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Lou Reed's 'Berlin' Is One Of Rock's Darkest Albums. So Why Does It Sound Like So Much Fun?

Lou Reed's third album is a harrowing examination of addiction, abuse and suicide. Yet the bleakness lands because it's so beautifully counterweighted.

Lou Reed 's Berlin begins with a nightmarishly tape-destroyed German count-in — eins, zwei , drei , zugabe — followed by the "Happy Birthday" song. It ends with a bloody suicide in a bed.

Wait, that's the second-to-last track; Berlin actually ends as the narrator callously brushes off said suicide — which happened to be of the mother of his children. The lynchpin track, " The Kids ," features a harrowing soundbite of children screaming for their mother.

In between, Reed relates the tale of a relationship that spins out into addiction, prostitution and domestic abuse against the backdrop of the titular city — which, at the time, Reed had never been to.

Berlin profoundly alienated some critics. Rolling Stone castigated it as one of "certain records so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them...a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence and suicide."

Likewise, Robert Christgau called the notion of Berlin 's artistic accomplishment "horses—" and added that the story of the couple "lousy," with the ambitious, operatic music "only competent." By all accounts, the incomprehension hurt Reed; he pulled a 180 with 1974's glammy Sally Can't Dance .

But despite the content, and the chaos in Reed's personal life at the time — fathoms of drugs, a failing marriage — Berlin is no druggie disaster. In reality, it's one of the crown jewels of the GRAMMY winner's voluminous discography, and a masterclass in finding beauty in the sordid depths of the human condition.

And it's difficult to imagine Berlin 's story landing without utterly gonzo music — and a fair amount of ink-black humor.

The key to the former is the GRAMMY-nominated producer Bob Ezrin , who's helped craft any number of epic, ridiculous, fall-on-your-face rock classics. Case in point: a year prior to Berlin , he'd produced Alice Cooper 's School's Out ; just after, he'd helm Aerosmith's Get Your Wings .

Berlin followed 1972's Transformer — his second album and breakthrough, by way of the epochal "Walk on the Wild Side." Both the album and single's successes were helped along by a very high-profile producer — an ascendant David Bowie .

But as Anthony DeCurtis lays out in his 2017 biography Lou Reed: A Life , Bowie had been attracting credit for Transformer , and Reed started to look like his imitator.

"From the industry perspective, the aesthetic differences between Bowie, Reed and Cooper were meaningless," DeCurtis explains in the book. "Broadly speaking, they were all working the same side of the street — bending gender categories and stunning conventional sensibilities."

Given this perception — and a brawl they'd undergone in a London club over Reed's habits — it was time for Reed to untether from Bowie, just as the latter launched into the stratosphere.

"Lou is out of the glitter thing. He really denounces it," crowed Reed's manager at the time, Dennis Katz. "He's not interested in glam rock or glitter rock. Lou Reed is a rock and roller." Reed and Katz went with the 23-year-old Ezrin, who was riding high on Alice Cooper's success — and seemed like the obvious choice.

With the success of Transformer in the rearview, Ezrin and Reed felt emboldened to devise a work of boundless aspiration. It would be a rock opera — a double concept album with an elaborate booklet, with photographs that depict the downfall of the central couple, Caroline and Jim.

Ezrin booked a wild backing ensemble — including keyboardist Steve Winwood of the Spencer Davis Group, Blind Faith and Traffic ; bassist Jack Bruce of Cream ; drummer B.J. Wilson of Procol Harum ; and Michael and Randy Brecker , respectively on tenor sax and trumpet. As the sessions rolled on, hype broiled around the project.

"It's not an overstatement to say that Berlin will be the Sgt. Pepper of the seventies," blustered Larry "Ratso" Sloman in Rolling Stone . Which is laughable today — but it helps frame Berlin in its time and context.

"When people thought of a concept album, they thought Sgt. Pepper ," singer/songwriter Elliott Murphy, who befriended Reed around this period, tells GRAMMY.com. "And Berlin is kind of the Antichrist of Sgt. Pepper ."

Just as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band used childhood and nostalgia as a launching pad rather than a set of rigid parameters, Berlin — which ended up being a single-disc release — doesn't simply bludgeon you with misery for 49 minutes.

Berlin takes flower from its title track, a barely-there sketch of a romantic scene in the titular city, originally released on Reed's self-titled 1972 debut. As DeCurtis opines in Lou Reed: A Life , "Perhaps it was the song's unfinished quality that appealed to them, leaving space for them to fill with their fantasies of what it might become."

Whatever the case, Reed had a natural facility for expansive narratives. As author Will Hermes explains, Reed's early "mentor and model" was Delmore Schwartz, his English professor at Syracuse University.

"There's humor and there's pathos in equal parts," says Hermes, whose sprawling, fascinating biography, Lou Reed: The King of New York , was released Oct. 3. He's referring to Schwartz and his work, but this extends to his mentee: "Reed was a hilarious guy, from everybody I spoke to, and certainly reading his interviews. So that darkness and humor came together. I don't think a lot of people got that about Berlin when it was first produced."

Reed had taken a theater class at Syracuse, loved Federico Fellini in college, and remained a cinephile for life. By its very nature, the episodic, operatic format of Berlin precludes monotony; each song examines this doomed coupling from a different angle.

Sure, every facet of the Berlin tale is cursed. But Reed explains why it's cursed — including from Jim and Caroline's warring perspectives, as on "Jim Says," "Caroline I" and "II" and beyond. Which gives it innate narrative variety, as the listener ping-pongs through the sordid tale.

"'The Bed' and 'The Kids' are very powerful experiences, but not really a hoot," Stickles says of Berlin's B-side. "But the A-side is a pretty big hoot. Like, 'Caroline Says I' rocks . 'How Do You Think It Feels' — these are fun, big rockers, and it's got the funny flutes and clarinets as well."

And while Reed is unflinching in his depictions of violence and suffering, that quality doesn't render him a bore on Berlin — Reed being Reed, it makes him a live wire.

" Berlin is not that one-dimensional; it's not a single-note record," singer/songwriter and Reed head Jerry David DeCicca, who's just released his latest album New Shadows , tells GRAMMY.com. "It might be shades of some of those things, but that's what makes it interesting."

This eclecticism extends to the music, which never rolls over and cries in its milk, but frequently detonates with goofy, stadium-sized, Meat Loaf -esque jubilance. But despite its pedigree and context within a specific chapter of hard rock, Berlin sounds oddly singular.

Patrick Stickles, the lead singer of the rock band Titus Andronicus and a Reed acolyte, calls Berlin "far more proggy than your typical Lou Reed material."

"It's very ornate, but it doesn't really sound like Yes or King Crimson or whatever was going on at that time," Stickles tells GRAMMY.com," because he's still writing with his favorite two or three chords."

"It just doesn't sound like a lot of records from that time period," DeCicca says. "So I don't think he was trying to fit in."

DeCicca then considers the wider scope of Reed's catalog: "He made another record after that, the next year, that was just incredibly different [ Sally Can’t Dance ]. Which I'm sure was in some part a reaction to it. But how conscious or unconscious is probably a little bit debatable. I mean, he was not somebody who wanted to repeat himself."

In the end, Berlin resonates due to Reed ' s boundless audacity — and the sheer oddness that permeates its grooves, from start to finish.

"That's probably his No. 1 virtue as a writer — that he always goes there ," GRAMMY nominee Will Sheff , who's struck out solo after two decades fronting Okkervil River, tells GRAMMY.com. "I think his main innovation is that he took the guardrails off of subject matter." (Tonalities, too: whether this was intentional or not, Sheff calls 1967's The Velvet Underground & Nico "one of the most f—ed up, cheap, amateurish things that you've ever heard.")

Sheff and his Okkervil River bandmates clung to Berlin during desperate, ragged tours of yore: today, he marvels at the contradictions of its studio dynamic.

"Based on a lot of the accounts, it sounds a little bit like Bob Ezrin was kind of dragging him through the process of making it," Sheff says. "It kind of sounds like a f—ed up, surly, stuck in molasses guy, who's being sort of dragged out of bed and forced into the studio, where there's a string section waiting for him."

(Was Reed on fire in the studio, or being "dragged" by Ezrin? "I think it was a bit of both," Hermes says. "There were a lot of drugs and alcohol involved, but they were working really hard, being really ambitious.")

However checked out Reed was or wasn't, Ezrin brought his consummate showmanship to the party. "And that's part of what makes Berlin fun — he really honors Lou Reed's ambitions, maybe more than Lou was honoring them at the time. I wouldn't call it joyous, but there is a lot very butch [energy], like, 'I'm just a guy strutting down the street in Berlin, and I'm a tough man.' I find that stuff very charming."

Sure, Berlin may be exactly how Sheff describes it: "excessively dark…sick, diseased, kind of broken heart of a masculine anger and sorrow." Against that pitch-black backdrop, every overenthusiastic drumfill, expensive string flourish and brutal joke truly sparkle. (As per the latter: ("This is a bum trip," Caroline complains about domestic battery.)

Despite the sting of critical rejection, Reed continued pursuing long-form, narrative works throughout his career. These included what Hermes calls "three experimental quote-unquote musical theater pieces.") These were with the visionary Robert Wilson — one based on H.G. Wells' The Time Machine , another based on Edgar Allen Poe, and another in Lulu , which germinated into a polarizing 2011 album of the same name with Metallica .

And Reed always felt strongly about Berlin . In 2006, he revived it for a stage show, which would be released two years later as Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse . As Hermes put it, "The performance was frequently gorgeous and a bitter pill: magnificent, overwrought, pretentious, full of thematic misogyny." In other words, it's a lot — and it deals in far more than you-know-what quality.

"Lots of content in life is depressing," DeCicca says, "but that doesn't mean you write off people's experiences as not being worth engaging with."

Half a century on, Berlin isn't merely worth engaging with — it remains brazen and captivating, a looking glass into the heart of darkness.

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Photo: Mike Miller

Gary Clark, Jr. On 'JPEG RAW': How A Lockdown Jam Session, Bagpipes & Musical Manipulation Led To His Most Eclectic Album Yet

Gary Clark, Jr.'s latest record, 'JPEG RAW,' is an evolution in the GRAMMY-winning singer and guitarist's already eclectic sound. Clark shares the process behind his new record, which features everything from African chants to a duet with Stevie Wonder.

Stevie Wonder once said "you can’t base your life on people’s expectations." It’s something guitarist and singer Gary Clark, Jr. has taken to heart as he’s built his own career. 

"You’ve got to find your own thing," Clark tells GRAMMY.com.

Clark recently duetted with Wonder on "What About The Children," a song on his forthcoming album. Out March 22, JPEG RAW sees Clark continue to evolve with a mixtape-like kaleidoscope of sounds.

Over the years, Clark has ventured into rock, R&B, hip-hop blues, soul, and country. JPEG RAW is the next step in Clark's eclectic sound and sensibility, the result of a free-flowing jam session held during COVID-19 lockdown. Clark and his bandmates found freedom in not having a set path, adding elements of traditional African music and chants, electronic music, and jazz into the milieu.

"We just kind of took it upon ourselves to find our own way and inspire ourselves," says Clark, a four-time GRAMMY winner. "And that was just putting our heads together and making music that we collectively felt was good and we liked, music we wanted to listen to again."

The creation process was simultaneously freeing and scary.

"It was a little of the unknown and then a sense of hope, but also after there was acceptance and then it was freeing. I was like, all right, well, I guess we’re just doing this ," Clark recalls. "It was an emotional, mental rollercoaster at that time, but it was great to have these guys to navigate through it and create something in the midst of it."

JPEG RAW is also deeply personal, with lyrics reflecting on the future for Clark himself, his family, and others around the globe. While Clark has long reflected on political and social uncertainties, his new release widens the lens. Songs like "Habits" examine a universal humanity in his desire to avoid bad habits, while "Maktub" details life's common struggles and hopes. 

Clark and his band were aided in their pursuit by longtime collaborator and co-producer Jacob Sciba and a wide array of collaborators. Clark’s prolific streak of collaborations continued, with the album also featuring funk master George Clinton, electronic R&B/alt-pop artist Naala, session trumpeter Keyon Harrold, and Clark’s sisters Shanan, Shawn, and Savannah. He also sampled songs by Thelonious Monk and Sonny Boy Williamson.

Clark has also remained busy as an actor (he played American blues legend Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis ) and as a music ambassador (he was the Music Director for the 23rd Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor).

GRAMMY.com recently caught up with Clark, who will kick off his U.S. tour May 8, about his inspirations for JPEG RAW , collaborating with legendary musicians, and how creating music for a film helped give him a boost of confidence in the studio. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

You incorporated traditional African music on JPEG RAW. How did it affect your songwriting process?

Well, I think traveling is how it affected my songwriting process. I was over in London, and we played a show with Songhoy Blues, and I was immediately influenced. I was like, "dang, these are my musical brothers from all the way across the world." 

I always kind of listened to West African funk and all that kind of stuff. So, I was just listening to that in the studio, and just kind of started messing around with the thing. And that just kind of evolved from there. I was later told by Jacob Sciba that he was playing that music trying to brainwash me into leaning more in that direction. I thought we were just genuinely having a good time exploring music together, and he was trying to manipulate me. [ Laughs. ]

I quit caring about what people thought about me wanting to be a certain thing. I think that being compared to Jimi Hendrix is a blessing and a curse for me because I'm not that. I will never be that. I never wanted to imitate or copy that, no disrespect. 

You’ve got to find your own thing. And my own thing is incorporating all the styles of music that I love, that I grew up on, and [was] influenced by as a pre-teen/teenager. To stay in one space and just be content doing that has never been my personality ever…I do what I like.

I read that you play trumpet at home and also have a set of bagpipes, just in case the mood strikes.  

I used to go collect instruments and old cameras from thrift stores and vintage shops and flea markets. So, I saw some bagpipes and I just picked them up. I've got a couple of violins. I don't play well at all — if you could consider that even playing. I've got trumpet, saxophone, flutes, all kinds of stuff just in case I can use these instruments in a way that'll make me think differently about music. It'll inspire me to go in a different direction that I've maybe never explored before, or I can translate some of that into playing guitar. 

One of my favorite guitarists, Albert Collins, was really inspired by horn players. So, if you can understand that and apply that to your number one instrument, maybe it could affect you. 

Given recent discussions about advancements in AI and our general inundation with technology, the title of your album is very relevant. What about people seeing life through that filter concerns you? Why does the descriptor seem apt?

