Lou Reed Solo

JCLC when will the axe you have so dutifully ground to an unnecessary sharpness for Lou Reed finally become dull

Wait lets throw in a beach boys song for good measure

Hadn’t noticed that he had beef with them.

I didn't even include The Bells in my list of his best. At this stage in his life he couldn't even concentrate on failed experiments.

I believe the Kokomo thread contains JCLC’s most scholarly opinions on their output

Xp

DISCO. DISCO MYSTIC.

― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, July 27, 2010 9:09 AM (eight years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I dislike the Beach Boys but Outis evidently has confused "occasionally gives voice to how much I dislike the Beach Boys" with "is on a crusade about it." idgaf honestly they're just fun to hate on because they suck. with Lou it's different, his best work is some of the best rock ever made & his worst work is considerably worse than the Mighty Mighty Bosstones on a bad day. The Bells figures in this latter category.

also my first post on this thread was in defense of Sally Can't Dance, I honestly think I like Lou more than most people I just don't think his shitty "I'm working something out here" albums are secret strokes of genius, they're just bad

^^^ wanna boogie with you imo

I'll insist forever that, obvious exceptions noted, Reed solo is best at the throwaway ("Sally Can't Dance," "I Love You, Suzanne," "Hookywooky").

There’s no law against disliking The Beach Boys, you can hate them in fact, but declaring they “suck” is simply a wrong opinion

i don't think it's particularly a secret stroke of genius, it just surprised me! it's a v odd record

bad Lou Reed albums:

Sally Can't Dance
Metal Machine Music
Rock and Roll Heart
The Bells
Growing Up in Public
Mistrial

Metal Machine Music may be a bad Lou Reed album, but it's a great album. It's unique in its transgression and its impact on the medium, and a scouring pad for the mind. I don't put it on if I want to listen to music, but sometimes I put it on because I need what it provides.

this is pretty much The Ostrich Part II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WsshDpMrxg

xp I'm sympathetic to that reading of MMM

DISCO. DISCO MYSTIC.

― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, July 27, 2010 9:09 AM (eight years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bad Lou Reed albums:

sally and mmm are both good and great respectively. rock and roll heart deserves way less hate than it gets though the biggest things it has going for it are "you wear it so well," "ladies pay," the title track, and "temporary thing"

you are making me listen to Sally again...

SCD is a solid album.

maybe, I don't enjoy it

I like Sally Can't Dance the way I like Draw the Line, but suspect it's incomprehensible to anybody who's not already invested in the Lou mythos, which means it's probably a shitty album, even though it's the Lou solo record I'm most likely to play after Coney Island Baby

not sure what myth I'm supposed to buy into, usually being a huge Lou Reed fan works for me

what I mean is "does where Lou was at in his life at the time factor at all into the way you listen to the album" - I generally resist this kind of listening & think it's basically made most music writing unreadable in 2018, but as a guy who spent a whole lotta time thinking about Lou as a person/persona and not just "the guy who made these records" I can't fully separate myself from that mythos, it's part of how I relate to this music. I think if you're just listening to the music as-is without other stuff informing your ear, SCD probably sucks pretty bad.

aah ok I get that, indeed I don't know much about what he was up to, seems like more of an outlier than a transitional album

I generally resist this kind of listening & think it's basically made most music writing unreadable in 2018,

preach

also thought JCLC's favorite was Rock n Roll Animal and not CIB but consensus seems to have formed pretty securely around the latter in the past decade

oh I dunno -- Sally Can't Dance is a fun, smutty album even w/out knowing about the chaos in his life. The kids who made it a top ten album weren't reading the Lester Bangs interviews, or at least not all of them.

Coney Island Baby has been my favorite Lou Reed album since I first heard it, R&R Animal is close to my heart but CIB has always been the one where his best qualities rise to the surface & his worse ones recede - his vocals have never been treated more lovingly (it's kind of hilarious how the records that followed are the ones that led him into the finger-wagging panicked baritone quality that became his signature going forward), his guitar never subtler (nor more effective save in the crazy live work-ups of mid-period VU sets), his POV never more relatable for me. some of that's personal - I did my time with the same substances Lou's reckoning with there - but tonally it's just a gorgeous record, which I largely attribute to the studio used & the engineers there.

