Set the Twilight Reeling (1996)

Lou Reed’s 17th studio album was standard-issue for him at that point in his career—overarching fealty to the rock band 2 guitars bass drums array of sound, with generous bolts of feedback and other rude noise, Fernando Saunders on bass, homely vocals, and densely varying tones of lyrics. New York City references abound. The album opens on “Egg Cream” (“a cold beverage consisting of milk, carbonated water, and flavored syrup [typically chocolate or vanilla] ... [it] originated among Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City”) and follows with “NYC Man,” rife with twists on cliches, e.g., “I'm a New York City man, blink your eyes and I'll be gone.” “Hookywooky” is just for the infectious fun. The live “Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II” (whither Part I?!) has him riffing on the outrage of Republican Party hypocrisy. Pretty good for 1996. He’s cracking jokes but he’s mad too. “Riptide” clocks in at 7:47 replete with howling feedback. For me the centerpiece and center of gravity to this album is the song “Trade In,” where Reed’s much vaunted emotional honesty might be shading over into cruelty. The singer is formally addressing someone he used to be. Namely, at least the way I hear it, the singer in “Heavenly Arms,” which credits Reed’s second wife, Sylvia Morales, with his most heartfelt redemption, calling her by name in an agonizingly beautiful passage. That was 1980. In 1994 they divorced, and Reed by then was already involved with Laurie Anderson. In “Trade In,” he refers to Anderson as “a woman with a thousand faces / And I want to make her my wife.” They married in 2008. I don’t take the song as deliberately malicious, though it veers close. The song has many powerful points, notably when the guitar comes in full, but I think what makes it work to the extent it does is that the singer seems as confused about his romantic reversals as anyone. Maybe he’s trying to atone for “Heavenly Arms,” whose own powerful moment is a little reduced by the failure of the marriage. The singer in “Trade In” is rueful and self-deprecating, saying he wants a “fourteenth chance at this life,” suggesting awareness of many previous mistakes. What feel like attacks on his former lover, and spouse—Reed does characterize the target in this song as a former self, so maybe that’s actually what the song is about ... I’m just spitballing here—are more often result of his own self-lacerations: “A child that is raised by an idiot and that idiot then becomes you / How could I believe in a movie? How could I believe in a book?” Nevertheless, he is stubbornly sticking to his guns. He wants a trade in. Amazing song on a pretty good album.

White Light / White Heat (1968)

Of all the major Velvet Underground releases—The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light / White Heat, The Velvet Underground, 1969, Loaded, and VU—everyone has to have a least favorite. This one is mine—yes, and "Sister Ray" notwithstanding. It's not that I don't like the album in a general sort of way, their second ("sophomore effort," as we say) and the first after sidelining Andy Warhol and Nico. In fact, when I came back to White Light / White Heat recently I thought it was better than I remembered, even "The Gift," which has always been my primary article of evidence for not listening to the album more. That track lasts more than eight minutes, with John Cale reading a Lou Reed short story that is trying hard to be bizarre. If you want to stretch a point it might even be a kind of very dry marker for splatterpunk horror. Tensions between Cale and Reed were coming to a head generally during the recording of this album. I can hear it—or think I can—specifically in the production of "Lady Godiva's Operation," based on another Reed short story, this one apparently about trans surgery. Reed has a backing vocal where he comes in for a part of a line at a time, but he's mixed unusually high. It feels like a personality conflict, Reed asserting himself for the sake of his ego not the song. It adds an interesting tension, but it's also an uncomfortable tension. As for the 17-minute "Sister Ray" (or the "White Whale"), yeah sure, stone rock rave-up classic. The raw groove bludgeons. Distortion and fuzz dominate. Pounding monotony is a good thing in this case. Now Reed is mixed way down, as if the vocal can barely keep up, riding the current, under the assault of the band. Halfway in it is hypnotic like a factory machine. Heavy drug references and loopy sexual references abound. At 16:00 it's a horse race with the avant-garde rock equivalent of a photo finish. "Sister Ray" is much revered and perhaps deservedly so. But it has long verged on homework for me, and I've never fully connected with it. Thinking the length of it might be the appeal, I turned to the 38-minute version from the Quine Tapes box set, recorded in San Francisco. It's more slow-paced and methodical and in the style of the 1969 double-live (not surprising as both were drawn from some of the same shows in 1969). Moe Tucker hits and hits. The rhythm guitar strums and strums. Someone's noodling on a guitar. It goes through some changes, which sound at least semi-rehearsed. At one point, from about 8:30 to 15:00, it sounds a little like they're attempting to emulate "Dark Star." Where is Jerry Garcia when you need him? They were right there in San Francisco. The White Light / White Heat version altogether comes off better, much closer to the controlled chaos they appeared to be going for, the formal and conscious antithesis of West Coast side-long tracks like "Dark Star." Someone somewhere once observed that all of the Velvet Underground starts and ends with "Sister Ray," and anyone who claims to be a fan but is indifferent to "Sister Ray" is ... something judgmental. Guilty. But like I say, we all have to have a least favorite, even among the most loved sets of things. You probably already know exactly what you think of White Light / White Heat. But I will still say: Approach with caution.

