John Cale had the better solo career between the two main creative forces of the Velvet Underground, but I adore the twists and turns of Lou Reed’s solo career more. After tasting solo success with “Walk on the Wild Side” hitting #16 on the billboard charts, Lou Reed put out a depressing album with no viable hit in sight on Berlin, and he brought any alienated fans back into the fold with the back-to-back Sally Can’t Dance and Rock n Roll Animal. Requested by his label to keep the momentum going, Lou Reed acquiesced with a double-sided album of nothing else but noise, confounding listeners once again, and then, freed up to his own devices, Reed put out a ton of great work all the way to the end, mostly in deep cuts, but occasionally some great albums too. When Reed failed, it was a spectacle. When Cale failed, it was merely boring.
The Velvet Underground was, of course, the most important commercially-ignored band of the 1960s—in all of rock history—which as led to perhaps too much adoration from people who use them as a means to tear more famous, more successful contemporary bands down a notch; if I’ve heard that Brian Eno quotation once about them, I’ve heard it a billion times. George Starostin made the point that anyone who claims that they were the original punk band—Lou Reed holds the title ‘Godfather of Punk’—is sorely mistaken because they barely made any punk music: they made noise music in their first two albums by merging New York City’s avant-garde scene, particularly the minimalists (classical), with rock (pop); then they made a super quiet album, and then a ‘normal’ one. Latecomer Doug Yule, brought in to replace John Cale, carried the band name after everyone else left and put out a fifth album under their name that I still to this day haven’t heard, out of respect.
But because their discography is shorter than most any other canonical rock band from that era, it feels like there’s no interesting takes to be had, which is why I don’t feel compelled to talk about them, much as I adore them. So I’ll just plug here that the first album is, song-for-song, the weakest of the first three; that “European Son” and “Sister Ray” are the least interesting songs on their respective albums; that their third album is their best; that their fourth album will forever be underrated because it was not a radical sound like their previous albums. But worth noting is it feels important in the context of Reed’s solo discography: Reed never remade “Heroin” in his solo career, barely looked back at “Sister Ray,” but he did re-use the G and D chords of “Sweet Jane” over and over to strangely undiminishing returns.
Worth pointing out is that a decade before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed got a taste of the music industry in a doo-wop group called the Jades that released only one single, but in that regard, there’s a parallel between him and Sun Ra. Both legendary avant-gardists; both got their feet wet with doo-wop in the 1950s.
After quitting the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed returned home and got a proper job as typist in an accounting firm. But that didn’t last long. He flew to London and started his solo career, remaking eight Velvet Underground songs with members of Yes and Elton John’s guitarist on the woefully uninteresting Lou Reed. Skip straight to his second album, which is his most popular one and also his best.
Transformer plays very similarly to David Bowie’s Hunky Dory: glam rock with the rock component de-emphasized so that it was closer to folk music. To wit, they get the big rock song out of the way first and then Transformer—despite being one of the most acclaimed glam rock albums—never reaches that volume again.
In that regard, it’s one of the most subversive albums ever. Here’s a big rocker called “Vicious” that sounds like “Sweet Jane” mixed with “White Heat/White Light” that goes “Vicious / You hit me with a flower” and “You must think that I’m some kinda gay blade.” Here’s a gentle ballad called “Perfect Day” that’s about Reed reminiscing about exactly that, except the delivery of the line “You keep me hanging on” feels so desperate that the song is so obviously about heroin even though it makes no explicit mention of any drug. Here’s the big hit called “Walk on the Wild Side” that doesn’t play like any hit, telling the stories of multiple transgender women at a time when such subject matters were taboo and then deploying a chorus of white women at the signal of “And the coloured girls go / Doo, doo-doo.” Here’s a song called “Make Up” about coming out that’s just as odd and reserved as you’d expect a coming out song in 1972 (while homosexuality was still classified as a mental disorder in the DSM). Here’s a song called “Goodnight Ladies” where Lou Reed sounds like he’s singing at a open mic night to a completely empty bar (the pitiful “High high high” might be his best vocal performance), while Ronnie Ross’ sax does the melodic heavy lifting that Reed, with his rather immobile voice, simply cannot. Here’s a song called “Andy’s Chest” written in 1969 originally with the Velvet Underground about the murder attempt on Andy Warhol’s life that goes “You know what they say about honey bears / When you shave off all their baby hair / You have a hairy minded pink bare bear.” The most common pushback I see on this album is that it’s uneven. By design, says I! The biggest pox on it are the misogynistic lyrics of “Wagon Wheel,” probably the vilest rock song by a major respected artist that I can think of — certainly not “Run For Your Life” or “Under My Thumb.”
