Lou Reed, Berlin
Featured Album
A controversial, well-written and elaborately produced LP about a love affair gone terribly wrong
We're living in a musical world that Lou Reed helped create, a world that, through his influence as solo artist and leader of the Velvet Underground, has experienced glam, punk, goth, grunge and more. And so it's almost inconceivable in today's America that a well-written and elaborately produced LP about a love affair gone terribly wrong would be met with near-universal scorn. But that's just what happened in 1973, when Lou Reed followed his 1972 glam-rock breakthrough Transformer with this dramatic downer.
Unlike Reed's subsequent Metal Machine Music, Berlin wasn't meant as an anti-commercial gesture: Earlier that year, Cabaret made bisexuality in pre-WWII Germany an Oscar-approved subject, and Pink Floyd topped the charts with its madness-minded Dark Side of the Moon. Fresh from his Alice Cooper hit streak, producer Bob Ezrin joins Traffic's Steve Winwood, Cream's Jack Bruce and a slew of equally skilled session players who here merge glam with burlesque — a mix that would soon beget The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But Reed's tale of a relationship destroyed by depression, drug addiction, sexual compulsion and spousal abuse proved itself far more daunting for listeners just starting to process Watergate's shocks.
After the title track sets a scene with sound effects and piano bar tinkling, "Lady Day" alternates musical themes reminiscent of Germany's Weimar Republic era with organ-heavy sturm und drang. The Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill connection goes even deeper during "Men of Good Fortune," when Reed juxtaposes observations of upper and lower classes, undercutting both with the distancing refrain, "I just don't care at all." It's with this detachment that his narrator Jim views his relationship with Caroline: She routinely cheats on him; he beats her black and blue, and it all goes downhill from there.
With "Walk on the Wild Side," Reed proved it was possible to sneak even pill-popping, trick-turning transsexuals into the early '70s mainstream with the right playful hook. Here the album's catchiest phrase raises the toughest question: "All of her friends call her Alaska," he sings of his anti-heroine in "Caroline Says II." "When she takes speed, they laugh and ask her, 'What is in her mind?'" Berlin challenges because Reed never reveals how he feels about his characters. Why are they so destructive? He holds a mirror where the answer would usually sit.
