On the Lou Reed and Metallica Album “Lulu,” or, Is the Bowie Prophecy Fulfilled?, or, I Am the Table, You Are the Table, We Are All the Table!

DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!

RUN! RUN AWAY!

DING! DING! DING! DING!

YOU GOTTA LEAVE NOW! NO, DON’T GRAB YOUR SHIT! NO TIME! RUN!

DING! DING! DING!

Hear that? Why, it’s the unmistakable sound of Lulu’s leper’s bell. Go! Leave! Run! Run to “Walk on the Wild Side!” Run to “…WE’RE OFF TUH NEVAH NEAVH LANDAHHHHHHH!” 

Here she comes. That bell (don’t say “for whom the bell tolls”), that leper’s bell. 

…and cut! 

New scene:

INT. OFFICE BREAKROOM 

TYPICAL 2011 OFFICE GUY, 35, leaning against the breakroom watercooler while bloviating to his co-workers on their lunch break.

TYPICAL 2011 OFFICE GUY

                                    Heh heh…hear about the new Metallica album?

                                    It’s with that Lou Reed guy. Heh heh. Sounds 

                                    weird. Anyway, catch  Leno last night, heh heh?

…aaaaand cut! 

“At Lou Reed’s posthumous induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 19 April, his widow Laurie Anderson told the audience at the ceremony about Bowie’s regard for the record. “One of [Reed’s] last projects was his album with Metallica,” she said. “And this was really challenging, and I have a hard time with it. There are many struggles and so much radiance. And after Lou’s death, David Bowie made a big point of saying to me, ‘Listen, this is Lou’s greatest work. This is his masterpiece. Just wait, it will be like [Reed’s 1973 album] Berlin. It will take everyone a while to catch up.’

“Anderson added: ‘I’ve been reading the lyrics and it is so fierce. It’s written by a man who understood fear and rage and venom and terror and revenge and love. And it is raging.” –“David Bowie: Lou Reed’s masterpiece is Metallica collaboration Lulu,” The Guardian, April 20, 2015 (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/20/david-bowie-lou-reed-masterpiece-metallica-lulu)

Well, we’ve “just wait[ed].” Believe it or not, it has been ten years since what ranked up there with Kiss and Pavarotti for the strangest and unexpected collaborations over the course of a career characterized by constant risk met the world with scorn and disdain, and, judging by the so many “Oh maannn! Just wait ’til you get to Lulu!” comments from friends over the years, is still met with scorn and disdain. 

There are contrarian acquaintances who champion this album, but they are few, and they are also the kinds of people in the world who find their personality through being contrarian. Individuality through negation. 

We haven’t caught up yet, and as of now, it’s looking doubtful that we ever will. 

But that’s the fun of it all, isn’t it? Who the hell knows anymore, because I can’t think of any other musical artist who produced so many albums that were reviled when first released, but later acknowledged as not only masterpieces but influential genre-creating masterpieces at that–the first two VU albums, Berlin, Metal Machine Music, and I’ve just this week really taken a shine to The Bells, an album that didn’t quite sit with me upon the first few listens around when I started this project in 2017-2018. 

Speaking of The Bells, Lulu is the most Lou sings/emotes, for better or worse since that 1979 album. But whereas the emoting in The Bells is a refreshing change from the trademark NYC cool talk-sing, I can’t help but think, and please forgive me if this comes off as sounding glib and punching down, because that’s not my intention at all, that so much of Lulu is filled with Lou Reed ranting in this stream-of-consciousness style like, in one of the more universal and tragic urban experiences, a schizophrenic in the back of the bus or at the bus stop or on the street or in the subway. It’s that talk that so characterized The Raven that made it such a tedious listen. 

And there’s really nothing to lose here, for anybody. Some metalheads got cheesed off. The much-maligned-on-Yelp “hipsters” had a good laugh. Whatever. Although, one hopes at least some of the millions of Metallica fans used this as a gateway to the other Lou Reed albums, to The Velvet Underground, and broadened the depth of their musical knowledge. 

The other weird thing about Lou’s singing on this, is that it’s so often not in tune, and this doesn’t seem to bother anyone, or no one wanted to or could possibly “produce” or have a heart-to-heart with him about it. Who wouldn’t be so starstruck, all constructive criticism flies out the window? The end result isn’t the kind of soulful rage you hear in the best punk rock of yesteryear, but it’s more akin to like the guy at the ballgame who really wants to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but isn’t much of a singer, or the devout Catholic at Mass who has a loud voice and really wants to sing “Though the Mountains May Fall” and distinguishes himself from the mass-monotone of the other parishioners through his earnest atonalities. 

The easiest thing would be to take potshots at this, but it’s really not that fun to do it. I honestly really want David Bowie and Laurie Anderson to be right in this case. Are they blinded by love, in the way that Metallica and all involved with this project were blinded by working with A Legend and An Icon? 

Over the years, we had to rewire our minds and ears to “get,” oh, let’s see: Leave Home, Double Nickels on the Dime, Trout Mask Replica, Marquee Moon, Locust Abortion Technician, and, since undertaking this project, a good many albums in the Lou Reed discography that confounded expectation, that shifted perceptions of what can be done with those 2, 3, 4 chords. And it’s rewarding and it feels good to come around to something…to “get it,” in the parlance of teen lingo. 

I sit here now, literally 2,601 miles from where I first started this project back in October, 2017, mulling over not only Lulu, but all the albums, and What This All Meant and Why the Hell Did I Do This? I’ve spent some time with the Lulu album, but not enough to be converted, and not even sure if that’s possible. But what echoes in my mind is “Brandenberg Gate,” of James Hetfield bellowing out “Small town girlllllll!” over and over as the “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” chords are given a Metallica treatment and Lou sings of this small town girl here in Berlin to “give it a whirl,” or Hetfield shouting “I AM A TAY-BULLLLLLLAHHHH” in another song, and that crazed spiel Reed does in these songs, or, speaking of Butthole Surfers, the multiple “fake endings” of “Mistress Dread,” after so many minutes of one chord pummel as Lou shouts over it lyrics like: 

Tie me with a scarf and jewels
Put a bloody gag to my teeth
I beg you to degrade me
Is there waste that I could eat

He even adds a Hetfieldesque “ahhhh” to the word “teeth.” 

I randomly chose a song and randomly highlighted some lyrics, figuring (correctly) that they would be a good representation of all the lyrics. This is from the song “Frustration”:

Kiss your breasts and toes
I cry icicles in my stein
The heartbeats flutter with an abnormal rhythm
The pain shoots through my body
A sword between my thighs
I wish that I could kill you
But I do love your eyes

There’s ninety minutes of this, pert near. On this side of the spectrum, leaning way towards Lou Reed than Metallica, it sounds and seems like Reed met Metallica more than halfway. A reinvention of Metallica as musicians would have been way more interesting, in much the same way Reed reinvented himself and the music in practically every album. Metallica, musically, arguably, did pretty much the same thing every album. They only made their music more accessible over the years, or tried to, anyway. 

I could take or leave Metallica. Like The Smiths or Pavement, they’ve just been kind of there, in the air, surrounding me as a suburban American kid who grew up at a certain point in time. As a drummer, the sextuplet double bass drum of “One” blew my mind when I first heard it, but I typically get bored with longer metal songs with fifteen different parts. I don’t hate it, but it just doesn’t do anything for me. And yet, I perversely enjoyed Some Kind of Monster, not really as entertainment and not entirely as irony, but for being slightly ahead of the curve in terms of destroying the “rock god” mythos that so defined not just “rock stars” but “celebrity culture” as a whole before the TMI of social media and the self-obsession that social media hath wrought made it difficult if not impossible to imagine one’s “heroes” as being, well, heroic.