The dirty secret about David Bowie, swooping in to save Lou Reed’s solo career after his debut album was deemed a commercial failure, is that Bowie’s production for others sucks. Like the term ‘exec prod’ nowadays, his name in the production credits usually is there for brand recognition. His production worked in Iggy Pop’s favour when Pop wanted The Idiot to be cold and detached, but assuredly doesn’t work for the Stooges’ Raw Power or Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes. Transformer is warm because Lou Reed has a friendly baritone, but the production is actually quite dry: Mick Ronson’s guitar fails to catch fire on “I’m So Free,” a song that sounds like “I’m Set Free” set to “Sweet Jane.” The major exception is “Satellite of Love,” which feels like the influence coming full circle: where the Velvet Underground influenced David Bowie, here was a song that clearly mined Hunky Dory’s big singles, and Bowie’s entrance in the finale is a ridiculous yowl after the bridge about infidelity (itself ridiculous).
Berlin has some good moments—the overly dramatic “Lady Day” and Jack Bruce’s bass on “Caroline Says I”—but it also has one of the most flat-out embarrassing songs in his catalog in “The Kids,” where, legend has it, producer Bob Ezrin recorded his kids crying endlessly after pranking them and telling them their mother had died. Yeah, art! Imagine sacrificing your children to years of therapy for a b-tier Lou Reed album. Similar to how the Velvet Underground songs on debut Lou Reed might not have compared to their originals, “Caroline Says II” simply doesn’t compare to “Stephanie Says” from the outtakes collection VU released over a decade later, and both Candy and Stephanie had a lot more to say than Caroline. It’s reputation has held on because it’s a dark, depressing concept album at a time when most concept albums were fantastical.
Sally Can’t Dance and Rock n Roll Animal—both from 1974—represent an early bottoming out for Lou Reed. By this point, glam rock was already clearly on its way out, the appealing decadence now replaced by sleaze. Rock n roll Animal was apparently the first Lou Reed album to go gold, which is pretty fucking bonkers when you consider that all of these songs are significantly worse than the originals. “Lady Day” is the only one that bears resemblance to the original but it has the same problems as everything else: too much flash from the two guitarists as if no one understood that part of the charm of the Velvet Underground songs were how economic they were. Sally Can’t Dance would be Lou Reed’s highest-charting album, which he would remember fondly a few years’ later as “a piece of shit from beginning to end.” It’s not that bad, but the lyrics could’ve used another once-over (“Last time I saw him, I couldn't take it anymore / He wasn’t the Billy I knew, it was like talking to a door” isn’t going to make anyone empathize with war trauma). It’s the first Lou Reed solo album to not at all rely on Velvet Underground material, and it shows: it’s a skimpy 32-minute listen.
I mean this sincerely, but I would rather listen to Metal Machine Music than either of those albums, an album purely made up of droning noise inspired by La Monte Young and Iannis Xenakis that got dunked on by critics who had never heard the music of either. You’ve heard every possible take about the album—that it’s a bad album, that it’s a great ‘fuck you!’ to a label, that it’s good or bad drone—but my favourite take on it has always been courtesy of CapnMarvel, who brought it up in comparison to Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon (Eno’s worst album) in a way that made me appreciate Metal Machine Music more:
“[Metal Machine Music] was nothing but 117 minutes of tuneless, grating guitar feedback, but so is half the fucking Melvins catalog, and that never stopped them from being perennial Number One chart successes! But you know what? Lou ‘d’ Reed actually went into the studio and played all that stuff...in real time! Or, you know...stood somewhere nearby while the amplifiers and pickups did their respective things! Someone had to induce those guitars to sound like that, because they really don't tend to do that on their own. Plus, and this is key there's actual sound on the tape! For all of those 117 minutes! Talk about value for money, kids. Just look at your graphic readout when you play it...it dances all over the place like Brazilians with their asses on fire. Put on Thursday Afternoon and...nothing.”
