of they paid $59.98 or $75 for it, they should be grateful I put the fucking thing out and, if they don't like it, they should go eat rat-shit.

The album nearly ended Lou Reed's career. But a year later, Coney Island Baby was climbing the charts and Metal Machine Music was becoming a collector's item. A quadrophonic copy of the album is currently on EBay priced at $129.98.

In a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, Reed said

I shouldn't be here, man, not after Metal Machine Music. Nobody is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive. 

40 Year Itch : Some Kind Of Gay Blade

[Purchase]

   To take advantage of the shocking success of Sally Can't Dance, RCA Records released Lou Reed Live in March of 1975. Made up of left-overs from the same concert that makes Rock'n'Roll Animal one of the essential live albums in rock history, it's really just a footnote. More of the same.

  

      But RCA's gesture would be met with something truly terrifying come July: the tuneless--and truly vicious-- noise-a-thon Metal Machine Music.

40 Year Itch : One Minute Born, One Minute Doomed

[Purchase]

“Rock’n’roll people tend to live on the edge. That’s what this album is all about. Rock’n’roll has always been and still is one of the few honest things left in this world. That’s what this album is about … I hope parents will still get scared when they find their daughter listening to this music.” - Elliott Murphy in the liner notes to 1969 Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed 

   It may have been released by Mercury Records to cash in on Lou Reed's success, but damn the motivations! We got ourselves a live Velvet Underground album, recorded during a 70 date tour in support of "the quiet album". The album is a recording taken from two shows. The rougher sounding tracks were recorded by a fan at a Dallas show. The better sounding tracks were recorded in-house at The Matrix in San Francisco. You can't hear the audience in either case so there's no telling how many people attended these shows. Also, the album jumps back in forth between shows so you never get the sonic feeling you're attending one concert. 

gatefold with liner notes by Elliott Murphy

   But there are some amazing moments caught on tape. "What Goes On" runs nearly twice as long as the studio version, with Lou Reed battering his rhythm guitar until every muscle ached. That's followed by a lovely version of "Sweet Jane", the one the Cowboy Junkies covered. Not a surprise because , for a lot of fans, this was the only VU album they could find in stores. The other albums went out of print.

One more point about the Dallas show before I leave room for someone who was actually there. It begins with Lou Reed making small talk about the Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles game. The Cowboys won 49-14. "It was ridiculous. You should give our people just a little chance." he says before blasting into "I'm Waiting for My Man" ( as he introduced it)

I just never thought Lou watched football for some reason.

A member of the Rate Your Music community who goes by the name wrayb  says he was at the Dalla performance:

The crowd was small but respectably large on Thursday, big on Friday, the place was jammed on Saturday. Then surprisingly Sunday night I think there were only a handful there who were not directly connected to the staff of the club.

   The club was located in a small strip mall. The performance space seemed to be made of what once were two store fronts, still divided in half by the two by four wall studs. I remember the audience being only a few people who stayed over by the door and a small but noisy group of four to six people who chose to be in the back section, behind the "wall." I and one or two other die hard fans were in the front section. The floor was carpeted, no tables or chairs, with sofa cushions and large odd shaped pillows scattered about. I gathered some up into a little sofa bed of my own and lay back. One amazed 18 year old kid watching a virtually private performance. It seemed that that the older group (twenties as opposed to teens) in the back section were connected to the club. Perhaps the owner and his buddies, male and female.

    Lou's comments about the football game were meaningless to me but I guess he had had little to do that Sunday afternoon except watch tv at the hotel. When Lou commented on the next day being a school day and laid out the option I was puzzled: which would result in the most music? My voice finally joined the responses asking for one long one.

OK, that's my little story. The music is so imprinted on my DNA I have a hard time summarizing it or describing it. From that night I vividly remember small details such as the interplay between Lou and other members of the group. Lou's directing Moe on the pace of the beat. His seeming to be overly enamoured of Doug Yule's contribution to the performance. ( *during band introductions he calls Yule his brother).

    I think Yule and Morrison shared bass duties, changing at least once when Yule playing some slide guitar. Yule played organ when needed. There were times when it was three roaring guitars and Tucker's pounding on the drums.

40 Year Itch: Two-Bit Psychiatrists and Electro Shock

[Purchase]

   Lou Reed was firmly caught up in the rock 'n roll machine by the time Sally Can't Dance, his highest charting album, was released in August of 1974. Launched into stardom by the Bowie-produced Transformer, Reed then released the concept album Berlin , followed by a tremendous live recording, Rock 'n Roll Animal. 

Compounding the hectic schedule ( all but "Kill Your Sons" were written in a single month) was Reed's own all-consuming heroin addiction.

Former Blood Sweat and Tears guitarist Steve Katz produced the album. He recalls:

As an artist Lou not totally there...He had to be propped up like a baby, with things done for him and around him . Clearly, this was the situation he wanted. The drugs were becoming just too much for me to deal with. 

Late on he started giving out interviews claiming he was 'surrounded by schlock artists'. Not so...He simply refused to be there. Most of the time he was in the bathroom shooting up. 

Not the kind of thing Reed admitted to openly, telling the Australian press "I don't take drugs. I want people to take drugs".

    40 years later, Sally Can't Dance sounds like an album for which Lou Reed has been miscast. This might have been a good album for Alice Cooper, but there are few highlights for Reed. The ten year old, autobiographical rocker,  "Kill Your Sons", is the best thing on Sally Can't Dance but I have a soft spot for a few other tunes including "Baby Face" which probably gives us some insight into Reed's drug issues and relationships with transsexuals.

