Record of the day: Lou Reed, "Rock'n'roll Animal"

Record of the day: Lou Reed, “Rock’n’roll Animal”

Lou Reed
“Rock’n’Roll Animal” (Cd RCA 0786367948-2)

Perhaps Lou Reed’s most famous album, “Rock’n’Roll Animal” was actually a rescue operation that the American musician had to carry out to recover the audience lost with the previous album “Berlin”, one of his masterpieces but also a resounding failure upon its release; after all, Reed has always had to mediate between his needs as an extreme artist, a lover of both strictly basic rock and more risky experimentation, and the expectations of his fans.

After the success of the album “Transformer” and the single “Walk on the Wild Side”, produced by David Bowie, the arrival of “Berlin” was welcomed as a cold shower, so Reed quickly recovered the decadent and sexually previously held ambiguously by appearing on stage in a more familiar guise also from a musical point of view, re-presenting Velvet Underground classics such as “White Light/White Heat” and “Heroin”, which in a version over thirteen minutes long constituted the heart of the show , where Reed staged the spasms of a heroin addict by even miming the gesture of injecting the substance into his vein.

Excellently supported by a band oiled to perfection (led by guitarist Steve Hunter, also author of the long instrumental introduction that opens this concert) Reed tells his stories saturated with the chaos of New York, from the transsexual of “Sweet Jane” to the madness of “Lady Day” reaching its expressive zenith in the visceral anthem of “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
His violent and transgressive image coincided perfectly with the desperate humanity that inhabited these songs, made up of lives always on the verge of collapse, nihilistically focused on their own existential pain, excluding any glimmer of hope.

In these years, drug abuse led Reed to face his music in a continuous melee, spitting violent vocal utterances into the microphone always halfway between words, screams and songs, creating a rock equivalent of the European “Sprechstimme” of composers like Weill and Schoenberg.

After having regained the charts with “Rock’n’Roll Animal” Reed will mess up the game again by publishing his
most impenetrable work, “Metal Machine Music”, a double album made up of electronic sounds that are decidedly difficult and unbearable to listen to for an audience accustomed to the sounds of rock.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical topics.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: A record for every day of the year” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.