Icon: Lou Reed
Being Lou Reed all the time can’t be easy. Especially when Lou Reed is, despite his fixed legend as the glowering poetic soul of the New York rock underbelly, a mighty changeable man. Not just as in celebrating “coming out of our closets” on his breakthrough album (1972′s Transformer) only to turn around a decade later and insist that he’s never been able to keep his hands off women (1982′s The Blue Mask), but as in being both ahead of the curve (with the Velvet Underground) and eagerly following it (1974′s Sally Can’t Dance) – and going from a pop hit (’72′s “Walk on the Wild Side”) to a decadent, near-gothic rock opera (1973′s Berlin) to sheets of feedback (1975′s still-infamous Metal Machine Music) all within a few years – and then going on to craft some of the most nuanced middle-aged rock ever (Mask). All the while his dry, sometimes sour wit and surprisingly lovely melodies have made all of it, even the really weird stuff, surprisingly durable – and all of a piece, even when he’s making industrial and/or new age noise.
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A.K.A. Lou Swoons. This is the prettiest of his many solo albums maybe his prettiest, period, The Velvet Underground is as lovely overall. Transformer also contains a bona fide hit, the ultra-classic "Walk on the Wild Side," a song that commingles the Velvets' demimonde (it's a lyrical tribute to a handful of Warhol "superstars" that were regulars at Andy's Factory around the same time he was "managing" the Velvets) and Reed's roots (it's a musical tribute to the jazz and doo-wop he grew up on) so flatly it seems even more inevitable in retrospect. What wasn't is the fact that, thanks to Herbie Flowers' iconic bass swoop, it went to No. 16 in the U.S. and acted as a guiding light for a lot of small-town kids who wanted to escape to New York. The rest of Transformer is a primer on what to expect when they got there. "Make Up," featuring a beaut of a tuba line from Flowers, who sounds like he's been listening to Sgt. Pepper even if Lou wasn't, was a readymade gay-lib anthem: "We're coming out/Out of our closets/Out on the streets." "Satellite of Love," which would become one of Reed's enduring songs, confronts a wayward lover: "I've been told that you've been bold with Harry, Mark, and John." No one said that the big city would be easy.
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Berlin was widely reviled at the time of its 1973 release: infamously, Rolling Stone's review of the album ended by calling it "his last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou." Ouch. Yet three decades on, it stands as one of Reed's signature work and it's easy to understand why. It isn't simply that Berlin is a rock opera the same way the Who's Tommy was albeit a really depressing one, as befits the story of a couple slowly self-destructing in a morass of dope, reckless sex, suicide and, in the grueling "The Kids," the children being taken away. It's that its overt theatricality (the show horns on "Oh Jim," the swooping orchestration on "Caroline Says I" and "Lady Day," the way "Men of Good Fortune" stomps like glam-rock gone off-Broadway) helps it hang together and work as a parable, and its fingerprints are on such latter-day punk-musical landmarks as John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the demented cabaret of Kiki & Herb. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that Berlin was issued at the same time as Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Show was first staged in London, either; both made a heavy footprint on what would become known as goth as well.
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ere's one of those rare instances of a bonus-packed reissue not simply making the case for the original album, but enhancing it in fact, making it better with the extra material. Released in 1976, Coney Island Baby was a hard left turn from its predecessor, 1975's controversial (and hilarious!) Metal Machine Music, in that it featured some of Reed's most tender moments particularly the stirring title track, which built from a monologue featuring Reed mumbling his regrets about having "wanted to play football for the coach" (i.e. to just fit in somehow) to a stirring meditation on "the glory of love" and a dedication to his then-squeeze Rachel. The music was slicker and (relatively) funkier than usual, another U-turn, but given how acid many of Reed's lyrics were, that was something of a relief. But the six cuts added to the 30th anniversary edition of the album expose what could have been: a rangier, looser, more raucous affair, with versions of "Crazy Feeling," "She's My Best Friend," and "Coney Island Baby" that rock harder, straighter, and more un-self-consciously than even the not terribly inhibited originals. The other bonuses add even more dimension: "Nowhere at All," a B-side, looks back to the flashy, scabrous guitar of '74's live Rock 'n' Roll Animal, while "Downtown Dirt," which showed up later on '78's Street Hassle as "Dirt," features a quiet, stinging arrangement and some of Reed's quietly vituperative singing he overloads the mike on the word "dirt" a few times, giving it and the rest of the expanded Coney Island Baby an edge even more unsettling than usual.