That’s part of the reason why it’s so much fun to read Paul Stanley’s Twitter feed in your best Paul Stanley “Kiss: Alive!” stage banter voice. “Went on a bike ride today, Deeee-troit!” But I digress…

Will future generations hear something in Lulu that we don’t? Will The Bowie Prophecy be fulfilled? I really can’t envision that, but who knows anymore. “The future” is so beyond and beneath what I thought it would-could be back in say the 1980s. 

But I think what I find most maddening about Lulu is that, musically, it’s not that daring. Metallica sounds like Metallica. Lou did all the heavy lifting inherent to getting out of the comfort zone. Metallica pretty much just contributed Metallica-style music. 

And to the bitter end, no matter what you think about Lulu and her decadent (to put it mildly) story (based on two plays (the Lulu plays) by Frank Wedekind in 1895 and 1904) (modernized rather economically early on the album by making reference to one “Kinski”), while there’s no doubt a style and aesthetic and any number of musical and cultural and sartorial signposts that came to define (jerkoffs now would call it “branded”) Lou Reed, he never stood still, and that’s what emerged time and time again while going through the discography.

Each album was its own surprise. They weren’t all good surprises, but most of them were, and if we could expand what Bowie said about Lulu to the entire discography, I come out of this project optimistic that many Lou Reed albums that have slipped through the cracks relative to “the hits” will find wider audiences. I certainly didn’t go into this thinking this way. 

No, really. I did think, back in October 2017 when first undertaking the idea of writing about every single Lou Reed album, that it would be a quick and easy undertaking, over and done by the holidays. I didn’t expect to want to spend a year on New York. I didn’t fully comprehend the breadth and depth of the achievement, of a career where far too many focused on what an asshole he was (apparently…never met him), and less on the music, and quick to dismiss the music because he had the asshole reputation, or the drug use reputation, or that everything was held up in relation to The Velvet Underground. 

There will be an afterword, and some postscripts to many, if not all, of the album writing, but it’s, as always, bittersweet to put a long-term writing project to bed. It was so much more than I expected, and I never obviously intended this to be strictly reviews, or some internet fodder like “THE FIVE LOU REED ALBUMS YOU MUST LISTEN TO BEFORE YOU DIE!” or “LOU REED ALBUMS RANKED FROM BEST TO WORST” or even “HEH HEH CHECK OUT THIS GUY’S REACTIONS TO HEARING LULU FOR THE FIRST TIME!” The personal seeped into this because it was and is impossible to separate this music from my life. 

But more on that later. We’re not done-done with this, but it is pretty much finished. No more new albums to hear. And, no, I’m not taking any requests about which band or musical artist to write about next.

If you don’t get to the Afterword–if I don’t get to the Afterword–hey thanks for reading one, some, or all of these. 

On the Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio Album “The Creation of the Universe”

Can The Creation of the Universe be the swan song instead of Lulu? 

No, of course not, but only because “the infamous Lulu” exists in a, no, not more accessible realm per se, but better known, and besides, in terms of notoriety, Lulu must be the last album in Lou Reed’s career, and not only because it actually is, you know…the last album, but how else can you shock and surprise and piss off so many people decades after a thing like Metal Machine Music or “Heroin” can no longer achieve such distinction?

But, but, but, but, but: The Creation of the Universe is, arguably (yes, arguably) the last great Lou Reed album of his life. What a swan song! What a droning skronky skreeeeeecheeeeeee fond farewell.

It’s overlooked, assuming you even knew of its existence. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio. Lou, with Ulrich Krieger channeling the most beloved Ghosts of Impulse! Records Past., and Sarth Calhoun on the electronic soundscapes, and while MMM is the starting point, The Creation of the Universe really is something else altogether. 

You obviously can’t do a Berlin with MMM, like a more-or-less note-for-note in precise order cover of the latter album like he did with the former. You can hear elements of MMM in this, certainly, but that’s merely one ingredient. In the drone that runs through all of it, a churn und drang, there are some call-and-answer moments like a guitar arguing with a drunk demon, as the moods shift from the sublime to the hellish. In Night 2, there’s even a channeling of the rhythm guitar of what sounds like the guitar of the last few minutes of “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black” by Sonny Sharrock. 

This is a joyful listening experience. How long has it been since Lou got this weird? Maybe “Like a Possum” on Ecstasy. But really, there hasn’t been much of this since MMM, as the struggle to even maintain a career was challenge enough, even though noise like this dated back all the way to the first two VU albums. 

Hudson River Wind Meditations is something else entirely. Why? It’s a vanity project, no matter the pure intentions, with little at stake. Like Lulu for that matter. Unlike MMM, there’s nothing to lose by these projects. There’s nothing to lose by putting out something like The Creation of the Universe either, but this is much more than the victory laps of the home stretch of his career, and more than a vanity project like Lulu or The Raven because The Creation of the Universe is looking forward, while deceptively looking backwards. It’s not an MMM tribute album, and MMM is simply the launchpad for this. 

No no no, not that much avant noise ambient skreescapes over the course of these 30+ records, and not enough. 

If you could somehow strip away the zeitgeist, the shifts in the cultural landscapes, the spectacle of it all, and simply compare MMM with TCOTU, the latter is a “better” album. But you can’t do that, duh, and this ties into something alluded to earlier in this, and discussed a bit in Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse. 

It’s all such a foregone conclusion now. What do you do when the transgressive is no longer transgressive? I think this is something that Boomer artists in particular have struggled with in the 21st Century. The default response, particularly with Boomer comedians, is to Blame the Audience for Being Too Sensitive. And that’s a total cop-out, and it’s lazy, and it’s pathetic, and it displays a total ignorance of entertainment history, a lack of self-awareness, and an inability to evolve that leaves these artists and entertainers irrelevant, and rightfully so. 

Lou Reed was smarter than this. Or, perhaps he didn’t care or think about it in these terms. But the victory laps show that he knew he was right, and very much aware that he was always 5-20 years ahead of the (at least sub if not uber) culture’s capacity for everything from songs about sadomasochism to double albums of noise. 

By the late 2000’s, the time of this release, as good as it is, TCOFTU isn’t really anything new. Sure, one could argue, as Rolling Stone actually did in 1975, that even MMM wasn’t anything new, was even “old-fashioned.” Which just goes to show that you can be jaded to anything. 

But there was so much more at stake in 1975 than 2009 to do something as audacious as MMM. By 2009, “noise” is just another hors d’oeuvre on the subgenre smorgasbord. 

This is a great album. It really is. But it’s not as much fun as Metal Machine Music. Not as anti-social. When writing about Metal Machine Music, I talked about how enjoyable it was to blast it out of my car while driving through the godawful weekend traffic of the Wicker Park stretch of Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. The Creation of the Universejust doesn’t have that room-clearing entertainment value. 

It’s a close call, but “Night 2” is the slightly better of the two tracks. It’s more, um, orgasmic. It also shows, that, had he lived a bit longer, Lou Reed had more in the tank besides revisiting “the oldies,” and failed musicals about Edgar Allan Poe (“not the boy next doe”). Would have loved to have heard more recordings of this trio, to hear Lou maintain relevance not by recording weird albums with Metallica, but by just getting fucking weird in the music, way out there, even more uncharted territory yes go yes go yes! 

And–oh hey, speaking of Metallica…seems it’s just you and me now, Lulu. We finally meet. Hoo boy. Here we go. 

Lulu is next, and then that’s it. 