During the pandemic, since I wasn't out in the world, I was on my phone and the information I was getting was through whatever social media platforms and what was going on in certain news outlets, all the news outlets. I'm just paying attention and I'm just like, man, there's devastation . 

I realized that I don't have to let it affect me. Just because things are accessible doesn't mean that you need to [access them].  It just made me think that I needed to do less of this and more of being appreciative of my world that's right in front of me, because right now it is really beautiful.

You’ve said the album plays out like a film, with a wide range of emotions throughout. What was it like seeing the album have that film-like quality?

I had conversations with the band, and I'd expressed to them that I want to be able to see it. I want to be able to see it on film, not just hear it. Keyboardist Jon Deas is great with [creating a] sonic palate and serving a mood along with [Eric] "King" Zapata who plays [rhythm] guitar. What he does with the guitar, it serves up a mood to you. You automatically see a color, you see a set design or something, and I just said, "Let's explore that. Let's make these things as dense as possible. Let's go like Hans Zimmer meets John Lee Hooker . Let's just make big songs that kind of tell some sort of a story." 

Also, we were stuck to our own devices, so we had to use our imagination. There was time, there was no schedule. So, we were free, open space, blank canvas.

The album opens with "Maktub," which is the Arabic word for fate or destiny. How has looking at different traditions given you added clarity with looking at what's happening here in the U.S.?

I was sitting in the studio with Jacob Sciba and my friend Sama'an Ashrawi and we were talking about the history of the blues. And then we started talking about the real history of the blues, not just in its American form, in an evolution back to Africa. You listen to a song like "Maktub," and then you listen to a song like, "Baby What You Want Me to Do" by Jimmy Reed…. 

The last record was This Land , but what about the whole world? What about not just focusing on this, but what else is going on out there? And we drew from these influences. We talked about family, we talked about culture, we talked about tradition, we talked about everything. And it's like, let's make it inclusive, build the people up. Let's build ourselves up. It’s not just about your small world, it’s about everybody’s feelings. Sometimes they're dealt with injustice and devastation everywhere, but there's also this global sense of hope. So, I just wanted to have a song that had the sentiment of that.

I really enjoyed the song’s hopeful message of trying to move forward.

Obviously, things are a little bit funky around here, and I don't have any answers. But maybe if we got our heads together and brainstorm, we could all figure something out instead of … struggling or suffering in silence. It's like, let's find some light here. 

But part of the talks that I had with Sama'an and his parents over a [video] call was music. He’s from Palestine, and growing up music was a way to connect. Music was a way to find happiness in a place where that wasn't an everyday convenience, and that was really powerful. That music is what brought folks together and brought joy and built a community and a common way of thinking globally. They were listening to music from all over the world, American music, rock music, and that was an influence.

The final song on the album, "Habits," sounds like it was the most challenging song to put together. What did you learn from putting that song together?

Well, that song originally was a bunch of different pieces, and I thought that they were different songs, and I was singing the different parts to them, and then I decided to put them all together. I think I was afraid to put them all together because we were like, "let's not do these long self-indulgent pieces of music. Let's keep it cool." But once I put these parts together and put these lyrics together, it just kind of made sense. 

I got emotional when I was singing it, and I was like, T his is part of using this as an outlet for the things that are going on in life . We went and recorded it in Nashville with Mike Elizondo and his amazing crew, and it's like , yep, we're doing it all nine minutes of it .

You collaborated with a bunch of musicians on this album, including Naala on "This Is Who We Are." What was that experience like?

Working with Naala was great. That song was following me around for a couple of years, and I knew what I wanted it to sound like, but I didn't know how I was going to sing it. I had already laid the musical bed, and I think it was one of the last songs that we recorded vocals on for the album. 

Lyrically, it’s like a knight in shining armor or a samurai, and there's fire and there's war, and this guy's got to go find something. It was like this medieval fairytale type thing that I had in my head. Naala really helped lyrically guide me in a way that told that story, but was a little more personal and a little more vulnerable. I was about to give up on that song until she showed up in the studio. 

"What About the Children" is based on a demo that you got from Stevie Wonder. You got to duet with him, what was that collaboration like?

Oh, it was great. It was a life-changing experience. The guy's the greatest in everything, he was sweet, the most talented, hardworking, gracious, humble, but strong human being I've been in a room with and been able to create with. 

I was in shock when I left the studio at how powerful that was and how game changing and eye-opening it was. It was educational and inspiring. It was like before Stevie and after Stevie.

I imagine it was also extra special getting to have your sisters on the album.

Absolutely. We got to sing with Stevie Wonder; we used to grow up listening to George Clinton. They've stuck with us throughout my whole life. So, to be able to work with him and George Clinton — they came in wanting to do the work, hardworking, badass, nice, funny — it was a dream. 

Stevie Wonder and George Clinton are just different. They're pioneers and risk takers. For a young Black kid from Texas to see that and then later to be able to be in a room with that and get direct education and conversation…. It's an experience that not everybody gets to experience, and I'm grateful that I did, and hopefully we can do it again.

In 2022, you acted in Elvis. What are the biggest things you've learned from expanding into new creative areas?

I really have to give it up to a guy named Jeremy Grody…I went to his studio with these terrible demos that I had done on Pro Tools…and this guy helped save them and recreate them. I realized the importance of quality recordings. Jeremy Grody was my introduction to the game and really set me up to have the confidence to be able to step in rooms like that again.

I played some songs in the film, and I really understood how long a film day was. It takes all day long, a lot of takes, a lot of lights, a lot of big crews, big production.

I got to meet Lou Reed [while screening the film] at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and I was super nervous in interviews. I was giving away the whole movie. And Lou Reed said, "Just relax and have fun with all this s—." I really appreciated that.

Do you have a dream role?

I don't have a dream role, but I do know that if I was to get into acting, I’d really dive into it. I would want to do things that are challenging. I like taking risks. I want to push it to the limit. I would really like to understand what it's like to immerse yourself in the character and in the script and do it for real.

You're about to go out on tour. How will the show and production on this tour compare with the past ones?

We're building it currently, but I'm excited about what we got in store as far as the band goes. There are a few additions. I've got my sisters coming out with me. It's just going to be a big show.There's a new energy here, and I'm excited to share that with folks. 

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Photo: Edward Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images

Remembering Seymour Stein: Without The Record Business Giant, Music Would Be Unrecognizable

The music man who signed everyone from the Ramones to Madonna will be profoundly missed throughout the global music community. He passed away on Apr. 8 at 80.

There’s a Belle and Sebastian song titled “Seymour Stein” that evokes a real-life, lavish feast between the soft-spoken Scottish indie band and the record company executive.

In the 1998 ballad, singer Stuart Murdoch details the tension between their working class identities and the dizzying prospects that Stein held in the palm of his hand. “Promises of fame, promises of fortune/ L.A. to New York/ San Francisco, back to Boston,” Murdoch dreamily sings. But he demurs, thinking of a girl back home in the country: “My thoughts are far away.”

There was a very good reason Murdoch and company associated Stein with an almost blindingly paradisiacal vision of music success. For an entire generation of alternative weirdos, Stein — the co-founder of Sire Records and vice president of Warner Bros. Records — was the guy who made it happen.

Sadly, Stein passed away on April 2 at his home in Los Angeles of cancer at the age of 80. This seismic loss to the global music community has rightfully earned tributes from far-flung corners of the music industry. Many, like his signee Madonna, openly pondered where their lives would be without his razor-sharp perception and adoration of all things music.

Think of the three-or-four-chord powderkeg of the Ramones ’ 1977 self-titled debut, and the CBGB-adjacent army that answered to its detonation: Talking Heads , the Pretenders , Richard Hell and the Voldoids — on and on. Stein signed them all to Sire, either initiating their careers, as per the Ramones, or heralding their second acts, as he did the Replacements .

That paradigm arguably amounted to the biggest shift in guitar-based music since the Beatles — the ratcheting-down of opulent ‘70s rock into something leaner, meaner, and arguably more honest. But even that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Stein's influence on music and culture at large.

Stein was the man who signed Madge, a profoundly pivotal figure in the following decade. And the rest of his resume was staggering: the Smiths , the Cure , Seal , k.d. lang , Brian Wilson , Lou Reed , Body Count… the list goes on.

He helped to establish the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, by way of the foundation of the same name, initiated by Ahmet Ertegun in 1983 — and was himself inducted in 2005. In 2018, the Recording Academy bestowed him with a coveted Trustees Award, which acknowledged his decades of service to the music community.

Indeed, the music man’s loss reverberates throughout the world’s leading society of music people.

“Seymour Stein was one of the greatest A&R executives of all time,” Ruby Marchand, the Chief Awards & Industry Officer at the Recording Academy, tells GRAMMY.com. “His passion, magnetic energy and natural curiosity underscored a lifelong dedication to unique artistry.

“He especially prized the art of songwriting and had an encyclopedic knowledge of songs, often bursting out in song to regale and delight friends and colleagues,” recalls Marchand, who worked with Stein for decades. “Seymour traveled the globe for decades and basked in the glow of discovering emerging artists singing to small audiences, from Edmonton to Seoul.

“He was a doting mentor, advisor, cheerleader and advocate for hundreds of us in the industry worldwide,” she concludes. “We cherish him and miss him terribly, and know how fortunate we were to have had him in our lives.”

The Recording Academy hails the late, great Stein for his monumental achievements in the music industry — ones that have fundamentally altered humanity’s universal language forever.

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20 Albums Turning 50 In 2023: 'Innervisions,' 'Dark Side Of The Moon' 'Catch A Fire' & More

1973 saw a slew of influential records released across genres — many of which broke barriers and set standards for music to come. GRAMMY.com reflects on 20 albums that, despite being released 50 years ago, continue to resonate with listeners today.

Fifty years ago, a record-breaking 600,000 people gathered to see the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band and the Band play Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. This is just one of many significant historical events that happened in 1973 — a year that changed the way music was seen, heard and experienced.

Ongoing advancements in music-making tech expanded the sound of popular and underground music. New multi-track technology was now standard in recording studios from Los Angeles to London. Artists from a variety of genres experimented with new synthesizers, gadgets like the Mu-Tron III pedal and the Heil Talk Box , and techniques like the use of found sounds.  

1973 was also a year of new notables, where now-household names made their debuts. Among these auspicious entries: a blue-collar songwriter from the Jersey Shore, hard-working southern rockers from Jacksonville, Fla. and a sister group from California oozing soul. 

Along a well-established format, '73 saw the release of several revolutionary concept records. The Eagles ’ Desperado , Pink Floyd ’s Dark Side of the Moon , Lou Reed ’s Berlin and the Who ’s Quadrophenia are just a few examples that illustrate how artists used narrative techniques to explore broader themes and make bigger statements on social, political and economic issues — of which there were many.

On the domestic front, 1973 began with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade . Internationally, the Paris Peace Accords were signed — starting the long process to end the Vietnam War. An Oil crisis caused fuel prices to skyrocket in North America. Richard Nixon started his short-lived second term as president, which was marked by the Watergate scandal. 

Politics aside, the third year of the '70s had it all: from classic- and southern-rock to reggae; punk to jazz; soul and R&B to country. Read on for 20 masterful albums with something to say that celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2023. 

Band On The Run - Paul McCartney & Wings

Laid down at EMI’s studio in Lagos, Nigeria and released in December 1973, the third studio record by Paul Mcartney & Wings is McCartney’s most successful post- Beatles album. Its hit singles "Jet" and the title cut "Band on the Run" helped make the record the biggest-selling in 1974 in both Australia and Canada.

Band on the Run won a pair of GRAMMYS the following year: Best Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical. McCartney added a third golden gramophone for this record at the 54th awards celebration when it won Best Historical Album for the 2010 reissue. In 2013, Band on the Run was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame. 

Head Hunters - Herbie Hancock

Released Oct. 13, Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters was recorded in just one week; its

four songs clock in at just over 40 minutes. That the album was not nominated in the jazz category, but instead Best Pop Instrumental Performance, demonstrates how Hancock was shifting gears.

Head Hunters showed Hancock moving away from traditional instrumentation and playing around with new synthesizer technology — especially the clavinet — and putting together a new band: the Headhunters. Improvisation marks this as a jazz record, but the phrasing, rhythms and dynamics of Hancock’s new quintet makes it equal parts soul and R&B with sprinkles of rock 'n' roll. 

The album represented a commercial and artistic breakthrough for Hancock, going gold within months of its release. "Watermelon Man" and "Chameleon," which was nominated for a Best Instrumental GRAMMY Award in 1974, were later both frequently sampled by hip-hop artists in the 1990s.

Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. - Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen , 22, was the new kid in town in 1973. This debut was met with tepid reviews. Still, Greetings introduced Springsteen’s talent to craft stories in song and includes many characters The Boss would return to repeatedly in his career. The album kicks off with the singalong "Blinded by the Light," which reached No. 1 on the Billboard 100 four years later via a cover done by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. This was the first of two records Springsteen released in 1973; The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle arrived before the end of the year — officially introducing the E Street Band.

Innervisions - Stevie Wonder 

This Stevie Wonder masterpiece shows an artist, in his early 20s, experimenting with new instrumentation such as TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra) — the world’s largest synth — and playing all instruments on the now-anthemic "Higher Ground."

The song reached No.1 on the U.S. Hot R&B Singles Chart, and Innervisions peaked at No. 4. The album won three GRAMMYS the following year, including Album Of The Year . Wonder was the first Black artist to win this coveted golden gramophone. In 1989, Red Hot Chili Peppers kept the original funk, but injected the song with a lot of rock on their cover — the lead single from Mother’s Milk .

The Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd

Critics perennially place this Pink Floyd album, the band's eighth studio record, as one of the greatest of all-time. The Dark Side of the Moon hit No.1 and stayed on the Billboard charts for 63 weeks.

A sonic masterpiece marked by loops, synths, found sounds, and David Gilmour’s guitar bends, Dark Side of the Moon is also a concept record that explores themes of excessive greed on tracks like "Money." Ironically, an album lambasting consumerism was the top-selling record of the year and has eclipsed 45 million sales worldwide since its release. The album’s cover has also become one of the most recognized in the history of popular music.

Pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd - Lynyrd Skynyrd

This debut release features several of the northern Florida rockers' most beloved songs: "Gimme Three Steps," "Tuesday’s Gone" and "Simple Man." The record, which has since reached two-times platinum status with sales of more than two million, also includes the anthemic "Free Bird," which catapulted them to stardom. The song with its slow-build and definitive guitar solo and jam in the middle became Lynyrd Skynyrd's signature song that ended all their shows; it also became a piece of pop culture with people screaming for this song during concerts by other artists.

Houses Of The Holy - Led Zeppelin

The first Led Zeppelin record of all originals — and the first without a Roman numeral for a title — Houses of the Holy shows a new side of these British hardrockers. Straying from the blues and hard rock of previous records, Houses of the Holy features funk (“The Ocean” and “The Crunge”) and even hints of reggae (“D’Yer Mak’er”). This fifth studio offering from Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham also includes one of this writer’s personal Zeppelin favorites — "Over the Hills and Far Away.” The song was released as the album’s first U.S. single and reached No. 51 on the Billboard charts. Despite mixed reviews from critics, Houses of the Holy eventually achieved Diamond status for sales of more than 10 million. Interesting fact: the song “Houses of the Holy” actually appears on the band’s next record ( Physical Graffiti ).

Quadrophenia - The Who

The double-album rock opera followed the critical success of Tommy and Who’s Next . Pete Townshend composed all songs on this opus, which was later adapted into a movie. And, in 2015, classically-scored by Townshend’s partner Rachel Fuller for a new generation via a symphonic version (“Classic Quadrophenia”). The story chronicles the life of a young mod named Jimmy who lives in the seaside town of Brighton, England. Jimmy searches for meaning in a life devoid of significance — taking uppers, downers and guzzling gin only to discover nothing fixes his malaise. With sharp-witted songs, Townshend also tackles classicism. His band of musical brothers: Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon provide some of their finest recorded performances. The album reached second spot on the U.S. Billboard chart.

Berlin - Lou Reed

Produced by Bob Ezrin , Berlin is a metaphor. The divided walled city represents the divisive relationships and the two sides of Reed — on stage and off. The 10 track concept record chronicles a couple’s struggles with drug addiction, meditating on themes of domestic abuse and neglect. As a parent, try to listen to "The Kids" without shedding a tear. While the couple on the record are named Caroline and Jim, those who knew Reed’s volatile nature and drug dependency saw the parallels between this fictionalized narrative and the songwriter’s life.

Catch A Fire - Bob Marley & the Wailers

The original cover was enclosed in a sleeve resembling a Zippo lighter. Only 20,000 of this version were pressed. Even though it was creative and cool, cost-effective it was not — each individual cover had to be hand-riveted. The replacement, which most people know today, introduces reggae poet and prophet Robert Nesta Marley to the world. With a pensive stare and a large spliff in hand, Marley tells you to mellow out and listen to the tough sounds of his island home.

While Bob and his Wailers had been making music for nearly a decade and released several records in Jamaica, Catch a Fire was their coming out party outside the Caribbean. Released in April on Island Records, the feel-good reggae rhythms and Marley’s messages of emancipation resonated with a global audience. A mix of songs of protest ("Slave Driver," "400 years") and love ("Kinky Reggae"), Catch A Fire is also notable for "Stir it Up," a song American singer-songwriter Johnny Nash had made a Top 15 hit the previous year. 

The New York Dolls - The New York Dolls

The New York Dolls burst on the club scene in the Big Apple, building a cult following with their frenetic and unpredictable live shows. The Dolls' hard rock sound and f-you attitude waved the punk banner before the genre was coined, and influenced the sound of punk rock for generations. (Bands like the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and KISS, cite the New York Dolls as mentors.) Singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren — who found time to release A Wizard, A True Star this same year — produced this tour de force. From the opening "Personality Crisis," this five-piece beckons you to join this out-of-control train.

Aladdin Sane - David Bowie

This David Bowie record followed the commercial success of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders from Mars . Many critics unfairly compare the two. A career chameleon, with Aladdin Sane , Bowie shed the Ziggy persona and adopted another alter-ego. The title is a pun that means: "A Lad Insane." For the songwriter, this record represented an attempt to break free from the crazed fandom Ziggy Stardust had created.

A majority of the songs were written the previous year while Bowie toured the United States in support of Ziggy. Journal in hand, the artist traveled from city to city in America and the songs materialized. Most paid homage to what this “insane lad” observed and heard: from debauchery and societal decay ( " Cracked Actor " ) to politics ( " Panic in Detroit " ) to punk music ( " Watch That Man " ). Top singles on Aladdin Sane were: "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday." Both topped the U.K. charts.

Faust IV -Faust

This fourth studio album — and the final release in this incarnation by this experimental avant-garde German ambient band — remains a cult classic. Recorded at the Manor House in Oxfordshire, England (Richard Branson’s new Virgin Records studio and the locale where Mike Oldfield crafted his famous debut Tubular Bells, also released in 1973), Faust IV opens with the epic 11-minute instrumental "Krautrock" — a song that features drones, clusters of tones and sustained notes to create a trance-like vibe. Drums do not appear in the song until after the seven minute mark.

The song is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the genre British journalists coined to describe bands like Faust, which musicians largely did not embrace. The rest of Faust IV is a sonic exploration worthy of repeated listens and a great place to start if you’ve ever wondered what the heck Krautrock is.

Brothers & Sisters - the Allman Brothers Band

Great art is often born from grief, and Brothers & Sisters is exemplary in this way. Founding member Duanne Allman died in 1971 and bassist Berry Oakley followed his bandmate to the grave a year later; he was killed in a motorcycle accident in November 1972. Following this pair of tragedies, the band carried on the only way they knew how: by making music.

With new members hired, Brothers & Sisters was recorded with guitarist Dicky Betts as the new de facto band leader. The Allman Brothers Band’s most commercially successful record leans into country territory from the southern rock of previous releases and features two of the band’s most popular songs: "Ramblin’ Man" and "Jessica." The album went gold within 48 hours of shipping and since has sold more than seven million copies worldwide.  

Call Me -  Al Green

Call Me is considered one of the greatest soul records of the 20th century and Green’s pièce de résistance. The fact this Al Green album features three Top 10 Billboard singles — "You Ought to Be With Me," "Here I Am" and the title track — helps explain why it remains a masterpiece. Beyond the trio of hits, the soul king shows his versatility by reworking a pair of country songs: Hank Williams ’ "I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry," and Willie Nelson ’s "Funny How Time Slips Away."

Killing Me Softly - Roberta Flack

This Roberta Flack album was nominated for three GRAMMY Awards and won two: Record Of The Year and Best Female Vocal Pop Performance at the 1974 GRAMMYs (it lost in the Album of the Year category to Innervisions ). With equal parts soul and passion, Flack interprets beloved ballads that showcase her talent of taking others’ songs and reinventing them. Producer Joel Dorn assembled the right mix of players to back up Flack — adding to the album’s polished sound. Killing Me Softly has sold more than two million copies and, in 2020, Roberta Flack received the GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award.

The album's title cut became a No.1 hit in three countries and, in 1996, the Fugees prominently featured Lauryn Hill on a version that surpassed the original: landing the No.1 spot in 21 countries. The album also includes a pair of well-loved covers: Leonard Cohen ’s "Suzanne" and Janis Ian’s wistful "Jesse," which reached No. 30.

Bette Midler - Bette Middler

Co-produced by Arif Mardin and Barry Manilow , the self-titled second studio album by Bette Midler was an easy- listening experience featuring interpretations of both standards and popular songs. Whispers of gospel are mixed with R&B and some boogie-woogie piano, though Midler’s voice is always the star. The record opens with a nod to the Great American Songbook with a reworking of Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s "Skylark." The 10-song collection also features a take on Glenn Miller’s "In the Mood," and a divine cover of Bob Dylan’s "I Shall be Released." The record peaked at No. 6 on the U.S. charts.

Imagination - Gladys Knight & the Pips

Released in October, Imagination was Gladys Knight & the Pips' first album with Buddha Records after leaving Motown, and features the group’s only No. 1 Billboard hit:  "Midnight Train to Georgia." The oft-covered tune, which won a GRAMMY the following year , and became the band’s signature, helped the record eclipse a million in sales, but it was not the only single to resonate. Other timeless, chart-topping songs from Imagination include "Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me," and "I’ve Got to Use My Imagination."

The Pointer Sisters - The Pointer Sisters

The three-time GRAMMY-winning Pointer Sisters arrived on the scene in 1973 with this critically-acclaimed self-titled debut. Then a quartet, the group of sisters from Oakland, California made listeners want to shake a tail feather with 10 songs that ranged from boogie-woogie to bebop. Their sisterly harmonies are backed up by the San Francisco blues-funk band the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils. The record opens with "Yes We Can," a hypnotic groove of a song written by Allen Toussaint which was a Top 15 hit alongside another cover, Willie Dixon’s "Wang Dang Doodle."

Behind Closed Doors - Charlie Rich

This pop-leaning country record of orchestral ballads, produced by Billy Sherrill, made Rich rich. The album has surpassed four million in sales and remains one of the genre’s best-loved classics. The album won Charlie Rich a GRAMMY the following year for Best Country Vocal Performance Male and added four Country Music Awards. Behind Closed Doors had several hits, but the title track made the most impact. The song written by Kenny O’Dell , and whose title was inspired by the Watergate scandal, was the first No.1 hit for Rich. It topped the country charts where it spent 20 weeks in 1973. It was also a Billboard crossover hit — reaching No. 15 on the Top 100 and No. 8 on the Adult Contemporary charts.

1972 Was The Most Badass Year In Latin Music: 11 Essential Albums From Willie Colón, Celia Cruz, Juan Gabriel & Others

Photo: Bret Curry

Will Sheff Swears Off Primary Colors, Reductive Narratives & Pernicious Self-Mythology On New Album 'Nothing Special'

The Okkervil River bandleader's story has been occasionally oversimplified and distorted in the name of commerce — and he's unwilling to let that happen again. Will Sheff discusses the life changes that informed his new album, 'Nothing Special.'

Just before logging on to Zoom to interview Will Sheff , who's out under his own name 20 years after his proper debut, this journalist spent some time tearing down vines climbing up a tree — sapping its nutrients, stymying its growth, and, if left unchecked, killing it.

Given Sheff's ups and downs in the business, the scene led to the question: Is the tree the thousands-year-old wellspring of human musical expression, which is fully able to survive and thrive regardless of capitalistic hijacking? And are the vines the music industry?

"The music business doesn't have to be this way," Sheff, a GRAMMY nominee, tells GRAMMY.com. Coming from him, this is a weighty statement.

The Okkervil River bandleader had just been describing how press narratives distort and reduce reality into cartoonish, unrecognizable forms. Six years ago, a candid, self-written bio for his album Away that touched on his grandfather's death — but was about a multitude of subjects — led to the narrative that it was all about that . Damaging in a more immediate, practical sense is the financial hit he projects he'll take from his upcoming US and Europe tours — thousands in the red .

That financial horror is partly because Sheff finally decided to put Okkervil River to bed. Despite him being the final original member still in the band, that name carried a cachet which led to steeper guarantees.

In return, Sheff has gained an artistic freedom like he's arguably never experienced before — free reign to make whatever music he wants, unfettered from the expectations of those who really, really, really want him to make another Don't Fall in Love With Everyone You See , or Black Sheep Boy . And Sheff's new album, Nothing Special , released Oct. 7, shimmers with the hues of everything he is now, and all he can be from now on.

Musically, Nothing Special isn't so different from records like Away : if you trisect his career, Sheff has spent roughly the last third writing from a zone of serenity, devotion and encouragement — pretty much the polar opposite of old Okkervil River songs about murder and revenge and psychospiritual downfalls.

But his current collaborators — including  Will Graefe, Christian Lee Hutson, and Death Cab for Cutie 's Zac Rae —, give his approach a new depth, a fresh lilt. To say nothing of vocal contributions from Cassandra Jenkins and Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman — who are both at the vanguard of forward-thinking singer-songwriter music.

Lyrically, we're dealing with a similar matrix as Away in terms of life stuff. But  where said familial loss, including the partial dissolution of the previous Okkervil River band, informed Away , Nothing Special expands its scope. The album partly deals with moving to California, winding down his old band, swearing off alcohol, and caring for his ailing rescue dog, Larry.

And there's a profound loss at the center of it — that of Travis Nelsen, Okkervil River's awe-inspiring drummer and a larger-than-life personality, who had a fraternal bond with Sheff played in the band during their commercial zenith in the mid-2000s. Their friendship ended on a messy and sad note: as Nothing Special 's title track goes, Nelsen "failed and fought/ In a pattern he was caught/And his family, they could not break through." Soon after the pandemic hit, Nelsen passed away.

Back to the tree, choked by the vines: Sheff would be "really unhappy" if Nelsen's life and legacy were sleuced into the oversimplification machine. He could have not mentioned him at all in this press cycle, for good reason — look what happened regarding the story of Away — but he chose to speak about him.

"Travis was a true connoisseur of rock lore, and I know that he wants to be remembered," Sheff says. "I didn't want to feel like I was profiting off of his sad story, and I want people to remember him. I want to do what I can to keep his name out there. Those were the factors that led me to be like, 'Alright: I'm going to be honest about this album.'"

And no matter whether Nothing Special is your thing or not — Sheff's intentionally not reading his own press — there's no question about it: honesty permeates every word, every groove, every expression.

GRAMMY.com sat down with Sheff to discuss the new album, his place in the industry apparatus, and the breathtaking vista of potential before him, now that he's been unshackled from the band that defined him — and somewhat confined him.

* Will Sheff. Photo: Bret Curry *

It's common for artists to get burned out on their offerings long before they're actually released. Are you tired of talking about Nothing Special yet?

No, no, no. I barely talk to anybody about it, and I'm enjoying talking about it. I'll never stop feeling enthusiastic about the record. The only thing that's the mind — is anything to do with the business, which encompasses publicity and branding, which is what I'm engaging in right now as I'm talking to you.

I was saying this yesterday — I feel like I will very soon start repeating the same things. And I'll probably, always very tediously, say, "I've said this before, but…" because otherwise, I feel like a phony.

But the thing that's really a head trip is that you make an album, a song, or a collection of songs. And not everybody's like this — I think a lot of people are — but you're not necessarily thinking about the audience. What people are going to say it is, or what genre it is, or whatever.

You have to turn off that voice, or else you can't create.

