ROX-TV digs into the milk crates for Lou Reed’s “Rock n Roll Animal”. Roll one up and drift back in time with us.

1. Intro and Sweet Jane (Velvet Underground material)(Fourth Studio Album “Loaded” 1970)

2. Heroin (Velvet Underground material)(Debut Album “The Velvet Underground and Nico” 1967)

1. White Light/White Heat(Velvet Underground material)(2nd Studio Album “White Light/White Heat” 1968)

2. Lady Day (Solo material)(3rd Studio Album “Berlin” 1973)

3. Rock n Roll (Velvet Underground material)(Fourth Studio Album “Loaded” 1970)

Well, what can I say about Lou Reed ? He was a God, a genius, and maybe a disaster all rolled into one very long day. I first got hooked on the Lou Reed band wagon many years ago. Back in the summer of 1998 I had been breaking away from the rap music scene which had dominated the decade and most of my young life. I wasn’t leaving in anger, I had just rode the train to the end of the station. I had been a rap head since the late eighties when I first started to strike out on my own musical tastes. Everyone who grew up with music first starts somewhere and for me that was with my parent’s generation of music.

There’s no escaping it and I’m sure I’m not the first or the last to follow the trend. In my early years I had been schooled on Motown mostly, some decent British bands like the Animals and the Rolling Stones, a little of this and some of that. Music is a long journey and a person needs to have a decent jumping off point. By the time I was ready to move on from the American sound of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the eighties were coming to an end. Before that time though I had exhausted my parents record collection and had heard my fill. I was becoming self aware of what I liked and what was going on in America.

Anyone who remembers knows rap began to seep into the picture in a major way. My first introduction to rap was through a compilation “West Coast Rap” or something like that. I convinced my dad to buy it for me and I was off. Ice T became my first “favorite” and the song was called “Six in the morning“. Before long I was devouring anything I could get my hands on. I didn’t care who or what year it came out. I drifted from the likes of the Sugar Hill Gang to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (The Message being one of my top picks). From Public Enemy to NWA, Wu-Tang Clan to Digital Underground (when Tupac was still a member). The nineties was a great time to be alive no matter what you listened to, but rap was my constant until the summer after my Senior year. I could go on forever but this is not the time for the hip hop saga, this is about Lou Reed.

The event that changed it all was simple enough and I was ready for a change. I was and still am a fan of rap and gangster rap, but by the late nineties things were changing. Mainstream rap seemed to be morphing into what I refer to as “brag rap”. I didn’t care much for the Puff Daddy and Mase years and I couldn’t relate to dudes with five Rolexes and Bentleys. I didn’t drink Cristal and I was broke. Needless to say I was searching for something new. As it turns out, something new was something “old”. At a drunken party at my girlfriend’s brother’s house it finally happened.

I was drinking Mickey’s Malt liquor that evening when I heard a new sound from an old band, blasting out of the speakers. The song was “The End” and the band was the Doors. I ceremoniously got annihilated as Jim Morrison worked up into a poetic frenzy. It was “the next big thing” for me and once I found out how much of a drunken mad man Jim could be, I became huge admirer. I dove into their body of work and then came across the Door’s movie which by then was a few years old. This movie held the key and as I started to watch it as only a drunk teenager could, over and over, I was captivated by a scene in which Jim and the Doors visit the Factory in New York City.

The Factory was Andy Warhol’s magical tiny universe where he could paint, direct, get weird, and do people so to speak. Among the many interesting things about the factory was that Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, promoted and financed by Andy himself, were starting out on a strange journey of their very own. During the movie, Jim gets loaded and decides to hang around long after the other Doors have been scared off by the freaky scene at the factory. In the background as Jim walked around the Factory, the song “Heroin” was being played and I was captivated by the imagery set to the music. Jim meets Andy and eventually flees the scene with Nico (featured on the Velvet’s first studio album). The Doors turned me on to the Velvet Underground and so I went.