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All of a sudden Lou Reed was middle-aged. He'd gotten married, had a house, was feeling both the weight of his past and lifted from being mired in it. He was happy, but not content and that combination means The Blue Mask felt utterly unlike anything else he'd ever recorded before. It's an album about accepting your own limits, from realizing that blackout drinking isn't working anymore ("Underneath the Bottle," with its perfectly timed "Ooh-ooh-wee son of a B!") to the helplessness of being held up at gunpoint (the tense "The Gun"). The closest thing it has to an anthem is "Average Guy": "Average looks, average tastes/Average height, an average waist/Average in everything I do/My temperature is 98.2." It's not a celebratory album not with a centerpiece like "Waves of Fear," which Reed snarls like he's running a fever and someone won't stop buzzing his door, or one like the title cut, with its lines about castration but such plainspoken-ness is one reason it's so powerful. And if "Women" ("I couldn't keep my hands off women/And I won't till I die") is a strange line in the sand from the man who brought transvestites to Top 40 radio just ten years earlier, Fernando Saunders' bass makes it hard to resist anyway.
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Once punk had reared its head and Lou's old neighborhood, too and he'd answered back with 1978's Street Hassle, Reed tried something a little less rough-and-ready. The Bells, from 1979, is all-over-the-place musically: it even features a largely instrumental cut titled "Disco Mystic" that isn't a joke. (For its opposite number, skip to the next year's Growing Up in Public and hear "So Alone," with its vicious four-on-the-floor parody.) Neither is the one called "I Want to Boogie with You," though that one is far more of a throwback doo-wop number smothered in sax. "The Bells" itself began as a one-take vocal improvisation that he wound up loving so much he kept it intact, and highlighting on three subsequent career overviews a 10-minute swirl of a track that also features Reed playing guitar synth and trumpeter Don Cherry (part of the '50s Ornette Coleman quartet Reed worshipped, rightfully, as a teenager) blowing freely on. The Bells balances Reed's ambitious side and his throwaway side with ease.
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Anyone who'd heard Transformer or Berlin knew Lou Reed had a flair for the dramatic. Anyone who'd heard the Velvet Underground was aware that he'd helped alter the vocabulary of rock and roll guitar without playing it overly flashy. But chops sold, then as now, and Reed desired something more than cult stardom. So live, he began to really put on a show tying off with a mike cord and pretending to shoot up with a microphone, a move that was precisely as controversial as it sounds. Or looked, anyway because you can't actually hear him do that during the 13-minute version of "Heroin" that anchors this 1974 flash-guitar in-concert fiesta. Released the same year as 1969 Velvet Underground Live, it's a study in contrasts with that double-LP: Rock N Roll Animal emphasizes the (often unison) leads by guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, Ray Colcord's show-stopping organ, and splashy arrangements rather than the grinding unity of the Velvets, and the fidelity is crystal-clear, as opposed to 1969's mud-fi. But Animal holds its own with any live rock album from the era, including the VU's. The secret is that for all their showboating, Hunter and Wagner sound like they love "Sweet Jane" or "Rock and Roll" as much as Reed does and it's contagious.
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Anyone who's heard even the mildest of noise albums made during the '90s or '00s is long past being scandalized by Metal Machine Music. In fact, as many people have already written, its dual guitar feedback, pulsing and oscillating at different speeds, has come to seem much more obviously musical in the wake of the likes of Merzbow and Wolf Eyes. Does that make it especially soothing? Not really: even at very low volume in the background, MMM is still an assault, the vibrating strings crossing paths with each other too haphazardly to settle into a pattern. But listenable it definitely is surprisingly so, at least when you're in the mood.