Yeah, and you're kind of chewing on something in a song. It could be some really big thing that obsesses you that you need to solve, or it could be just some way to express beauty that you want to feel.

 And then somebody comes around, if you're lucky enough that people care about what you did, and interviews you about it, and they ask you what went into the songs. And you tell them, because they asked you.

It inevitably ends up seeming very oversimplified, because that's what stories do. A good storyteller throws out some of the details and pumps up some of the other details to get people hooked.

It becomes crystallized, canonized. Reduced to primary colors.

Maybe other animals tell stories, but it feels like the most human thing in the universe — to tell stories and construct narratives. Story is one of the most beautiful things that we do, and one of the most damaging things that we do.

Thousands of people can die in a single day because of a story. Genocide, prejudice — these things come with all of these stories , you know what I mean? Or, like, "I'm in the right; I'm doing the right thing. The end justifies the means because of this story."

The point is, like you say, it's this complicated thing, and it gets simplified. And then somebody reads that interview — the simplified interview — and they're already imposing this simplified story on you.

Essentially, you end up with this thing that was really subtle, complex, reaching out in the darkness, a dialogue between you and whatever it is that makes you write, and it just kind of gets turned into a cartoon really, really quickly. And then you have to play along, or push against it, [when] pushing against it just seems sort of churlish or something like that.

The supreme irony of all of this is that this is something I've been trying to unpack for myself for decades, and oftentimes contributes to a lot of unhappiness for me, personally.

** How would you apply this thinking to Nothing Special ? **

One of the things I was grappling with on this album was trying to not tell myself fake stories, and trying to not think too much about extrinsic rewards for what I'm doing.

Also, not trying to particularly peddle a really clichéd story that it feels like everybody has to peddle now, just to get somebody to turn their heads. Which is to say, "I'm the greatest!" — the most obvious thing. Rappers do it all the time; indie people do it sort of fake-ironically. It's just the currency we're asked to exchange ourselves in.

So, I do all this stuff, and then try to make this record, which really is a personal reflection of all this. But then, I have to promote it. I, like, literally pay a guy to promote it! I pay a company to get people to try to talk about me on this album, that's sort of like, "Hey, don't worry. Don't think about me too much." There's this really bizarre irony-slash-hypocrisy that may be in there that is really interesting, that I'm trying to negotiate.

In the four or five interviews I've done [at the time of this conversation], I don't feel like I've done anything really gross yet, in terms of selling myself in that cartoonish way. But it also feels like it's such a slippery slope — you know what I mean?

Just have fun with that tension! Conceptual dissonance is where so much beauty comes from. There's also that real danger of Travis and his legacy becoming distorted.

When I was working on Away , my grandfather had died, and he was a really big influence on my personality and all that stuff. It was very much on my mind. And I decided that for that press cycle, to not pay somebody to write a bio and just write the most transparent thing I could myself. And it didn't work the way I hoped it would.

What ended up happening was, there emerged this narrative of some guy who was devastated by his grandfather's death and wrote an album about it — which is, like, criminally distorted.

I had a lot going on, and I had him on my mind because his death was very sad. It was also very expected, and it was kind of a culmination of his story and life. I just feel like it turned into a distortion that made me unhappy.

When I wrote a lot of these songs [on Nothing Special ] — and some of the songs that aren't on the record, because I wrote a lot of them — Travis would flit in and out of many of them. All the different ways that I was trying to celebrate him and grapple with what had happened. I could not say that. I could tell them to not put that in the biography. But I'm trying to be honest; that was a big part of it. 

There are a lot of things that were a big part of it — moving, coming out to California, looking back on Okkervil River, then sort of dissolving Okkervil River. Caring for another being, starting over again, aging, looking at the rock 'n' roll business and the myth of rock 'n' roll.

And these things were not separated from each other; they were all in dialogue. I also wanted to pay tribute to Travis, because we loved each other like brothers.

Can you talk a little more about your relationship with Travis?

That's the most important friendship I've had in my life; maybe my friendship with Jonathan [Meiburg, author and leader of Shearwater], who is equally important. But Travis was a true connoisseur of rock lore, and I know that he wants to be remembered.

We had had a falling out over a really complicated bunch of factors. But I know from knowing him as well as I did, and from talking to a lot of his friends, that we still always loved each other and always wanted to reconcile.

I didn't want to feel like I was profiting off of his sad story, and I want people to remember him. I want to do what I can to keep his name out there. Those were the factors that led me to be like, "Alright: I'm going to be honest about this album."

But at the same time, I will be really unhappy if, when I look back on this whole promotion cycle, it got boiled down to "This was the concept album about how he was sad about Travis dying." Because it's not true. This album is about so many things, and it's all interwoven and intermingled.

Right before this interview, I tore down a bunch of vines off a tree in my yard because they were sucking out the nutrients. Does the tree symbolize art as a whole, and the vines are the music business?

Music has always been around, and the idea that it should have anything to do with business is crazy, when you think about it a little bit. It's just this bizarre shotgun wedding, trying to reconcile capitalism with an activity that people do that other people really appreciate.

Furthermore, I think the idea of musical celebrities, and musical stars, is also slightly gross. I like the idea that up until very recently, music was just something that a lot of people did. And they did it for fun! They did it for community, and for entertainment.

It was like, "My daughter's getting married! Have Joe come over; he plays the fiddle!" It wasn't like everybody was sitting around, interviewing Joe and asking him for the influences on the jig he just played, and Joe was wearing Wayfarers, giving cryptic answers to their questions before hopping on his private jet. It's kind of disgusting.

And those stories we talked about fold into that.

We love stories; I love those stories. I love stories about Bob Dylan and David Bowie and Iggy Pop and Alex Chilton. But as fun to think about as it is, it's a sick and f—ed up system — especially when it comes to getting to live a life that's extravagant, while other people are living these miserable, hand-to-mouth existences.

Because we love stories, it's really entertaining to have a Bowie. Maybe you can see yourself in the exaggerated, larger-than-life aspects of things that happened with Bowie. [But] I like that David Bowie never changed his name, and he was David Robert Jones.

I guess the best way to try to be a rock star is to just understand that you're really like a vessel for other people's projections and entertainment, and just go, "Hey, man, I'm just here to entertain. Please don't worship me. If I make you laugh, make you smile, give you a good Saturday night's entertainment, then it's worth me wearing this stupid outfit and acting like such an ass."

But if it's all about me getting some disproportionate reward, then it kind of becomes gross.

For a while, you've been making music that deals with something close to serenity, which is not a sexy nor clickable concept. Most fans probably got into Okkervil River almost 20 years ago, when you were screaming about murder. Can you talk about that tension between who you are and what people want you to be — or pay you to be?

Like any artist, you follow your nose — and when I was younger, I wrote in a younger way. I wrote in a way that was really informed by where I was at in my life, and where I had been — specifically, what I had experienced.

And I don't mean to make it sound like it's worse than anybody else, but I'd experienced a lot of pain and hurt. And — this is not uncommon with men — it sort of transformed into anger, and I had a lot to prove.

I think this is true of me now, and has always been true: I have a tendency to go there . When I'm writing, I have a tendency to want to go to the place that makes people — or me —  uncomfortable.

Those songs, where I dealt with things like murder and suicide and very violent feelings — I don't regret any of those songs. I don't think that they came from a hurtful place, and I think, probably, at the end of the day, they were a net positive for people who really liked them. I hope and think they were more cathartic than stirring up shittiness, or anything like that.

But the engine for a lot of that was anger and hurt and pain, and as a human, I very much felt like I needed to figure out how to not hurt people, and how to help people, and be present for the people I loved and notice them and see them and pay attention to their feelings and not be unhappy.

Like, nobody wants me — and I certainly don't want any of my friends who are in their 40s — to be drug-addled, chasing tail, only wanting to play three chords on an electric guitar. You get older, and you start to see all the different tones and all the diversity of musical expression, and it's my job to always try to make it new and reflect what I want out of music. That was a real big shift.

Which isn't always appreciated by the drunken frat boys screaming for "Westfall."

Yeah, there are some people who really imprinted on the anger and the rage. And it wasn't just young men; I think it was women, too, who kind of identified with it. Maybe they put me in that drawer. I don't think it was malicious, but it's like, they just want that again. But I don't want to be miserable. These days, I feel like I go there with religion and spirituality and big existential questions.

I think that maybe that actually makes people uncomfortable. And I think the discomfort that people feel about murder and violence is actually very familiar. We all like gross, grimy, dark anger, and I think some of the more spiritual stuff actually makes people very uncomfortable.

** I really enjoyed watching critics squirm at lines like "Brother, I believe in love" from the last record [2018's In the Rainbow Rain ]. **

Yeah, yeah. What's fun about that is just going full[-on] risking being called a stupid hippie. I like the idea of exposing yourself to criticism and failure.

I was talking to somebody about some record in the past, and they were encouraging me to write quote-unquote bulletproof pop songs. I was thinking about that metaphor, and nothing could be further from describing the kind of music I like.

I don't want my muse to be an impregnable fortress, a bulletproof vest, a tank rolling through town. I want it to be porous and vaporous. Easy to ignore, easy to make fun of. Going out on a limb, inviting the listener in.

It shouldn't be like an irrefutable argument; it should be just a strange artifact that you are called to interact with, or something.

** Even on that extreme end, your work never lands in a sense of gross grandiosity, or a Messianic complex. I love the ending of "Evidence" from Nothing Special , because a lesser songwriter or arranger would have built that chorus to absurd heights. Instead, you chose to let it waft in and out, and gently settle. **

It's funny how you talk about it being a decision, because I never thought about that. It speaks to the difference between the two ways of looking at a song — the making of it, and then the talking about it after, which are equally important, I think.

I always want to say "This is the song I'm most proud of," because I love all these songs in different ways. But "Evidence" really articulates a lot of fundamental feelings I have about life, at this point in my life. And I think the music does just as much to articulate them as the words. I really did want that song to be comforting. Soothing, and not necessarily papering over pain, but something that would make people feel fundamentally good.

When you're talking about turning it into a big chorus, that was something I thought a lot about in its absence on this record — never pushing anything.

"Like the Last Time" pushes, I guess, because that's just what naturally happened in the studio. That song wasn't supposed to rock out that hard. It just sort of happened. I'd say my biggest goal on this record was to never oversell anything.

I love how Nothing Special is predicated on these diatonic, very simple melodies. I know you've talked about Bill Fay in those terms.

When you say that, it's funny, because I don't think about things in terms of theory too much. But I definitely had this thing where I was like, "I want these songs to be melodically very singable, and lyrically very gettable," even if there's a lot in them.

You've made the difficult decision to go under your own name, despite the financial hit. But now, you've torn off the Band-Aid. You could theoretically just keep making solo records of any kind, and the fans will continue to follow you wherever you go. How do you see the next decade of your career?

I don't know what the future holds. And sometimes, when I look back on my favorite artists, it does feel like decades really have the power to destroy people's careers. A really obvious example is when alternative rock and grunge came along, and suddenly, all these '80s bands seemed like they were 100 years old. Some of them never recovered.

The closest thing we ever had to being connected to the zeitgeist was that brief 2006-to-2010 stretch. I don't think we were ever the front-runners. We would just be mentioned in the same conversation as a bunch of other bands.

I feel like I've managed to keep going and fly under the radar. When I think about my favorite artists with the longest careers — Dylan is an exception that proves the rule; he's not a good artist to compare your career to — I think about somebody like Michael Hurley.

I love that he's just been doing the same thing his whole life, and there's really never been a drop-off in quality. His records all sound the same; they're all really good! You're never like, "He's over the hill; he's passed around the bend now."

The most exciting thing about getting to be Will Sheff instead of Okkervil River is that I feel like there aren't any rules about what I can and can't do. When I made this record, I wasn't really thinking about whether it was Okkervil River or Will Sheff or anything other than just making music.

But as a result, I think [with] the next record, I'll feel a lot more emboldened to do whatever I want stylistically, and not feel like it has to square with someone's conception of what the brand Okkervil River sounds like.

You could go full Lovestreams , or you could play a single lute.

[Laughs.] Yeah, exactly! I could go like Sting and just start playing John Dowland on lute, and more power to me!

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• 1 Lou Reed's 'Berlin' Is One Of Rock's Darkest Albums. So Why Does It Sound Like So Much Fun?
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A conversation with EDWARD LACHMAN ( Director/Cinematographer, Songs for Drella ) and ELLEN KURAS ( Cinematographer, Lou Reed’s Berlin Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse ) on making films about making music.

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Ellen Kuras, ASC

Widely regarded as a pioneer among women cinematographers, Kuras is known for her visually stunning work on Michel Gondry’s  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  (2004) and Ted Demme’s  Blow (2001), and has collaborated with directors including Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Sam Mendes, Jim Jarmusch, Errol Morris, and Rebecca Miller. She was nominated for an Academy Award and a Spirit Award for her first film as a director, The Betrayal — Nerakhoon , which won the Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.

Kuras has directed some of television’s most lauded series, such as “Ozark,” “Legion,” “The Umbrella Academy,” and the limited series “The Night Of” and “Catch 22.” She will next direct Kate Winslet in  Lee , a film about the model-turned-photojournalist Lee Miller.

Edward Lachman, ASC

Lachman garnered Academy Award nominations for his work on the Todd Haynes features  Carol  (2015) and  Far from Heaven  (2002) and an Emmy Award nomination for his work on Haynes’ HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce” (2011). At Cameraimage, the most significant festival for cinematographers, he has received the Golden Frog for Carol, the Silver Frog for  Far from Heaven , and the Bronze Frog for  I’m Not There  (2007), in addition to winning the director/cinematographer Golden Frog Award. Lachman is the only American to receive the prestigious Marburg Camera Award in Germany, and he won the British Society of Cinematographers Award for Carol. He has won the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Telluride Medallion Award, the Gotham Tribute Award, the prestigious Angenieux ExcelLens in Cinematography Award at Cannes, and, last year, The Golden Camera 300, the highest honor at the Manaki Brothers Film Festival, the oldest cinematography festival in the world.

Lachman is also an accomplished visual artist who has had installations, videos, and photography exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA, The Ludwig Museum in Germany, and many other museums.