New York (1989)

Judging from Wikipedia and possibly faulty memory, the conventional wisdom on Lou Reed's 15th solo album is that the lyrics are brilliant and the accompanying music pro forma at best. "Reed's straightforward rock and roll sound on this album was unusual for the time and along with other releases such as Graham Parker's The Mona Lisa's Sister presaged a back-to-basics turn in mainstream rock music," the Wiki article notes, going on, "Conversely, the lyrics through the 14 songs are profuse and carefully woven, making New York Reed's most overtly conceptual album since the early 1970s." Strange comparisons abound—maybe someone with another view needs to chip in some further insights. The article also mentions John Cougar Mellencamp, of all people, scoffing that "it sounds like it was produced by an eighth grader," adding, "but I like it." While quick and dirty roundups of internet opinion don't seem to deride the music as much, they use the word "literary" much more frequently than I am used to seeing in album writeups. It is the continuing, dominating theme of reviews.

And it's basically the opposite of my own reaction, notably on the lyrics. For me, New York suffers a problem that is similar to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." If you listen carefully to the Springsteen song, it is sensitive and thoughtful on the plight of Vietnam veterans returning to the US. However, if you don't listen carefully, it sounds enough like jingoism that GOP politicians have had to be warned for years with cease-and-desist notices to keep it out of their rallies. In a similar way there are lots of lines and bits in New York that jump out at me as get-off-my-lawn stuff with all the easy carping: hitting with "the statue of bigotry" (which my brain keeps insisting is a mispronunciation, "Statue of Libitree," for some unclear effect, maybe dialect?), reaching for Moby-Dick gravitas on "Last Great American Whale" and finishing it with the old "stick a fork in them" gag, and just generally ripe with insights like "Spittin' in the wind comes back at ya twice as hard." The album closer, "Dime Store Mystery," seems to want to have a pie and coffee discussion about the movie The Last Temptation of Christ. The main track that lost me was "Dirty Blvd.," which was more or less the signifying "hit" of the album and which sounds to me—again on loose listening—like an old person complaining about young people and This City Has Gone to Hell.

The Bells (1979)

[Early cuts here and here.]

More than 40 years later (I happened to pick it up the day it came out), I still can't make up my mind about this curious Lou Reed album, poised before one of his best solo periods. Sometimes it feels like a brilliant experiment I can't quite fathom. Sometimes it feels like outtakes from the previous year's Street Hassle. It carries on with the "binaural" production strategy from that album, with Reed taking the sole formal producer credit this time. But the sound is lumbering and muddy, like someone spilled syrup on it. Too late I learned the supposed way to listen is on headphones, which I don't do anymore and never thought to try with this. Reed's vocals are often pitched at hysterical levels, distractingly weird, and out of step with the lyrics. Lester Bangs in Rolling Stone cobbled together a case for The Bells as a return to Velvet Underground form and Robert Christgau in the Village Voice gave it an amiable B+, but the folks throwing up reviews over at Amazon are closer to my own take for once (though I will say I like the album more than many of them). "Families" drew me in first and most enduringly with its tale of nuclear family heartache but sadly I have about used it up by now. The album kicks off pretty well with "Stupid Man"—neglectful father with regrets—though it is hampered by Reed's vocal, which sounds like a coke jag. "Disco Mystic" follows. It is neither hostile to disco nor actually disco, coming on with a walloping attack, pepper pot sax, and drowned "disco mystic" quasi-chant.