On the Lou Reed Album Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse

When Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse was released, I was working in a record store in Chicago. No, don’t look for it, as it has long since gone out of business, and the space where the record store once operated is now an emporium known as Dildoughs (“Lincoln Square’s One-Stop Shoppe for Pickles, Sex Toys, and Bread!”), and while one hopes the residents of Lincoln Square are enjoying their gherkins, butt plugs, and mocha almond biscotti (but not necessarily in that order, heh-heh), there was a time not that long ago when the sounds of Pitchfork du jour wafted (yes wafted!) up and down Lincoln Avenue from that little record store….all those 8.3’s now so forgettable and irrelevant….I want to name names, but the only one I can really recall is Bon Iver, and I guess that’s as good an example as any….oh wait–a bunch of bandnames were like two words that both started with F….Flash Fishy, Foxy Fartknocker, Fanged Frydaddy…shit like that going on in the indie scene…while another garridge punk wave was about to hit, this time loaded with songs about fast food and redundant reverb and, oh yes, the “Whoo!”

The “Whoo!” was big, and maybe it still is. 

Anyway, I do know where I’m going with this, and that’s to say that I vividly recall the promo poster of Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse, as the photo of Lou was the same as the one on the cover, and I remember being fascinated by his arm. 

Yes, his arm. It was, like, jacked. Like a roided home run hitter in the 90’s. Muscles on top of muscles. Like he should change his name to Lou Reed Van Damme. Like the arm was photoshopped from an arm in the 80’s Stallone arm-wrestling film Over the Top. Like the Rock and Roll Animal Himself could arm-wrestle Rocky Balboa and maybe even win. 

He looked healthy, y’know? Like the flip-side of how he looked in the mid-70’s, when it seemed likely that the decadence would kill him.

But it didn’t, and as that may have surprised some people, it was equally surprising that he didn’t have that much longer to live after that photo was taken. Less than a decade. What with the tai-chi and the health and true love from a creative equal and cultural force in her own right in the form of Laurie Laurie Laurie, I remember thinking that, based on the musculature of his arm anyway, that Lou Reed would be with us for a long, long time. 

And while we can speculate and lament that he wasn’t around to see just what a fucking mess we’ve gotten ourselves in these eight years since his passing, that loss in terms of the music and the writing, despite this vast body of work the man left behind, is immense, as I for one believe that Lulu was not an indication and bizarre portent of what would have happened after, but that all of this going on might-could have inspired another epic or two, as scathing as New York was in the political, and as scathing as Berlin was in the personal. 

Lou as playwright, as Laurie Anderson thinks of him. The characters we may have met, had he lived for just a few years more. 

You can read what I wrote about the original Berlin here, and there are differences between that one and this one–this one was a longtime dream to present it as a stage production with, among other things, a thirty-piece orchestra, with producer Bob Ezrin conducting (Berlin as a proto version of the album he produced six years later and the one he’s best known for–Pink Floyd’s The Wall), a production that would give Berlin all the reverence and veneration it deserved and most certainly (uh…yeah) didn’t get way back in 1973. 

But–this is also a time when bands who had been around for a while were starting to dispense with any illusions that audiences wanted to hear “the new shit,” and started playing their “classic albums” in their entirety and in order. 

The obvious choice for that kind of treatment would have been Transformer. But instead, we get the album that got the most hate, and the most vitriolic caustic nasty rockwriter hatred, and after all these Victory Laps in this later stage of his career, one can’t help but think that this Victory Lap was the most victorious for him. 

Berlin, no longer the commerce it was to be kicked around with merciless impunity in 1973, but now a work of art. An artifact of a time before such topics and themes weren’t foregone conclusions in popular music. Not quite an artifact, and not quite the equivalent of like Shostakovich Summer Nights in the Park, but it seems safer…now. Not any less powerful and deeply moving in its story of two decadents and the damage they caused to themselves, each other, their kids, and everything around them, but now we know the story, and the man who created it, and the whole pantheon of what he created, and how this fits into the body of work, and thirty-three years later, there’s a distance that divorces from the initial/immediate reactions, and the emotional visceral hollowed-out sadness of hearing it is more clinical, yet another of the infinite examples of this kink in the human race that doesn’t allow us to immediately see the genius in so many of the artists and so much of the art until years, decades, generations later, and if said artists are lucky, they get the victory laps Lou Reed had, but, far more often than not, it’s the Herman Melville formula of dying in near total obscurity long before resurrection and rediscovery decades later. 

It’s yet another Lou Reed live album from his late period that isn’t as good as the original songs, even if I’m glad this document exists. I personally don’t need to hear Anhoni emote the word “Alaska,” for instance. And the musicianship is perfect, despite some of the cheesy moments of American Idol “whoa oh ohhhhhh whoaaa ohhhhh ohhhh” backing vocals. Shredding guitar, but tasteful shredding, and that’s not a contradiction in terms. 

But Jim and Caroline…they now seem animatronic. Like a fucked up and completely inconceivable EPCOT presentation. Where the hell of abuse and cuckoldry and suicide come to you in IMAX, every hour on the hour until closing. The “two-bit friends,” the Berlin Wall, “Dubonnet on ice,” the “eyes of hate,” the “Germanic Queen/miserable rotten slut”…almost as accessible to the culture now as a big ol’ Andy Warhol banana. 

And yet…no. Even with the passing of time (of the original Berlin and this iteration) and the museum feel and the very seriousness and the flawless presentation and everything else…well–let’s put it this way: You could still play “The Kids” in a bar and clear it out faster than if you blasted Reign in Blood in the middle of a Sunday morning Southern Baptist church service. 

It still evokes a cold hollow feeling in the soul, and it still forces a reckoning about what it is we want exactly from the music we listen to. I never want to revisit Berlin in any form, but I know I will, because it still, like so much of Lou Reed’s best music, shows what’s possible with a foundation of three simple chords. 

The Creation of the Universe, the second to last album, is next. 

On the Lou Reed Album “Hudson River Wind Meditations,” or, Why It Is Inaccurate to Compare This to the Growling Stomach of a Moderately Hungry Platypus

The funny thing about ambient music is that it brings out the absolute worst in pompous twats and anti-snob snobs alike. It gives the former room to wax pretentious, and for the latter, it serves up so many readymade expressions of disdain on the order of “This artsy craftsy bullshit doesn’t rock me or my PBR t-shirt and jeans turn up the Judas Priest [burrrp!].”  

On a similar note, the funny thing about being a freelance writer is that you sometimes need to come off as the “expert” even if you go into an assignment not being an expert on the topic, so to do it right, you’re going to have to research and learn. Like, if you’re going to cover and review improv comedy in Chicago, it’s good to know your “Yes, ands” from your Harolds, and the differences in approach between this improv comedy theater and that improv comedy theater. 

My biggest beef with music writing, when I was getting a paycheck of sorts for doing it, was that you were groomed to be “eternally hip” even if you didn’t want to do or be that. To be a careerist at it, I mean. You have to be the coolest kid in the room, even if you’re not cool, and even if you’re not a kid, because you’re most definitely not a kid. It becomes less about the band and the music, and more about the music writer. 

I loved writing about bands and what was going on–don’t get me wrong–so grateful for the experiences–but like so much of my time in Chicago…it wasn’t meant to be a permanent thing, even if it went on for several years bordering on and crossing into decades. 

This is all a convoluted long-winded prolix way of saying that I don’t really know how to properly write about an album like Hudson River Wind Meditations. In the same sense that Animal Serenade is the staid opposite of Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal, this is the soft rock version of Metal Machine Music. 