“Berlin was less startling but no less ambitious or, in the end, touching. The music stayed … close to the album’s original arrangements, but with more room for guitar solos, more clarity, and the immediacy and dynamics of a concert. Mr. Reed wasn’t revisiting his songs as oldies or artifacts; he was reinhabiting them.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES

Now widely recognized as a masterwork, Lou Reed’s 1973 gorgeously dark concept album about drifting, tormented addicts in love on the outskirts of a divided city was panned by critics and never performed live. That is, until St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Sydney Festival joined forces in 2006 to fulfill Reed’s dream — to produce a fully staged version of the album live. Reed’s friends and passionate Berlin devotees — producer Hal Willner and artist Julian Schnabel — signed on from the first major decision — that Lou would sing the leading role. The world premiere at St. Ann’s Warehouse — five sold-out performances — was an ecstatic, late-career triumph for Reed, captured on film by the great rock cinematographer Ellen Kuras ( Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ).

Lou Reed’s Berlin Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse  was produced by John Kilik for Matador Films, released by Third Rail. Julian Schnabel, Director/Designer; Bob Ezrin, Album Producer; Hal Willner, Music Producer; Jennifer Tipton, Lighting Designer; by Lola Schnabel, Onstage visuals; Brooklyn Youth Chorus Artistic Director/Conductor Dianne Berkun Menaker

“Coney Island Kinder” Q&A with ‘Berlin’ writer Lou Reed – NEW YORK MAGAZINE

“resurrecting ‘berlin,’ lou reed’s seedy masterpiece” – the new york times, “lou reed’s dark masterpiece gets a belated staging.” – vanity fair, st. ann’s warehouse presents a double feature of seminal moments in st. ann’s and rock music history captured on film:, john cale and lou reed’s songs for ‘drella november 13-19, lou reed’s berlin november 20-29, while unable to welcome audiences back inside its brooklyn waterfront theater, st. ann’s streams two of its most acclaimed legacy-productions-turned-films, for free.

St. Ann’s Warehouse presents films of two landmark St. Ann’s theatricalized concerts that were also key moments in rock music history: John Cale and Lou Reed ’s Songs for ‘Drella – A Fiction , co-commissioned with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and shot by Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Edward Lachman ( Carol ) in 1989; and Lou Reed’s Berlin, directed by Academy Award nominee Julian Schnabel ( The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ), who also helmed the 2006 staged production at St. Ann’s Warehouse that was shot for the film by veteran rock cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Spike Lee’s film of David Byrne’s American Utopia, Martin Scorcese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party ). The screenings give home-bound audiences access to two performances that helped establish St. Ann’s reputation, over four decades, as a producer and champion of major new works at the intersection of theater and rock and roll. This presentation is offered free of charge and will include newly programmed, contextualizing live conversations.

The genesis of the double feature followed the tragic loss of music producer Hal Willner to COVID-19 this past April and the public response of St. Ann’s audiences to the organization’s virtual tribute to him. It occurred to Artistic Director Susan Feldman “that this was a moment to share our prodigious history with many who don’t know it. What began in our original home, the Church of  St. Ann & the Holy Trinity, with John and Lou, Hal, Marianne Faithfull, Aaron Neville, Jeff Buckley, and others awakened our theatrical sensibilities, established lasting artistic relationships, and shaped our identity in DUMBO ‘at the crossroads where theater meets rock and roll.’ In the pandemic, we only wanted to stream professional films of live productions that also speak to who we are now. Producing Songs for ‘Drella and Lou Reed’s Berlin Live, two films by artists about art, define the daring, transgressive tone of what St. Ann’s Warehouse eventually became.”

Songs for ‘Drella – A Fiction will be available for streaming at stannswarehouse.org from November 13 at 7:30pm EST through November 19 at 11:59pm EST. The screening follows Rhino Records’ 30 th anniversary vinyl reissue of the Songs for ‘Drella album on October 24, for Record Store Day 2020. Lou Reed’s Berlin streams on the site November 20 at 7:30pm EST through November 29 at 11:59pm EST. Information about the accompanying talks will be announced soon.

Songs for ‘Drella – A Fiction

John Cale and Lou Reed’s Songs for ‘Drella is an intensely personal tribute to pop artist Andy Warhol , their longtime friend, collaborator, and former manager. The project reunited Cale and Reed for the first time since their notoriously acrimonious split as founders of the pioneering rock band the Velvet Underground two decades earlier. Their reconnecting, and the work they created in Songs for ‘Drella, had all the passions that had brought the two together and driven them apart in the first place.

The song cycle proceeds chronologically through Warhol’s life, with poignant post-mortem reflections on his death, expressed in Reed and Cale’s raw, literary lyrics and emotionally charged rock music. Rolling Stone has described the work as a “shining, tense merger of visions” that rendered Warhol as only those with a close relationship with him could, as “both immediate and mythic.” Its title borrows John and Lou’s nickname for the iconic artist—an affectionate combination of Dracula and Cinderella.

Songs for ‘Drella was co-commissioned by Arts at St. Ann’s with BAM in 1989 and premiered at its original home in the Church of St. Ann & the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn Heights. It was performed and filmed later that year at the BAM Opera House as part of the Next Wave Festival. The reconciliation of Cale and Reed inspired drummer Moe Tucker and guitarist Sterling Morrison to join them for a European Velvet Underground Reunion tour in 1993. Ironically, this screening precedes a documentary about the VU, by Todd Haynes, currently in production.

Director Ed Lachman, who went on to garner wide acclaim as the keen-eyed cinematographer of films by Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz, and Steven Soderbergh, captures the Cale/Reed connection—and their complex relationship to their late friend and mentor—at close range, along with the rich visuals projected on the stage, designed after Warhol by Jerome Sirlin .

‘Drella now returns at a time when it can once again offer healing and beauty in the face of grief. The film is produced by Channel 4 Television Corporation | Sire Records Group .

Lou Reed’s Berlin

After Songs for ‘Drella, Reed continued to be a regular at St. Ann’s in the Church and the new St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO. At Susan Feldman’s urging, in Berlin, he returned to a project that had long been a cult favorite but had also been a source of both pride and painful disappointment for him. He had recorded the Berlin album in 1972, when he was at a peak in his solo career, having just released Transformer , which included the Top 20 hit “Walk on the Wild Side.” Expectations were high that Reed would achieve another big commercial success, but, instead he delivered a gorgeously dark concept album about drifting, tormented addicts in love, broken-hearted and self-destructive, on the outskirts of a divided city.

Although now widely recognized as a masterwork, Berlin was panned by critics, and Reed, deeply wounded, put it away without ever performing it live in full. That is, until St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Sydney Festival ’s Fergus Linehan joined forces to fulfill Reed’s dream: to produce a staged concert of the album. Reed’s friends and passionate Berlin devotees Hal Willner and Julian Schnabel signed on, as Music Director and Director, respectively, from the first major decision: that Reed would himself perform the central role on stage.

Lou Reed’s Berlin Live featured performances by Sharon Jones, Anohni , and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus , conducted by Dianne Berkun Menaker , set design and direction by Schnabel, lighting design by Jennifer Tipton , and musical direction by Willner and Berlin album producer Bob Ezrin . Lola Schnabel , Julian’s daughter, provided on-stage visuals that imagined the inner world of Berlin central characters Caroline and Jim. The film also features Emmanuelle Seigner as Caroline.

The World Premiere at St. Ann’s Warehouse—five sold-out performances—was an ecstatic, late-career triumph for Reed, captured on film by the great rock cinematographer Ellen Kuras . Reviewing the concerts for The New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote, “ Berlin was less startling but no less ambitious or, in the end, touching. The music stayed rightfully at center stage: close to the album’s original arrangements, but with more room for guitar solos, more clarity and the immediacy and dynamics of a concert. Mr. Reed wasn’t revisiting his songs as oldies or artifacts; he was reinhabiting them.”

Schnabel’s film was edited by Benjamin Flahert y, produced by John Kilik and Tom Sarig for Matador Films , executive produced by Stanley Buchthal , and distributed by Third Rail Releasing. When it was released theatrically in 2008, Stephen Holden, in a Critic’s Pick review for the Times, called it “a grimly majestic concert film.”

Press contact: Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell & Associates, 718.643.9052 or [email protected] .

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Lou Reed’s Berlin is free to watch on-demand, no registration required.

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Make It Uneasy On Yourself: Lou Reed’s Berlin At 50 Matthew Lindsay , October 5th, 2023 08:45

Matthew Lindsay tells the story of Lou Reed's most difficult album; an often misunderstood masterpiece which is also a problematic ode to rage, jealousy and loss. CW: Contains some discussion of domestic abuse and suicide

It’s 1973 and Lou Reed is rising from the underground, like the vapour emerging from the subway on Loaded ’s cover. The double-punch of last year’s November arrivals, ’Walk On The Wild Side’ and Transformer , have elevated Reed finally from the doldrums of cult star status. The 45 is a transatlantic top 20 hit, the album climbs to a US number 29 and a UK number 13. It’ll chart even higher in Holland and Australia. Velvets superfan Bowie has co-piloted his ascent. Ever since meeting at NYC’s Ginger Man restaurant in September 71, the RCA label mates have been moving closer towards each other, Bowie wooing Reed with a dozen roses spray-painted gold, the pair caught by Mick Rock’s lens kissing at London’s Dorchester Hotel. Reed says he’s eager to learn from the thunderbolt-fast Bowie, who co-produced Transformer with Mick Ronson, tarting up Reed’s tunes with hard-rock swagger, classically tinged prettiness and tuba-powered campery.

But while Transformer taps into the glam rock zeitgeist, contemporary ads make it clear who got there first: “In the midst of all the make believe madness, mock depravity and pseudo sexual anarchists – Lou Reed is the real thing… the original.” Transformer elegantly stitches together fragments for a world that is quickly catching up; Velvet off-cuts, songs that sound like an abortive Warhol musical, ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ taking its title from a 1956 Nelson Algren novel. 'Perfect Day' captures an early date with Bettye Kronstad (the pair married in January 73), when Reed, in post-Velvets exile at his Freeport childhood home, would take the Long Island train into the city. It’s magically poignant, an idyllic snapshot frozen in time, its edges darkened by impermanence and a New Testament proverb. By the end of 73, Reed’s marriage will be over, as will his dalliance with glam and the hit parade. 'Perfect Day' could be the tender moment missing from Caroline and Jim’s saga on next record, Berlin .

Warning signs flicker across Transformer ’s cover, which Reed tells Disc & Music Echo is "divine", perhaps a nod to dialogue from 72’s Cabaret (“divine decadence, darlings!”) On the back, a priapic stud, straight from the pages of a gay porn mag, stares at model Gala Mitchell, her drag-like glamour framed in what looks like a mirror, as if the butch caricature was looking at another potential self. It’s an immaculate construction, taken by Roxy album lensman, Karl Stoecker, right down to the tumescent bulge in road manger Ernie Thormahlen’s jeans (a banana stuffed in a sock). The front features Reed photographed by Mick Rock on 14 July 72, onstage at the Scala in Kings Cross, in full glitter rock regalia (or as Rock puts it “the degenerate side of glam”). Beneath the high voltage lettering Reed is part Sally Bowles, part Boris Karloff, part Pierrot, part sad panda. Behind those vacant, zombie-like eyes could be anything; loneliness, boredom, helplessness. His white pancake make-up, black lipstick, eyeliner and nail polish will see him dubbed “the phantom of rock” – apt for a man lost inside a mask, who isn’t quite there.

Unease runs through Transformer ’s critical reception too, far chillier than the public’s reaction. “A cockteaser,” says Rolling Stone , urging him to “forget this artsy-fartsy kind of homo stuff.” “The Lou Reed chic album,” snorts the NME ’s Nick Kent, as if it is a bad thing. The New Yorker ’s Ellen Willis rolls her eyes at the “pseudo-decadent lyrics,” Disc & Music Echo get closer to the album’s heart with three adjectives: “beautiful, sad, funny”.

Despite his outward contempt for critics, the bad reviews always hurt Reed and their discomfort with his wild mutation mirrored his own ambivalence. He started 73 telling LA’s KMET radio that glitter rock’s potential was fantastic but that weird scenes had unfolded on the Transformer tour. Bouquets of flowers were tossed onstage. At a show in Buffalo that March an overeager fan bit Reed on the buttocks while he prepared to launch into ‘Waiting For The Man’. The fan yelled, “Leather!” while running for the exit, successfully evading capture, causing Reed to complain that America “seems to breed real animals”. With his nerves jangled by fame’s harsh spotlight, Reed self-medicated with Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, disappearing into rooms to shoot speed.

There was a nagging sense from scribes that his most famous fan was devouring him. Melody Maker accused him of being sucked into the “cultural vortex” of “a second rate plagiarist”, decking himself out in ill-fitting attire “tottering on and offstage in silver heels like an ageing whore". But even back in 72 Reed told Disc & Music Echo : “I’m not going in the same direction as David.” Throughout 73, Ziggymania intensified, but Bowie’s influence on Reed waned. Reed’s black velvet bolero suit, with its sequins and rhinestone trimmings, bought with Angie at London’s Granny Takes A Trip came off. As did the make-up. In a June edition of NME he told Nick Kent his next record would be “a backlash on Transformer ”.

On 9 April 73, Reed performed at Toronto’s Massey Hall. In the audience next to RCA A&R man Dennis Katz was producer Bob Ezrin. Dazzled by support act Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel, the 24 year old Canadian turned to Katz, who’d been managing Reed, and asked: “Can you get me the guy with the flower on his head?” Ezrin would go on to produce Gabriel’s solo debut Car (1977), but before that he’d make Berlin with Reed, who had been impressed with his work on Detroit’s 1971 cover of the Velvet’s ‘Rock & Roll’.

They met at Ezrin’s Summer Hill Avenue home in Toronto. Reed played him “disconnected” compositions. Ezrin had bigger ambitions, telling Reed his songs told a life story in two and a half minutes but he often wondered where his characters went next, suggesting Reed follow them over an entire record. The lovers in Berlin, from Reed’s 1972 debut particularly piqued Ezrin’s interest. He told PBS years later that inside the “vivid”, “filmic” song was “the kernel of a great tale”; that the image of “candlelight and Dubonnet on ice” distilled "the essence of that entire relationship.” Reed agreed to the concept, returning a month or so later with his acoustic guitar and notepad, playing Ezrin 'Caroline Says' and 'The Kids'. “I got goose-flesh,” said Ezrin, moved by Reed’s simple yet poetic storytelling.