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Wow Lou Reed made an album that sounded like this? Well, 1974 was a weird time. So weird that this wildly arranged, horn-laced mlange went Top 10 and still sounds bracing today. Some Reed nuts hate it it's often cited among his worst solo recordings but today it sounds like a remarkably vivid snapshot of big band rock & roll circa 1974, albeit the kind featuring a song like "Animal Language," in which woodland creatures shoot up human sweat. (Two years too late for the Fritz the Cat soundtrack, alas.) Closer to Reed's home base is "Billy," a fond remembrance of a childhood friend set to acoustic guitar and sax.
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The middle album of Reed's early-'80s domestic trilogy is the homiest. 1983's Legendary Hearts is far more workaday than its predecessor, The Blue Mask--most albums are, to be fair but it's the workaday as glimpsed through a steely eye and unheld tongue. The highlights are "The Last Shot," a no-joke variation on Mask's "Underneath the Bottle" ("When you quit, you quit/But you always wish/That you know it was your last shot"), and the unblinking "Betrayed": "Quick she turns and slaps my face/And with her eyes open wide she screams/'I hate you, I hate you, I hate you'/But she's looking right past me."
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In which Lou Reed meets his New York anti-doppelganger, Patrick Bateman, in a Totally '80s sweepstakes that's been largely lost to history. In truth, though, it's kind of a kick to hear Reed battling it out with a wall of processed guitar, beer-commercial saxophone, and gated-to-death drum machines: if nothing else, it proves how adaptable this hard-headed man often was. Mistrial isn't just a time capsule for how it sounds, either: "This is the age of video violence," he bemoans in one chorus before railing against televangelists, and in another song's verse he tells us that "Outside reflects the worst of styles." But he still has some fun with "Mama's Got a Lover" who's "into dirty rotten essence of urban decay." Sounds familiar.
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From 1976, Reed's most straight-up commercial album yet probably ever. The hooks on Rock and Roll Heart come surprisingly easy, though the opening "I Believe in Love" equates "good-time music" and "the Iron Cross" as perversely as anything in Reed's catalog, as is the whole of "A Sheltered Life" (yeah, right), and when he yammers, "You've got style and grace" on "You wear it so well," it's clearly not something he's accustomed to saying so baldly. But the music is both varied and assured: the brisk, jagged "Follow the Leader" is a surprising stab at Latin rhythm, and "Chooser and the Chosen One" is a jazz-tinged instrumental.
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No one much liked Reed's 1980 album at the time even uber-fan Lester Bangs didn't have anything good to say about it. But time has been kinder to it than anyone thought, for the simple reason that it's one of Reed's funniest. Sometimes the jokes misfire, as when he finishes "Smiles" with the famous "doot-doot-doot"s from "Walk on the Wild Side." But the vicious disco parody that horns in on the singles-bar snarl "So Alone" is impressively sour, as is the self-explanatory "The Power of Positive Drinking" ("Some people think alcohol makes you less lucid/And I think that's true if you're kind of stupid").
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In which Reed takes the best band he had as a solo artist Robert Quine on guitar, Fred Maher on drums, Fernando Saunders on bass to Verona and Rome in September 1983 and they all have a real raucous time together. Reed's voice will never be pretty, but his roar is present and full of conviction, and while Quine's shredding guitar is less present than on 1982's The Blue Mask, he and Reed build a cunning wall of noise: see especially "White Light/White Heat." Most of the '70s Reed songs here beat the LP versions handily (though not "Walk on the Wild Side"), and the VU reworks kick their own kind of ass.
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Lou Reed was always in some sense fighting with his audience for the first 15 years of his career anyway, so of course there was an album devoted to it. There are sharp versions of all your favorites here ("Sweet Jane," "Satellite of Love," "Wild Side," you know the rest), but the real draw of Take No Prisoners is listening to him turn into a punk-rock Henny Youngman (his comparison) as his band vamps away in the background. Targets include the crowd, Barbra Streisand, Patti Smith, critics from the Times and Voice, the sound guy, and many more. He coulda been a comic and on this night, he was.
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This is like the opposite of Metal Machine Music: four pieces, two of them in the half-hour range, of music for tai chi and meditation, a practice Reed has followed for a few years. Formally it's ambient: heavy on low end, floating atmospherics, and a faint pulse. As an artist, Lou Reed is a constant surprise.
