Inauspicious Debuts: Lou Reed’s ‘Lou Reed’ (1972)

Welcome to Inauspicious Debuts! With this column, we’ll be taking a look at the false starts in musical careers that are otherwise full of highlights. We’ll prove that legends aren’t always necessarily created overnight: for every Please Please Me, Are You Experienced?, or Never Mind the Bollocks, there’s an undervalued, forgotten, red-headed stepchild of an album that represents a beloved musician’s painful artistic birth.

Lots of times, these albums are rightfully cast aside to the dustbin of history; other times, we may be lucky enough to uncover a diamond in the rough. So, let’s begin, shall we?

Lou Reed was in a strange sort of limbo as the Seventies began. As the leader of the Velvet Underground, he thrust some of the most uncompromising rock ‘n’ roll ever recorded into the public consciousness. His primitive tributes to prostitutes, queers, drug addicts, and drag queens were catnip to the avant-garde Warhol crowd, not to mention music critics who gladly played the foil in Reed’s contentious relationship with the press.

Those hundreds of thousands of bands that Brian Eno would famously say were formed in tribute to Reed and his group of misfits were a way off from materializing, however, and the group never made the Billboard charts. Reed quit the Velvet Underground in 1969, shortly after recording their fourth album, the warmly nostalgic Loaded. After two years of hibernation, Reed was seemingly ready to launch his solo career. Or was he?

Sessions for what would become Lou Reed began at Morgan Studios in London in December 1971 under the supervision of producer Richard Robinson. The first problem became apparent almost immediately: Reed showed up to London with almost no new material.

Aside from the piano-driven soul ballad “Going Down” (on which Reed gives a vocal performance that can most charitably be described as “catatonic”) and “Berlin” (which would later be repurposed as the centerpiece of Reed’s infamous 1973 rock opera of the same name), the remaining eight songs on Lou Reed would all end up being comprised of leftovers from the VU era.

With the exception of snide rocker “Wild Child,” all of these songs would later resurface in their original inceptions on various retrospective releases, including the seminal rarities comp VU, 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, Peel Slowly and See, and Loaded (Fully Loaded Edition).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWVCshp6Z84

In every single instance, the Velvets’ versions of these tracks put the versions that appear on Lou Reed to shame. Whether it be the guitar rave-ups of “I Can’t Stand It” and “Walk It and Talk It” or the avant-balladry of “Lisa Says” and “Ocean,” these songs lost something special in their Morgan Studios incarnations, as if Lou Reed had somehow forgotten, over his two-year absence from music, how to be, well, Lou Reed. The solo versions are just too polished, too tentative, too safe — all terms that one would never dare associate with the man who, at that point, had given us the likes of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin,” and “Sister Ray.”

And that brings us to perhaps the biggest problem with Lou Reed: for some reason, someone thought it would be a good idea to put together a studio backing band for Reed that featured not one, but two members of the bombastic prog rock group Yes: Rick Wakeman on piano and keyboards and Steve Howe on guitar. You would be hard-pressed to find two rock groups with more differing aesthetics and agendas as the Velvet Underground and Yes; perhaps their only similarity is that they both utilize musical instruments.

Listening to the finished product, one gets the idea that Reed was perhaps racked with insecurities and just throwing everything he could at the wall in an effort to see if anything stuck. That might explain why it took him 13 months to record a bunch of songs he already knew very well, and why, according to an interview with Wakeman, Reed dictated that during tracking, “the lights had to be out so nobody could see.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jVRRB0JT0A

When RCA released Lou Reed in April of 1972, the thud was deafening. With a few exceptions (including Robert Christgau, who gave the album a B+), the critical response was lukewarm at best, and the album peaked at a lowly #189 on the Billboard 200. Reed, for his part, almost immediately disowned the record, telling Rolling Stone that, “There’s just too many things wrong with [the album],” adding, “I’m aware of all the things that are missing and all the things that shouldn’t have been there.”

It’s almost impossible to read that last quote and not imagine Reed casting a shady glance in Wakeman and Howe’s general direction. As if to show that this wasn’t all talk, Reed almost immediately called a mulligan: he hooked up with David Bowie and Mick Ronson, spent August of 1972 holed up at Trident Studios (one month, compared to the 13 months it took to make Lou Reed), and emerged that November with an instant classic, Transformer.

With its debauched lyrics, slinky rhythms, and aura of dark decadence, Transformer spawned three hit singles: “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Satellite,” and “Vicious,” almost single-handedly laid the groundwork for what would become glam rock, and continues to pop up on Greatest Albums of All Time lists to this day. It took mere months for Lou Reed to be relegated to the status of an embarrassing footnote.

Reed would go on to thrill and confound listeners for the next four decades with such perverse stylistic left turns as inventing noise rock with 1975’s Metal Machine Music, then following it up with perhaps his most accessible pop album, 1976’s Coney Island Baby; writing and releasing a song called “I Wanna Be Black” (on 1978’s underrated Street Hassle); recording an entire album based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe (2003’s The Raven); and finally, 2011’s Lulu, the universally reviled sludge-poetry collaboration with Metallica that ended up being Reed’s final musical statement before dying of liver disease on October 27, 2013.

While Reed stubbornly followed no one but his own muse, and seemingly got a kick out of making his fans continually scratch their heads, perhaps it’s his 1972 self-titled solo debut that remains the most perverse thing imaginable: a forgettable Lou Reed album.

Liam Carroll

Liam Carroll has written for such sites as Critical Mob, TWCC, and Wonder & Risk. He is an alumnus of Ridge High School and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. If he could make a living by eating pizza rolls and watching bad horror movies on VHS, that's what he'd be doing. He currently lives in his home state of New Jersey, and he'll gladly fight you about it. He suggests dating the roommate of the editor as a good way to get published on REBEAT.