Chronicling Caroline and Jim’s doomed romance in brutal, visceral unflinching detail, as it descends from bohemia into addiction, domestic abuse, culminating in the state removal of their children and Caroline’s suicide. Fact bled into the harrowing fiction, Reed’s own violently disintegrating marriage and his substance abuse. In 1986 he’d tell Rolling Stone : “ Berlin was real close to home.” For Kronstad that was especially true of 'The Kids', painfully reminiscent of her own separation from her recently deceased mother at the age of five. Reed had referred to the original Berlin as his “Streisand song” when he played it at the Bataclan, Paris, with John Cale and Nico, in January 1972. Nico, just like Caroline, succumbing increasingly to heroin addiction, was also raw material. So was the Velvets’ past, as Reed reworked songs and titles from the vault: ‘Men Of Good Fortune’, ‘Oh Gin’ becoming ‘Oh Jim’, ‘Sad Song’, ‘Stephanie Says’ mutating into ‘Caroline Says’.

Reed was keen to stress that Berlin, a city he’d yet to visit, was merely a backdrop, that the setting could be anywhere, Brooklyn, Ohio, Scarsdale. But the English major liked the metaphor of the wall. It symbolised conflict or divisions of love, of culture, of the world, of a troubled psyche. The wall also firmly planted Caroline and Jim’s bohemia in a post-Weimar wasteland, wrenching it from inter-war hedonism, deepening the desperate alienation.

Reed brought the grit, Ezrin, brought the grandeur. Reed saw Berlin as an opportunity, he’d tell the NYT in 2006, “to apply novelist’s ideas and techniques into a rock format”, developing a style that was as blunt as Chandler, as melodramatic as Tennessee Williams, as forbidden as Hubert Selby Jr. But inside Reed’s folky sketches Ezrin also heard the “soundtrack to a non-existent movie”. He spent a month working on the arrangements, devising an elaborate sound design, bejewelling the ten songs with widescreen arrangements, opulent orchestrations full of solos, digressions and interludes bridging the songs together. It would be stretched across a double album, featuring a lavish booklet with text and accompanying images. There was talk of putting it on the stage too. It would be a tragic rock opera on a grand scale with Ezrin likening it to Puccini.

Cinematic, novelistic, operatic and theatrical – Berlin indeed came with lofty aspirations. Despite this, RCA were no doubt reassured by Ezrin’s success with Alice Cooper. Since 71’s Love It To Death , Ezrin-produced chart smashes which wrapped dark material in experimental, filmic soundscapes ('Ballad Of Dwight Fry', a musical mini-movie used Alka Seltzer dissolves for explosions). But Ezrin was mesmerised by Reed’s talent. Commercial considerations went out the window. The producer told the NYT in 2006 that “[I] maybe lost sight of my mandate. I didn’t do what I was hired to do”. Reed wasn’t interested in making a hit-stuffed Transformer sequel either. He just hoped Ezrin would add "punch" to his "sledgehammer images".

Recording commenced, summer 73, at London’s Morgan Studios, where Reed had cut his solo debut, impressed by Rod Stewart’s ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’, while singing, or rather Reed’s “dramatic readings”, were done largely at NYC’s Record Plant. Ezrin arrayed a company of top-shelf Anglo-American players. For drums, he first enlisted Procol Harum’s BJ Wilson; moving on to Aynsley Dunbar, who’d been replaced by Mick Fleetwood in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers for being “too busy.” Bass was largely provided by Cream’s Jack Bruce, whose sensitive performances were prompted by his interest in seeing Reed’s words. (Tony Levin, who’d eventually work with Peter Gabriel and King Crimson, played on 'The Kids'.)

Reed played acoustic, while Alice Cooper sidekick Dick Wagner and Detroit’s Steve Hunter provided an electric rock snarl, sporadically unleashed like a symphonist’s motif. But much of Berlin ’s textures came from outside the standard rock set-up. Keyboards were centre-stage, with Traffic’s Steve Winwood supplying organ and harmonium; while piano came from Ezrin, Allan Macmillan and Blue Weaver (Bee Gees, Mott The Hoople). There were synths and mellotrons and brass from the Brecker brothers, Randy and Michael. Ezrin topped things off with an orchestra, woodwind, a violin-free string section and a choir (fellow Canadian Gene Martynec came up with the choral arrangement on ‘The Bed’).

London in 1973 was, Ezrin says, “hotter than a pistol”, a city teeming with pop culture where Bowie was king. The star would drop by the sessions with Ronson, while Reed, eyes blacked out by shades, cigarette in one hand, coffee in another, often arrived with an entourage of “rock stars, painters, poets, philosophers from the underworld of London culture.” The atmosphere for the dozen 20-hour sessions was "emotionally hyper-charged", partly because of the personal demons invited along as plus ones. “Everybody was messing around with stuff they shouldn’t have been messing around with,” said Ezrin to PBS in 1997. He was going through a period of marital strife then, adding that the recording “pulled the very best and very worst out of all of us”. The commitment to bringing the heavy subject matter to life took them to extremes. For 'The Kids', Ezrin recorded his two sons wailing for their mother on a Nagra tape machine, distorting and compressing the sound to nail-biting effect. Crying as if they’d been locked out of the house, it was so agonising people assumed Ezrin had told them their mother was dead.

At the eleventh hour, RCA nixed the double album idea, leaving 14 minutes on the cutting room floor. Berlin ’s 8-track and cassette offered a glimpse of the original concept – a short, florid passage featuring Macmillan’s piano, plus keyboards and guitar sandwiched between 'Berlin' and 'Lady Day' (it bridged the album’s two sides when Reed staged Berlin in 2006). Intensifying the cinematic drama, foregrounding Berlin ’s prog factor – it could have fitted snugly onto Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – the piece also suggests the lost instrumentals were theatrical relief from tense narrative. 'Caroline Says I’s outro collision of powerhouse band and chattering orchestras suggests Ezrin even superimposed parts to shrink the running time. Sadly, the original director’s cut has never been restored. Frazzled by the entire process, Ezrin would spend time afterwards in a psychiatric institution. “It was a heroin rebound,” he’d say in 1992.

Anticipation swirled around Transformer ’s follow-up. In September, Rolling Stone featured a progress report by Larry "Ratso" Sloman entitled Lou Reed’s 'New Deco Disk A Sledgehammer Blow To The Glitterbugs’. "This is going to destroy them", warned Reed, while Sloman declared the upcoming release to be “the Sergeant Pepper of the 70’s”; praise repeated on Berlin ’s vintage movie-style ads, which also promised "a film for the ear".

Berlin hit American record stores 5 October. The sleeve, a Pacific Eye and Ear design, featured a leather jacketed Reed flanked by Caroline and Jim, the haunting black and white boxed portrait surrounded by a sepia-like collage of bodies entwined, shot from above, resembling a giant human wreath, or human garbage. Annie Leibovitz’s similar Fleetwood Mac portrait on a Rolling Stone March 1977 cover was another snapshot of the orgiastic, incestuous 70s. Title and author were scrawled in passionate blood-red graffiti on a cover that aestheticized Berlin ’s tensions, its street-tough cold eye, its big, grand beating heart. Initial copies came with a more modest version of the planned booklet, eight pages of handwritten lyrics with accompanying images of Caroline and Jim, and dingy hotel rooms.

The record inside opened with the title track. Radically reworking the original song, all sweetening passages were mercilessly wiped, the refrain, oddly evocative of Elektra singer-songwriter David Ackles at his most romantic, the proto- Tubular Bells guitar breaks, the coda’s breezy pure pop gear shift. Only the verse remained, as Caroline and Jim’s existential love theme, in an apocalyptic cocktail jazz cafe setting. The introductory cacophony of birthday party and air-raid squall neatly places the desolate bohemia in a world ravaged by war. Allan Macmillan hammers away intensely at the ivories, playing that’s both lyrical and severe. Wistfully intoxicated by past love, hardened by its bitter outcomes, Reed’s performance recalls the voiceovers from the ill-fated chumps of film noir as the action flashes back.

'Lady Day' does just that, to Jim’s first encounter with Caroline. The title’s a nod to Billie Holliday, who’d recently been the subject of the 1972 Diana Ross vehicle, Lady Sings The Blues . It’s a disorienting swirl of high times and low living, casting Caroline as a modern day Pirate Jenny (Weill/Brecht). Lushly orchestrated cabaret recalls Transformer ’s jazzy, vaudevillian struts, but now cast in oversaturated, fabulously queasy hues, as sickly as Caroline’s “greenish” walls, the colour of Jim’s future jealousy. The seedy organ provides noir menace, Reed alternates between cool observer and double-tracked, borderline hysteria. 'Men Of Good Fortune' is Jim’s soliloquy, a lament on the rock-solid class structures he’s fatalistically resigned to. Meritocratic myths are punctured, contradictions exposed; the suicidal impulses of the rich son and the steely determination of the poor one. It’s languidly soulful and staccato mean and lean, like Reed’s sorrowful, stoic vocal.

'Caroline Says I' is Jim’s deceptively upbeat love-letter to his “German queen”, a bouquet of roses and thorns (like Lou Reed’s name on that 72 debut), a galloping anti-ballad swamped in deliciously syrupy super 70’s orchestration. Bitterness taints the sickly co-dependant sweetness, hinting at a violence that will soon erupt within Jim, the emasculated man-child. It’s a romp of marital discord worthy of Taylor/Burton; theatrical, blackly humorous, gut-wrenching. 'How Do You Think It Feels?' descends into Jim’s hell, finds him “speeding and lonely”. Stark piano and bass accompanies the personal (could it be ripped from Lou Reed’s diary for 1973?) It’s puffed up by tawdry razzle-dazzle, a rocking show tune bump and grind, the false fun of a desperate high (this cri de Coeur, hiding behind black shades in a black leather jacket was a US single).

'Oh Jim' sinks deeper, its tribal beat and brass blasts predating Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by six years, a mechanical, ominous grind with a throbbing synth line and a Reed vocal as casually ferocious as 1974’s put-down of 'N.Y. Stars'. Here Jim’s corrosive self-pity spills over into physical abuse. He’s revealed to be an unreliable narrator too. Perspectives shift with the eerily poignant acoustic postscript, sung by Caroline, hardly the imperious monarch from two songs ago. Drenched in reverb, lamenting the ghost of a romance, it flashes back to rock & roll past (Presley’s spooky Sun Studio recordings) and forward (resembling Suicide unplugged).

The second side documents Caroline and Jim’s final chapters with forensic, sad, savage detail; a narrative cohesion lacking in most so-called concept albums. 'Caroline Says II' is 'Perfect Day' in a broken mirror, verses of domestic abuse not idyllic day-trips, its similarly swelling chorus full of suicidal, speed-freak heartbreak not romantic rapture. Wind chimes shimmer as Caroline’s fist goes through the glass, reflecting a mind too drug-addled to feel the shards. This time the orchestra comes from a mellotron, its glacial artifice thawing with that searing climax. Full of what Ellen Willis elsewhere called Reed’s “distinctive cosmic sadness”, 'Caroline Says II’s mental anguish comes with shivering intensity. In some parallel universe this would have kept Nilsson’s 'Without You', Don Maclean’s 'Vincent', James Taylor’s 'Fire And Ice' and The Carpenters' 'Hurting Each Other' company in the charts; a hit that never was from the deep, sad 70s.

'The Kids', is arguably Berlin ’s cornerstone, Jim cataloguing Caroline’s promiscuities and infidelities, as their children are taken away. Sonically, its drop-out London, ragged nursery rhyme folk, crumbling like the white stucco W11 dens of junkie bohemia. Critics only heard Jim’s callous, gloating contempt, his seething misogyny, but possibly missed the fragility, trembling with a regret too overwhelming to be fully expressed. These subtle touches, and very uncomfortable complexities made Berlin easily misunderstood. The album cast Reed, like Billie Holiday, as someone limited in range though endlessly expressive, such an affecting vocalist. Those sobbing children, dramatising Lennon’s larynx-shredding climax on 'Mother' (a Reed favourite), give way to Berlin ’s most devastating moment: Jim, alone with an acoustic guitar in a luminous spotlight, a tired mess of overflowing heart and feigned happiness. But how much of Reed was there in Jim? The musician's biographer Howard Sounes would eventually brand him a "monster", when he tallied the stories of violence meted out to women, although others, who knew Reed well, branded him an unreliable narrator, pointing out that some of these stories pedalled by the musician himself, weren't necessarily to be trusted.

'The Bed', Jim’s druggy, dreamlike state merges past joys (children conceived by candlelight) with present horrors (Caroline’s suicide). Razor sharp reality sporadically pierces the baroque lullaby, an acoustic setting, enveloped by spectral female voices and a mellotron-heavy soundscape. Leonard Cohen’s brooding boudoir-set folk-ballads come to mind, with their siren-like backing vocals (note the poetry on Caroline’s shelf). Reed was a fan, telling biographer De Curtis, “Cohen always seems wise, the people in my songs are not wise. They’re in the middle of a battle. I always thought things were better in a conflict.” Comparing them to Johnny Boy from 1973’s Mean Streets , Reed’s characters were like "a piece of metal caught in a magnet, [facing situations] way past your ability to control – whether you know it or not." 'The Bed' veers towards the phantasmagorical, gothic, choral/orchestral arrangement recalling Les Baxter scores for Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, that master of the macabre so beloved by Reed. The final eerie sonic swarm echoes the diabolical buzz used in the sound design of that year’s The Exorcist .

'Sad Song', is Berlin ’s final orchestral flourish, with heavenly choirs, strings spiralling, like Aaron Copland’s symphonies venturing into new world frontiers, electric guitars soaring skywards. But Jim’s world has shrunken. He’s like Marlowe walking away with just a harmonica to hold on to by The Long Goodbye ’s finale, gazing at photos of a shattered family, unconvincingly determined to stop wasting time. Chafing at his picture book nostalgia are misogyny and regret; messy, unpleasant emotions inside a sentimental showstopper as Walt Disney-extravagant as The Beatles’ 'Good Night'.

There could be a grim irony at work – in 1998 Reed called Berlin a black comedy. The song could be the soundtrack to Jim’s own dying moments, an ascension. Like Mean Streets ’ denouement, with Charlie, shot, emerging from a crashed car, kneeling before a spraying hydrant, 'Sad Song' could be a redemptive soul-cleanser for a wretched protagonist. Warren Zevon – another musician and domestic abuser with a permanently stained reputation – wrote ‘Desperadoes Under The Eaves’, itself festooned with orchestras and choirs, equally triumphant and downtrodden. In the chaotic 1970s there were few tidy, unambiguous endings.