Anyone who lost interest in Lou Reed with the release of Metal Machine Music would have sorely missed out on Coney Island Baby, a very short and tender album released that same year with tasteful guitar licks from Bob Kulick throughout and help from Reed’s old pal Doug Yule (whom Lou Reed reconnected with for Sally Can’t Dance). It’s soft rock to the extreme, way softer than Fleetwood Mac’s reinvention that same year or the Velvet Underground’s third album, and it’s Reed’s most melodic release; the opener even has bell harmonies. Only the strangely violent “Kicks” hints at an old aggression. The title track is the best song, which spends half its run-time musing about playing football (for the coach) and then switches to being about the glory of love before closing the album with a kiss to his then-partner Rachel Humphreys (“Man, I’d swear, I’d give the whole thing up for you”). One blight: the ASMR backing vocals of “Gift.”
Coming off yet another career high, Lou Reed left RCA for Arista, a record label that was cannibalizing legacy acts like the Kinks around the same time and then Aretha Franklin and having no idea what to do with them. Case in point, 1976’s Rock and Roll Heart feels like Reed is playing it safe to appease his new masters: there’s no shadow beyond a throwaway joke about believing in the Iron Cross on a song whose sentiment is the same as “Rock & Roll” but sucks in comparison, and he’s back to mining whatever Velvet Underground material he can (“A Sheltered Life” and “Follow the Leader”).
Released during punk’s heyday, Street Hassle has been received as Lou Reed’s response to punk rock. Don’t listen to these critics desperate for a narrative: this is not Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps. It’s the same ol’ Lou, rocking steadily at just above mid-tempo. The highlight of this album is “Street Hassle,” an 11-minute 3-part epic whose droning strings is the most overt John Cale’s influence on the Velvet Underground appears in Lou Reed’s solo discography. (A point to the Cale fans: that Lou Reed has shown next to no interest in experiments after Cale’s departure from the Velvet Underground suggests that Cale played a much larger role in shaping the Velvet Underground’s sound than even Lou himself. Not even Reed’s marriage to Laurie Anderson brought out any dormant avant-garde tendencies.) Famously, Bruce Springsteen appears near the end, uncredited due to Columbia’s policies, and so here we have—even if it’s not totally fulfilling—a meeting of the two great empathizers in rock music not named Ray Davies. One other point goes to “Real Good Time Together,” which, like many of the cuts from Lou Reed’s solo career, just pales in comparison to the version you can get by the Velvet Underground, this one on the rather indispensable live album 1969: Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed. Despite being the first pop album to use binaural recording technology—recording technique to make it feel like the listeners is in the room with the musicians—a lot of Street Hassle sounds surprisingly muddy, and the subservice elements that once made Transformer so appealing are dialed up to moronic: “Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest / Fucking faggot junkie!” The less said about “Shoot twenty feet of jism too,” the better. He then released a comedy album in the guise of a live concert in the previous year’s Take No Prisoners, which contains a 17-minute version of “Walk on the Wild Side,” where he goes on a tirade against critics, “Can you imagine working for a fucking year and you got a B-plus from an asshole in The Village Voice?” (Xgau responded, “I thank Lou for pronouncing my name right.”)