I start to lose attention with "I Want to Boogie With You," in which boogieing has never sounded so lackluster yet strangely desperate. The star of this album could well be saxophonist Marty Fogel, although on "Boogie" he sounds more like an SNL session guy. "City Lights" is a pleasant ditty that appears to be about the Chaplin movie, or maybe just Chaplin himself, or possibly something else altogether—it's cryptic. (Still, if it inspires anyone to see City Lights it has done its work. I recommend you look into it immediately.) "All Through the Night" reprises the same party background effects (with possibly the same exact recording) as "Kicks" on Coney Island Baby. It's convincing as a portrait of a New York party in the '70s but Jesus Christ Reed himself already did it. Maybe the most apt comparison I found for The Bells was to Iggy Pop's The Idiot, which is similarly out of character for its artist, yet recognizably him, and much adored among a certain slice of the dedicated fans. For me, I've always been a Lust for Life partisan for Iggy in that period, and I like Street Hassle a lot more than The Bells—for the title suite alone, even if the rest of the album veers toward the weak. The problem, as M. Salmestrelli argued it in 2013 on Amazon, and I think I agree, is that it just wasn't a good period for Reed. "Lou Reed was in a very bad state by the tail end of the 70's and his music reflected it," he writes. "Aside from Metal Machine Music, the live Take No Prisoners, Growing Up In Public and Rock N Roll Heart are the worst albums in Lou Reed's career." Of course I don't agree entirely—I'm one who likes MMM and I think 1974's Sally Can't Dance (not to mention Mistrial if we're looking beyond the '70s) belongs with his worst. I will probably be puzzling out The Bells for the rest of my life. To start, why that title?

Lou Reed, "Coney Island Baby" (1976)

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Lou Reed's death has caught me up a bit. It wasn't one anyone could say was a surprise, but I felt it as an unexpected loss and still do. More, I have been amazed by the outpouring I have seen, often exasperated by what people laud and ignore. But of course—it could not be any other way. Lou Reed contained peevishness too, a Walt Whitman of our times, contradicting himself, large, containing multitudes. I wanted to post "Baton Rouge" on Facebook as my own personal expression of grief, but played it safe with "Sweet Jane." More I was intrigued by what everybody else was throwing up—it was an amazing variety, from pre-Velvets to "Egg Cream" and beyond, which may have been the most remarkable testament of all. Applying the work ethic Andy Warhol so famously drummed into him, Lou Reed willed himself into becoming a creative giant, one of the most enduring, influential, and productive artists of his time, and someone who personally became important to me, for his storytelling and sharp eye and his stories of substance abuse, bad relationships and good, and for his commitment to physical and, yes, emotional health. I saw him in performance once in Minneapolis, in 1984, and again in Seattle in 1992, and he was a sensation both times. I've been listening to him for 40 years but am only now getting some sense of the giant figure he cut. As for "Coney Island Baby," it's Lou Reed the way I particularly like him, with his defenses down and his heart wide open, alert and paying attention and getting the details. I mean, "I wanted to play football for the coach"? How does he get away with that? Among other things, Lou Reed was a consummate showman and a dedicated student of the human heart. Sit for 6:47 and enjoy a little masterpiece, why don't you.

Lou Reed, "Heavenly Arms" (1982)

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It's none of my business, but I still miss Sylvia. In retrospect, maybe Lou Reed was more in love with something she helped him find in himself than with her—though who can say that isn't the reason most of us are in love in the first place anyway? Not my business, as I said, and beside the point anyway. I can go visit her any time I like in this song (or, if not her, then what I miss, because obviously I don't know her). It's the song Reed used to climax The Blue Mask, his first great album of yet another reascendant period, the early '80s. And that's no coincidence, because among other things the (carefully incidental) priority is on the lines of a heterosexual agenda. "I love women, I think they're great," he says in the song "Women." Everywhere you look on that album it is women, women, women. So if it's going to be a torch song at the end the ground is laid. But it's laid with other elements too: this amazing band he assembled, with Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on an aching soulful bass, and rock-solid drummer Doane Perry. The birth of 2 guitars bass drum as self-conscious ethos buoys this. Not to mention something about emotional recovery, the details hazy but the feeling of assessing and owning up strong here. It all comes to a bracing head in "Heavenly Arms," one of Reed's most nakedly revealing songs. The heavenly arms of the title belong to Sylvia, of course, called out by name. Not just called out, but implored, beseeched, howled for, from as vulnerable a point as may ever have been recorded, more or less. A bellow of love. It's fair enough to call it calculating—it's Lou Reed, after all, and I've outlined the case above. But that doesn't mean it won't move you, over and over again.