Famed rock poster illustrator David Byrd did the cover:

   The most that I can remember about doing this album is that I met with Lou Reed at The Ninth Circle, an old gay bar on Christopher Street where Edward Albee drank, as well as my very own self. He brought a shoebox filled with SX-70 Polaroids of various drags and transexuals in all forms of undress, some even tightly swathed in Saran Wrap. One of these was Sally, who can't dance. I put her face reflected in a close-up of his sunglasses on the back of the album. He was a handsome man, in a damaged sort of way. 

 When the album hit top 10, Reed--who was touring Europe during the final mixes-- dismissed it, saying ,

 "It seems like the less I'm involved with a record, the bigger a hit it becomes. If I weren't on the record at all next time around, it might go to Number One." 

RCA would churn out another live collection before Lou Reed would have his revenge: 1975's Metal Machine Music.

40 Year Itch : Lou Reed in Paris

   On May 25, 1974 Lou Reed performed at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. He'd just finished recording his fourth solo album Sally Can't Dance at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios before starting this European Tour. With bleached blond hair, the skinny as a rail Lou is barely recognizable.

40 Year Itch: The Who Summer of 74 Fest

"Charlton was very disappointing , because when we went out the first thing I felt in the air was violence . It was like a feeling of something not quite right . I dunno what it was but I felt very uneasy for some time . The only way I could get myself together was by shutting out the audience and working with the group "
-Pete Townshend

On May 18, 1974 The Who played before a sold out crowd of 50,000 fans at Charlton Athletic F.C. Despite the bill, the opening acts were Humble Pie, a bleached blond Lou Reed, Bad Company ( whose debut album would come out in a few weeks), Lindisfarne, Maggie Bell  and Montrose. 

There was an ugly period in the 70's when people threw glass bottles at shows. (50 people had been hurt at a Jackson 5 concert at RFK Stadium the week before) There are reports of bottles and cans being thrown at this concert but no performers were hit. Just unlucky members of the audience. 

For more memories of Charlton '74 click this link

40 Year Itch: Animal Lou

[Purchase]

Rock 'n'Roll Animal, what a degrading thing that was

-Lou Reed

Rock 'n'Roll Animal is Lou Reed making good on a promise. He promised RCA he'd made a commercial album after Berlin bombed. The public's disinterest in that 1973 concept album must have hurt. But by the same token, Lou had a hit record under his belt ( "Walk on the Wild Side") so what better time to show the world where he started. Four of the five songs on Rock n Roll Animal are Velvet Underground tunes --as played by a polished hard rock band led by two smokin' guitar gods : Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter who would soon be playing with Alice Cooper.

This live album  and 1975's Lou Reed Live were recorded on December 21, 1973 at Howard Stein's Academy of  Music in New York. Reed performed with swagger even though his singing remained as wooden as ever.

Reviews were mostly good but very, very strange.

Rolling Stone wrote 

Rock n Roll Animal is much less claustrophobic and oppressive than Berlin, but many people will probably loathe it anyway. Faggots, junkies and sadists are not very pleasant, but theirs are the sensibilities Reed draws upon. His songs offer little hope. Nothing changes, nothing gets better 

For NME future Pretender Chrissie Hynde wrote

 He looks like a monkey on a chain, court geek. Listen to him scramble to a corner, damaged and grotesque, huddled in rodent terror. Animal Lou. Lashing out in a way that could make the current S and M trend freeze in its shallow tracks. And the audience cheers after every song: we’re with you, yeah, we always loved those songs, ha ha. Well…he hates you.

But the review that probably hit Lou hardest was from his former Velvets band mate John Cale who was hardly impressed.

He thinks that by sticking to his guns, he'll succeed and he has. He's got the whole sickness market tied up. 

In tours that would soon follow, Reed would pretend to shoot up during "Heroin". The two disc, all-noise "fuck you'"onslaught of Metal Machine Music was just a year away.

Goodbye Lou!

Short of words at the moment , I offer pictures and music in memory of Lou Reed.

40 Year Itch : I Am No Waterboy

[Purchase]

When Lou Reed followed up his commercially successful 1972 album Transformer with Berlin, some critics thought he was committing some kind of commercial seppuku. Writing for Rolling Stone, Stephen Davis called the album a disaster:

There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them. Reed's only excuse for this kind of performance (which isn't really performed as much as spoken and shouted over Bob Ezrin's limp production) can only be that this was his last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou. 

40 years later that same publication ranks Berlin #344 of the Top 500 greatest albums of all time.

the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide describes the album as "grandiose, decadent", and finally "one of the most depressing records ever made, and oddly beautiful in its own awful way."

I think the earlier review is closer to the mark. 

Lou Reed recorded with one of the most exciting rock artists of his time: David Bowie. And what was his take-away? To make a depressing album of cabaret tunes that form a song cycle about a doomed couple that wallow their miserable way into prostitution and suicide.

OK, you may argue, this is capital "A" Art. Then why is Reed taking two songs from his Velvet Underground days (Oh Jim and Carolina Says (II))? And just in case you want to immerse yourself in a quiet pity party, there's two minutes of screaming and crying infants in "The Kids". A portent ( like the first 15 seconds of the album) of Metal Machine Music.

    The funny thing: I actually like the way Lou reinvented some of these songs for his live tour --witness Rock 'n' Roll Animal and  Lou Reed Live ( both recorded December 21st, 1973).

And yes, the Waterboys got their name from this album.