Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse

We Say...

Review by Billy Altman

While up to that point he'd been one of the most critically admired artists in all of rock, ex-Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed took quite a beating from reviewers when, in 1973, he followed up his surprise hit album Transformer (and its Top Twenty single "Walk on the Wild Side") with Berlin, a conceptual work that shocked and angered even his staunchest supporters. Loosely built around an overall theme of decadence, with bleak songs exploring everything from drug and sex addictions to sadomasochism and suicide, and produced by Bob Ezrin in the overblown Grand Guignol fashion that he'd later use to much better effect on Pink Floyd's The Wall, Berlin seemed at the time mostly a vengeful act by Reed designed to take novice "Wild Side" fans and rub their noses in "real" life.

In retrospect, of course, and given his periodic acts of creative and commercial self-trashing over the ensuing decades (Metal Machine Music, anyone?), Berlin may have had more to do with Reed exorcising his own demons than ours. In any event, one of the great surprises of listening to Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse, a staging of the entire album recorded (and also filmed as a documentary by director Julian Schnabel) in 2006, is realizing just how embedded these strange songs have remained in one's consciousness. Deftly accompanied by an eclectic group of musicians including a string section, choir (the Brooklyn Youth Chorus) and, most notably, original Berlin guitarist Steve Hunter, Reed revisits the material with inspired new perspectives. "Oh Jim," for example, sheds its faux-soul shroud for a frisky guitar boogie shuffle, while "The Kids" hones in on the (admittedly cracked) folk flavor of this bizarre lament for a supposedly unfit mother (unfit because of her voraciously bisexual appetites, that is). Throw in encores of the old Velvets classics "Candy Says" and "Sweet Jane," as well as 2000's brilliantly perverse "Rock Minuet," and you've got quite a portrait of the artist as a sick puppy named Lou Reed.