Berlin has often been seen as an unmitigated failure, shunned by the public, reviled by critics. Rolling Stone ’s Stephen Davis, dismissed it as “a career-ending disaster”, suggested it was so “patently offensive” bodily harm might be warranted for its author. But Timothy Ferris’ Rock 'n' Roll Animal , review months later in the same magazine contained a rebuttal, arguing art needed no moral compass.

NYT ’s John Rockwell praised its striking originality. Circus said it was "the most affecting rock effort in recent memory". NME ’s Nick Kent saw it as "a coup", a return to form after Transformer , though he had reservations about its flight from rock’s boundaries. Ambivalence ran through peers’ verdicts too, with head Doll David Johansen, claiming in December’s Phonograph Record , that Reed was “bullshitting” the kids, hoping to pull off a “vindictive, moralistic” un-rock move.

Davis’ drubbing did cast a huge shadow over the record and stateside it stalled at 98. The stage-show was swiftly shelved. Post- Pepper's , grand ambitions were fine but when wedded to such bleak, uncompromising material, the combination was lethal. In Britain though it soared to 7, his highest placing yet. Post- Transformer momentum perhaps but UK pop, 73-style, was often odd, grand, crude. It was falling "wanking to the floor" on Bowie’s 'Time', canoodling with inflatable dolls on Roxy’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’.

Reed cited Othello and Hamlet when defending Berlin ’s tragic depiction of humanity’s ugly side. The "film for the ear" had much in common with the period’s cinema too, specifically that of New Hollywood. Aesthetically and topically challenging, these films were heavily influenced by Europe, full of flawed, anti-heroes, as they addressed American reality not the dream.

Berlin exerted a greater influence over British pop culture than it did America’s. Reed may have escaped Mainman’s clutches but when Diamond Dogs appeared six months after Berlin , it had given the decadent dystopian sonic stage-show a lurid Marvel Comics paint job. Pink Floyd’s The Wall , produced by Ezrin, owed something to Berlin too, from the barricade of its title to 'Comfortably Numb’s 'Sad Song'-style orchestration. Both Marc Almond (with the Mambas) and Siouxsie (with Suede) covered 'Caroline Says II'.

Suede’s own Dog Man Star was inspired by Berlin , another grand, chart-unfriendly, anti-glam statement, coming hot off the heels of a hit album. The sweeping structure mirrored Berlin ’s, with a slow-mo four track final section, climaxing with its own orchestral bombast, ‘Still Life’. Even the artwork’s bedroom-bound green hues recalled Caroline’s walls, the sad, unsettling, arty images accompanying the lyrics uncannily similar. Guitarist Bernard Butler, who based 'Daddy’s Speeding' on parts of How Do You Think It Feels', spoke of how Berlin "draws you in".

Even those involved baulked at Berlin . According to Reed, “like isn’t the right word for it”. Ezrin claimed Reed couldn’t listen to it for years, that it made him “want to hide in a closet.” When Kronstad finally left Reed as the 1973 tour rolled into Paris, she returned home and purchased Berlin . The record store worker suggested she reconsider saying “people are returning it, it’s so depressing.” Lester Bangs agreed, calling it “the most depressed album”, a reductive view of a perversely beautiful, oddly uplifting album.

Reed quickly fled its shadows though, donning fiercely gay attire, cropping his hair, unleashing his biggest stateside success to date, the 1974 Velvets-heavy live album, Rock 'n’ Roll Animal . If one image invented punk, then the album’s bestial blur of a sleeve is it. The same year’s Sally Can’t Dance , a US top 10, fared even better. But Reed would continue to confound, with Metal Machine Music .

With Ezrin in tow, Reed would eventually, in 2006, stage Berlin , with sets designed by Julian Schnabel, film projections and support from Anohni and Sharon Jones. Taking the production from NYC’s St Ann’s Warehouse to Australia, this time Berlin was rapturously received with Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Annie Lennox, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz attending.

Ezrin praised Reed for his synecdoche, his knack of expressing big ideas via small ones. Berlin does just that, being a microcosm of the glam/glum 70s, its unstable relationship and unreliable narrators, indicative of the era’s deep uncertainty, spinning in myriad directions, while America was ravaged by Vietnam and Watergate. There was a sense of things coming apart, of shibboleths crumbling. It embodies the spirit of a decade that started with both The Beatles’ split and Reed’s own exit from the Velvets. It was an age when everything was unravelling, and it was embodied by the break-up album, but like all the great tragedies, Berlin is timeless, universal, an eternal paean to what Julian Schnabel called “love’s dark sisters – rage, jealousy and loss.”

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• June 26, 2007 Setlist

Lou Reed Setlist at Tempodrom, Berlin, Germany

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Tour: Berlin Tour statistics Add setlist

• Sad Song Overture Play Video
• Berlin Play Video
• Lady Day Play Video
• Men of Good Fortune Play Video
• Caroline Says I Play Video
• How Do You Think It Feels Play Video
• Oh, Jim Play Video
• Caroline Says II Play Video
• The Kids Play Video
• The Bed Play Video
• Sad Song Play Video
• Sweet Jane ( The Velvet Underground  song) Play Video
• Satellite of Love Play Video
• Walk on the Wild Side Play Video

Edits and Comments

5 activities (last edit by event_monkey , 1 Mar 2023, 01:02 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Caroline Says I
• Caroline Says II
• How Do You Think It Feels
• Men of Good Fortune
• Sad Song Overture
• Satellite of Love
• Walk on the Wild Side
• Sweet Jane by The Velvet Underground

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Lou reed gig timeline.

• Jun 23 2007 Palais des Congrès Paris, France Start time: 8:50 PM 8:50 PM
• Jun 25 2007 Philipshalle Düsseldorf, Germany Add time Add time
• Jun 26 2007 Tempodrom This Setlist Berlin, Germany Add time Add time
• Jun 29 2007 Manchester International Festival 2007 Manchester, England Add time Add time
• Jun 30 2007 Hammersmith Apollo London, England Add time Add time

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Lou Reed – Berlin: 2007 Tour Edition Remastered

What they weren’t expecting was a concept album detailing a deteriorating relationship, sleazy sex, drugs, domestic violence, suicide and the sounds of children screaming in distress. This was not a party album. This was not what was expected.

Yet over the years, Berlin has been reappraised. Yes, it’s depressing, yes it’s daunting and no, it’s certainly not easy listening. There are times when it could accurately be called one of the upsetting albums ever made. Yet it is also a compelling and absolutely magnificent listen – one of the greatest albums ever made in fact.

Remastered and re-released to coincide with Reed’s current European tour (where Berlin will be played in its entirety), it’s interesting to note how well the album has dated. Where Transformer seems stuck in the ’70s, Berlin seems utterly timeless. Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine any of today’s bands recording anything like it, but that’s testament to the record’s unique qualities.

Masterfully produced by Bob Ezrin, the album is a swarm of orchestral arrangements and desolate piano, sometimes sounding frail (the title track) and often sounding bloody scary (The Kids). It’s also not as inaccessible as legend would have it, with the deceptively pretty melodies of Caroline Says II and the horn section of How Do You Think It Feels sounding almost commercial.

Admittedly, there are also 7 minute long songs about a mother’s children being taken away from her, a song about a deathbed and a general feeling of sleaze, moral decay and doom. There are times when it all becomes very difficult to listen to, such as the notorious section in Kids where the sound of screaming children is heard over Reed intoning “they’ve taken her kids away for being a bad mother”.

There are also parts of the album that are quite uncomfortable – the blatant misogyny for example, where Reed appears to justify domestic violence in Sad Song (“I’m going to stop wasting my time, somebody else would have broke both her arms”) and lyrics that are just plain nasty at times: “But since she lost her daughter, it’s her eyes that fill with water, and I am much happier this way”.

Yet this is to ignore the fact that Reed is playing a character here – that of Jim, who as a drug addict with a penchant for beating his girlfriend, is a pretty screwed-up individual anyway. Besides, compared to most gangster rap, the views towards women here are quaint at worst.

34 years after its release, Berlin stands as a towering achievement – one that makes the sneers of many critics at the time look utterly lubricious these days. Yet the sheer scale and ambition of the album means that it always seemed like a classic anyway. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid having this album in your collection, there’s no excuse now.

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​​ ​ STEVE HUNTER

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Copyright 2016 Deaconrecords. All rights reserved. ​ Contact: [email protected]

​Main Photo By Alessandra Tootsie Tulli

Photo Credit Amy - Beth McNeeley

Berlin Tour 2008  -  All Photographs By Amy-Beth McNeeley

Sweet Jane Live - From The DVD

Staging Berlin has been discussed for over thirty years and in December of 2006 it became a reality. Berlin was said to be one of the most depressing albums ever made and as it was brought to life it was far from dismal. Using the divided city of Berlin as its backdrop the story of Caroline and her lovers is told through the emotive and provocative words of Lou Reed.

October 27th 2013

“Today the world lost a true genius…an American genius. And I lost a dear beloved brother…Lou Reed. Some of the highest points in my career and life have been spent either in the studio or on stage with Lou. Thank God he wrote so many brilliant songs that we can continue to enjoy. It is a beautiful legacy. I love you my dear old friend and God bless your sweet soul. I will surely miss you always…steve”

Lou Reed Berlin European Tour 2007

18-Jun Brussels Forest National  20-Jun Amsterdam Heineken Music Hall  21-Jun Amsterdam Heineken Music Hall  23-Jun Paris Palais de Congress 25-Jun Dusseldorf Philipshalle  26-Jun Berlin Tempodrom  29-Jun Manchester International Festival 30-Jun London Hammersmith Apollo  01-Jul London Hammersmith Apollo 03-Jul Lyon Grand Théâtre Romain de Fourvière 04-Jul Arles Theatre Antique 06-Jul Rome Il Parco della Musica  08-Jul Arezzo Piazza Grande 10-Jul Milan Teatro degli Arcimboldi 11-Jul Turin Villa Venaria 12-Jul Cremona Stradivari Square  14-Jul Cagliari Rocce Rosse Festival

Lou Reed Berlin US Tour 2008 April 20 - Northamptom, Calvin Theatre April 25 - Norfolk, The NorVa April 26 - Richmond, The National April 28 - Durham, Carolina Theatre April 29 - Asheville, Orange Peel April 30 - Knoxville, Tennessee Theatre

Lou Reed Berlin European Tour 2008 June 23 Cork Marquee June 24 Belfast Waterfront June 25 Edinburgh Playhouse June 26 Nottingham Royal Centre June 28 Paris Salle Pleyel June 30 London Royal Albert Hall July 03 Munich Philharmonie July 06 Hamburg CCH - Congress Centrum July 07 Copenhagen Opera House July 09 Stockholm Annexet July 11 Tallin Saku Arena (Estonia)  July 12 Latvia Riga Arena July 14 Warsaw Towar July 16 Brussels Bozar July 19 Lisbon Campo Pequeno July 20 Loule Moinumento Dujarte Pacheco July 21 Malaga Terral Festival July 22 Madrid Conde Duque July 25 Girona Portaferrada FestivalArtificial Eye 

July 26 Benidorm Bullring

Steve Hunter - Guitar

Fernando Saunders - Bass

Antony - Vocals  

Rob Wassermann - Bass

Rupert Christie - Keyboards 

Sharon Jones - Vocals (also later Katie Krykant and Jenni Muldaur)

A seven-piece orchestra and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus

Steve's arrangement of Lou's Rock and Roll on an encore 2008

Lou Reed  'Berlin Live' Tour 2008

Lou Introduces The Band And Orchestra - Arezzo 08/07/2007

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Lou Reed Brings Berlin To London, Triumphantly

I’ve mentioned here previously the time in 1979 I went to see Lou Reed at what was then still known as the Hammersmith Odeon when he reacted testily to requests from the crowd to play their favourite numbers by announcing that he would under no circumstances be playing anything else that night apart from his new album, The Bells, so there would, he repeated emphatically, no “Heroin”, “Sweet Jane”, “Walk On The Wild Side” or any of the other numbers so many people had obviously come to hear him perform.

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If anybody didn’t like this, he said, they could fuck off – which a large section of the increasingly disgruntled crowd did, what seemed like at least half the audience walking out in angry disgust, nosily vacating the premises in a collective huff that was quite hilarious.

Lou waited until the very last of this disenchanted sullen mob had moodily departed and then with glorious perversity launched into what you’d probably call a greatest hits set that included with predictable cussedness a sublime version of “Heroin”.

What you wondered turning up last Sunday, nearly 30 years later, might Lou have in store for us tonight. Since we had turned up to hear Lou play, as advertised, his 1973 song-cycle Berlin in its spectacularly maggoty entirety, might he similarly decide to thwart his audience’s feverish expectations by playing the whole of a completely different album -Transformer, perhaps, or Coney Island Baby.

In the event, Lou played, exactly as promised, the version of Berlin that he and producer Bob Ezrin had intended all those years ago for release – until their original vision was compromised by a thoroughly rattled RCA, who demanded Ezrin cut what had been recorded as a double album down to a single disc.

I remember drinking with Lou in a hotel bar in Stockholm in 1977 and listening to him for more than an hour bitterly denounce what had happened to the record he’d always thought of as his defining masterpiece, the savage dismissal of it by critics and an ensuing public indifference to the album that left him heartbroken and angry. “After that,” he said, “the shutters came down. I didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone.”

Nigh on 25 years after it came out, Berlin is most commonly regarded as the masterpiece Lou always thought it was, and it might be difficult now to appreciate fully why at the time it caused such a stir.

These many years on, however, it remains a frightening, grim and wholly sad epic about love and violence, drugs and suicide – and as performed tonight with a red-hot band of Lou regulars, plus original Berlin and Rock’N’Roll Animal guitarist Steve Hunter, augmented by members of the New London Choir and the London Metropolitan Orchestra, it’s a signal moment in Lou’s career, a triumphant vindication of his original intentions.

I don’t think I’ve seen him this good since – oh, at least, the 1978 Street Hassle tour. From the choir’s ghostly intro, anticipating the final refrains of the climactic “Sad Song”, the mood of the evening is grimly etched, the sense of ominous foreboding that builds through “Berlin”, “Lady Day” and “Men Of Good Fortune” reaching an early eerie peak with “Caroline Says” and “How Do You Think It Feels?”, things getting darker in a hurry with “Oh Jim” and “Caroline Says II”, an accumulation of unspoken woe, Lou and Hunter’s guitars combining brilliantly here to give voice to things words can’t say.

