Lou Reed

BERLIN-MILAN, ALL IN ONE NIGHT

by Gabriele Benzing

“You can tell your children you saw Lou Reed's Berlin”: if there's one thing Mr. Reed has never lacked, it's certainly ego. And the idea of taking the full performance of “Berlin” on tour for the first time, over thirty years after its release, complete with a children's choir and a string and horn section, sounds like a project with a high risk of self-indulgence. It's no coincidence that, welcoming Lou Reed into the modern architectural shell of the Teatro degli Arcimboldi, is the most classic distillation of Milan's intelligentsia: forty-something professionals in jacket and tie clutching their freshly bought copy of Lou Reed's lyrics book, “alternative” teenagers of strict Velvet observance, jewel-laden ladies in search of the cleaned-up, intellectual version of the wild side of the street… In the foyer there's even an enthusiastic rep trying to sell me an American Express card: wow, so this is rock 'n' roll!

When the curtain of stormy waves hiding the stage opens, the appearance of a dozen kids in blue tunics straight out of “Sister Act” and a group of musicians in matching baby-blue Saturday-night-variety-show suits only sharpens the fear of a grim slide into kitsch.

But it lasts only an instant, because as soon as the notes of the “Sad Song” theme, serving as the concert's overture, rise over the audience, every doubt vanishes as if by magic, leaving room only for the tale of Caroline and Jim's descent into hell.

And so we find ourselves catapulted into a Berlin café, just steps from the Wall, once again witnessing Caroline's last birthday, while Rupert Christie's piano conjures smoky cabaret atmospheres. Lou Reed's voice is a dark, theatrical spoken-word, in which the narrator prevails over the singer. In the background, footage shot by Lola Schnabel, with Emmanuelle Seigner playing Caroline, is projected onto a kind of Chinese screen, like the blurred shadows of ghosts.

A majestic “Lady Day” marks the entrance of the full band, and the songs of “Berlin”'s “first act” take on an imposing emphasis, made of glittering sounds and insistent crescendos. The angelic voices of the New London Children's Choir and vocalist Katie Krykant, wrapped in a scarlet evening gown, seem intent on stretching the chorus into infinity, while Steve Hunter (yes, the very same one from “Rock 'n' Roll Animal” and the original “Berlin”…) sets his guitar strings ablaze without ever removing the wool cap he stubbornly keeps pulled down over his head.

Reed, for his part, no longer has the vocal flexibility of 1973, but delivers every line with a dark, gripping depth. The staging of “Berlin” – directed by American artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel and produced by Bob Ezrin and Hal Willner – manages to strike a subtle balance between the excesses of rock opera and the chiaroscuro of a raw, compelling album.

“Caroline Says I” rides an operatic lyricism that carries it through to Reed's jarring final solo, while “How Do You Think It Feels” unleashes a powerful rock vigor, driven by Tony “Thunder” Smith's drumming. But it's in “Oh, Jim” that the concert finds its most electrifying moment, with a pounding bass and jagged electricity that seem to leap straight out of the tracks on “New York”. Throwing a defiant glance at the crowd, Reed launches into a sudden guitar surge that immediately fires up the audience: the former Velvet breaks the frame of the performance, stops, gets the crowd clapping along to the beat, then hands center stage over to Katie Krykant's soul vocalizing, who despite a few uncertain moments earns a mid-song round of applause. The song's final coda unexpectedly slows down, sinks into the depths of Lou's voice, plunges into the absolute silence of the hall: darkness falls over Caroline and Jim's murky love, like a poisoned needle sinking into the veins.

With the filthy despair of a Greek tragedy written by Hubert Selby Jr., “Berlin” wraps itself in a cruel sense of fatality in the piano-and-guitar introduction of “Caroline Says II”. The icy queen everyone calls “Alaska” stares, as if into a mirror, at the spiral of selfishness and violence that has now trapped her. “You ought to learn more about yourself, think more than just I”, Reed declaims, slipping into the role of the drama's protagonist: “life is meant to be more than this”, he pleads. Behind him, meanwhile, images of snow-covered mountains scroll by, like an impossible dream of escape.

The recording of children's crying as they're torn from their mother's arms, which closes “The Kids”, becomes a deafening, senseless anguish. And in “The Bed”, Reed leads the audience on a sinister journey through the places where Caroline's fate has now played out, describing the suicide scene with the chilling indifference of his wrinkled grimaces. “I never would have started if I'd known that it will end this way, but funny thing I'm not at all sad that it stopped this way”. A frozen inevitability underscored by the reverb echoing Reed's voice at the end of each line, even if the ghostly singing of the choir can't quite match the unsettling anguish of the song's ending on record.

The orchestral epilogue of “Sad Song” is the only conclusion worthy of a work as tense and dramatic as “Berlin”. It's a shame Reed agrees to come back onstage for a handful of encores that completely shatter the spell: the restraint kept up until that point is entirely forgotten, and the American rocker turns sardonic, transforming his old hits into a rhinestone pantomime, handing the microphone over to the other band members one by one. “Sweet Jane” (with Hunter's legendary intro barely hinted at) is entrusted to Katie Krykant's trills, “Satellite Of Love” to bassist Fernando Saunders' vibrato (with whom Reed stages an awkward comic skit), while “Walk On The Wild Side” is left with a saccharine final “doo do doo do doo do do doo” from the children's choir… The crowd packs in below the stage, savoring the cathartic tribute everyone had been waiting for. That old fox Lou, as always, smiles behind his mustache.

(10/07/2007)

***

JIM AND CAROLINE AT S. CECILIA

by Mauro Vecchio 

An alienated poet of the underworld, in 1969 Lou Reed sang: "Between thought and expression lies a lifetime."