Indeed, and get out your highlighters and fire up the Blurb Machine: A gentle churning interspersed with light whooshes–perfect for the Tai-Chi master in your life.

It lacks the infamy and notoriety and story-behind dirt of Metal Machine Music, and so it was much easier to write about MMM, because it was as much a reaction to what has already been said and not said about it. But HRWM is one of the later lesser works in the oeuvre, and (here we go), I don’t know how to approach it, because there is pretension on one side and hack rock snobbery on the other, and neither approach is worthy, duh. And while I’ve endured my fair share of condescension from the noiseiscians and soundscapers of the world and Pilsen Schmilsen (good interactions too, infrequently), it’s not worth the time to bash any of it, and while the four people who read this would enjoy the music writer trying to meditate on his own while listening to it or go into some tirade about how it just sounds like the growling stomach of a moderately hungry platypus, it’s not accurate to say that, and the Whole Art of Lou Bashing, as finely honed as it has become from the music writers since Creem immemorial isn’t that interesting or even honest.

What is honest is that this isn’t something I feel like I have enough knowledge about to effectively communicate what’s happening. I’ve dabbled in the Eno “Music for…” albums, and enjoyed/endured my fair share of white noise, drone, pedalboard skreeee, and moog farts from Gainesville to Pilsen over the years, I lack the authority to adequately write about this kind of sound, and I don’t have the time or, quite frankly, the interest (at the present date) to delve into ambient music and ambient music writing to present myself as someone who knows what they’re talking about. (“That hasn’t stopped you before, buddy.” Shaddap!) 

If you haven’t already, someday you will learn that it’s perfectly alright to NOT HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN THING IN THE UNIVERSE. For instance, I don’t have an opinion on Danzig or powdered donuts. They exist. Some people like them, and some people don’t. I don’t care either way, because I have other interests and views on (for me) more interesting topics. 

It’s like in the eight million documentaries about the first or second waves of punk. When asked about what’s happening now, you never get an interviewee Who Was There and Everything say what they should say, and that’s: “You know, my priorities have changed since I was twenty, and I don’t really keep up with new music like I should. I’m sure there are amazing bands happening, but as I’ve grown up and gotten older, music and the local music scene is not the front-and-center priority it once was.” Instead, you get Grade-A Andy Rooney Cranky Uncle Watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan self-parody. Pathetic. 

It’s OK to not know, and in the context of Hudson River Wind Meditations–I’m here to learn. Not today or next week with this album or ambient music, but it’s not something I’m giving up on. My lack of knowledge here isn’t a lack of curiosity. Nor is it a copout. It’s keeping an open mind and not rejecting or accepting it outright. 

To quote Lou himself on the back cover: “I first composed this music for myself as an adjunct to meditation, Tai Chi, bodywork, and as music to play in the background of life–to replace the everyday cacophony with new and ordered sounds of an unpredictable nature. New sounds free from preconception…I hope you find as much use for this music as I have in both writing and listening to it and exploring inner spaces.”

“The background of life”…”sounds of an unpredictable nature.” It takes time to determine if the artist achieved this goal, no matter what you personally think of such ambitions. Hot takes and not-knowing isn’t fair. So there will be a “Part 2” that revisits this album several months from now, to see if this listener can find the use in it–but for now, we’re moving on to Berlin (Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse).  

On the Lou Reed/John Cale/Nico album “Le Bataclan ’72,” or, Between Expression and More Expression

Released in 2004 after existing in bootleg form for a number of years. In Paris, also televised, in a 1000 seat venue. Recorded January 29th, 1972, a mere eighteen months after Lou’s departure from the Velvet Underground and the Summer of 1970 farewell as documented on Live at Max’s Kansas City, three months before the release of the self-titled debut album, and the first time these three had played a live show together in five years. 

There are other live recordings from roundabout this time (American Poet for instance), but the royal we are hoping you will forgive the reviewer for choosing to not write about every single one of these, and not stake a dorky purist’s claim that “maaaaaaaaaan….he’s not really writing about every single album in the discography.” 

The big reason is that the reviewer has already written about six live albums that were official releases during Reed’s career, with a seventh on the way (Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse), and there’s only so much you can say about live albums, and the limitations of live albums become ever more apparent with each listen to each new live album in that it’s media (as in “mediated”) and not experienced directly and you can only capture so much, and while some of the live versions of songs over the live albums already written about have moments where the songs are better than the studio versions, they’re still the same songs. 

But Le Bataclan ’72 is something else altogether, in the sense that it’s as much a documentation of an interesting time and place–between VU and the solo career, and also with two of the three VU members who weren’t playing on Live at Max’s Kansas City. (Doug Yule’s brother plays drums on that one, just as he did on Loaded, as Mo Tucker was pregnant at the time). 

After so many victory laps and professional respect accorded to the classics in the 90’s and 2000’s, to say nothing of how the songs could be played in one’s sleep after living with them for decades, Le Bataclan ’72 is a refreshing look back to when the songs were still newish or brand-new, and not Classics From the Lou Reed Canon. 

Relaxed. Loose. Raw. “Mistakes were made.” 

Yeah, those adjectives in the previous paragraph are overused, but that’s what comes out, and it’s enjoyable because of this, perhaps for the same reason Live at Max’s Kansas City is enjoyable. “Berlin” the song is a work of art, as we will come to know and appreciate decades after the album is critically savaged, but on this album, in this moment, Lou self-deprecatingly introduces it, and hilariously so, as “my Barbara Streisand song.” I laughed when I first heard him say this, as much that he would compare “Berlin” to something Babs might do as much as the idea of Babs singing “Berlin.” 

(But then again, after seeing Steve Jones play “A Man I’ll Never Be” by Boston on Instagram in 2017, really anything once thought to be impossible and inconceivable in popular culture is within the realm of possibility. The future!)

On the video footage of “Berlin,” Lou is seated with a cigarette while John Cale plays piano, and maybe there is something of the torch song about it. 

Acoustic guitars, piano, viola. It starts with “Hello. It took us awhile to get here. This is a song about copping drugs in New York. It’s called ‘I’m Waiting for My [sic] Man.” Piano, vocals. It’s like blues, but in a good way. The arrangement comes off as something past tense, like recalling a sad stroll up to Lexington/125 instead of the present tense of the original, where the eighth note pound does indeed evoke a subway, a present tense in the moment hurryup even if you always gotta wait. 

Managed to catch the third Laurie Anderson Norton Lecture at Harvard that she did earlier this year, and in it, she talks about how Lou’s lyrics are akin to the work of a playwright. Writing about other people, observing, describing, their words, their actions. 

It was one of those observations that I knew, but didn’t know I knew. I think she named the characters in the verses to “Walk on the Wild Side” as an example of this, but the examples are plentiful. That lecture altered how I hear these songs now in the sense that I put the playwright idea more to the forefront, and it’s a paradigm that deepens the appreciation and respect, an appreciation and respect that was already there despite any snarkiness expressed along the way, and so to hear this bluesy piano stroll of “I’m Waiting for The Man” in this context, as observation and empathy instead of the always assumed (because you grow up liking punk rock you think everything is direct self-expression) autobiography. There’s something liberating about hearing the songs this way; “The possibilities are endless.”

This minor near-digression could easily become a major and total digression if I let it, so let’s get back to the album. Two Lou Reed solo songs. Three John Cale songs. Three Nico songs. Four Velvet Underground songs, plus two bonus tracks of attempts at “Candy Says” and “Pale Blue Eyes” during a practice for the show. 

The last two are rough recordings, a hint at coulda-mighta been in some world where Cale and Reed could have kept the working relationship going into the third album. 

The Cale songs are excellent. “The Biggest, Loudest, Hairiest Group of All” works for obvious reasons. (Starts with an “H” and ends with “umor.”  “Ghost Story” from Vintage Violence. and “Empty Bottle,” a song that appeared on an album produced by Cale called Jennifer by Jennifer Warnes, who had a hit later in the 70’s with “Right Time of the Night,” another song from that era that evokes early childhood backseat summer heat and car sickness, but hearing it now, it’s pretty good AM Gold, so maybe it’s another relic from that era that can be forgiven, or we can move on, or associate it with John Cale instead of Midwest stuffy heat and restlessness. 

The Nico songs, except for the first time listening to this album, inevitably made me doze off. They sound like bagpipe dirges. I’m not anti-Nico, but I’m not the biggest fan either. It’s worth mentioning that about a minute of this album features Nico having a coughing fit. Some wiseacre in the crowd says something in French about cigarettes, and when she says that she doesn’t smoke, people–French people–applaud. 

All that aside, Nico’s voice has a richness and depth to it that doesn’t really come through in the substandard sound quality of The Velvet Underground and Nico. I think there’s a law on the books somewhere, possibly enshrined in our Constitution, that one must use the adjectives “icy” and “Teutonic” when describing Nico’s singing, so yes, there you go, because these are very much present as they transition to the last two songs on “Le Bataclan ’72”–“I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Like Daltrey in the Who, Nico is never anyone’s favorite Velvet Underground member, dismissed as a good looking voice while the geniuses genius it up behind them. After hearing so many live versions of these songs across the discography, it’s worth acknowledging her contributions to these songs, and you probably already know this and believe it or you strongly disagree, but yes–while I personally could take or leave Nico’s solo output, there’s no voice quite like it, rightfully worthy of so much more than mere La Dolce Vita style or a Wes Anderson slo-mo. 

Overall, Le Bataclan ’72 is a worthwhile documentation of Lou Reed’s between-time–on the verge of this solo career, as a legend-not legend, connected with something that was more infamous than influential, with two collaborators who were also part of the infamy and influence, embarking on distinctive solo careers in their own right. 

OK. Hudson River Meditations is next. 

On the Album “Animal Serenade” by Lou Reed, or There’s So Much Love in the Room and Other Clichés

            Animal Serenade, as in, Not Rock n Roll Animal. 

            Recorded June 24th, 2003 at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, California. 

            Yet another live album? Yyyyup, another live album. 

            Didn’t we just review a live album? Yes. Yes we did. 

            This live album is two hours and eight minutes long. It features twenty songs culled from eleven albums that span the entire career from The Velvet Underground and Nico, to the latest release, a little something called The Raven.

It’s also yet another victory lap, but this particular victory lap seems the most triumphant thus far. It could even be the ultimate victory lap, although maybe it wasn’t seen that way at the time, as the live albums tend to follow the commercial and/or critical flops. 

            There’s so much love in the room, pardon the cliche. Love for the songs, love for audience, love for the musicians, and that audience–well, they’re yelling “Whoooo!” just as much as they’re bellowing “Louuuuuuuuuuuuu.” 

Let’s get all the cliches out of the way: This audience is eating out of the palm of Lou’s hand. It’s a little strange to hear exuberant “Whooooooos!” for songs like “The Bed” or clapping along in rhythm to “Heroin,” but had I been in the audience on that night, I too would have clapped along and “Whoooo”ed and “Louuuuuuuuuuu”ed until my hands were sore and I could whoo and lou no more. Perhaps as much to say “Thank you” as much as anything else going on in the moment. 

            Lou starts off rather chatty at the beginning–not as chatty or funny as in Take No Prisoners, but it’s endearing nonetheless, as he deliberately plays the intro to “Sweet Jane” without the fourth chord (B) to heighten a joke/not joke about making a career out of three chords, and when he does add that fourth chord, he informs the proverbial young bands of 2003, you shaggy haired garage rockers tearing up the charts for the last time rock and roll would ever come close to doing anything like that unless some song from the 70s graces a soundtrack and experiences a 2nd or 359th life in the zeitgeist…he tells them, “As in most things in life, it’s that little hop at the end.” Hahahahahahaha. 

            For real. Hahahahahahaha. 

            Then, they don’t play “Sweet Jane,” and that’s fine. He does take an audience survey while playing “Small Town”: “Do you think this [Los Angeles] is a small town?” A passionate 50-50 response, as Lou points out that most of the audience is probably from NYC anyway—another hahahaha. 

            The listener also gets the treat of Uncle Lou with some choice opinions on pre-recordings and loops in a live setting. (Spoiler: He doesn’t like them.)

            No “Sweet Jane,” and again, that’s fine, because it leads to the ultimate question concerning all these live albums: Do we need new takes of these songs? 

            I think I asked this about Perfect Night in London, and the answer of course is subjective, as subjective as my take on Anohni/Antony’s presence on this album, which annoys the shit out of me, but what do I know (me like rock music ugh ugh ooga booga grunt fart)? To my subjective taste, Anohni/Antony sounds like the emo progeny of Tiny Tim and Aaron Neville, but I really do want to like what Anohni/Antony is doing, but I really don’t like it, for the same reason I don’t much care for the singing on “American Idol” and all of those shows, and how “good singing” is equated with a kind of vocal gymnastics that the average person equates with talent but I personally equate with excessive practice and polish at the expense of soul.

            Again, this is purely subjective, I know. Great singing to me is something you can find on “Reality Breakdown” by No Trend, where the depth of the feeling transcends everything else. Where it sounds like, in this instance, the anger is so intense, the singer is on the verge of pulling out his voice box with his bare hands and throwing it through the high school principal’s window. 

            I say this, to get back to Animal Serenade and the initial question re: what to look for with the quality of live albums, to say that I don’t ever want to hear Anohni/Antony sing “Candy Says,” when the original will do just fine. We don’t have to agree on this. We don’t have to agree on everything. It’s ok, pal. 

            “Well, what do you like on Animal Serenade?” “The Bed” is so gorgeous and sad and emotional in the singing, so much too much. “Vanishing Act,” the best song on The Raven, is beautiful, and as I said before, I love how Lou never played the obvious “hits” on these live albums, but instead, it’s almost like he fought for the overlooked/underrated songs and demanded that we give them another listen. Like “Tell It to Your Heart” from Mistrial, which, as I said while reviewing that album, would have been great if not for the 80’s sauce drenching the thing, and this version is much better, even with what sounds like Anohni/Antony, but is actually Lou’s longtime bass player Fernando Saunders. 

            The absolute best moment is in “Venus of Furs,” where (I think it’s a) cello (played by Jane Scarpantoni) goes way out there into sounds I haven’t heard on stringed instruments since first getting into Albert Ayler. It’s the highpoint of the album. 

            When Animal Serenade is good, it’s very good, and it’s nice to bask in this victory and lovefest with Lou and his collaborators and the audience and these songs, but when it isn’t, it doesn’t work, and there are too many examples of when it doesn’t work. We don’t need a funktified “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” for instance. “Sunday Morning” doesn’t come close to the original and doesn’t really offer a new interpretation that’s worth revisiting. Oh, and nine and a half minutes of “The Raven,” wherein Lou gets increasingly louder as he reads the Poe and there’s something about a “respite through the height of cocaine’s glory!!!” 

            “Street Hassle” is pretty good, but not as good as either the studio album original or the version on Take No Prisoners, but it’s worth it in how he explains how he was trying to write a song with monologues influenced by the work of (you can probably guess, but) Algren, Chandler, Burroughs, Selby, Rechy, Tennessee Williams 

            “Revien Cherie” is a song written and sung by Fernando Saunders, and I could be wrong, but this may be the last album in the discography that he plays on. The remaining albums are more live albums from the past and present, ambient noise, and the infamous Lulu. 

            OK, I am wrong–he also played on 2008’s Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse. He played on eleven albums, from ’82-’86, and then ’96-’08. As I’ve said before (I’m getting to the end of this, and therefore repeating myself like A LOT A LOT ALOT), maybe it’s not an exact comparison, but Saunders’ involvement makes me think of Jimmy Garrison’s work with Coltrane, through so many radical changes that left so many others behind. 

            Perhaps, amidst all the love in the room on that night in Los Angeles, what emerges as strong as anything else is the relationship between Reed and Saunders. Once again, his bass playing is fantastic, running the spectrum from (oh boy–another cliche) in the pocket to avant-heynow!. And and and and and—for fuck’s sake, this is a bass player who made the FRETLESS BASS sound cool, and not some 80’s MTV video nightmare unleashed by all those who tried and failed to copy Mick Karn of Japan. 

            Overall, Animal Serenade is an album that shows how much good will and love and appreciation the fans still had for Lou Reed, even or perhaps especially when emerging from self-parodic flops like The Raven. It’s not in the same league as Live in Italy or Take No Prisoners, but as proof of the hard-fought victory of sustaining a career in music for decades despite so many close calls with career suicide.  

On the Lou Reed Album “The Raven,” or, “You’re a Mean One, Saucy Lou”

            Yeah, it’s bad. 

            The worst. Arguably? Maybe to you, but there are no arguments from the one who has gone through the previous twenty-three albums. 

            OK, maybe Lulu will be worse. But for now, The Raven is the worst. 

            We could go on and on, and sharpen our rock-writer claws and shred and shred and shred, but it would be too easy and not very satisfying. Let’s just say this: As the title implies, listening to this makes one think of that scene in This Is Spinal Tap at the end of their disastrous tour when David and Derek are talking about all the pretentious rock operas they can do now that Nigel quit the band.

            The Raven is like if one of those concept albums came to life. 

            “This is the story of Edgar Allan Poe/not exactly the boy next doe.”            

            That’s a rhyme in the second song. The first song is just a fermata like they do at the end of the Saturday Night Live theme song when the special guest takes center stage, with honking sax and everything except Don Pardo introducing Tom Hanks. 

            Willem DeFoe reads the story “The Raven.” Steve Buscemi croons to you “live from the Poo Poo Lounge.” David Bowie makes a cameo slightly longer than “New York Telephone Conversation.” Ornette Coleman plays the saxophone on a song. The Blind Boys of Alabama stretch out the vocals for a long period of time, and it’s the kind of vocal gymnastics that impress the American Idol set, and I’m sure it was a moment in the studio, but to hear it now, it’s cheesy. 

            For no clear reason, Antony sings “Perfect Day.” Also for no clear reason, there’s a reworking of “The Bed.” I never want to hear either ever again.

            After trying to “spend time” with it for the past 4-5 months, I was finally able to get through it yesterday, while working out on the elliptical machine. (No, it’s not good workout music.) The experience left me so depressed and despondent that any plans I may have had on a warm and sunny if totally and insufferably boring Orlando Saturday afternoon were gone. I paced the living room, paced the kitchen, desperately texted friends to see if there was something–anything–to do and there were no good answers (“Ride the Hulk!” “Go to a hotel pool by Disney!”) because there are none. I slammed the two beers I had left in my fridge and listened to “Bored Out of My Brains” by Personal and the Pizzas, then listened to most of the rest of that album, something to scrape out the remnants of The Raven from my brainpan. I was so drained of life that even the idea of getting more booze or going out drinking like rockwriters of yesteryear might’ve done in our romantic notions of them didn’t seem worth the effort or fun, and it was doubtful it would even cure the post-Raven depression. 

            Most of the tracks are so long, too long. The song “Change” has a not-uplifting message like something heard amongst the cynicism of New York — “The only thing constantly changing is change/and change is always for the worst.” 

            Great, thanks. Fuck. 

            The best song is “Vanishing Act,” a song that could have found a home on any of the previous three studio albums. “It must be nice to disappear/to have a vanishing act/to always be looking forward/and never looking back.”

            Oh yes. 

            I’d like to give Lou Reed a pass (yesyesyes a mulligan) here, since I honestly thought there would be so many terrible albums from like 1979-2011, but it has been quite the opposite, honestly, and so the only thing I’d like to say before moving on is that this comes off as a missed opportunity, and a frustrating one at that. 

            Here’s your chance to meld literature and rocknroll, and the result is that “boy next doe” line that is so grating and lazy and it makes me understand why the Lester Bangses and Peter Laughners of the creemy world of the good-gone days of malaise got so overwrought about the less than stellar 70’s solo albums. 

            Because, if art exists to (among other things, yeah sure) let us know that we are not alone in the universe in our suffering and loneliness and ecstasy and universality………..Lou Reed’s music, at its best, has done that more than any other artist in any other medium for me, and so it feels shitty and glib and tedious and easy to go on and on about how bad The Raven is, especially when there are songs like “Wait” and “Waves of Fear” and “Set the Twilight Reeling,” to say nothing of the VU classics that still can send shivers down our spines, and furthermore, there are precious few solo artists from that time and generation who took so many creative risks with their music and lyrics when they didn’t really have to do that, and so many didn’t, and among those who did, so few really put their careers on the line so many times, or found so many new ways of expressing the same 4 chords. 

            I know I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here. All I’m saying (I think) is that there’s enough good will built up from the oeuvre of Everyone’s Favorite RocknRoll Curmudgeon that it’s simply not worth the time to show off my caustic writing chops over one album that failed, when so many musicians out there are doing. or have done so much worse so consistently. 

            But yeah—-Again: Yeah, it’s bad. 

            FIN

Animal Serenade is next. 

On the Lou Reed Album “Ecstasy”

1.

Out of all the albums to this point, Ecstasy has been the most difficult to wrap my brain around. It’s very much a product of its time (2000 A.D.), with some songs that seem like they were attempts at radio friendliness, like for instance “Modern Dance,” and there’s even a music video for it where Mr. Reed is dressed like a chicken in a boiling pot as two models dressed in a wide array of costumes pluck his feathers. 

2. 

It defies simple definitions. It’s all over the place. Along with the radio friendly hits are the beautiful and emotionally devastating “Baton Rouge,” and the eighteen minute opus “Like a Possum” where the man shouts over a two chord caterwaul about, among other things, “feeling like a possum” and “smoking crack with a downtown flirt, shooting and coming baby ’til it hurts.” 

There are many fans who champion “Like a Possum” and compare it favorably to “Sister Ray.” It’s similar in both length and coo-coo crazy decadent urban imagery, but the former lacks the Moe Tucker chugga chugga drums, and the recording is nowhere near as raw of course, but the former can also clear out a room should the circumstances warrant it. 

So there’s that. 

3.

It is very much a product of its time. It’s the most dated album since Mistrial. The “radio-friendly” numbers are that kind of alt-slack post-grunge loud-quiet-then-loud again that so defined what one would hear at the turn of the century on any radio station that had the word “MIX” in its name. 

4. 

A product from the Age of the Compact Disc. Yes, use all 77 minutes of space on that CD, Lou. It’s what everybody did then. It’s his longest album. Twenty-one minutes longer than New York, and fourteen minutes longer than Metal Machine Music. 

5. 

The album cover is black. In the upper lefthand corner, “Lou Reed” is in red, and below that, in white, the word “Ecstasy” is in a calligraphy font one is most likely to associate with the “tramp stamp.” 

In the middle of the album is Lou Reed’s face and neck. A red spear of light appears to be going through his neck, and his face is the face of a man masturbating, because that’s what Reed was doing, as requested by the album’s designer, the graphic artist Stefan Stagmeister. 

Interpret any of this as you will, but avoid the obvious and banal temptation to equate the masturbation to what’s going on on the album, because it’s not accurate. But that idea is there, of course, when you find out that’s what’s happening on the cover. Low hanging fruit…the easiest set-up for a joke in the history of jokes. 

But don’t fall for it. Don’t do it. 

6. 

However. Lyrically, it’s some of his best work. “Songsmith” is a cheesy word, but it applies in this instance, because the craft is there, the product of someone who has devoted his life to it, someone who took it way more seriously and tried much harder than the scribes of the 70’s gave him credit for.

7. 

“Baton Rouge” is one of, if not the best song on the album (yes, arguably), and definitely it’s most gut-wrenching (no argument). At first, there’s a very real worry that the song is going to degenerate into bad way overdone southern tropes and the expected cliches of the proverbial “yankee in the south,” and sweet tea this and fried green grits that y’all etc etc etc…but it shifts away from such cornpone dreck, and Baton Rouge is only a beginning, an entry into saying goodbye to a failed marriage. 

You remember the joy in which he sang “Syllllllllveeeeeeeeeuhhhhhhhhh!” in “Heavenly Arms” from The Blue Mask. Even if you know how it all turned out, even as it seemed maybe it wasn’t going so hot on New York, and the appearance of Laurie Anderson on Set the Twilight Reeling…but this is that Final Nail, and he accepts it, that she has moved on, and he has moved on, but he knows who he was and what he couldn’t provide. 

Acceptance. Crushing acceptance. It’s personal, but accessible to those who have gone through it in their own way. And like Berlin, for all of the quality and the beauty of the craft, it’s not an easy listen, and if you can’t get the emotional distance to not be saddened by it, it’s overwhelming. 

Some songs are like that. Once, while driving back from Gainesvlle, Florida from Orlando after one of many returns after years in a “new life” in Chicago, I needed to pull over because I was getting choked up over “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and how the images brought back so many memories of the people I used to know. Another time, years later, drunk on vodka and brooding on the undeniable fact that my days in Los Angeles would be numbered, I walked the dog up to Barnsdall Art Park to watch the sunset while listening to side 2 of #1 Hit Album and silently broke down as the sunglasses (needed for functionality with the sunset and all, but yes, such a cliche) covered up the eyeflood while groups around me drank wine and talked loudly about their careers. 

(And as hesitant as I am to share these moments, I take comfort in knowing that this self-revelation isn’t much compared to, say, putting your masturbation o-face on the cover of your major label album.) 

These are head/heartspaces you don’t want to revisit any more than you have to, and maybe it’s this paradox of art where the expression is so pure and real it can’t be aesthetically enjoyed/consumed. 

8. Ecstasy is also the last studio album that’s not an overt concept album, or another live album, or avant ambiance. The eighteenth studio album. It’s surprising to take that in, since there would be another eleven years worth of material and thirteen more years of life. 

9. 

Yes, it is dated, and yes, some of it sounds like it might have come out of the Set the Twilight Reeling sessions, but overall, it does inhabit its own world, and also reflects and overviews the ambitions Reed had all along about what rock and roll could be for those willing to not play it safe. 

(OK/Oh no: The Raven is next.) 

Lou Reed: “Perfect Night: Live in London”

Perfect Night Live in London is the first of many victory laps in Lou Reed’s late period. This is also the beginning of Lou Reed’s “late period.”

The victory laps consist of live concerts where he is more or less free to do whatever he wants, as opposed to, say, breaking out all “the hits” one more time. You won’t find “Walk on the Wild Side” or “Sweet Jane” on this album, but you will find some deep cuts, and deep cuts you probably didn’t like that much on the first go-round, but then you hear “The Original Wrapper” without the awkward 80’s datedness that defined so much of Mistrial, and instead it’s a not-bad James Brown homage. 

All partta da victory lap, my frent. Another part of the Lou Reed victory lap is having no worries about putting “The Kids” as the third song in the set. How many would put one of their saddest songs as the third in their set, when the band is now warmed up and the audience is settled in and ready to have your rock and roll gimme gimme gimme some good times? 

Lou Reed did this because he could. The fruits of his labors as being a Very Serious Artist have now borne enough good will and good faith that the audience will be there and with him and open to the deep cuts taking precedence over the “big hit songs.” 

At the beginning, the album feels like a classical music performance. The audience claps, and only the occasional genteel “whoo!” as the workman interpretations of the first few songs sound like they have been rehearsed to the point of professional perfection. Lou’s voice, well into his 50’s now: deep, rich, sonorous….yet again, capital s-Serious. The guitars sound like they’re being played by cross-legged tuxedoed gentlemen dutifully following along to the sheet music. 

It works, sonically, for these first three songs: “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Perfect Day,” and “The Kids.” But does it work in the sense that you would want to hear these versions over the originals? Answer: No, Yes, No. 

In the fourth song, a reworking of “Vicious,” the drum kit is first put to use, after three songs of minimal percussion. The audience, like the band, is awake now, more like the audience of an Adult Rock Concert rather than A Night at the Symphony. In other words—they’re dressed in black turtlenecks now instead of tuxedoes. 

It’s a slow build, this set. Like the formality is shed, one item at a time. Like the proverbial dowdy librarian from the 80’s sitcoms who hides behind bunned-up hair and glasses and shapeless clothing before revealing that, once she puts the Delmore Schwartz book away and changes clothes, lo and behold, she’s Lita Ford. Holy shit. 

The music really starts to blossom and burn and live when the band plays “Kicks.” At first, it’s eyerolls because it sounds like a bad cover of that Eric Clapton song “Cocaine,” but as it continues, Lou has lost the formality, and the band, despite being consummate professionals, delivers a version that’s better than the Coney Island Baby version, and, like “The Original Wrapper,” the potential of the song itself comes to life after the drowning in the attempts at mixing boards and technological tomfoolery in the originals. 

The backing band. On the whole, Perfect Night: Live in London is a solid record, even if it doesn’t make it to the best of the best live albums (Live in Italy, Take No Prisoners). Part of that is due to the backing band, but I suspect it’s not really any fault of their own. The control Lou Reed exerts by this point is beyond evident. Even while Lou gives them the chance to “cut loose” at least once (and happily (sounds happily anyways) exhorts them by name to take it way out there), there isn’t much of a (to use a Minutemen term) stench to what they’re bringing. In contrast, there’s stench all over the place in Live in Italy. Fernando Saunders continues to shine, and is by this point the Jimmy Garrison to Lou Reed’s John Coltrane, and the guitars are dutifully accurate, and the drums sound like a lot of practice, and that’s fine, but goddammit, as a drummer, I get nitpicky about the subjective, like say the overuse of the rimshot, and as I think I’ve said in more recent reviews, I understand that my subjective taste isn’t going to mesh with where Lou Reed was at this point in his career, and it probably wouldn’t with the fans and the venerable critics by this point, because—what?—he was going to hire some inept sloppy raw spirited unstable garage rock brats from circa 98 to pull of these songs? No. Of course not. 

Worth mentioning: this version of “New Sensations” is better than the studio version, and it’s rather delightful to hear Lou Reed attempt to yodel a la Hank Williams. Formality? What formality? 