The heart-wrenching centrepieces of the performance, however, are the harrowing “The Kids” and the jaw-droppingly moving “The Bed”, a thing of spectral beauty and hushed terror, which gives way eventually to the grand agonised climax of “Sad Song”, featuring the overwhelming combined weight of band, choir and orchestra, with Hunter’s guitar driving through the elegant turmoil like muted lightning, Lou imperious at its epic centre as the song goes on and on and the apparently endless refrain of grief and calamity and endless writhing sadness reaches a final moment of cathartic wounded splendour. Amazing.

After a brief interlude, the whole ensemble returns for the welcome relief of wholly buoyant encores of timeless crowd-pleasers “Sweet Jane” – fantastically, the Rock’N’Roll Animal version, albeit with an abbreviated version of Hunter’s famous guitar intro – a storming “Satellite Of Love”, with lead vocals from bassist Fernando Saunders and a wittily delivered “Walk On The Wild Side”.

Tremendous, unforgettable stuff and a sensational reminder of Lou’s enduring genius. No wonder by the end, we were treated to the rare sight of the famous curmudgeon smiling broadly in his moment of victory.

Lou Reed played:

Men Of Good Fortune

Caroline Says

How Do You Think It feels

Caroline Says II

Satellite Of Love

Walk On The Wild Side

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Online Exclusive: Lou Reed Plays “Berlin” in Brooklyn

By David Fricke

David Fricke

In 1972, Lou Reed released his first hit album, the Top Thirty glitter gem Transformer . Reed’s next record, 1973’s Berlin , nearly killed his career stone dead. A ten-song short story charting a downward spiral from innocent bliss to suicidal hopelessness, Berlin was the graphic underside of glam — a tour of the mess that’s left when the pills wear off and the sparkles fade, sung by Reed in his drop-dead monotone against a full army of top session players, strings and choristers. Berlin was unrepentant in its tragic detail and theatrical ambition. And Reed paid dearly for his nerve, in near-zero sales and a blizzard of bad reviews.

The one thing no one wrote about, or even seemed to notice, was the simple magnificence and — considering the narrative — contrary pop lift of the songs on Berlin . On December 14th, thirty-three years after the album’s release, Reed opened a sold-out four-night stand at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, performing the whole of Berlin live for the first time, with full orchestration and atmospheric stage direction by Julian Schnabel. The story still thrills as it repels: the way Reed, with a poet’s ear and a reporter’s eye and no intruding moral comment, renders both artificial ecstasies (booze, speed, reckless sex) and real-life horror (beatings, blood on the sheets).

But the most astonishing thing about hearing Berlin live was the greatest-hits glow of the songs. The arrangements, which sounded muted and crowded on the album’s original, flimsy RCA pressing, bloomed in 3-D. The German beer-hall thump of “Lady Day” became an elephant-march heartbeat with guitarist Steve Hunter, who played on the album sessions, breaking out in fits of arena-rock shriek. In “Caroline Says I,” Reed countered the flirty melody and gently buoyant score with dry vocal cool. And when he got to “Caroline Says II,” Reed offset the escalating violence and emotional collapse with a tenderness, in the music and his singing, that made it a love song in all but the bruises.

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The brilliance of Reed’s writing for Berlin was the irony of combinations: the jolting cynicism of “Men of Good Fortune,” with Reed icing the discord live with his own grinding lead guitar; the perverse cheer of the chorus, after the dying, in “The Bed”; the blinding melancholy of “Sad Song,” especially when the Brooklyn Youth Chorus went into a breathtaking loop of the title chorus, soaring and diving in defiantly bright grandeur. Reed had done all of that before Berlin , with the Velvet Underground, and long after. For the encore at St. Ann’s, Reed played three songs — “Sweet Jane,” “Candy Says” (with a heartbreaking vocal by guest singer Antony) and the genteel catalog of deviance “Rock Minuet,” from the 2000 album Ecstasy — which respectively showcased his pop wiles, ballad charity and confrontational nerve.

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But in Berlin , he did it all at once, in what is arguably his greatest set of songs. And at St. Ann’s, Reed did it again, the way those songs deserved to be heard. His all-star big band included bassists Rob Wasserman and Fernando Saunders, drummer Tony “Thunder” Smith, singer Sharon Jones, trumpeter Steve Bernstein and cellist Jane Scarpantoni. The show’s music producers were Hal Willner and Berlin ‘s original producer/arranger Bob Ezrin, who also conducted.

The triumph, however, was all Reed’s. And too long in coming.

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A musical tour of Berlin: from Wagner’s epic opera to techno raves

In our new series, we explore a city through its musical landmarks and songs. First stop, Germany’s hip, historic capital, home to trailblazing clubs and inspiration for Dietrich and Bowie

M usic soundtracks our travels, kills time and distracts, entertainingly. In Berlin, which has more than 300 train stations and where you can see everything panoramically from the overhead S-Bahn, a well-loaded smartphone or MP3 player turns a journey into a film with a score.

I have more records related to Berlin than to any other city. I can’t help feeling the city should have a nexus or mother venue where all the currents cross – a musical equivalent of the mighty Berlin Hauptbahnhof, opened in 2006, a powerful symbol of reunification.

But which artists would play there?

For a child of the 1970s, it would be easy to start, and end, with David Bowie. But Berlin is more interesting than any single artist. The city was on the old German classical music circuit. Weber’s Der Freischütz , considered the first romantic German opera, premiered in 1821 at the Schauspielhaus – known today as Konzerthaus Berlin .

The Berliner Philharmoniker was founded in 1882 and is based at the extraordinary, asymmetrical, tent-like Philharmonie Berlin . The orchestra’s first ever recording, of Wagner’s Parsifal , was conducted by Alfred Hertz in 1913. The hisses and crackles reflect the rudimentary technology; musicians crammed themselves into a tiny room to sit as close as possible to a gigantic recording horn.

The Weimar Republic had its headquarters at the Reichstag , though the mythological narrative wishes it were run from cabarets and dive bars. Tourists search in vain for Weimar decadence, which was short-lived and hugely exaggerated. As for finding the haunts vaguely alluded to in Christopher Isherwood’s novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), as Isherwood said to Bowie: “People forget that I’m a very good fiction writer.”

At the end of 1930, after several moves, Isherwood settled into a flat, at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in the Schöneberg district, which he shared with the British war correspondent Jean Ross, the model for Sally Bowles in his fiction – and, ultimately, the musical – Cabaret.

There were 38 cabarets in Berlin in the early 1920s. Possibly, Isherwood caught a show called Tingel-Tangel that took place in the Theater des Westens (Kantstrasse 12). Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker performed there. Berlin’s cabaret songbook is, unsurprisingly, extensive. The most famous entry is Dietrich’s Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt ( Falling in Love Again is the English version), recorded in both languages for the 1930 film The Blue Angel , which was shot at the Babelsberg film studio in nearby Postdam . Danish tenor Max Hansen – who founded the Kabarett der Komiker – recorded lots of cheeky show songs, including Meine liebe Lola and War’n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt?, which satirised Hitler as a homosexual .

The Nazis deemed much art and culture Entartete – degenerate. Jewish music was banned. During the 1930s, Lithuanian Hirsch Lewin ran a “Hebrew Bookstore” at Grenadierstrasse 28 (now Almstadtstrasse 10) – the building is still there – and devoted the rest of his time to recording klezmer songs and releasing them on his Semer label. The Nazis trashed his shop and destroyed many of the shellacs and original plates but, in 2016, an international ensemble released a selection of songs on the Berlin-based Piranha label. Scholem Baith is a gutsy call-and-response number that packs as much punch as any Dietrich ditty.

Hitler loved Wagner and hated jazz, experimental music and Romany folk. In studies of Nazi propaganda, an oft-cited song is Swedish-born Zarah Leander’s 1942 hit Ich weiss, es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n ( I K now That Someday a Miracle Will happen ), recorded at Lindström Studios (Schlesische Strasse 26) .

During the Soviet era, East Berlin musicians played it safe to avoid the censor or worse. German easy listening, or schlager, was safe terrain and the DDR’s state-sanctioned Amiga label churned out hundreds of albums full of tunes such as Ilja Glusgal’s 1950 Nein Nein Nein – which you can imagine soundtracking a Stasi raid in a black comedy. The DDR Museum has an extensive collection of albums from the era. As the influence of jazz and big band waned, schlager became cheesier, full of crooners and ersatz country and western acts; it’s sometimes considered the precursor of the kitsch-camp Eurovision shtick. German audiences love it; last year Berlin’s Mercedes-Benz Arena hosted its 25th Schlager Nacht. This year’s “good mood music” festival will fall on 16 November .

The careers of Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop crisscrossed time and again. Reed was the first to go to Berlin – mentally speaking. His 1973 album Berlin is about a couple sundered by drug addiction and violence. The title track evokes a bierkeller-cum-cabaret atmosphere. Reed said he thought of the city as the “home of German film noir and expressionism”, but he also saw the Berlin Wall – now memorialised , a museum and an art gallery – as a metaphor for a broken relationship.

Did the concept album inspire David Bowie and Iggy Pop to try the real thing? The former said he went there to get away from LA and cocaine-induced psychosis. The story of how he recorded three landmark albums that would subsequently be grouped as the Berlin Trilogy is long and complex, and many songs from Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979) evoke the city and the cold war east. The title track fr o m “ Heroes” (also released in German as “ Helden ”), with its image of lovers by the wall and guns shooting above their head, has become one of Bowie’s best-loved songs. Low’s Subterraneans was first recorded in Los Angeles for the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (which, in the end, didn’t use his material ). He told Record Mirror in 1977 that the song was about those left in East Berlin “after the separation – hence the faint jazz saxophones representing the memory of what it was”.

Iggy Pop’s The Passenger (from 1977’s Lust for Life) may be an ironic commentary on working with Bowie. You can also hear it as a car-ride song, on a “winding ocean drive”. But the German photographer and former partner of the singer, Esther Friedman, told Zeit magazine that it was “a hymn to the Berlin S-Bahn”. Pop “took the S-Bahn almost every day,” she said. “The journeys inspired him to write the song, especially the route out to Wannsee .” Bowie and Pop recorded at the Hansa Tonstudio at Köthener Strasse 38, a few doors south of the Berlin Wall – as this map showing the course of the wall illustrates. Many other artists followed suit, including Depeche Mode, U2 and Boney M.

Also in 1977, the Sex Pistols made a brief trip to Berlin, which inspired their frenetic single Holidays in the Sun . There were no lovers kissing by the wall in the Berlin of Johnny Rotten (AKA John Lydon) – the song opens with the sound of marching jackboots and the line “A cheap holiday in other people’s misery”. Lydon later said : “I loved Berlin. I loved the wall and the insanity of the place. The communists looked in on the circus atmosphere of West Berlin, which never went to sleep.”

Nico, who worked with Reed on the first Velvet Underground album, played her last concert at West Berlin’s Planetarium in June 1988. Born Christa Päffgen in Cologne, she grew up in Berlin and sold undies at the KaDeWe department store. Nico is buried in the Grunewald-Forst cemetery .

Berlin’s underground in the 1970s and 80s ranged across DIY arts scenes, squatter activism and junky culture – with heroin users congregating in Bahnhof Zoo (as seen in the 1981 cult film Christiane F , soundtracked by Bowie). Tangerine Dream was one of the most enduring bands (despite regular lineup changes) to come out of the scene. They played huge concerts in West Berlin and became one of the first big-name acts to play in East Berlin. Their 31 January 1980 gig at the Palast der Republik , the home of the DDR parliament (since demolished), was heavily bootlegged.

Radical music, attuned to Berlin’s ruinous wasteland, would come from Einstürzende Neubauten , the West Berlin industrial/experimental rock band whose lead singer/screamer is Blixa Bargeld – a key member of both the Bad Seeds and the Birthday Party. Steh auf Berlin (Wake Up Berlin), from their debut album Kollaps, is a classic piece of trash-thrash noise performed on anti-instruments made from scrap metal and building tools.

Easier on the ear was the punky synth-pop that came out of Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) – the New German Wave. Nena’s 99 Luftballons , an international hit in English, was its mainstream zenith. I remember a friend unveiling a Dutch compilation album titled Die Neue Deutsche Welle Ist Da Da Da in 1982 that I thought the ultimate in transgressive imported coolness. A lot of the music on the album sounds like Kraftwerk speeded up and made pogo-able, or at least suitable for that Andy McCluskey skipping dance. Some of the best Berlin-based NDW, punk and metal bands were mixed by Harris Johns at his studio Music Lab Berlin studio in the back yard of Tempelhofer Ufer 10.

A lot of venues have come and gone, Kreuzberg’s SO36 , where Einstürzende, as well as Die Toten Hosen, Throbbing Gristle and the Dead Kennedys ran amok, is still standing, though I can’t see Bargeld turning up for the Monday rollerdiscos. The club’s Gayhane, a monthly “QueerOriental Dancefloor” night, is legendary.

Tresor , which opened in 1991, was one of the first clubs to bring Detroit techno to the city and continues to host big-name DJs. Berghain , another big club, occupies a former power station off monumental socialist boulevard Karl-Marx-Allee. The former Templehof airport, built in the modernist-meets-monumental style favoured by the Third Reich, used to host raves. Berlin’s zero-curfew rule, said to have its roots in West Berlin’s liberal attitudes to nightlife, makes it a draw for techno tourists. Detroit-born DJ Rolando keeps up the transatlantic alliance; his remix of Expo 2000 pays homage to Düsseldorf-based Kraftwerk, whose influence on many of the above-mentioned acts has been well documented. Berghain resident Ben Klock’s Subzero sounds like a retro-futuristic train on tracks of ice and is a perfect way to end our S-Bahn odyssey.

• Berlin holidays
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• David Bowie
• Richard Wagner
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Lou Reed to tour ‘Berlin’

Antony Hegarty is on board too for album recreation tour

Lou Reed has revealed plans to tour his 1973 album ‘Berlin’ .

He has also confirmed the concerts will feature contributions from Antony Hegarty of Antony & The Johnsons .

The album, thought by many to be one of the most depressing albums of all time, has never been performed live.

St Ann’s Warehouse in New York will host performances of the ‘theatrically realised’ version of the album.

The concerts run from December 14-17.

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