Buckle up: the 50 year anniversary of the Album Renaissance of 1972 continues with Lou Reed’s Transformer.
In 1970, Lou Reed walked out of a Velvet Underground gig at Max’s Kansas City to quit. He had written all the songs and sung most of them, and even though industry buzz was brewing at those shows—Patti Smith remembered dancing to the surf beat there—the idea of Reed holding it together in a band for four years was just about as long as it could possibly last. And great: Brian Eno would say that maybe 10,000 people bought their debut album, but they all started a band. How cool for them, but for this ahead of their time band, they were tanking for Verve, who would eventually refuse to release the final album they recorded for them. And easy for Eno to say—he was in a band, Roxy Music, that would sell 100,000 copies of their debut. The listeners did not need to start bands.
So there he was—30 years old and a Bartleby at his father’s accounting firm. This is Lou Reed we’re talking about! Something had to happen. Reed signed a contract with RCA, and recorded a debut, Lou Reed, that had a lot of leftover songs from the Velvets, with not one but two members of Yes among the session musicians. The album was filled with great songs—of course they were, they were written by Lou Reed, and he had been on an extended peak since he the beginning of The Velvets—but very few people bought it, and I doubt they started bands. If this were 2022, that one chance at bat would be it, but this was 1972, and even though it took longer than you think for the critics to be converted (Lou got back at Bob Christgau on his live Take No Prisoners album, when he speculated whether the Dean of Rock Critics was a “toe fucker”), but there was a fan waiting in the wings to spread the word about this misunderstood genius, and this fan was David Bowie, who had covered “I’m Waiting on the Man” and “White Light/White Heat.” He and Ziggy Stardust guitarist Mick Ronson would produce, provide backup vocals, string arrangements, eyeshadow and glitter. This conversation in Almost Famous probably happened between a teenaged Cameron Crowe and the rock critic swami Lester Bangs.
You like Lou Reed?
The early stuff. In his new stuff he's trying to be Bowie, but he should just be himself.
Yeah, but if Bowie's doing Lou, and Lou's Doing Bowie, Lou's still doing Lou. If you like Lou.
If you like Lou, you are probably reading this, and liking Lou meant making him go mainstream, and 1972 was a time when the rules were being updated very quickly for what that could possibly mean. Lou followed up the failure of his debut with something exciting. Bowie would make sure he would make this sparkle, and he did. It defined the idea of a certain kind of New Yorker, a certain connoisseur of decadence, someone who wanted to elevate the rock song to literature (or is it the other way around?). Lou hated the Beatles, liked the Stones and the Kinks well enough, but really thought that it was only Dylan who had the magic of poetry. That was the magic he was after, but he also needed a hit.
In 2006, I nominated Lou Reed for an honorary doctorate from Syracuse University, when I was on my second year on the tenure track there. I was using the desk of Delmore Schwartz, Lou’s Syracuse mentor, who got drunk with him in the Orange Bar off Marshall Street. In class, Reed told me, they talked about Yeats. Outside of class, Schwartz would read aloud from Finnegans Wake. “When he read aloud from it, I thought I could understand it,” Lou told me, the day before the ceremony in 2007. “When I tried to read it, I couldn’t understand it.” Schwartz hated rock and roll, but Reed dedicated “European Son”—the clangorous finale of The Velvet Underground and Nico--to him, after he was dead, but would remain, Lou liked to recall, the first great person he knew. Even though Lou once sang, “I’m no Lear with blinded eyes,” I still thought he deserved a doctorate, but SU gave him something called the George Arents Award, which was made into an even bigger deal. At the W Hotel near Union Square, Lou and his much better half Laurie Anderson were joined by Bono and Oscar Hijuelos and SU’s own Mary Karr, and… Bowie, who did not mingle with the crowd but who was beamed in and out from outer space. Half of that table are now on the other side, and the side we’re still on is looking increasingly questionable.
Lou Reed was not very nice to me, and I do not feel special in this. He saved his humanity for the songs that deserved them. But he did something even greater than this—he was honest and unflinching about who and what he was. He was blunt and gave us what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the rude truth. And he added extra rudeness for anyone who didn’t get the point. Lou called an album. New York, and that was his attitude. It’s a walk it like you talk it bravado that tells everyone around you: Don’t fuck with me. Did Lou actually know how to fight? He played someone who could. And many of his interviews from the early to mid 70s, when people started paying attention, were acts of combat, as if he had watched Dylan in Dont Look Back and decided to make him look polite.
1972 was a year for weirdos and outcasts to get their due. Lou Reed and David Bowie made their breakthroughs right on time. A few years earlier, unadulterated, they would have been unthinkable, too hot for RCA to touch. The same year Bowie made Ziggy Stardust, he also produced Transformer, and he took what he loved about The Velvet Underground and made it sparkle. Transformer had accessories unthinkable for the minimal Velvets—professional backup singers, strings, brass, multi-tracked and filtered vocals. “We’re coming out, out of our closets,” sings Lou on “Make Up,” and this is the was before anyone had heard of Harvey Milk. “Satellite of Love” sounds like a glam rock dream, aglow with the new technology, but that song was actually a Velvet Underground outtake, a frenzied rocker, not the sound of astonishment. If it sounded campy, it probably came from Bowie. Bowie packaged Lou for the world to fall in love with him, but Lou was still Lou, and that satellite of love was not necessarily going to be returned. It sounds like something Dion and the Belmonts could have sung, but they wouldn’t have. “Runaround Sue” is about jealousy, but not with this song’s wrath. This was the Lou who sang “better hit her” on the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again.” This is a doo wop glam song that packs a punch, getting told about getting bold.