Songs for Drella (1990)

This is a bit of a solemn project, a memorial album for Andy Warhol that Lou Reed and John Cale collaborated on after many years of estrangement, coming together in memory of their mentor and friend and blowing apart again almost immediately after. Perhaps because of lingering strains between them—or perhaps for some other reason entirely—the result is closer in feel to Double Fantasy than any kind of Velvets redux. Both artists are credited coequally for all 15 songs here but the styles veer about quite wildly, settling in two distinct places, one that sounds like John Cale and the other like Lou Reed. If the old Lennon & McCartney strategy for figuring out the real songwriter applies here, namely, who's got the lead vocal, then it's Reed by 10-5. But because it's not actually that simple (and isn't either with the Beatles), Songs for Drella also works as the Velvets redux everybody wanted. But that is more because the sense of Andy Warhol is so potent, taking off from the manifold images of him that Reed, Cale, and we as listeners carry around with us. They explore his biography, as in the opening "Smalltown," or in "Slip Away (A Warning)," which remembers the aftermath of his shooting. They play with his aesthetics and background milieu on "Trouble With Classicists" and "Images." Mostly they just heap love on him. You can feel it. This is a side of that whole scene that partly got lost in all the mess, but the degree of affection for Warhol that is on every song here, however melancholy, guilty, and defensive, is bracing. It's impossible to miss, the one thing I always take from it again. They liked Warhol. They resented him. They got exasperated by him. But more than anything they admired and loved him fiercely. They are humbled and proud to have been associated with him, and grateful. All that comes through the weird tensions and cross-currents that are nearly as palpable here. It's all good music, for all these reasons and more, but I think Reed has the advantage of Cale (which he evidently pressed with twice as many songs). This is the year after his mini-comeback New York, one of his better periods. He's all over his controlled noisy guitar squall thing here, and when he goes into his Coney Island Baby adorable pouty confessional style at the very end, in the song "Hello It's Me," he gets the last word and uses it to nearly steal the show. But I think the whole dang thing is just prime really, an interesting collaboration and a great album, testament, and set, tender and very moving at its best.

Lou Reed, "Bottoming Out" (1983)

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"One of the greatest songs written about alcoholism, spousal abuse and suicide ever!" says a YouTube comment at the video at the link. You have to give it up to that person. Setting aside how many songs are written about alcoholism, spousal abuse, and suicide in the first place, it's not far wrong, although it's not the alcoholism, spousal abuse, and suicide that make it one of the greatest songs written ever. A lot of the credit has to go to bass player Fernando Saunders, whose soaring, loping playing style provides one of the most important dynamics to Lou Reed's band in this period, one of his best, and this is one of his best showcases. The Blue Mask and Legendary Hearts, which is the home of this track, both feature Saunders, guitar player Robert Quine, and Reed in one of his best songwriting periods. "Bottoming Out" is told from the point of view of a person an awful lot like Lou Reed at the time, but not exactly, into discipline and control but weakened and tortured by addiction and a deep hunger for redemption, a drunk by the sound of it, with a searing drama about a terrible night and a bad accident, a relationship and bitter fights and making up and calling it love all over again, etc. Personal growth on public display, and it's bracing enough on that level, kudos to Reed of course. But I have to bring it back around again to Saunders. Because the way he lives inside this song, and the best of all these songs, the way he feels for the big moments in the tawdry rubble of Reed's stories, it's really something. Gorgeous. He makes it positively heroic. Alcoholism, spousal abuse, and suicide. Also a chopper, child bride, and open road "drunk but my vision's good"—straightforward bottoming out style. You don't forget it.

VU (1985)

