Album of the Day-May 14
Album of the Day-May 14
Lou Reed — Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal
Lou Reed — Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal
14. May. 2020
Lou Reed
Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal
1974
It’s hard to imagine that by 1974 Lou Reed was already considered washed up. But betting against Lou Reed’s career would soon become as common as betting against Keith Richards life…both would prove to be poor bets.
After his commercial breakthrough Transformer in 1972 came the commercially disappointing Berlin. And by 1974 Reed’s drug and alcohol intake had increased to a point where his live performances could’ve been either glam performance art or rock-n-roll train wreck, no one was really certain.
However, the performance from December 21, 1973, at Howard Stein’s Academy of Music in New York City cleared that up. That performance became Rock ’n’ Roll Animal — and its sequel Lou Reed Live — and the performance is anything but a train wreck.
Where Rock ’n’ Roll Animal elevates is not so much in Reed’s performance, which is good, it’s in the backing band, guitarists Dick Wagner and Steven Hunter, Prakash John — bass, Pentti Glan — drums, Ray Colcord — keyboards.
You get a sense of this right out of the gate with the first track “Intro/Sweet Jane” that the band is not some crappy pick-up band (in fact, the guitarists would go on to form the basis of the first Alice Cooper solo band on Welcome to My Nightmare). That intro jam is four minutes of the band while, presumably, Lou Reed stood off stage…being Lou Reed and refusing to go on (or so folklore has it). So the band does what a band does, jammed.
Again, as legend has it, Reed’s manager had to literally push him on stage and that would be right around the four-minute mark because you hear the audience scream louder. Whether that was deliberate or by design at this point is irrelevant because here it’s captured and it has an impact.
Of the five tracks on the original release, only one is from a Lou Reed solo album. “Lady Day” is off Berlin, while the rest are Velvet Underground songs.
“Intro/Sweet Jane” — as good as it should be.
“Heroin” — While I have never taken heroin, the 13:05 version of “Heroin” here is probably about as close as I’ll want to get.
“White Light/White Heat” the band plays with the muscle the song deserves and Reed sings with the bravado it needs. If you compare this live version to the studio version of the Velvet Underground, apples to oranges…spoiled out of season oranges loaded with seeds.
“Lady Day” — off Berlin. To be honest, I’ve never listened to Berlin.
“Rock ’N’ Roll” — There is a whole generation that knows “Rock ’N’ Roll” from Janes Addiction, which is great. Their version on their self-titled Tripple X album from 1987 is second only to this version. Clocking in at over 10:00 here it meanders a little. If you’re familiar enough, you can hear Lou playing guitar, giving as good as he’s getting from Wagner and Hunter. Clearly he’s enjoying himself.
But here “Rock ’N’ Roll” like on the “Intro/Sweet Jane”, the band stretches out a little more and loosens up. It’s also a brilliant way to bookend the album.
Album song sequencing albums is an art form that seems to have been lost.
Rock ’n’ Roll Animal would earn Reed his first gold record in the U.S. and injected a much-needed dose of B-12 and goodwill into his downward-trending career.
The album was so successful that Reed’s record company did what record company’s do…they released the rest of the concert. Rock ’n’ Roll Animal spawned a sequel released in March of 1975 — Lou Reed Live, which was recorded the same night. However, this album was more representative of Reed’s solo work.
Of course, Lou Reed being Lou Reed, whatever goodwill he’d gathered with the success of Rock ’n’ Roll Animal and Lou Reed Live was erased in July of 1975 when he turned in Metal Machine Music. An hour of modulated feedback and guitar effects that Rolling Stone described as “tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator.” However, on that night in New York City in 1973, Lou Reed was the furthest thing from a “groaning galactic refrigerator”.
Who knows what may have happened if any other band had been hired for that gig on December 21, 1973, and thankfully there’s no reason to consider that.
Through a modern lens, Lou Reed gets set aside for the many things he was, cantankerous, moody, insufferable, pretentious, arrogant, unlistenable, too arty, et al. and at certain points, in his career, he was one of them, and sometimes all of them, but one this particular night he was exactly as the name of the album suggests, a Rock n Roll Animal.