Lou Reed - Berlin

Released - July 1973

Genre - Art Rock

Producer - Bob Ezrin

Selected Personnel - Lou Reed (Vocals/Acoustic Guitar); Bob Ezrin (Piano/Mellotron/Arrangements); Michael Brecker (Tenor Saxophone); Randy Brecker (Trumpet); Jack Bruce (Bass); Aynsley Dunbar (Drums); Steve Hunter (Electric Guitar); Tony Levin (Bass); Allan MacMillan (Piano); Gene Martynec (Acoustic Guitar/Synthesiser/Bass); Dick Wagner (Backing Vocals/Electric Guitar); Blue Weaver (Piano); B.J. Wilson (Drums); Steve Winwood (Organ/Harmonium)

Standout Track - Sad Song

The late, great Lou Reed is an artist I've long admired but never managed to become really captivated by. His work with the Velvet Underground was, by and large, brilliant (though White Light/White Heat continues to be an album I really struggle to enjoy), and most of his early solo work is stuff I love (songs like "Perfect Day" and "Walk On The Wild Side" are songs I've adored since I was a teenager). It was only as my sense of quite what a key influence he was on rock music throughout the 70s developed that I felt a compulsion to listen to more of his work, both his solo stuff and his stuff with the Velvets before his departure in 1970. Ultimately, he's sporadically brilliant but far too inconsistent to ever really secure a place as one of my all-time favourite artists and I've not had the burning desire to plunge too far into his considerable discography. Essentially, the legacy Reed leaves behind is that of a great talent and an enormously influential cultural figure, but one who was so bloody-mindedly committed to doing things his way and to avoid becoming a mainstream sensation that he would go to great lengths to alienate his audience and maintain his cult status. The best example is Metal Machine Music, his lengthy album of distorted, looped feedback and guitar noise in 1975 which was seen by some as a joke and by others as a way of getting out of a record contract. As far as I'm aware, up until his death Reed avowed that Metal Machine Music was meant as a serious piece of work, and it's probably simply the ultimate example of an artist who would do things solely by his own rules, or not at all.

The first time this impulse of his - the impulse to shrink away from commercial success and prioritise his own creative whims rather than the whims of the buying public - can probably be found in the wonderful Berlin, his 1973 followup to Transformer. Of course, that's not to say that he was courting mainstream success in his work leading up to 1972 - the albums he recorded with the Velvet Underground were all staunchly anti-commercial and wilfully difficult, but at that stage Reed had no career to be jeopardising by following his impulses. Transformer, however, briefly made Lou Reed into a star, giving him hit singles in the forms of "Perfect Day" and "Walk On The Wild Side." With the glam rock stylings injected by producers David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Reed had the opportunity to capitalise on his newfound success and produce something similar that could have seen him morph into America's own answer to Bowie himself (ironically, a cultural phenomenon that Reed had vastly influenced and indirectly created). Lou Reed being Lou Reed, he did no such thing. All glam rock flavour was abandoned completely, with Reed himself limiting to nothing more than vocals and acoustic guitar on the new album. Musically, the mood was sombre and stark and, from the jazzy cabaret-style piano of the album's opening title track to the cinematic orchestral flourishes of album closer "Sad Song," highly theatrical, almost akin to a Broadway musical in places. The moments that excitable young music fans could dance along to were few and far between.

But what makes Berlin so violently unlike what had come before was less in its music (which was unusual and confrontational enough as it was), but in its lyrical content. Reed had spent years with the Velvet Underground establishing himself as a Bukowski-esque figure, romanticising the seedy details of the underbelly of American society with tales of drug abuse and sexual depravity ("Heroin" springs to mind), but even he outdid himself on Berlin. It's possible that no pop/rock musician had ever confronted the issues Reed confronts on this album quite so boldly or unapologetically, certainly nobody who was as prominent a figure. A loose concept album, Berlin tells the story of a doomed romance between the figures of Caroline and Jim. The story takes in drug abuse and prostitution and also charts Caroline's suffering from physical abuse and violence from Jim. Ultimately, their children are taken away and Caroline cuts her wrists, leaving Jim unrepentantly unmoved by the whole situation in his reverie in "Sad Song." It's perhaps that lack of empathy, and that sense of cold detachment, that makes Berlin so chilling. Even outside of Jim's own character monologue that ends the album, Reed reports these events with such a laconic, couldn't-care-less drawl that the everyday horror of them is all the more affecting, most notably on Reed's pithy dismissal of Caroline's "poetry and stuff" while describing the scene of her suicide on "The Bed."

