A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Lou Reed's solo albums, from his self- titled debut in 1972 through to New York in 1989 and the meandering quality of what Lou released in between those two records. At the time, inspired by a post at The Vinyl Villain about a 1981 Lou Reed best of album called Walk On the The Wild Side I thought I should commit to delving into Lou's solo releases further than I have before and see what I could discover. There is a view of Lou's solo career that there's a lot of duff material, a lot of chaff among the wheat. For every Transformer there's a Mistrial. This deep dive into the Lou Reed back catalogue may take months and may splutter out at some point but I thought I should give it a go and went back in with 1973's Berlin, the follow up to Transformer (I will at some point do his solo debut, the May 1972 album that bombed on release but as I noted last time, included the wonderful Wild Child among its treasures- I don't own a copy of the album yet. I could do it digitally but feel that committing to this Lou Reed project requires the acquisition of vinyl, the format it was recorded to be played on).
I had Berlin back in the late 80s, bought on cassette cheaply in the first flush of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground fandom. My memories of it were pretty scant but had been reawakened by the song from Walk On The Wild Side, How Do You Think It Feels, which is a superb song, a cabaret/ Weimar/ 70s New York crossover with stop- start dynamics, a killer guitar solo and the always arresting line, 'How do you think it feels?/ To always make love by proxy'. Listening again, three and a half decades later, Berlin blew me away. It was intended to be a sixty minute double album with longer versions of many of the songs but RCA pulled the plug on that and insisted it be cut down to a single disc. What was left was a killer ten song album that tells the story of a pair of New York addicts Jim and Caroline and their decline into drugs, domestic abuse, prostitution and suicide. So Lou Reed. Some of the songs, as was the case throughout the 70s, were Velvets leftovers- Oh Jim, Caroline Says II, Sad Song and Men Of Good Fortune were all played live or demoed by the band at some point.
Lou tells Jim and Caroline's story, playing acoustic guitar with Bob Ezrin producing (and the production is uniformly excellent). There are electric guitars, piano, trombones, organs, trumpets and sax, Mellotron, bass by Jack Bruce and a spectral choir. The title track opens with a cacophony of noise, voices, cabaret piano, a mass singing of Happy Birthday and then the song appears, piano notes and lush echo and then Lou, half singing, half speaking of candlelight and Dubonnet on ice, 'oh honey it was paradise'. Lady Day kicks in with organ and drums, the seedy world of Lou, and of Jim and Caroline, brought to life. The sound and music builds on the game- raising drama that Bowie and Mick Ronson brought to Transformer the previous year and takes it into new territory. Men Of Good Fortune and Caroline Says I continue the story, Lou diving into the grime and depression of Jim and Caroline's lives- 'Caroline says that I'm not a man/ So she'll go and get it where she can... But she's still my queen'
Oh Jim at the end of side one is heartbreaking, a five minute song with tumbling drums and squelching organ, droning trumpets and slashes of guitar, Lou singing of two- bit friends and being like an alley cat. It builds into squealing guitars before breaking down in the second half, just an acoustic guitar and Lou close to the mic, singing as Caroline, 'Oh Jim/ How could you treat me this way?/ You know you broke my heart ever since you went away'.
Side two goes further and harder. Caroline Says II is a ghostly starting point, more acoustic guitars and Lou singing softly. The cabaret sound re- appears, as Lou croons for Caroline, 'She's not afraid to die/ All of her friends/ They call her Alaska/ When she takes speed they laugh and ask her/ What is in her mind?' followed by the violence of the line' You can hit me all you want but I don't love you any more', the orchestral backing at odds with the lyrics. The Kids follows, Caroline's children being taken away because 'they say she is not a good mother'. When the sound of two children crying comes in it's too much- the story goes that the children crying were told by Reed and Evrin that their mother had actually left them and they then pressed record. If true, they'd quite rightly be done for neglect and abuse themselves. The early 1970s; they were different times.
The Bed follows, fading out of the ending of The Kids, side two really a side long medley. In The Bed Jim lies in the bed where their children were conceived and where 'she cut her wrists' and Lou sings as Jim, 'and I say oh oh oh oh/ What a feeling' (a line later sampled by A Certain Ratio on their 1990 single Good Feeling). We're deep into theatre and storytelling now, the ghostly choir swirling around a lone acoustic guitar, Jim alone in the apartment, everything lost, Caroline dead. 'I never would have started if I'd known that it would end this way', Lou sings as Jim- but follows it with the emotionally dead Jim singing that he's not sorry that it ended this way. Jim has no remorse.
Berlin ends with the seven minute song Sad Song, the conclusion of the album's tale, Jim and Caroline's horrific story, the song fading in from the choir and FX that swell out of The Bed's ending. Sax breaks in, dancing around quirkily. A bass bumps up and down. Trumpets. Lou singing of a picture book where 'she looks like Mary Queen of Scots', horns parping and drums thumping, the guitar solos and the strings sweep and then Lou breaks into the song's title, utterly dead pan, just the two words, 'sad... song', Jim's lack of remorse and amorality still the centrepiece of Lou's lyrics. Then we are treated to a long, gloriously melancholic but weirdly uplifting fade out, the strings with Lou and the choir, 'Sad song/ Sad song'.
Sad Song
Berlin is a masterpiece. My re- discovery of it recently reveals it as good as anything else Lou Red did post- The Velvet Underground, a fully realised work of art that doesn't flinch from the world it depicts, Lou's songwriting at its best and the production and playing pushing Lou beyond the early 70s guitar rock of his debut and Transformer. It was slagged on release, declared a disaster and panned as depressing. Lou always liked it. He resurrected it in 2008 for some live shows and was asked if he felt vindicated. 'For what?', he replied, never a man to suffer journalists gladly. 'I always liked Berlin'. I don't know yet what's coming next in my Lou Reed solo deep dive but it'll have to be good to match Berlin.
