Kill Your Sons - Lou Reed's First Tenure at RCA

After having read Kevin Mathews' excellent Robyn Hitchcock retrospective in last month's issue, I felt compelled to champion my own hero of rock, Mr. Lou Reed. However, I am only going to focus on Lou's first solo years at RCA Records as the man has just had such a long go of it and I always felt that his most interesting stretch of work was indeed his first batch of albums coming straight after the Velvet Underground's demise. This was after all when Lou was the Phantom of Rock, the Rock And Roll Animal, the Coney Island Baby, and so many other versions of "Lou Reed" that one began to wonder if Lou was finally outdoing David Bowie in sheer character transformation.

The Beatles made me want to play music. Lou Reed gave me the tools to make it happen. His music showed me that there is no trick to the guitar. That the simplest songs can sound the most complex. Three chords are just as good as fifteen, and above all else, make sure you remain honest to yourself with your songwriting. Long before there was Eminem and his so-called "ghastly" boring retreads on shock value, there was Lou and the Velvets singing about Sister Ray in 1968 and tossing out lines like "Too busy sucking on my ding dong". This just wasn't done at the time. But no one was listening and the people at Verve Records just wanted the VU to go away. In the Seventies, things would be much different for Lou.

He worked as a typist for his father for a short time after the Great Split, but soon Lisa and Richard Robinson were coaxing him back to give the solo life a shot. So off he went to London to record his debut album with the likes of Rick Wakeman from Yes (whaaaat?). The resulting Lou Reed was a collection of VU leftovers and a few new tunes that Lou had been working on while typing away at his desk job. It's a quaint work, if not a great one. "I Can't Stand It" and "Ocean" were certainly bettered by the Velvets' own versions, but tracks like the humorously funky "Wild Child" and the first version of "Berlin" are well worth hearing. Unfortunately during the mixdown of the album, the tracks were Dolby decoded and the record was left flat sounding and thin. Still, Lou's debut gives us one last look at what oft-times comes off as a naive and innocent recording. Strange.

Cut to Mr. David Bowie. A fan of Lou's from the start, David offered to produce Lou's next work and give him the great exposure and audience he felt Reed deserved. Bowie was currently riding high on Ziggy Stardust, and Lou felt a mutual admiration, so he accepted the offer. The street-smart Reed must have figured that any offer like that was too good to turn down. Besides, it wasn't like the world was listening to his music. And so the grand Transformer was created with the help of Bowie, Mick Ronson, and a few other groovy glam denizens. It was just what Reed needed. For some reason, "Walk On The Wild Side" was actually played on the radio and the line about "giving head" was ignored. The kids ate it up. Lou sang of homosexuality in camp glam style. He tossed out winking tongue in cheek pop jewels like "Make Up" and "Goodnight Ladies" as if he had been a star for years. He tipped his hat to his old mentor Andy Warhol in "Vicious" ("Oh you know. 'Vicious' as in 'you hit me with a flower'" Andy suggested) and "New York Telephone Conversation". And in the shimmering "Satellite Of Love", Lou took another VU leftover and transformed it into a beautifully decadent ode that actually felt Important. It worked. The kids bought it up and Lou became the Phantom of Rock, complete with pancake makeup, mascara and lipstick.

However, Lou quickly tired of the glam limelight and headed back to the studio to produce what many fans cite as one of his greatest works, the harrowing Berlin. Along with producer Bob Ezrin, and a handful of guest musicians like Jack Bruce, Steve Winwood, and Blue Weaver, Lou laid down his tragic story of love gone awry, drug and physical abuse, and suicide. I've always found the record to be lopsided at best. The "concept" doesn't really kick in until the second half, and after you've allowed the thing to drain you the first time around, repeated listenings are...well, for me they're few and far between. Yes, it completely bummed me out the first time I heard it. The screaming children in "The Kids" was unnerving. The almost flippant attitude towards the suicide in "The Bed" was equally caustic, but I think above all else it was the music that brought me down. Amidst all these depressing lyrics was this ironic musical landscape that featured woodwinds, horns, and other "non-rock" bits that sounded downright cheery at times. This is really where the brilliance of the album lies. At least that's how I see it. I don't care for Lou's reworking of the Velvets' "Sad Song" at the end. It's flat, monotone, and everything that every critic of Lou's knocked him for. But Berlin is something that no one else would have bothered to create at the time. Lou had to even bargain with RCA to release it. He promised the label two highly commercial albums in exchange for the record's release. And so it was. Berlin stiffed and disappointed all the fans who were wanting the expected sequel to Transformer.