This was a pleasant surprise—emphasis on "surprise." I didn't know anyone who expected it or anything like it: an iconic band, whose reputation was even then still on the rise, releasing an album of material from their prime, which no one particularly knew existed. That's one reason I pasted the 1985 release date on it, rather than the more accurate 1969 recording date. I just reflexively think of it as an album of the mid-'80s, not because it sounds like one—no, in fact one of its greatest pleasures was how much it sounded just like the Velvet Underground of the '60s. But it became such an infatuation, and that coincided so neatly with my own burgeoning obsessions with the band, and I played it so much and listened to it so intensely, that now it reminds me of times in my life from 1985 and 1986. Having done a bit of revisiting of the Velvets catalog in recent weeks I can even hear now like I never have before how plainly this is a notch off of all the pillar albums. But the sound quality is so good, and the songs so fresh even if we'd already heard other versions elsewhere (six of this 10 found their way onto Lou Reed solo albums), that the excitement itself must have made up for any deficiencies objective or otherwise. The story is that internal corporate shenanigans related to the labels the band was signed with effectively put this stuff on a shelf and from there it just got lost in the shuffle. It's probably most accurate to characterize it as a rough draft for a follow-up to The Velvet Underground—a lost album, if you will, which should have bridged that eponymous third and Loaded, a complicated story of business and judgment that ultimately involves some three labels altogether (Verve, MGM, and Atlantic). Two of the 10 songs on VU go back to the John Cale days, "Temptation Inside Your Heart" and "Stephanie Says," but there's no John Cale in sight. This is the post-Cale Velvet Underground. And it is in fine form: spry, quick, melodic, mostly stripped down pretty close to the 2 guitars bass drums types of fundamentals that Reed would come to favor. "I'm Sticking With You," like "After Hours," is another showcase for Moe Tucker. There's no particular studio sheen on anything here (with the possible exception of the effects on "Ocean") but it sounds remarkably polished, which I think is at least as much about the songwriting as it is about the fact that it had become a band that at least sounded remarkably comfortable playing with one another. The only false point for me is the version of "Andy's Chest," and that's only because I know Transformer so well and to me it is a Transformer song and certainly not a Velvet Underground one. But that's a very small quibble. If it's not the best Velvet Underground album by a good ways, it still remains the one whose release most thrilled me. Taking the shrink wrap off this and putting it on for the first time is a moment I can still recall for the sheer dumb stupefaction of it.

The Velvet Underground (1969)

I knew most of the songs on this album one way or another but wasn't on intimate terms with the album itself until the '80s. I liked it quite a bit and have found it's one that repays going back to regularly—"the quiet one," I came to think of it, among the core of their releases (compared to "the first one," "the loud one," "the live one," "the best one," and finally, way down the line, those last two orphans). With John Cale out of the picture, Lou Reed may have felt some need to burnish the avant-garde experimental credentials with the longest song here, the talky cerebral "The Murder Mystery," which has never done much for me, except occasionally excite some degree of respect but more often impatience. But the rest is a knockout, a lot of real beauties mixed with performance standards. "What Goes On," "Beginning to See the Light," and "I'm Set Free" are probably closer to the latter, pointing the way to the kind of grooves they laid down with such reliably gentle yet firm authority in their live shows (for the evidence, start with 1969 and continue with The Quine Tapes). Because I knew 1969 before anything else, those versions are still the ones I prefer. They are, as one would expect, a little looser, more freewheeling, stretched out and taken places. They sound fine here in their "studio versions," if slightly prim and airless, but my favorites on this one are all the folkie confessional ... I'm not even sure what to call them. They're quiet like ballads, but with hard clarion edges, such as "Some Kinda Love" and "Pale Blue Eyes" (my #1 favorite Velvets song without hesitation for a time). This is kind of Lou Reed's Leonard Cohen album, and you can feel him straining for the studied literary affect in the lyrics, which actually stand up to the scrutiny if one is moved to examine them closely. They work as poems on the printed page, more or less. But they are more than that, and that is seen perhaps nowhere more clearly than in "After Hours" and especially "Jesus," which really stake out their territory and occupy it. I mean, the year is 1969, and no one is going to mistake anyone in this band for Jesus freaks or any kind of innocents even then. Yet the song "Jesus" is played so achingly straight, with such a perfect absence of irony, pulling hard against the peculiarity of the circumstances of this band doing that song. And it works to that extent, sounding almost like a cover of some old-time gospel standard. But it's a Lou Reed song too. The color scheme for the cover drips with inky black but this album may well operate like the proverbial pinprick of light within the universal blackness. For the most part I think The Velvet Underground makes a reasonably straightforward case for peace and goodness. It is at any rate another excellent way in to this great band.

