Lou Reed

“I did what people expected of me, as I've already said I wanted to become famous so I could be the biggest asshole around, and I even managed to inspire some really massive assholes, because my shit is much better than other people's diamonds.” It's 1973, and with this self-mocking statement, delivered in the caustic style that characterizes his typically Yiddish humor—always laced with a touch of nastiness—Lou Reed takes a swipe at the worldwide success of “Transformer”, released the previous year. He has finally achieved the success he had craved for so long and could easily cash in on it by putting out an album in the same vein; instead, boldly, he forces “Berlin” on his record label—even though this means signing an agreement committing him to later release a commercial album (which would become the “Sally Can't Dance” he would subsequently brand as “garbage”) as well as a live album. The recording takes place in London, with production entrusted to the twenty-four-year-old enfant prodige Bob Ezrin, the same producer behind Alice Cooper's records, who would go on to produce other memorable albums: chief among them the Floydian—but above all Watersian—“The Wall”, which together with “Berlin” stands as the most intensely profound and psychoanalytical concept album in rock history.

The glam-rock persona created to launch “Transformer” probably didn't reflect any of Lou Reed's many personalities, and this split identity—compounded by excessive drug and alcohol use—made his behavior paranoid and alienated, to the point of poisoning his marriage, which would later collapse in miserable fashion.

The album that follows—inevitably shaped by this existential unease and by the increasingly fraught relationship between him and his wife, onto whom he poured all his frustrations, subjecting her to physical and psychological violence with real cruelty, both in private and in public—serves as an outlet for his inner rage, purifying his spirit as though through a catharsis: “I had to make Berlin or I would have gone crazy,” he later stated, confirming the theory that creativity peaks on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

With this concept album, “written by adults for adults,” which would prove to be another milestone on the road that helped move rock music away from adolescent subculture toward a more sophisticated language—the so-called “intellectual rock”—Lou Reed creates a work that digs deep into his soul, both as an artist and as a man. It is a bitter reckoning with personal failure, and perhaps, in many respects, a generational one too, tackling without metaphor, in a merciless analysis, themes such as the idealization of relationships and its inevitable disillusionment, immaturity, violence, neurosis, drug addiction—speaking of hatred and love, betrayal, loss, renunciation, defeat.

Abandoning the voyeuristic observer's role that had characterized his lyrics until now, Lou Reed has the courage—and perhaps the need—to tell his own story in the first person. The genius of this work lies precisely in how it's told: on the surface the only narrating voice is Jim, but in reality the narrator's role is schizophrenic, shifting, blending and overlapping between the characters and his own public persona, even though the boundaries between them are extremely blurred, and behind each of them the author is probably always lurking. Using ruthlessly direct language, he creates his most autobiographical work by far, sincerely authentic; song after song, veil after veil, he strips himself bare, showing us, without shame, his true face and his true soul, with all his demons and fears.

The involvement is total, and suddenly, without meaning to, as if through some kind of osmosis, we find ourselves becoming Jim, becoming Caroline, becoming Lou; his dramas, his fears, his frailties, his lowest moments, his petty cruelties, his uncertainties become our own, forcing us to dig into our own consciences and carry out a ruthless self-analysis of our own, because deep down each of us could, in human terms, be one of the protagonists.

A sadomasochistic love story, sadly nihilistic and realistically hopeless, set no longer in his New York but in Berlin—chosen as a symbolic city of division and decadence, with subtle nods to Brecht and Weill. Moving without ever tipping into the mawkish, uncompromising, coldly realistic and emotionally powerful, with this genuine masterpiece—the work in which he reaches his creative peak, perhaps his truest and most intense—this extraordinary artist manages, in a handful of songs, to make us fully grasp the complex, twisted personalities of the two protagonists, Jim and Caroline, a pair of American junkies transplanted to Berlin, where they lead a miserable, degraded life that will inevitably spiral into tragedy.

To sketch their characters and narrate events, Reed relies, in a highly cinematic way—the album, in fact, was described as “a film for the ear”—on dialogue and interior monologue, weaving a subtle relationship between the characters' moods and the objects surrounding them: with a few precise brushstrokes he lets us immerse ourselves in the settings and atmospheres and share in their emotions; each song is a flash of a situation and a state of mind.

In the opening track—“Berlin”—the feeling we pick up on is one of regret for something wonderful that has been lost, destroyed forever, and the musical accompaniment of solo piano makes the heavy tone of acute melancholy feel, if anything, even more palpable.

"Lady Day" is a clear reference to the unfortunate jazz singer Billie Holiday, who died prematurely from drug and alcohol abuse, and whose figure is used, metaphorically, in relation to the protagonist Caroline, already hinting at the tragic outcome of the story.

"Men Of Good Fortune" is a bitter reflection on the influence that wealth and poverty exert on human behavior: "Men of good fortune often wish that they could die. While men of poor beginnings want what they have and to get it they'll die".

In "Caroline Says Part 1" we learn, through the narrator's indirect account, the protagonist's words, in whom we can recognize, through the definition "Germanic Queen", the prototype of many of the female figures who played an important role in Lou Reed's life: from his mother, with whom he'd always had a conflicted relationship, to some of his partners, glacial and inflexible, who had to display a humiliating superiority over the male.

In "How Do You Think It Feels", the most autobiographical track on the whole album, what strikes us most is his fear of sleeping - likely a legacy of the series of electroshock treatments (a widely used therapy at the time) his parents forced him to undergo as a teenager, to be "cured of homosexuality" - and where, sadly, he poses a series of rhetorical questions to his woman, questions he already knows will go unanswered since he's certain of not being understood, and indeed, most likely, he holds her responsible for his own state of mind. This kind of morbid self-analysis continues with "Oh Jim", a track in which he attributes to himself, both as an artist and as a man, some far-from-flattering traits, drawing a starkly negative balance sheet of his own life, and with "Caroline Says Part 2", whose protagonist, the "Frozen Alaska" - which we can also read as a dual projection of himself, defendant and accuser, victim and executioner - hurls terrible accusations at Jim, and in which death already looms in unsettling fashion: "it's so cold in Alaska".