But Reed didn't care. He was doing what he wanted, just like he always did. And so he came through on his promise and gave the kids what they wanted. Both Rock And Roll Animal and Sally Can't Dance sold Lou out like never before. He brutalized his dearest VU tunes with help from guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner on Animal and tried to make a dance record with Sally. The over the top "heavy metal" bombast of "Heroin" on Rock And Roll Animal is almost inexcusable, but the funky power that props up both "Sweet Jane" and "Rock 'N Roll" are hard to resist. Lou had put down his guitar and lived the rock star persona to the hilt. Soon, he was dying his hair blonde and painting his nails black. He was simulating shooting up heroin on stage by tying off with his microphone cord and producing a syringe from his pocket. Soon his audiences were showing up to see if Lou would destroy himself right in front of them. Sally Can't Dance became Lou's biggest selling album ever, landing square in the top ten. Personally, I love it. The scathing "Kill Your Sons" and the creepy "Ennui" work better than most of anything from Berlin to my ears. The trashy title track reminds one of "Sister Ray" lyrically. "Baby Face" is downright sexy musically, and in "N.Y. Stars" Lou goes straight for his audience and critics. "They say I'm so empty/'All surface, no depth'/Oh please, can't I be you?/Your personality is so great".

When Sally climbed the charts, Lou had had enough. So he gave the people what he wanted. Is it too much of a stretch to consider Metal Machine Music the Sgt. Pepper of the Seventies? No one had ever done such a thing like this before. At least, not a rock star of Reed's stature. After its release, many would actually become influenced by it and work from it, creating their own anthems of noise. It could never be duplicated in such a way again. A double album's worth of sheer white noise and plenty of "fuck you" attitude, Metal Machine Music kicked RCA and all of Lou's fans straight in the balls. It was 1975 and everyone was mellow, man. Whatever. Take that, David Gates. Here's one for you, Karen Carpenter. Choke on this, John Denver. RCA actually wanted to release it on their prestigious Red Seal label. Supposedly, when Lou foisted the master tapes upon RCA and told them this was his new album, he reportedly ran to the men's bathroom and laughed his ass off after they agreed to release it. The end of a career? Not quite.

More tracks from the Rock And Roll Animal show were released as Lou Reed Live, an utterly boring piece of product that did nothing for Lou or his fans. By this time, Reed had fallen in love with a transvestite named Rachel. Mick Rock took some alluring photos of the two together, a pile of which would decorate the cover of Lou's first greatest hits package. However, Lou's new found love would inspire him to record what I consider to be his greatest work, the catchy and wonderful Coney Island Baby. What's not to like here? The bouncing locked in groove of "Charley's Girl" with its lyrical echoes of "There She Goes Again" is sheer brilliance. The frightening "Kicks" with its sound effects of what sounds like people snorting cocaine and laughing nervously in the background manages to equal "Heroin" pound for pound. The silly, macho "A Gift" finds Reed joking around with a smile for the first time in forever. "Ooohhh Baby" and "Nobody's Business" are what Sally Can't Dance could have been had Lou actually cared. The reworking of the Velvets' "She's My Best Friend" is decidedly decadent. But it's the beautiful title track with its homage to "the Glory of Love" that makes one believe it. Never before had Lou actually been himself as "the" Lou Reed as he had here. It's a moving song, no matter how corny the "I wanna play football for the coach" intro might seem at first.

And that would be that for the moment. Lou would move on to Arista Records the same year (1976) and crank out a handful of experimental albums that for the most part just didn't seem right. If you want the best of who Lou Reed was in the Seventies, look no further than his first group of albums with RCA. They show a man who was willing to do everything, from selling out to nearly destroying his own career by choice. Rock stars don't do that anymore. Rock stars aren't rock stars anymore, either. There's no sense of awe to the business these days. Back then people gave you a show. They gave you an album a year. Nowadays "rock and roll" is about people dancing around the stage with mics strapped to their heads and selling CDs at McDonald's. Is that rock and roll? Fuck, no. So here's to you, Lou. Much thanks for teaching me how to play guitar and keeping true to my own rock and roll. How much more could I ask for?

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Jason Thompson: January, 2001, December, 2000, November, 2000

Jason Thompson's Reviews: January, 2001, December, 2000

Jason Thompson's Reviews: November, 2000

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