Rock and Roll Animal is just a kick-ass rock record for me but part of what I love about it is exactly that you don't have to have any investment at all in Lou to bang your head to it. It could be an Alice Cooper album with a more sensitive understudy singing, really.

finally, if a hefty percentage of the sales of Sally weren't label people spending label money in actual stores to get the damn thing to chart, please, we spent a lot of money on this guy, I'll eat my hat.

this'd be my Lou solo 70s ranking most days:

Coney Island Baby
Rock and Roll Animal
Transformer
self-titled
Sally Can't Dance
Street Hassle
Live: Take No Prisoners
Lou Reed Live
Rock and Roll Heart
The Bells

back when, I loved the hell out of "Take No Prisoners" and still think the band there smokes, but for desert island purposes I could happily lose everything after Sally on that list

oh I forgot Berlin. which is fine, because I have no use for it.

Amusing myself by imagining a Lou Reed soundcheck somewhere sometime... "Can you hear the drums, Fernando?"

Chart positions were meant to be manipulated in 1974, but it's hard not to believe that after Transformer and R&R Animal he didn't have career momentum (even with the sodden Berlin as roadblock).

I don't know how much of the guitar work on CIB is Lou's. I'm pretty sure Bob Kulick played the prettier slide work.

Yes, like Lou could play guitar like that!

He rarely played lead post-Velvets until The Blue Mask, and I can hear the difference between him and Quine.

He plays quite a bit of (lead) guitar on "Rock and Roll Heart".

... no session guy, worth his salt, would ever admit to playing the lead guitar on "Ladies Pay" for instance.

the one where his best qualities rise to the surface & his worse ones recede - his vocals have never been treated more lovingly (it's kind of hilarious how the records that followed are the ones that led him into the finger-wagging panicked baritone quality that became his signature going forward), his guitar never subtler (nor more effective save in the crazy live work-ups of mid-period VU sets), his POV never more relatable for me.... but tonally it's just a gorgeous record, which I largely attribute to the studio used & the engineers there.

well put, my feelings exactly. I stumbled on a vinyl copy of CIB at Rhino Records in Claremont while in high school in 1989 and it's been close to my heart ever since

In fact, having just checked, he plays all the guitars on "Rock and Roll Heart".

the lead work on the title track of CIB is so stately and smooth, there's no way that one was Lou. Like Alfred, I'd wager the majority (if not all) of the leads there are Kulick.

All of the lead work is by Kulick.

agreed on coney island baby as a peak of his '70s work, it's so beautifully recorded and feels like a continuation of the later velvets records in a way he never really went for again (which is why it's really nice when "she's my best friend" pops up, though i guess if i'd bought this record at the time it'd be the only version i was aware of)

it's also a v thematically connected suite of songs without being ponderous and obvious about it like berlin (i love berlin, i love theatrical lou obv bc i love ecstasy and lulu but there's such a lightness of touch on coney island baby)

Berlin’s sound is p oppressive, is my main problem w it. With a gentler approach to the arrangements it would’ve made a decent Fassbinder musical.

but Lou's rhythm work on CIB is also p good! it does what it needs to do -- pedals the song forward nicely, sits in the pocket maintaining the groove. there was a quote from Lou at some point along the lines of "if God asked me today, what do you want to be? do you want to be a bestselling author? a millionaire? no, I want to be the rhythm guitar player in a rock band" that resonates for me in that CIB/Street Hassle moment

i really do love the rhythm section on berlin (jack bruce and aynsley dunbar) and also the brief appearances of the hunter/wagner twin guitar attack that drives rock n roll animal

His rhythm guitars on "Foggy Notion" and "What Goes On" are the best in recorded history.

I'm with you on that, Alfred. Particularly on the Live 69 WGO. Just amazing work by Lou and an obvious influence on the next few generations of indie rockers. I'm looking at you David Gedge, and of course many, many others.

I just learned today that Wakeman & Howe played on his S/T debut. Hot playing on that one!

Also -- I dig The Bells. It's a bit hairy in parts, but sure has personality... (And how can you beat an LP with the credit, "Don Cherry - African hunting guitar, trumpet"?)

I still haven't dived into that one, I prefer to find these kind of 70's classic-era things on LP as opposed to streaming. that does sound cool.