Take it from me: The Bells is better, a take so obvious that I was surprised to learn it’s a hot take that seems only shared by Reed himself: “The older I get, the more meaningful [The Bells] becomes to me. [...] No one liked it when it came out and nobody seems to have changed their mind about it since. I love it, though.” Firstly, Lou Reed’s guitar playing in the Velvet Underground was influenced by Ornette Coleman, and here, he gets to work with Coleman’s kindred spirit Don Cherry here. The jazz adds a new dimension to his skeletal rock that’s been sorely missing in his records since 1975. The ‘more meaningful’ aspect is seen in “Families” which contains the lines, “And families that live out in the suburbs / Often make each other cry.” Reed had a troubled relationship with his family, who consented to giving him ECT that may or may not have been used to ‘cure’ feelings of homosexuality, a subject that he’s brought up before on Sally Can’t Dance’s “Kill Your Sons.” But he’s also funny here, rhyming “Saskatchewan” with “Stupid Man” (only Torontonians would butcher that word to that degree), or an avant-garde funk-jazz-minimalist take on disco that makes me wonder if Arthur Russell heard that song; even the album cover seems to nod at David Bowie’s “Heroes.” All told, The Bells is a top 5 album for Reed, but the way no one talks about would make you believe it’s in the bottom 10.
Alas, he did not keep the fire going for his last album for Arista, Growing Up in Public, an album so thoroughly unremarkable except the Al Green interpolation on the very last song that makes me wonder if he got the idea because the Talking Heads covered “Take Me to the River” two years prior, and Reed was known to occasionally visit CBGBs.
For The Blue Mask, Lou Reed perfected his two guitar, bass, and drum format that he’d been leaning on for so long: Robert Quine on lead guitar and Fernando Saunders on bass are the best musicians that Lou Reed would ever surround himself with, and they play off each other as if it were the Lou Reed Jazz Quartet with Doane Perry on drums. Remove the bass from “Underneath the Bottle” and it would be nothing special. But Saunders’ bass pokes around the main melody with its own little hook, and single-handedly elevates the material; elsewhere, it’s Quine’s surging chords that paint the image of a beautiful suburban house on the opener far better than Reed can. Xgau wrote a really beautiful review about this one in particular, “he sounds glad to be alive, so that horror and pain become occasions for courage and eloquence as well as bitterness and sarcasm.”
Swapping Doane Perry for Fred Maher is a downgrade for Legendary Hearts—an album whose cover looks suspiciously similar to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories three decades later—Maher is too fucking simple on the kits, such that even when he’s paying homage to Maureen Tucker on the elegiac “Make Up Mind,” it still sounds like he’s not even trying. His lifeless plod is particularly accented on the 7-minute “Home of the Brave,” and mars the otherwise-lovely “Rooftop Garden.” “Legendary Hearts” is a melodic opener, and despite the fact that the words could be silly (“He’s in a bar or in a car”) or clunky (“churning his blood with an impure drug”), he sticks the landing of that verse: “He's in the past and seemingly lost forever”; “Don’t Talk to Me About Work” is a new wave sassy rocker that the album could’ve used more of. And “Make Up Mind” is the closest he’s come to The Velvet Underground (the third album) in his solo discography. Good as the opening salvo is and some of the songs in the middle, ultimately, Quine is correct in his assessment of the record, “It wasn’t going to be as good as the last one: the songs weren’t as good […] When I got the final mix, I was really freaked out. He pretty much mixed me off the record.” Quine would tour with Reed afterwards, resulting in the lackluster Live in Italy (feeble sound despite the abundance of classic material, needlessly clarifying that Candy gave “good” head on “Walk on the Wild Side”), and then Reed promptly fired him.
With Reed succumbing to the irresistible vortex of 1980s’ production, Fred Maher sounds more like a machine than ever on New Sensations, and a lot of the songs radiate dad energy, particularly when Reed gets a little sexual about his motorcycle on the title track (“The engine felt good between my thighs”) and when Reed leaps on white reggae on “High in the City.” No matter how eye-rolling the album gets—there’s no thought to “My Red Joystick” besides the innuendo—I score New Sensations with a firm ‘B’ purely off the shoulders of opener “I Love You, Suzanne,” Reed’s most danceable cut that just exudes a happiness that his music normally doesn’t.