But then there was a moment when the Bowie production just added to the drama. “Perfect Day” has the strings, the echo, the melody, but the words are unmistakable.
Just a perfect day
You made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else
Someone good
What is a perfect day if one is far, far from a perfect person? What distinguishes “Perfect Day” from almost anything is that this is a pop song with no guile. Most of pop music is selling a product. This person is cool, this one is sexy, this one is sensitive, this one is an outlaw. Lou was sexy and he was an outlaw, but he wasn’t selling it. He was who he was and he didn’t seem to care. How many people will cue up the studio musicians and a full orchestra to tell the world that it was lovely to take a vacation from the dark side, which, for Lou, was the prominent side? “You’re going to reap what you sow,” he intones in the end. This perfect day feels perfect, for now. What Lou was doing to his body in this period of his life would come back to haunt him later, despite clean living and tai chi for the last 30 years of his life. But it’s not just about drugs or mortality, it’s everything in this miserable prick who wants to have a perfect day. The darkness swirls around the perfect day, until it sucks out all of the oxygen, and the petting zoo and sangria become overwhelmed by a whole lot of instant karma.
Transformer was a hit, and Lou would continue to make the albums he wanted to make for the rest of his life. He never had to work in dad’s office again, and there were always people who would indulge him no matter what. The album after Transformer, Berlin, was a complete downer—a story of drug addicts who don’t take a walk on the wild side but malinger on life’s darkest corners. Another album, Metal Machine Music, was 64:11 of feedback for an entire album. “My week beats your year,” he wrote in the liner notes.
At age 12, I became aware of Lou Reed from the one song Dallas classic rock radio would play by him, “Walk on the Wild Side,” which was also being used for a Honda motorcycle ad. (“Don’t settle for walking,” he said.) It was the most New York thing I had heard in a song, at least outside of the Great American Songbook. I didn’t know about Candy Darling or the Warhol factory, or even the kind of music Lou was trying to evoke. I later saw him perform at an Ornette Coleman performance at Lincoln Center, and I realized that Coleman’s harmolodics were yet another thing Lou was trying to get into rock and roll. Transformer was Lou’s way of getting us hooked after a sample of his stash. He finally hit the mainstream with this album and was never looking back. “You’re not the kind of person that I’d even want to meet, ‘cause you’re so vicious,” he sang on the album’s opening track. And yet we did. And there he was at the W. Hotel, being honored his alma mater, even though he was busted for pot at his graduation ceremony. Accomplish enough, and the tables turn.
Ah, all night long you've been drinking your tequila rye
But now you've sucked your lemon peel dry
So why not get high, high, high and
Goodnight ladies, ladies goodnight
And so goes the final track of Transformer, a nod to The Waste Land, which was nodding to Hamlet. It’s a lovely cabaret song, with a levity one doesn’t usually associate with Lou. Lou was breaking into the mainstream, but he was still going to put himself in the ranks. I wasn’t sure how he would even feel about getting a doctorate. I couldn’t have imagined him sitting through a graduation ceremony. The event at the hotel was better. There they were, Lou Reed and David Bowie, just a few tables away from me. They had made Lou’s career making transformation the year before I was born. Now they were drinking non-alcoholic beverages, and thinking back on walking on the wild side and where it brought him. And, for a few moments, I actually saw him smile.
Excellent article. I was gifted the album “Magic & Loss” from an older co-worker back when I was in high school, jockeying a UDF counter in Cincinnati, Ohio. That album remains one of my great experiences of listening to music in the 1990s.
The empathy in Lou Reed's songs is incredible. Not the empathy of someone who stops and embraces another. He offers no comfort, only the vision of someone with his eyes open, observing the bleak lives that end outside of our sightlines. Has anyone ever heard a song about social services taking away someone's children, and then there is the sound of the children screaming and sobbing? Or how about Caroline singing to her lover (a 1970s word for a 1970s song): "You can hit me all you want to but I don't love you anymore." Or the impoverished child Pedro selling roses for buck and wanting to become a musician so he can make himself disappear? I listened to Berlin and New York nonstop as a researcher at Travis County Adult Probation. One time in Travis County, a social service agency worker convinced a mentally ill pregnant woman who was in our mental health unit to give her child up for adoption (even though this woman wanted so badly to be a mother). Because she loved her child, she did give him up for adoption, and days after leaving the hospital, killed herself from the pain of that sacrifice. Her child is growing up never knowing how much his bio mom loved him. Not that this adopted child would necessarily want to know the answer to "Did my bio mom really love me?" Lou Reed is the only rock star with the words to encompass these realities.