My Amazon Reviews: Lou Reed "Transformer"

You hit me with a flower
5 Out Of 5 Stars

David Bowie and Mick Ronson must have really been fans of The Velvet Underground, because when Lou Reed's fledgling solo career needed a dynamite second album, the two of them stepped in and offered to produce. The glam-bomb that is "Transformer" became a bona-fide hit and delivered what is arguably the weirdest top 40 single of the 70's, "Walk On The Wild Side." Bowie and Ronson tarted up Reed with glammy arrangements that also flirt with cabaret while leaning heavily on atmospherics, which resulted in an enduring classic and one of the few times Reed made a conscious effort at recording a commercial album (albeit one that deals with drag queens, dealers, drug users and plenty of other denizens of NYC's darker regions).

"Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side"

You didn't hear much anything else like it on the AM radio, and nothing much like it since. Bowie and Ronson kept the production clean and "Walk On The Wild Side" had a slithering bassline that carried most of the song, topped by Reed's deadpan delivery. When he tries to really sing ("Goodnight Ladies"), it comes close to the Berlin trappings that he'd explore on his next album. Still, the songs are often smarter than a surface listen would give away, like the lovely "Perfect Day." It sounds like another nice day in the city until you understand that it's about wandering Central Park while higher than a kite.

That was Reed's greatest strength on "Transformer," that he could so easily couch lyrics that almost anyone else would run and hide from before committing them to an album. The flirtatious mixing around with sexual identity ("Make Up," "Walk") was probably just as much Bowie's Ziggy personae giving Reed a bit of a goosing, but it holds up really well. You also can't discount Ronson's contributions, as it's his fuzz-buzz guitar that drives "Vicious" for one instance.

The songs themselves have endured, too. "Satellite of Love" (complete with Bowie singing back-up) remains one of Reed's best, and stands as strong as "Walk On The Wild Side" and "Perfect Day." "Transformer" marked the launching pad commercially for Lou Reed, is as flawless a record as the 70's had to offer, and possibly the best outside album work Bowie has been involved in.

     

My Amazon Reviews: The Velvet Underground and Nico "The Velvet Underground and Nico"

Life on the underside
5 Out Of 5 Stars

By taking all the romantic aspects out from the musical visions others may have had concerning New York City, the Velvet Underground upended the NY Art scene by recording an album about kinky sex, mad drug use, pimps and dealers and femme fatales. Andy Warhol attached himself to the band's skewed vision and began to shepherd them, bringing singer/model Nico along. In 1967, The Velvet Underground and Nico was released, and during the Summer Of Love, nobody really got it. But as the famous quote (accredited to Brian Eno) goes, the Velvet Underground may not have sold many albums, but everyone who bought a copy formed a band.

Nowadays, the album is heralded as a seminal piece of the rock and roll puzzle, and listening to it years later will surprise you as to just how well the album has held up. The center of attentions were singer/songwriter Lou Reed and multi-instrumentalist and art-music fan John Cale. They teased and tormented conventional pop structures while still delivering hooky songs (like "Sunday Morning" or the haunting "All Tomorrow's Parties") before Cale would whip out a viola and draw his bow across some squealing noise ("Black Angel's Death Song"). There's even the fact that Nico's voice had just a mysterious quality to it that added to her allure. When she emotes on "Femme Fatale" that you're just a clown, it drawls out as "clowan."

But what attracted the bulk of the attention (and still does to this day) was the way the band cavalierly treated the dark underbelly of sex and drugs. Reed's "Venus In Furs" explicitly describes the trappings of an SM ritual with a mistress who wants you to "kiss the boots of shiny leather." The fixation of drugs in "Waiting For My Man" and the actual rush of using in "Heroin." There is the push-pull of addiction in an unromantic light that is positively brutal in its almost journalistic qualities. The Beatles were singing about a day in the life, Reed was saying "heroin be the death of me."

It's that kind of non-romantic bluntness that makes the best material on "The Velvet Underground and Nico" so compelling. While the group (it should be added that Maurene Tucker was the first great female rock drummer) rode the pulse of primitive and proto-punk music, they'd lose Nico by the next album and find their way to even more abrasive topics on "White Light White Heat." All the VU albums that featured the line up of Cale, Reed, Tucker and bassist Doug Yule are essential listening, this is the first step off a very steep cliff. Even today, it can be a difficult listen, but it is one of those kind of albums that bent the musical direction of bands to follow.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Various Artists "I'll Scratch Yours - A Tribute to Peter Gabriel"

Mutual Scratching Society
3 Out Of 5 Stars

Although it took him three years to pull it together, Peter Gabriel at last put his "Scratch My Back - And I'll Scratch Yours" out as a whole piece. Initially designed to be a collaborative project, Gabriel gets 10 of his "Scratch My Back" artists to add their voices to a select Gabriel song, with varying results. (You may also quibble about Bryan Eno subbing for David Bowie, but it does up the collabs; the missing links are Neil Young and Radiohead.) If you don't already have "Scratch My Back," I highly recommend getting the limited edition two CD issue.