Released in the year that everyone collectively bottomed out that was 1986, Lou Reed released his worst album in Mistrial wherein everyone is hopelessly not doing what they’re talented at. Fernando Saunders, the great bassist? Delegated to production and drum programming. Lou Reed, the great guitarist? Rapping on a song titled “Original Wrapper.” For the morbidly curious only: it’s worse than the albums by Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Neil Young from that year.
New York is Lou Reed’s second-best album, ever-so-slightly overrated because it has the cardinal sin of not just one, but two ‘c’-words that critics love. (1) It has a very loose concept, and (2) it was released in 1989, the year of the comeback alongside Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy and Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels. (Steel Wheels sucks ass.) In general, it’s his longest album since Metal Machine Music and that’s not deserved; you can scotch the last three songs without missing much (“Strawman” especially is a 6-minute tirade about nothing at all).
That being said, “Dirty Blvd.” is the latest in the long lineage of “Sweet Jane” imitations from Lou, but it’s also one of his best songs; the G and D chords are, for once, the best-sounding G and D chords his band has cooked up since The Blue Mask. “Halloween Parade” is even better than that, a tremendously sad song that never feels sad, similar to “Walk on the Wild Side”: it isn’t until the backing vocals come in that you realize how devastating the song really is, like the voices of his friends all departed from the ongoing AIDS epidemic singing along with Reed. Fred Maher, once a machine, actually adds a jazzy snap to that song. Lou Reed is in fine form throughout the album, not forcing casual observations about his beloved city to be poetic and achieving a more natural poetry as a result. “Caught between the twisted stars / The plotted lines the faulty map / That brought Columbus to New York” is how the first song starts and “And something flickered for a minute / And then it vanished and was gone” is how the first song ends; “Dirty Blvd.” has the ambiguity in the rather simple line, “[Pedro’s] father beats him because he’s too tired to beg,” making you ponder who is too tired—Pedro, or his father—and knowing the situation is hopeless either way.
Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground’s mentor-manager, passed away in 1987, prompting the first time Lou Reed spoke to John Cale since the Velvet Underground days. Together, they recorded Songs for Drella to chronicle Warhol. The whole affair is strangely cold despite sporting two of the warmest voices in the avant-garde. John Cale’s piano, specifically in the middle of “It Wasn’t Me” and the Steve Reichian figure of “Forever Changed,” is a welcome change of scenery, and the “Goodbye, Andy” sign-off at the end is touching, but the album is about as boring as Growing Up in Public. Overall, the album proves something I mentioned earlier about critics needing narratives: most listeners are excited about this one in a way that the music simply doesn’t justify. Robert Christgau, for example, wrote “Lousy background music—absorb it over three or four plays, then read along once and file it away like a good novel. But like the novel it will repay your attention in six months, or 10 years. The music's dry because it serves words…” and then ultimately slapped an A- on it.
The same applies for Magic and Loss, prompted by the deaths of Doc Pomus and Rotten Rita (mentioned in “Halloween Parade”) from cancer, an album whose words are too arcane and mundane at the same time evidenced in the dual titles, “The same power that burned Hiroshima / Causing three-legged babies and death.” There’s one winner in “What’s Good — The Thesis,” but otherwise, drummer Michael Blair takes it way too easy, just smacking the on-beats on “Power and Glory — The Situation” and “Gassed and Stoked — Loss” in such a manner that I think were Reed to ask him to insert a drum-roll, he may have fainted from fright. “Harry’s Circumcision — Reverie Gone Astray” is a deeply uncomfortable listen about a suicide attempt, and the bit about wanting to change genders makes me yearn for the far more subtle “Candy Says.”
Reuniting with Fernando Saunders invigorates Lou Reed on Set the Twilight Reeling, where he rocks out occasionally and more convincingly than he has since New York. The album is underrated: had it been his last non-collaborative solo rock album, it would get the ‘swan song’ hosannas that Ecstasy receives, but it’s a more attractive album because it’s leaner. The highlight for me is “Finish Line,” a fast acoustic chugger that’s a tribute to the recently-departed Sterling Morrison. Perhaps the album’s reputation is brought down by the silly songs that open both sides, one about “Egg Cream” and the other about “Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker).”
