How do you deal with an erratic, drug-addled loose cannon who’s arty appeal is getting decidedly more, umm, selective as time beats ever onwards?
RCA Records faced with this very conundrum decided to go for broke, upping the ante by providing Mr Reed with a decidedly kick ass rock band, getting them to play it loud, polished and simple and recorded them live at New York Palladium* around Christmas 1973.
Lou had became a Rock n Roll Animal. Velvet Underground purists wept. I think it’s all jolly amusing.
Rock n Roll Animal opens with the crunching lyrical melodic FM rock sound of ‘Intro/Sweet Jane’. It’s a fun game to play it to friends and watch the wonder on their faces when the riff comes in around 3:30-ish.
The band, snapped up wholesale by Alice Cooper, via Bob Ezrin** for Welcome To My Nightmare, are polished, pumped and primed throughout. Guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter are just full-on excellent, Prakash John on bass and Pentti ‘Whitey’ Glan on drums make for a formidably good rhythm section.
It is fascinating and simultaneously very funny to hear them grind off the jagged edges and shore up the shonky foundations of ‘Heroin’, even including some great Deep Purple/Atomic Rooster style organeering at one point as well as a blistering guitar solo. I have no idea how or why it works so well, it just does. This isn’t a version that I would have to pretend my mate Michael had put on the pub juke box. In fact, I would argue there’s even something far more subversive about this version’s big major key palatability over the original’s^*.
The rock out version of ‘White Light/White Heat’ that kicks down the doors on Side 2 sounds like Foghat live; which can only be an excellent thing. I love the way it takes the original’s wired angular nervousness and turns it into a sure-fire air guitar classic rocker. Lou sounds like he was enjoying the sheer ridiculousness of it too.
‘Lady Day’ from Berlin is up next and whilst I like the rock majesty of this version I can’t help wishing they’d attempted their FM magic on one of the more traumatic cuts from the LP, maybe ‘The Kids’?^
Inevitably Rock n Roll Animal finishes off with a 10-minute version of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’. Do I really need to tell you how well Wagner and Hunter nail this one down? Lou is having fun again on this one, I swear he changes ‘implications’ to ‘amputations’ once too^^. It all goes a bit Frampton Comes Alive! for a while, but only in a good way.
Perversely as the man is one of my very favourite lyricists, I think a good part of the joy of Rock n Roll Animal for me is that it is the only solo LP of his where the words take a back seat to the tunes; never mind Lou’s screed or Lou’s creed. With a band as good as Wagner, Hunter, John and Glan, as well as Ray Colcord on keys*^ that’s a rare pleasure indeed.
Ladies and gentlemen I commend Lou Reed Rock n Roll Animal to you all, without any hesitation.
1077 Down.
PS: Dig it!
*ok it was technically called Academy Of Music at the time, but I prefer Palladium and this is my world.
**who produced Lou’s 1973 chucklefest Berlin.
^*I did a similar thing with my recent bouncy Europop cover of ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’, to vast acclaim.
^singalong everyone, ‘They’re taking her children away / Because they said she was not a good mother’. Yeah! Rock and roll!
^^as in, ‘Despite all the amputations you can dance to the rock ‘n’ roll stations‘, or maybe it’s just my cloth ears and his accent.
*^co-producer of Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings.