LOU REED - TRANSFORMER
I wont lie and pretend I miraculously discovered the greatness of Lou Reed on my own. Like most things I got into early, Lou Reed was uncovered by teenage detective work through the pages of Rolling Stone. When I borrowed a copy form the library (yep, CDs from the library) I recognised the songs but didn't know who sang them. Like anything that happened before your time, usually the timeline of events means nothing in the discovery. Like, you read WW2 started and Hitler dies 5 mins later, it didn't happen like that, but that’s how your brain learns the information. The same could be said for music History. The Velvet Underground could have been at their peak when Transformer was released and because they were both accessible simultaneously it didn't matter that it wasn't factually true...am I making ANY sense at all?
Well, to dispute the very point I just made - I actually did have respect for the difference between Lou Reed in VU and Lou Reed solo. It obviously sounds different but there’s a subtleness in Transformer that mirrors the growth in Reed. New York City is the overriding flavour here. At 15 when you listen to this and you’ve never been anywhere, you can almost feel hip and relevant and on the cusp of something great..New York style.
I owe my love of Lou Reed to REM who always mentioned the Velvet Underground in interviews and since I obsessively read those interviews it was a good staring off point to learn more and give me something new to read.
When I was 15 I saw Lou Reed at a short lived music festival that was never held again called ‘Alternative Nation’. I mean, with a cutting edge name like that I’m surprised it didn't take over the world. Being the good Catholic school kid that I was I couldn't dye my hair any more outrageously than the magic silver white engineered purple so my best friend and I added the extra oomph of green yellow and blue with food dye. Unfortunately that master plan went awry when it poured with rain for a good six hours straight and we were left with watered down rainbow streaks across our foreheads. As chaotic as it was, that festival had one of the best line ups ever:
NIN
Faith No More
Ween
Violent Femmes
L7
Live
Cosmic Psycho’s
The Tea Party
Primus
Bodycount
Lou Reed deserved more than an ungrateful bunch of drenched turds chanting for Faith No more and NIN...but he was composed, unrelenting and epic. Just like Transformer.
No comments:
Post a Comment