The life of the former Velvet Underground man was a troubled one, full of rage and desperation that had yet to find a definitive outlet, a creative catharsis. Sometimes, though, an entire existence can last just a single year. In 1972, with the crucial help of David Bowie, Lou became the new, vicious drag-queen of decadent rock. The bittersweet, theatrical atmospheres typical of glam permeate "Transformer", a sonic odyssey of transgression that launched him into the pantheon of stars for the masses already smitten with the alien stardust. And yet the real Lou Reed was a deeply depressed man as well as a complex artist careless of rules and conventions.

Only a year passed before, flying in the face of Bowie's new, glittering suggestions, the New Yorker tossed aside every commercial temptation and created "Berlin", a nihilistic rock work swollen with sick ghosts. The album thus begins a journey into the derangement of the senses and souls of two toxic lovers, Jim and Caroline, living out a story as vicious as a Visconti film.

It is Lou Reed's own psyche on the verge of collapse that is portrayed here, amid bursts of urban rock, orchestrations rich in pathos, and searing Mitteleuropean melodies à la Kurt Weill. "I had to make Berlin or I would have gone mad": between the swinging feel of "Walk On The Wild Side" and the disillusioned thinking of "Berlin" truly lies a lifetime.

The Thought

When "Berlin" was released in 1973, it caused a genuine shock for both fans and critics, who were expecting another glam-scented record after the success of "Transformer". Its bleak, desperate atmospheres left dozens of journalists dumbfounded, unable to grasp the sick depths of Reed's vision. "Berlin" thus remained a hated album, wrapped in an aura of negativity, almost a curse. It was Reed himself who, at the Howard Stein Academy of Music in New York, partly buried those atmospheres under a blanket of leather-clad hard-rock riffs.

Only many years later did public letters of apology begin to circulate, but by then, catharsis complete, Reed had already given up on taking the album out on tour.

Today, thirty-four years later, "Berlin" is widely regarded as one of the American musician's masterpieces. Reason enough to turn an old dream-turned-nightmare into reality. As a sweltering Sala S. Cecilia awaits "the event", the distorted notes of "Like a Possum" flow on, insistent and enveloping.

It's no coincidence that the track's 18 sprawling minutes come from Lou Reed's last relevant album, "Ecstasy", released, by now, seven years ago.

Amid greatest-hits sets of varying usefulness, the rock and roll animal seems ever closer to meditation and Eastern disciplines than to the schizoid distortions of "Metal Machine Music".

And so here's the great gamble: a composed sixty-five-year-old once again embodying the ghost of his younger, desperate, drugged-out self.

When the second, stripped-down and intimate part of "Oh, Jim" begins, Lou Reed finds himself singing more to himself than to the Roman audience. In his delivery there's a sense of belated vindication, but also of inward reflection on the end of a personal journey.

He certainly wouldn't have gone mad if he hadn't staged this grandiloquent theatrical-musical production, but when "Sad Song" stretches out amid guitar solos, horns, strings and weeping choirs, the feeling is that the gamble, in the end, paid off. After all, it wasn't easy to render the complex musical weave of "Berlin" live. A small contingent from the Metropolitan Orchestra of London manages, however, to bring back to life the syncopated stride of "Lady Day", just as the New London Children's Choir chases the gothic ghost of "The Bed". Credit goes to the meticulous production of veterans Bob Ezrin and Hal Willner and, above all, to the film directed by Lola Schnabel, in which Caroline takes on the features of Emmanuelle Seigner.

The black-and-white images are the natural complement to Rupert Christie's harrowing piano, which opens the concert on the skeletal one-to-three count of the title track. The rest is rock, sharp and vibrant on Tony Smith's elephantine drumming, and above all gripping thanks to the superb Steve Hunter, who at times towers over everyone else, as in the finale of "Men of Good Fortune" or the delirium of "How Do You Think It Feels". Reed accompanies him from the sidelines, carving out his own obvious, intimate moments in "Caroline Says II" and in the harrowing "The Kids", which still raises goosebumps with those desperate childlike screams.

The Expression

When the long "Sad Song" fades out, a roar makes the venue explode. Lou Reed plays master of ceremonies and introduces all the protagonists to the audience, as if to thank them above all for giving him the concrete chance to finally get rid of what may be his last remaining regret.

Obviously the concert has lasted too short a time, and the crowd is eager to get closer to the stage, to dance and sing after living through the nightmare of Jim and Caroline.

So there's nothing left to do but go back on stage to inject some energy, to have fun. And Reed has a great time, with the "Berlin" band, slipping back into the role of the vicious drag-queen. The lights come up on Steve Hunter as he hints at the legendary intro of "Sweet Jane", which, however, is greeted with the usual frenzy only after the "three chords that are worth a career". The song is unusually powerful, but it's marred by the soul-tinged backing vocals of Katie Krykant, who is perhaps the only truly unnecessary element in the band. Had Antony been there, it would have been very different.

Reed hams it up on guitar and jokes around with the syrupy voice of Fernando Saunders, who opens "Satellite of Love", thankfully stretched out to perfection by the orchestra and choir in the final section.

It's clear that the goal is to seize this special moment to render historic songs even more faithfully. "Walk On The Wild Side", a poignant dèjà vu of Warhol's Factory, is bathed in new light thanks to the old jazzy arrangement, torn open by the final sax.

The concert is over. Reed spreads his arms in a sign of victory as the audience applauds him, enraptured.

It may no longer be the ghost of Jim waiting for his man on Lexington, but tonight, the old rock and roll animal has won his bet once again.

(06/07/2007)

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