So it's worth knowing that going into Berlin is hardly an enjoyable journey, but it's a compelling and profoundly powerful one. Musically, there's nothing remotely as catchy or immediately memorable as the great tunes on Transformer, but it's music that slowly gets under your skin, and it's all lent a greater sense of grandeur by the orchestral arrangements of producer Bob Ezrin, which ornament a number of the songs (Ezrin would later go on to produce Pink Floyd's masterpiece The Wall, an album with a similarly skewed and dark sense of theatricality). Towards the top of the album, things are deceptively straightforward - after the initial shock of the wail of distorted feedback that opens the album, "Berlin" itself is a gentle-sounding cabaret number, while "Men Of Good Fortune" is a fairly stolid rocker with some nice guitar fills, and perhaps the closest the album comes to a traditional rock song. "Caroline Says I" is reminiscent of some of the Velvet Underground's more upbeat rock songs like "I'm Waiting For The Man," but lent greater cinematic sweep by Ezrin's orchestral flourishes. "How Do You Think It Feels," via its horn section and stirring guitar solo, is perhaps the most upbeat the music gets on the whole album.

Things begin to get progressively more downbeat through the menacing, almost-tuneless murmuring of "Oh Jim," and it's up to "Caroline Says II" to shift tonally into the horribly depressing second half of the album. It's a genuinely provocative ballad, with Reed's weak and wheedling tone rendering Caroline's passivity all the more tragic, while instrumentation is kept to little more than Ezrin's maudlin strings. "The Kids" is a hugely difficult song to listen to, let alone to love, but is by far one of the album's emotional high-points. It narrates the story of the pair's children being taken into care, and halfway through, as Reed plugs away at the same acoustic guitar riff, things dissolve into the repeated wailing and screaming of children. It's horrible to listen to, and even worse when you know the story behind it - in order to get the recording, Ezrin resorted to waiting until his wife was out of the house and telling his own kids their mother had died before locking them in a cupboard and recording their cries. It's a truly shocking and appalling story, and Ezrin was rightly castigated severely by his wife for his actions, but it makes for one of the most arrestingly powerful moments on the record, turning what is a fairly simple and unremarkable song into an unforgettably uncomfortable listening experience. "The Bed" is one of Reed's better-known songs and sees him dispassionately relating Caroline's suicide, with his cracking and tuneless voice on the "Oh oh oh oh oh, what a feeling" refrain heart-breakingly inadequate at conveying the true horror of the situation.

As mentioned above, "Sad Song" is Jim's uncaring lament for his wife, and ironically for such a cynically mirthless song, actually has perhaps the most compelling melody of all the songs on offer, although melody and tunefulness are hardly Reed's top priorities here. It's rendered all the more perverse and upsetting by the jubilant grandeur of Ezrin's orchestral arrangement. Ultimately, Berlin is a horribly uncomfortable listening experience, with moments of compelling and exciting musicality few and far between, with more focus on the lyrical content and the pervasive mood of quiet desperation. It achieved Reed's aims, of course, of totally alienating the mainstream audience he was in danger of securing for himself - in years to come, such stories of suicidal longing and domestic horrors would become less taboo and bands could enjoy mainstream success while exploring such territory (Joy Division spring to mind), but at the time when glam rock ruled the charts, such an album looked like career suicide, which is probably exactly as Reed liked it. It's without a doubt the most profoundly affecting album to be recorded in the early 70s, regardless of how difficult it may be to listen to.

Due to Lou Reed's own sporadically consistent output, my own delving into his own work has never really got much further than Berlin - he's undoubtedly a genius and a hugely important cultural figure, but I've just never felt the need to listen to much more of his stuff. The only exception is The Raven, a vast, sprawling album he recorded in 2003 that caught my attention for its being part of a collaboration with the New York-based director Robert Wilson (a frequent collaborator with my all-time favourite genius, Tom Waits), and for the involvement of Antony Hegarty (perhaps one of the most brilliant musicians working today) and, collaborating with Reed for the first time since 1972 on one all-too-brief song called "Hop Frog," David Bowie. Intended as an interpretation of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, the entire concept fascinated me and seemed like something I'd love considering the talent involved. Unfortunately, like so much of Lou Reed's approach to music-making, it's frustratingly uneven. It's far too long, with well over half an hour of it simply being recordings of Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi reading out Poe's dialogue (and there's nothing wrong with that per se, but one would have hoped that an album of Lou Reed musically reinventing Poe's works would have resulted in something a bit more innovative). The songs themselves are mostly fairly unmemorable, although it's well worth hearing "Who Am I? (Tripitena's Song)," which is phenomenally brilliant and one of Reed's finest compositions. Just don't bother listening to The Raven all the way through for that one song. But, while he never managed to achieve the same obsessive grasp over my listening habits that, say, Waits or Bowie or even Antony did, Lou Reed still made a huge amount of brilliantly compelling and exciting music that has stayed with me long after I heard it, and he leaves behind a truly vital and exciting legacy, regardless of its inconsistency.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Lou Reed

1. Berlin

2. Lady Day

3. Men Of Good Fortune

4. Caroline Says I

5. How Do You Think It Feels

6. Oh, Jim

7. Caroline Says II

8. The Kids

9. The Bed

10. Sad Song