There are three songs here that, as far as I know, didn’t appear anywhere else, and sound like they may have been outtakes from the Magic and Loss and/or Set the Twilight Reeling sessions. The sound, style, and subject matter are the hints, but I gotta wait until I finally read the Anthony DeCurtis biography to see if that’s true or not. (Again—holding off on reading it until I finish this…)

After making it this far into the oeuvre, it’s almost a relief that “the hits” aren’t a part of the set. I appreciate how it’s almost like Lou was saying, “You said you didn’t like this before, or maybe you missed it, but here it is again.” 

Asking, demanding, expecting the audience to reassess songs that aren’t the songs you first pick when you want to throw on a Lou Reed album is all part of the Declaration of Victory. And if you’re a fan, you’re happy to take part in these selections spanning eight studio albums going from the first to the latest, even if this isn’t an album you’re going to revisit like the ones you tend to revisit when you’re in a Lou Reed mood—whatever the hell that means to you. 

OK. We’ve now made it to the 21^st Century. Ecstasy is next. 

On the Lou Reed Album “Set the Twilight Reeling”

After death, rebirth.

After three albums worth of death, dying, and decay (generally speaking, of course), Set the Twilight Reeling is one of the most enjoyable surprises on this “journey” through the Lou Reed discography.

Lou—reborn and relaxed and returned (4 years since Magic and Loss) and reminiscent and reinvented (but for real this time).

“I salute the newfound man, and set the twilight reeling.” Reed has made it through the storms and the universal mortality-grappling of middle age, and so begins Late Period Lou, even if it’s going to be 15 years’ worth of Late Period Lou. A Late Period that appears to be filled with the Victory Laps of the Venerable…live albums, a victory lap live performance of Berlin in its entirety, and Laurie Laurie Laurie.

Wooing. Lou the Wooer. Laughing at himself. Laughing at/with the “glory of love.”

Friends, “like, more than friends,” books, movies, albums…they all tend to come into your life at just the right time, and for this reviewer, Set the Twilight Reeling is no exception. Because, as important as it was to hear White Light/White Heat for the first time at 20, it has been just as important to hear Set the Twilight Reeling much older than 20.

These beacons, they lead you through the fog, point you in the right direction.

Oh, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let’s talk about the music. OK. The music is loose, looser, and refreshingly so, after so much control and click tracks and the tight reins of the last three.

Like “Egg Cream,” the first song on the album. A good indication of what’s to come. A guitar tone like what’s on another album from roundabout that time (1996), Too High to Die by Meat Puppets. After all the heavy ponderings on politics and dying and death, here’s a recollection from childhood. Not always a pleasant childhood recollection (“knife fights, and pissing in the streets, ohhhhh!”), but a recollection just the same. An ode to a regional dessert, and a tribute to the best places for enjoying that dessert. Maybe it’s not a first take, but it sounds like it could be, and that in itself is a welcome change.

The bookends of this album are fantastic, “Egg Cream” and “Set the Twilight Reeling,” but what’s in between has so much humor, charm, beauty, snarl, happiness…the fear and joy from within and without of falling in love.

In “Trade In,” Lou “met a new me at 8AM,” and while perhaps any cynic who has followed his career will be skeptical, this rebirth comes off as more real than, say, shaving iron crosses into your hair. A “fourteenth chance at this life,” after he “met a woman [heroine?] with 1000 faces, and I want to make her my wife.” Parting with that old self, as the past and present selves still co-exist.

That uncertain leap into becoming “the newfound man” is what makes Set the Twilight Reeling an album that should be seen as something more than “underrated” or one of the “lesser works.”

There’s this verse in “Hang On To Your Emotions”:

“When your imagination has too much to say
When that facile voice inside your head says give your life away
You might think to ask – how it got that way
What books it has read – that make it that way
And where it got the right – to speak to anyone that way”

Not only confronting the past self, but the inner voice inside that had too much power over the past self. The battles you fight in that amorphous time between the old and the new.

The awkward steps inside, but also outside. That self-defense that Lou ascribes to being an “NYC Man,” the self-defense of “say(ing) the word and I’ll be gone” at the first sign of Games and Drama and Bullshit. The music sounds too much like the bouncy near-jazz of the late-night one-on-one interview shows of the era, but that can be overlooked.

“Hookywooky” has a similar exploration of that uncertain time between Casual and Serious in the relationship, where Our Hero, on the rooftop above Canal Street with the lover’s ex-boyfriends (“yet another ex”), is self-deprecating in comparison to the lover’s ability to maintain friendships with her exes, as he indulges homicidal fantasies while “looking at the chemical sky,” aaaaand we’re back to sex and death.

One thing that must be mentioned: The lyric “..and someone’s shooting fireworks or a gun on the next block” might be, in a career known for exploring All Things Urban, the most Big City lyric he has ever written. Twenty years in Chicago, that was the Eternal Question—fireworks or gunshots?—every 4^th of July, New Year’s Eve, and Infrequent Sports Championship.

Mortality and politics pop in from time to time. “Finish Line” (guess what that’s about) is a beautiful dedication to Sterling Morrison, who had recently passed around that time. “Sex with Your Parents,” with its rage-humor at “Rush Rambo” and Bob Dole, is like an addendum to New York, and the dualities in “The Proposition” recalls the (altogether now) Fundamental Dualities Inherent in Existence explored in Magic and Loss.

Getting deeper into Side 2, the rebirth is almost complete. The acknowledgement that “we were meant to be” at the conclusion of “The Proposition” is now an expression of love in “Adventurer.”

“Riptide” seems an anomaly on the record, an extended foray into wah-wah grunge about someone who could not hang on to their emotions, lost to insanity, death and dying, pulled away, gone. I’m looking at the Atlantic Ocean while writing this, quarantined away from Covid-19, and it’s easy to imagine the riptide taking the soul away, more death, while the singer, with his guitar and wah pedal (not in the sand, we hope), remains on shore. Alive, so maybe it’s not an anomaly after all.

Because, out of all of this, every experience that went into the past life—the love and death and memory and the gray areas and the constant identity crises  inherent to change, the rebirth is here, accepted and celebrated in the title track.

Lou’s voice older and vulnerable, “take me for what I am, a star newly emerging.” Then, a beautiful evocation of a dawn when both the moon and sun are in the sky.

“What was misunderstood what was thought of with dread
A new self is born the other self dead
I accept the new found man and set the twilight reeling”

A vision of a sweating soul singer in mid-performance, down on one knee. The horns, the drums, “he finds himself growing hard,” sees “her face growing large” “in the microphone’s face.” Sexual-spiritual rebirth, raging against the dying of the light, yes yes yes.

A moment of calm, floating, strings, and then guitar chords that sound like Townshend Windmills and then, and now—

“As the twilight sunburst gleams
As the chromium moon it sets
As I lose all my regrets and set the twilight reeling

            I accept the new found man and set the twilight reeling”

The music is like Quadrophenia only with click-track restraint instead of Moonie flourish and no Entwistle flutters, and/but it works. A triumph. Still alive, motherfuckers, but better than that–Reborn.

This moment…it’s one of the highpoints of his career, maybe not as high as the other and better-known highpoints, but just the same, it comes off as a hard-fought victory, especially after all the magic and loss and Drella regret and dirty boulevards. If I mentioned before about the right people or art coming into your life at the right time, this is as good of an example as any, as this is in line with where I am in the midst of and despite this fucking pandemic, finally on to a new/better life, done with the old, done with what no longer works. Forward, onward, go go go go go go go.