Ecstasy has some good moments—the way Reed sings “Now” on “Paranoia Key of E”; the sharp, bracing guitar tone of “Like a Possum” even though I’ll never reach for its 18 minutes again—but it’s buried in a 77-minute album that’s far too long for material this thin, even if I appreciate Reed attempting to stretch out: the title track feels like an attempt to be Peter Gabriel, for example. Too many mid-tempo, heavy-volume clunkers (“Mystic Child,” “Mad,” “Future Farmers of America”), even if I begrudgingly admit that they do rock convincingly enough thanks in no small part due to Fernando Saunders on bass once again. The best song is one that I have to thank Laurie Anderson for, not just because she’s there playing electric violin, but because it was the song playing over the credits on her excellent Heart of a Dog documentary: “Turning Time Around.” Imagine the second half of “Coney Island Baby” by way of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” and if that hasn’t already turned you off enough, it ends up striking a very similar territory to Paul McCartney’s “Early Days” from New.
The Raven is a concept album inspired by Edgar Allan Poe—someone who is “not exactly the boy next doe” Reed force-rhymes over and over on the second track—replete with dramatic readings by actors Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi, and woefully underutilized collaborations with Laurie Anderson and David Bowie. (The first time Reed reconnects with Bowie in decades, and he stifles him on a filler song.) Reed has always been invested in poetry—“Coney Island Baby” was adapted from a poem he published in The Harvard Advocate, and he’s mentioned Poe before on Growing Up in Public—so I’m doubtless this is the album he’s wanted to make for a long time, but the poetry is bad (Quine had a theory that “[Lou’s] biggest weakness is that he wants to be regarded as a poet. The more conscious he is of this, the worse songs he writes”). The most egregious example is that Dafoe, enlisted to read the famous “The Raven,” is forced to say “Respite through the haze of cocaine’s glory / I smoke and smoke the blue vial's glory,” newly added lines that Reed injected into Poe’s most famous work. Berlin’s “The Bed” is remade in the style of Anderson’s “O Superman” and doesn’t come off because Reed isn’t invested in that kind of music; Anohni sings “Perfect Day” but I’ve never liked her histrionically-tortured soul. The distinctive tone of Ornette Coleman is the album’s sole saving grace.
A devoted practitioner of yoga and tai-chi, Reed made ambient-drone music to use as background for meditation, eventually manifesting in a full album called River Wind Meditations. It invites comparisons to Metal Machine Music some thirty years prior, two long, instrumental, drone albums released near the start and end of Reed’s career; one noisy, the other calming. In that regard, it reminds me of Glenn Gould’s two vastly different interpretations of The Goldberg Variations. As background music for meditation, I don’t see how one would be able to focus on letting go while listening to the anxious tones of “Find Your Note” or “Hudson River Wind (Blend the Ambiance).” As drone music, I’m not invested enough in the pulsing throbs of “Move Your Heart,” a 29-minute piece with a 5-minute coda. In terms of late-period Lou, it’s at least listenable which is more than I can say about the Metallica collaboration that came next. There’s a lot of meme-worthy lines throughout Lulu—“I would cut my legs and tits off / When I think of Boris Karloff” (which opens the album), James Hetfield yelling “I am the table!” (in the lead single), “To be dry and spermless like a girl,” etc.—so don’t believe anyone who trying to reclaim this famously-derided album. Lou Reed’s words and voice aren’t interesting, but I lay a lot of blame on Metallica, all of them just smashing their instruments without any sense of dynamic or groove, making the 87-minute album feel twice as long.
That’s it for uncle Lou. His passing in 2013 from liver disease was one of the first musician deaths that really shocked me because of how much the four Velvet Underground albums meant to me when I discovered them around 2010 — how much they still mean to me.
Here’s some other writing I published this year:
A review of Can’s archival live album, Live in Paris, and a tribute to Damo Suzuki after the musician passed away on February 9 in my debut article for Stereogum.
A review of Kim Gordon’s solo album, The Collective, via Tone Glow.
A review of Bolis Pupul’s debut solo album, Letter to Yu, via Resident Advisor.