One of the things that held my rating back of the initial album was that Gabriel had set all his choices to orchestral arrangements (he did the same to himslef on "New Blood"), which kept the album's pace to a crawl. Fortunately for "I'll Scratch Yours," the collaborators had no such imposition. It varies the album considerably and offers a few surprises. For starters is the realization that anything Randy Newman touches sounds like Randy Newman, from the dry wit of the vocals to the piano playing, and he turns "Big Time" from the ironically pop MTV hit into the biting commentary that the lyrics had posited all along.

My other favorite here is Lou Reed turning "Solisbury Hill" from Gabriel's gathering of courage in a pastoral setting into a dingy echo laden guitar look into the mean streets of New York City (and may be one of Reed's last recordings). The criminally underrated Elbow take one of my all-time favorite Gabriel songs, "Mercy Street," and do an uncanny sound-alike version. Stephin Merrit (Magnetic Fields) stamps the paranoia out from underneath "Not One Of Us" and makes it sound like a bubbly synth-pop record from the 80's. And finally, Paul Simon turns "Biko," a song I thought I was tired of, into an acoustic folk anthem.

Those are the hits. There are a couple of misses; Brian Eno doesn't do anything to make "Mother Of Violence" interesting. Bon Iver tries as hard as he can to sound interesting, but remains a bore to listen to. David Byrne uses his falsetto on "I Don't Remember" to make you remember what nails on chalkboard sounds like. But that's only three real duds. The remainder of the songs, from the likes of Feist, Arcade Fire and Regina Spektor at least show that Gabriel hasn't lost his taste for new artists and that his songwriting transcends formats. Taken together, "Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours" is a good pair of bookends and a fine tribute to Gabriel's multi-decade career.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Velvet Underground "Icon"

Comes up Short
3 Out Of 5 Stars

A spotty if still relevant compilation of Velvet Underground songs, this entry into the budget "Icon" series is a tough one to categorize. Every song here is revolutionary for its time, but the quality between the recordings was and remains spotty. The young Lou Reed already has the part down of underbelly poet, and songs like "Waiting For My Man," "Heroin" and "Venus In Furs" de-romanticize New York City long before punk rock found it fashionable to do so. But it does so at the expense of Nico, who's voice on "Femme Fatale" would be on my short list for any Velvet's anthology. I also would have preferred the studio versions of "Rock and Roll" and "Sweet Jane" instead of the live versions included.

You're better off getting individual albums, and especially "The Velvet Underground and Nico" (aka "Peel it Slowly and See"). "Icon" makes a good toe-dippper, but it ultimately is not enough.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Lou Reed "Essentials"

Lou Reed. March 2, 1942 - October 27, 2013
5 Out Of 5 Stars

There aren't too many figures in America Rock and Roll that have a footprint quite like Lou Reed's. From his start as part of Andy Warhol's factory band to his later status as a sort of NYC Poet Laureate, to even recording and album in cahoots with Metallica (not represented here, though), he is one of the USA's predominant rock icons. Or as he put it on one of his live albums, a Rock and Roll Animal. This "Essentials" set is a repackaging of "NYC Man," but still a great set if you don't already own that older package.

The tracklist is a varied set and covers most of his time with various incarnations and major labels (RCA, Arista and Warners). There are excellent liner notes courtesy of Lou himslef, describing the thought processes behind the songs. The sequencing is a bit odd, as the first song here is from "The Raven" (his adaptations of Edgar Alan Poe) and then ends on disc two with "Transformer's" "Pale Blue Eyes." Reed describes his concept for the sequencing as "the point of view which songs relate to each other in the best fashion." Because of the really sweet remastering job (mostly from 2003), many of the songs, even from the Velvets, slip into the others sounding as contemporary as ever. There's the basic rock of "Dirty Boulevard" to the atmospheric guitar the grinds through "Rocket Minuet," which Reed viewed as worthy of following each other. (Minuet" also featured his wife, performance artist Laurie Anderson, on violin.) He could make any sound he wanted, and he did, without compromise.

I have my own personal favorites here, especially from the albums "Magic and Loss" and "New York," which in my opinion, were brilliant even if it took a few years for an audience to catch up to them. And while the Arista albums tended to get slagged, selections from the likes of "The Blue Mask" and "Legendary Hearts" are here and deserve a re-listen. Of course, there are the magical songs from "Transformer," including "Perfect Day." As a compilation, it's a great starter kit, although I'd recommend any of the albums mentioned here (and "The Velvet Underground and Nico") as perfect albums in their own right. "The Essential Lou Reed" is a terrific overview of one of Rock's greatest cantankerous characters, and the world is a slightly less interesting place because of his passing.