The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

This one of course is a very big deal for many people, and I suppose I am one, but still I think there's a wide range in the specificity of experience of these things, so here's mine. I actually do remember seeing copies with the peel-away banana skin, at parties I wandered into one way or another in the mid-'70s, which were invariably dark midnight affairs, with candles and gauzy curtains and such, and at least once I was crashing it cold, so didn't actually know anyone. I wasn't particularly familiar with the album for a long time. It was the first Velvet Underground album but it wasn't my first exposure to them—that was 1969. To be honest, this album scared me a little. I always thought the seven-minute "Heroin" laid it on a little thick, and still do, but "I'm Waiting for the Man" (the strange formality of the title proper, a phrase not used in the song), "Venus in Furs," and the closing noise affairs, "The Black Angel's Death Song" and "European Son," actually scared me quite badly, the way horror movies could, somehow instantly conjuring desperate nightmare feelings. The Nico vehicles, "Femme Fatale" and "I'll Be Your Mirror," appealed to me most, as exotic, surprisingly pretty, almost soothing by comparison, yet not without hints of their own brands of malevolence. I did not own a copy of this album until 1982 and then it was a matter of profound infatuation, every day, loud, standing up, jumping around, etc. I thought it was patchy, even the stuff that I liked was patchy by styles. There were often dead spaces listening to it straight through—though not always the same ones, they shifted around some. "All Tomorrow's Parties," for one, was practically a litmus test of my own mood, finding it alternately drony and boring or a place of great power I have been privileged to visit. "Run Run Run" another reason to dance more and dance harder or an impatient "what the fuck?" This made it a little different for me from other such Albums of Great Moment, Freewheeling, Revolver, Electric Ladyland, Sandinista, so on and so forth, which more often tended to be matters of all or nothing. But there's no question this is one of the greats and totally essential. With Andy Warhol pasted all across the surface of it, like the psychedelic light show playing across the band's glum figuratively black and white visages in one of the photos on the cover, it brings an absolutely unique assortment of voices and sensibilities to bear: Nico, Lou Reed, John Cale, Moe Tucker, Sterling Morrison. In its way, and all the careful urban grit notwithstanding, it's an affair of the most blissful harmonies imaginable, in terms of bringing together such a wild array of strands quite this colorfully, a moment unlike any they ever again achieved. Which, I know you can say that about practically each and every one of the Velvet Underground's albums, and that's one of the reasons they remain so interesting, amazing, and vital.

Loaded (1970)

I knew this was a great album when I finally flipped it over, and yeah, I know I am dating myself with that. The first side is front-loaded with an impressive array of post-John Cale highlights, "Sweet Jane," "Rock and Roll," and "New Age," by name. If you don't know them you should, probably in about that order, not to great preachy or judgmental. They are alone worth price of admission, for sure. But what's on the back has more sides of Lou Reed the tender, fresh and surprising every time they show (he always did appear to know how good that side of his shtick is as two other such, "Who Loves the Sun" here and "Sunday Morning" from the banana album, were designated to open two of rawk's stone great albums). For a time I think I might even have been at least as infatuated with the back of this album as with its front (and that is and remains "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" notwithstanding, though I admit it grows on me). "Head Held High" is about the usual squall (bearing in mind that generally speaking everything here is at least slightly above average), but "Lonesome Cowboy Bill," "I Found a Reason," and "Train Round the Bend" seem to me unique little chapters in all of Lou Reed's catalog, and utterly worthy. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" makes like a kiddy song, with the sing-along invitation of the melody and then cowboys too, as advertised. Riding horses and everything, in rodeos, no less. It's a goof from nowhere and plain charming. "I Found a Reason," by contrast, is serious about its romance and other things eternal, built on more kiddy-style vocal harmonies and tunes. It gives itself away all heartfelt and adolescent on the speech from Lou: "Honey, I found a reason to keep living. And you know the reason, dear, it's you." How Lou Reed was getting away with such adolescent maunderings as a 27-year-old is another question, but lay that to the side. He was, and would for awhile longer. And it doesn't matter: once he's done talking the singing on "I Found a Reason" really starts, and if you know what's good for you you're singing right along. At the top of your lungs if you can manage it. It is really quite a remarkable moment, and it sneaks up on you too. Then "Train Coming Round the Bend" starts grinding its insinuating way in, with the kind of groove that either Creedence Clearwater Revival or T. Rex could drift into as well. And out on the 7:24 of cooing and sighing that is "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" (great title, that one) to polish off the lovely suite and a great side too. That is one of the benefits of liking the first side so much. It leads to additional exposure to the second side and other good things.

