Lou Reed

Certain Songs #987: Lou Reed – “Big Sky”

September 13, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Ecstasy
Year: 2000

Not that it mattered, because Lou Reed had a lifetime pass for his work with the Velvet Underground, bug as it turned out, Magic and Loss was the last time I felt any kind of personal connection to a Lou Reed album.

And while he never really stopped working — in the mid-1990s he turned his attention to live albums, opera, meditation albums and, er, Metallica — he only produced two more true solo albums, 1996’s Set The Twilight Reeling, and 2000’s Ecstacy, which featured perhaps the worst best album cover of all of his shitty album covers, a selfie of Lou coming.

Certain Songs #986 – Lou Reed – “Sword of Damocles (Externally)”

September 12, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Magic and Loss
Year: 1992

Fuck cancer. That might be a hot take, but it’s mine, and I stand by it.

Eerie and spooky, “Sword of Damocles” rides a bed of acoustic guitars, an atmospheric bowed bass and an irregular drumbeat as he considers the plight of his friend, who is getting zapped by poison radiation in the vain hope it will cure their cancer.

Certain Songs #985: Lou Reed – “What’s Good (The Thesis)”

September 11, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Magic and Loss
Year: 1992

After a pair of concept albums about New York City and Andy Warhol, on Magic and Loss Lou Reed decided he wanted to tackle death itself.

This was spurred by the imminent deaths of a pair of close friends of his, most notably the songwriter, Doc Pomus, who wrote or co-wrote a bunch of songs that you definitely know, from “Save The Last Dance For Me” to “Little Sister,” to “Sha La La La Lee,” and so the mood on Magic and Loss was appropriately darker than any of his solo albums since The Blue Mask.

Certain Songs #984: Lou Reed / John Cale – “Work”

September 10, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Songs For Drella
Year: 1990

Of course the reason that Lou Reed & John Cale recorded Songs For Drella as a duo instead of with a full band is that they knew that a full band would instantly invite comparisons to their work with the Velvet Underground, and they wanted to make sure that the focus was on the stories they were telling about their mentor, the late Andy Warhol.

Which made sense, because for rabid Velvets fans such as myself, just the prospect of hearing the interplay of Cale’s keyboards and Reed’s guitar for the first time since the late 1960s was far more important than anything they had to say about Warhol, who I always perceived as important to their career, but not so much to their music.

Certain Songs #983: Lou Reed – “Strawman (Live 1989)”

September 9, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: Live in Toronto, 1989
Year: 1989

The first time I saw in Lou Reed in concert was on the New York tour.

It was April, 1989 at the now-gone Universal Ampitheater in Los Angeles, and not only did The Feelies open up, Lou joined them when they played “What Goes On” as their encore. Oh, and I pissed next to Richard Lewis, who of course was a Lou Reed fan. As for Lou, he played almost all of New York from start to finish, the climax of which was a version of one of my favorite songs on the album that made it even better..

Certain Songs #982: Lou Reed – “Dime Store Mystery”

September 8, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: New York
Year: 1989

If in “Doin’ The Things That We Want To,” Lou Reed referenced the films that his buddy Martin Scorcese made about New York, then it’s weirdy ironic that he closed his album about New York with a song about a film Marty made about a time and place far far away.

That film, of course, is The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorcese’s film that featured a controversial sequence where Jesus comes down from the cross and experiences an alternative reality as a normal man. You know, like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard gets hit by an energy beam from a probe and lives out the life of a guy named Kamin, but much less blasphemous.

Certain Songs #981: Lou Reed – “Romeo Had Juliette”

September 7, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: New York
Year: 1989

It seems like every great 1960s artist who survived into the 1980s had their “1980s” album. The record where the temptation to be contemporary ends up outweighing their normal instincts to hoe their own rows.

So Bob Dylan had Empire Burlesque and Neil Young had Landing on Water, and Lou Reed — who had a better overall 1980s than the other two combined — had 1986’s Mistrial, which after the three great records that preceded it, shoulda been called “Misfire.”

Certain Songs #980: Lou Reed – “Doin’ The Things That We Want To”

September 1, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: New Sensations
Year: 1984

My favorite of all of Lou Reed’s solo songs, the utterly gorgeous “Doin’ The Things That We Want To” is a pean to artistic freedom that also slyly name-drops some of his famous friends in other mediums.

But it’s also more than that, which is insane, because artistic freedom is pretty much one of the two defining characteristics of Lou Reed, because in the ongoing repetition of variations of the title, I think he gets at a deeper truth about fandom and its relationship to the muse.

Certain Songs #979: Lou Reed – “New Sensations”

August 31, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: New Sensations
Year: 1984

Fading in like a motorcycle coming over the crest of a distant hill, “New Sensations” feels like one of the most important songs of Lou Reed’s solo career.

Or at least it is to me. I’m not normally a lyrics guy, but when a song has as great of a set of lyrics as “New Sensations” does, it’s almost impossible for me — even 21-year-old-me in 1984 — not to notice. The message, to me, was that you’re never to old to experience new sensations.

Certain Songs #978: Lou Reed – “I Love You, Suzanne”

August 30, 2017 by Jim Connelly

Album: New Sensations
Year: 1984

It probably seems counter-intuitive that at some point in 1984, the number one album on College Radio was the 13th solo album by a man who was 20 years older than his target audience. It me. But that was the weird confluence of events that surrounded the brief second cultural ascension of Lou Reed.

It was, of course, infamously signified by the “Hey, don’t settle for walking” Honda scooter commercial, but it manifested itself in other ways, as well: the V.U. and Another View outtakes albums, his participation on the Sun City album and the Conspiracy of Hope tour, appearances in various soundtracks like Perfect to Rock and Rule, and of course, this shameless attempt at manufacturing another massive hit single.