The track "The Kids", so harrowing if only for the children's crying, describes the squalid family situation the couple lives in, and Jim's resentment toward Caroline is total and without remorse - so much so that he's glad the children were taken away, without giving them a second thought - though we never quite understand to what extent the accusations against his partner are justified.

In "The Bed" the irreparable has already happened, and when all the accumulated resentment seems to have dissolved with Caroline's suicide, Jim feels a wrenching nostalgia for the past, though veiled by a kind of ambiguous indifference, and in a dreamlike, almost spectral atmosphere, like a reporter, he recalls the departed through the description of places and by listing, in a pitiful inventory, the objects that belonged to her. The parallel between Caroline's suicide and the actual suicide attempt that occurred during the making of the album, when Reed's wife slashed her wrists, is chilling, even though, unlike the character, his wife fortunately survived.

The album closes with that musical masterpiece "Sad Song", a classically styled and cynical epitaph with which Reed absolves himself, easing his conscience of the weight of possibly being responsible for his partner's suicide ("I'm gonna stop wasting time, somebody else would have broken both of her arms"). With these lyrics Lou Reed earns himself a place of prestige in American poetry of the second half of the 20th century, alongside his great teacher and mentor Delmore Schwartz.

The arrangements, overseen by Bob Ezrin with the collaboration of Alan MacMillan, range from jazz to classical, from melodic rock to pop music; far removed from the usual rock sounds, they have none of the genius of the sounds boldly experimented with by the Velvet Underground (we can only imagine how they would have been "handled" by John Cale), but they're nonetheless always in tune with the lyrics and interact with them masterfully. To create the perfect soundtrack for this "film for the ear", Ezrin enlists exceptional musicians - for Lou Reed the best band since the Velvet Underground days - chief among them the two guitarists brought in by Ezrin himself, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, who would go on to back Lou on the "Rock'n Roll Animal" tour (later released as the live album stipulated in his contract), but also the Becker brothers on horns, Jack Bruce on bass - who, fascinated by the lyrics and totally absorbed by the work, took particular care with his playing - Alan MacMillan on piano, and Steve Winwood on keyboards.

The opening is perfect with "Berlin" (a track previewed at the 1972 Bataclan concert in Paris with John Cale on piano), whose indistinct sounds and distorted voices intoning a warped, filtered "Happy Birthday" quickly give way to solo piano, whose sound evokes the decadent atmosphere of a smoky 1920s Berlin cabaret - two decisive piano strikes mark the start of "Lady Day", a track in which Lou Reed's voice is strong and powerful, before moving into the steady cadence of "Men Of Good Fortune", where a beautiful bassline plays counterpoint to the voice. "Caroline Says pt.1" is a song with an almost pop melody, complete with the ritual backing chorus, followed by the only truly rock track on the album, "How Do You Think It Feels", with driving drums and the metallic sound of electric guitars. "Oh, Jim" begins with almost pop music, a reworking of an old piece written with the Velvet Underground, before suddenly shifting register and turning into a long acoustic composition played by Reed himself (as with all the acoustic parts on the album), his voice tinged with a light echo effect. "Caroline Says pt.2" is a beautiful, melodic track.

Acoustic guitars also feature on the next two tracks: "The Kids", a painful song with an almost anachronistic flute-like sound underpinning the children's crying, sung by Lou Reed with incredible lightness, and "The Bed", very sweet and dreamlike, one of his most intense and moving performances.

Then the music almost loses its coherent structure, like a film soundtrack, the choir's voices become distorted, and out of this fog emerge, achingly sweet, the first notes of "Sad Song", celestial music, the rainbow after the storm, a wonderful, almost operatic melody that closes the album.

All of it half-spoken, half-sung by Lou Reed, whose voice - desperate, angry, suffering, hypnotic, seductive, dreamlike - is always deeply emotional and charged with atmosphere.

The LP, which had initially been conceived as a double album, with artwork featuring a gatefold sleeve and a booklet with the lyrics and some stills illustrating the story, was released as a single album because the record label had no intention of investing in a "product" it didn't consider commercial: disastrously, this forced Ezrin to cut a full 14 minutes from the original work, essentially all the musical interludes between one track and the next; who knows if one day they'll decide to reissue it in its original form... we, of course, keep hoping!

The production was extremely difficult and exhausting for everyone, both physically and psychologically, emotionally destructive - but the one who paid the highest price was Ezrin himself, who, unused to the excessive drug use he had to resort to in order to keep up with Reed, eventually had to be hospitalized from collapse.

A hugely influential work that inspired generations of songwriters, difficult and far from commercial, deemed too dark and depressing, it was panned by most critics who, as sometimes happens with masterpieces, proved blind and deaf, failing to grasp its greatness right away - the prestigious Rolling Stone, in a classic case of "famous last words", reviewed it as "the end of a promising career"; even its audience, who perhaps expected another Transformer-style album, turned its back on it by not buying it: in America it sold very poorly, doing somewhat better in Europe, culturally closer to this kind of work, where it would also go on to win several critics' awards.

For Lou Reed, the disappointment over the fiasco was bitter, as he once stated: “The fact that the album was misunderstood was the biggest disappointment of my life.”

At that point he decided to shut the doors on his inner universe and never open them again, becoming the Rock'n'Roll Animal so beloved by audiences the world over: but can we be sure he actually kept that promise?

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06/11/2006