7. Velvet Underground, "Sweet Jane" (1970)

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It's practically impossible by definition to pick a favorite Velvet Underground album but if forced I'm going with Loaded. There's a warmth and an unaffected and generous adolescence to it, looking forward to Mott-style glam, that never fails to catch me up. It's an odd affect, particularly coming at the tail end of their ride. It hardly hurts that it piles on upfront with one of the great rock anthems in "Sweet Jane," an allusive tale, supported by a nearly perfect array of acoustic guitar chords, about kids moving to the city and living their lives. In the right moment it is the thrill of a lifetime. I've talked before about how a person may aspire to master the phrasing of certain signature songs, enabling a kind of process of transubstantiation in order to actually become those beloved singers and songwriters (Buddy Holly and Prince), at least for the duration of the songs and one's ability to sing with them perfectly. I have long held strong suspicions that the same holds for Lou Reed and this one, but I have never managed (yet) to entirely duplicate the various asides and chortles and feints and dodges of his deceptive singing in the verses, not for lack of trying. It's a pleasure every time to hear, particularly when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, folksinger Lou Reed style. As loud as you can now: "And there's even some evil mothers / Well, they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt / Y'know, that women never really faint / And that villains always blink their eyes / And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush / And that life is just to die." P.S. Never mind the later metal versions of this, as on Rock n Roll Animal. I insist it's the Loaded version you want.

14. Lou Reed, "Families" (1979)

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In a solo career that now spans 40 years, Lou Reed has released something like 21 albums and an additional handful of collaborations, so naturally there are any number of lost highways, failed experiments, and mistrial misfires to sort through among the brilliant triumphs at this point. "Families" lives on The Bells, one of the more overlooked/undervalued among this motley, and it's an example of Reed donning his mask of naked sincerity—as believable and heartfelt as he gets, which doesn't mean he hasn't fooled me one more time (there's that thing about the family dog, for one example of overplaying his hand here). But the wretched monotony of the "how's the family?" chant, in combination with the riffing sax and handclap rhythm-keeping and I guess I have to say various circumstances in my own life too when this came along, worked together to produce a heartrending experience. There's nothing uniquely insightful about it. "Families that live out in the suburbs often make each other cry" and "I don't come home much anymore" are the lines that go through me on a reliable basis, and they're things you could say with just as much accuracy about families and people that live right in town, or out in the country, or other suburbs. But I was on strained relations with my family then—the usual crap, in my 20s, but with our mother dying to make everything that much more confusing, and me trying to "make something of my life" after years of fooling around and being essentially given up on, as it felt, plus all the alienation and loneliness to be expected. Nothing remarkable, just the normal stuff you can imagine and probably know for yourself one way or another. Still, this song provided some kind of touchstone for me, even as, like those families out in the suburbs Lou Reed is singing about, it often made me cry.

22. Lou Reed, "Perfect Day" (1972)

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Here's one truly that moves in mysterious ways—I've been aware of it ever since I was aware of Transformer, my first real introduction to Lou Reed, but it wasn't until I saw the way it was used in the movie Trainspotting that I came to embrace it (it later became a memorably star-studded BBC promo, and frequently covered elsewhere as well, but I think the original is still the best). On its face it is hilarious, a croaking monotone Lou Reed barely getting over the swooning orchestra he reclines on so luxuriously, with a swelling Liberace by way of Ferrante & Teicher hammering on a grand piano at the bridge that sends it swirling to the heavens. The theme? Remembering the good times through a haze of bitterness. "I thought I was / Someone else, someone good." The good times may be saccharine, the bitterness arch, but it remains a place we likely all know. Reed plays it straight on every measure and that's the key to the irony—if, indeed, there is a shred of irony in this at all. As likely as not the irony is imposed by the listener, by you and me, made rattling uncomfortable and awkward by the straightforward plainspokenness and a concomitant unwillingness to, er, feel the feelings. The things that constitute this perfect day—drinking Sangria in the park, feeding animals in the zoo, then later a movie too—are so unexpected, so homely, so pretty, and so right, that you just have to laugh in recognition. Or bawl your eyes out, depending on the mood. And then listen again to make sure you got it all right. I can't blame anyone for trying to figure out how this even works at all, let alone works so well.