I devoured the Velvet’s body of work, but nothing compares to that first album. I’m sure everyone that’s thirty and older could recognize and point out the album cover even if they never hear it. The cover famously featured a pee-able yellow banana that Warhol had designed. I became a junkie for their music and quickly picked up the box set and any vinyl that could be located. Sadly, the Velvets were too far ahead of their time and were a total flop as far as main stream was concerned. Luckily I never cared about the popularity of the music, just how it made me feel inside. The Velvets were the cat’s ass, the only problem was that they didn’t leave a large body of work for a devoted fan, with only four studio albums to speak of.

Lou Reed quit the group and retreated for awhile, giving up on music entirely. Two years later he was seduced back to music and released “Lou Reed“. It was his first solo album and by everyone’s account including his own “was a flop”. Although highly anticipated, it was a vast departure from where the Velvets had been. Undeterred, Lou was given another opportunity and hit a home run with his second solo release “Transformer“. Working with David Bowie, this record was everything the first was not. For Velvet’s fans like myself, this was exactly what I needed to carry on. It also gave Lou some much needed commercial success and breathing room. The album eventually peaked at 29 on the Billboard 200 and reached 13 on the UK Album Charts.

With the success of Transformer, Lou made came out with his third solo album “Berlin” in 1973. It didn’t do as well as “Transformer” and was declared a “disaster” by Rolling Stone Magazine. Much like “Transformer”, it was influenced by material from the Velvet Underground. That same year, Lou recorded “Rock n Roll Animal” live at Howard Stein’s Academy of Music, which brings us up to speed.

I didn’t care for Berlin and as I suspect, most of the Velvet’s fans didn’t either, not that there had ever been that many to begin with. As I progressed through his catalogue, Lou was starting to lose me. I longed for the Velvet’s and anything that was akin to the “old stuff”. Where “Berlin” and “Lou Reed” the album failed, “Rock n Roll Animal” brought that good time feeling back. Although it was basically just old Velvet songs with clever packaging, it was still enough for me to cling on to. Although the intro to “Sweet Jane” was a bit over done and longer than it needed to be, when the band finally started laying into those old familiar notes, the good time feelings rushed back. Lou’s singing was good enough and I fell in love all over again. The next song was a thirteen minute rendition of “Heroin” which wasn’t the original, but still had the same charm and wonderment about it.

“White Light/White Heat” was not as good as the original, but nothing ever is. I still had a soft spot in my heart for this wonderful narcotic tune. “Lady Day” did nothing for me then or now. Like I said a minute ago, Berlin did not turn me on and neither did “Lady Day”. It was time to pick up the needle and “skip” to the next song. “Rock and Roll” rounded out the album on side B and was about as good as it could get under the circumstances. The album is good and I still consider it an essential Lou Reed record for any fan to have.

But perhaps the real take away from the “Rock n Roll Animal” was something else altogether. I didn’t notice it back in the nineties or over the coming years but there was an undercurrent of sadness in this album. I don’t mean Lou sang like his feelings were hurt or the music was dark and lonely. I guess after listening to it again for this review it occurred to me that Lou Reed must have been extremely frustrated by what the audience responded to and his inability to escape his own past. It must have been heartbreaking to know that his best music would always be in those first couple of years, trapped in the sixties forever.

I was guilty myself and only wanted to hear the Velvets or stuff “like the Velvets” from Lou. That’s what I got turned on by and that’s what I thought was important. I have to admit that I didn’t care for some of Lou’s solo stuff, actually not much at all outside of the “Transformer” and the “Rock n Roll Animal” sphere. Ok, I take that back…Lou would excite me with “Street Hassle”, “Metal Machine Music” and “Live: Take No Prisoners” as well as his eighteenth studio album “Ecstasy” which came out in 2000 (Twenty-six years after RNR Animal had been release). I’m sure that there were some die hard fans who took the entire journey with Lou but I wasn’t one of them. I would forever be trapped in the time warp with the man, who could never seem to escape either. If you’ve never heard of Lou Reed or the Velvet Underground, I think it’s time you took a walk on the wild side.