Search And Destroy: Lou Reed

Blue Mask is head and shoulders above everything else IMO

(of solo Lou, not all rock albums ever — but it’s up there too!)

Don't sleep on Legendary Hearts -- "Betrayed," "Martial Law," "Don't Talk To Me About Work," "Bottoming Out," "Rooftop Garden"...so much greatness there.

Mixing Quine down blunts their impact as performances but not songs.

Prefer Legendary Hearts tbh

Yeah Legendary Hearts is great, I remember when someone told me I needed to check it out and I was like "that record with the stupid motorcycle helmet on the cover?"

Classic

going through that whole RCA box, the only album I really actively dislike is Growing Up In Public — I even came around quite a bit on Mistrial.
Sally Can't Dance is probably my least fave 70s album of Lou's but it still has some fun stuff.

Ah, Lou Reed's motorcycle period...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkXxFCu7kPI

going through that whole RCA box, the only album I really actively dislike is Growing Up In Public —

I kinda love Growing Up In Public, it's indefensible but entertaining.

something about the band / arrangements on that record just makes me feel gross. "think it over" is pretty OK.

I was actually surprised at how much I liked Growing Up In Public. Sally Can't Dance had more decent moments than I was expecting, too. But Mistrial was a rough go. When I got the box a few years ago, that was my first time hearing Mistrial since 1986, and it somehow managed to sound much worse than I remembered it.

(And what will forever be a mystery to me is, as much as Lou revered Ornette Coleman's work, why did he always/only get the lamest saxophonists on earth to play in his bands?)

I love Sally Can't Dance! "Animal Language"! "Kill Your Sons"! "Billy"!

Of the 70s joints I've never really warmed to Rock'n'Roll Heart, I mean it's ok, I just don't love it

R&RH is way duller than SCD

I pretty much like all his 70s albums tbh.

Me too. It’s the 80s when he lost me.

yup

I like the first half of the 80s well enough. I haven't listened to much thereafter.

For instance I've never heard Mistrial.

Alfred will never convince me of the virtues of Fernando Saunders's aimless bass farts

That sounds like a great credit: "Fernando Saunders on aimless bass".

Yeah, the overdetermination of offenses including the Saunders abf, the tipping point where the Sprechgesang became more Sprechge than sang, and the endless guitar and microphone tech talk obsession that nevertheless seem to result in a generic clanky dry Strat sound or whatever.

haha yeah for someone who was reportedly super-obsessive about guitar sounds, from the late 70s on Lou's preferences are um strange to say the least.

Including live records, I think Saunders has played on more of Lou's albums than any other musician.

Seventies Lou:

Coney Island Baby
Transformer
Rock 'n' Roll Animal

Eighties Lou:

The Blue Mask
Legendary Hearts
New Sensations

Include New York (I won't but I won't quibble), Set the Twilight Reeling and Ecstasy and you've got one helluva run. To me it's an indisputable fact that Reed wrote more good songs and played and sang them better after 1982. I'm sorry if the so-called transgression of the seventies excites you. To me, the transgression was necessary for him to see the weird in the normal, like David Lynch learned.

Key line: "Things are never good, things go from bad to weird"

Berlin is sodden garbage -- an unnecessary and swollen gesture after TVU&N and WL/WH.

lol I'm listening to it right now

it's always seemed like an interesting failure tbh

that's my thought about Mistrial.

like, the last producer Lou Reed is Bob Goddamn Ezrin.

yeah the conventional wisdom that this was a terrible mismatch rings true

"The Kids" works, but it could've been on Transformer.

Actually, the conventional wisdom is that it's one of his greatest records, unfairly maligned at the time.

maligning was fair, was what I was getting at

I love it. I didn't hear it until 2013, but it made me realize that huh, I guess I really did want to hear Lou Reed's The Wall.

Weird to see only three mentions of Street Hassle on this thread. Always liked that one though that’s also bc it was my first Lou solo LP. I can’t rate it over some of the others of his I’ve picked up since though.

related: https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=41&threadid=15150

Feel like Street Hassle gets more play on some other Lou threads. The album as whole is a bit uneven but the title track is a definite career high point.(xp)

At the end of this thread I put a link to a good article about the recording of Street Hassle, which I probably should have put at the end of the Street Hassle thread itself, but hey, I’m unpredictable, just like Lou himself: In Praise Of...Lou Reed "Take No Prisoners"

To me, the transgression was necessary for him to see the weird in the normal
Sorry, to me there is something disingenuous about his latter day fascination with the normal. Perhaps Shakey and I, as readers of the rolling sf thread, are especially wary of this cheesy defamiliarization technique.

honestly I could care less about the shift in lyrical content, if there even is much of one, it's the sonics I can't stand

Perhaps you would have preferred if he had started playing fingerstyle?

thumbstyle

Yeah, the overdetermination of offenses including the Saunders abf, the tipping point where the Sprechgesang became more Sprechge than sang, and the endless guitar and microphone tech talk obsession that nevertheless seem to result in a generic clanky dry Strat sound or whatever.

LOL I don't necessary agree, but this is a great post

thumbstyle

Sorry, to me there is something disingenuous about his latter day fascination with the normal.

have you heard him sing? It's like imagining Donald Trump singing nursery rhymes. The Fascination with the Normal is precisely what gives those post-1982 albums (the good ones) their creepiness.

Are you saying the creepiness is intentional? And desirable?

Unintentional and desirable.

What about ostensibly clumsy stuff like the oft quoted couplet “My Dedalus to your Bloom/ was such a perfect wit”? What’s your take on this kind of thing?

Xgau says that it “honors the way that people really talk.” But who talks like that but Lou and pretentious permanent literature undergrads like the guy who was flirting with Laurie Anderson a few posts up? Delmore Schwartz himself wouldn’t be caught dead in a pauper’s grave with a sentence like that coming out of his mouth or pen.

To me that's just a different kind of stupid from Lou's 70s stupid.

Me too, but I liked 70s stupid better, it’s of a piece with 70s NYC cinema.