26. Velvet Underground, "I'm Waiting for the Man" (1967)

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The banana album (formally, The Velvet Underground & Nico) was my first real exposure to the band, as before that I hadn't taken the opportunity to examine them closely and by then, honestly, it was already the early '80s, when I finally brought home a copy from the record store. One of those necessity purchases procrastinated, I guess—and I wish I had all those years back now so I could hear it that much more often. After the low-key and utterly pleasant overture of "Sunday Morning" this comes along to set the basic terms: a monotony of driving rhythm with pounding instruments stacked on top, packaged with a patented Story of Gritty Urban Reality™ (in this case scoring heroin out of Harlem). It's full of small wisdoms ("First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait") and sly humor ("Oh pardon me sir, it's furthest from my mind"), and it affords itself a good deal of untoward glee as it wallows in the various indignities and ultimate pleasures of the adventure it describes. But mostly it's fast and rocks righteous hard, functioning like a rave-up with a sour aftertaste, a gathering storm that can blow down houses, a pummeling beatdown you don't soon forget. For me, it always, always rewards turning up the volume, and for the first six months or so that I owned the album I rarely finished listening to this song not standing on my feet. It's one for waving your hands in the air like you just don't care and carrying on like a regular fool, and damn the neighbors pounding on the walls and ceiling.

"Walk on the Wild Side" (1973)

91. Lou Reed, "Walk on the Wild Side" (March 31, 1973, #16)

Sweet Lou Reed's one and only appearance in the top 40 delivers up the now well-famed throwaway of the chorus, "And the colored girls go / Doo do doo do doo do do doo," the one thing that may finally end up being what he is best remembered for, ironically or not, for better or worse. It's another one of those songs, like the Roxy Music's "Love Is the Drug," that could have found its way to the mainstream of American popular culture only in the flamboyantly decadent '70s, as it sardonically and explicitly celebrates transvestism, street hustlers, and drug addiction in a series of nursery rhyme style scenarios admirably sketched out with deft economy, e.g., "Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets / Lookin' for soul food and a place to eat / Went to the Apollo / You should've seen 'em go go go / They said, Hey sugar / Take a walk on the wild side." Reed's quavering alto seems barely capable of pushing the syllables past his lips. You can imagine him practically motionless in his shades and black leather. But the creepy affect is just more of the proto-Halloween fun. Fruit of an early collaboration with David Bowie, who at that moment was segueing from the Ziggy Stardust opus into the throes of his lightning-bolted Aladdin Sane phase, "Walk on the Wild Side" became the standard-bearer for Reed's Transformers album, which may or may not have done justice the way that producer Bowie wanted to his hero from the Velvet Underground. It's hardly Lou Reed's best but nor is it even close to his worst. I think a number of other songs on it happen to be better, such as "Perfect Day" (used brilliantly in the movie Trainspotting), but hey, this was the hit.

Velvet Underground Live (1969)

"What Goes On" Every time the Velvet Underground released an album they seemed to reinvent themselves and present an entirely new face. Some of this was surely due to personnel changes, but I don't think it was particularly evidence of an identity crisis. They stayed busy reinvigorating the music to its roots. They wrote the songs. They looked into various abysses. They played it arty, loud, and soft. They played it with the movies playing on them. With this, they removed any doubt about their legacy as a live act (only reinforced decades later with the release of the Quine tapes). This was not the Monkees or the Archies. This was a band: 2 guitars bass drums. And they rocked. They rocked fine.

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The Bells (1979)

"Families" What to make of this? "Disco Mystic" is stirring and hilarious. "Stupid Man" and particularly "Families" are real and surprisingly painful. Don Cherry sits in for the 99 bottles of beer on the wall-of-sound title song. I have never even been able to conceive a reason for, let alone the meaning of, that title. Bells? The bells? What bells? What in hell's bells? Don't tell me this has something to do with Dante. So relegate it as you will, and caveats like mushrooms everywhere in the forest. To me, this is a logical enough progression from Street Hassle into willfully experimental trappings as the price to pay for the privilege of an ongoing exploration of place -- that is, New York City. Because that's about all it's ever about much with Lou Reed. Heck, "City Lights" even attempts to connect across the Charlie Chaplin divides (never mind that city is Los Angeles). Lots of good moments among the intriguing failures.

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Street Hassle (1978)

"Street Hassle a) Waltz.." More or less this is where the Lou Reed we know as Lou Reed today finds his origins. (Well, maybe Coney Island Baby.) Wherein horrific yet often fanciful street crime is detailed, binaural recording of 2 guitars-bass-drums along with an emotive warble to his voice that shakes loose the profound feelings are discovered and embraced, "that guy who really sounds like Bruce Springsteen" turns out to actually be Bruce Springsteen, and nobody really gets "I Wanna Be Black," except you have to admit it's kind of funny. Overall, tuff. Very, very tuff.