This was my entry into the Lou / Velvets catalogue. Then it was Rock’n’Roll Animal, back to Transformer and then forward while, in parallel, heavily mining the Velvet’s catalogue.
Stephen Davis, in a December 1973 review for Rolling Stone, felt the album was a “disaster”; he disliked the world of “paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence and suicide” that the album introduced to the listener, as well as Reed’s “spoken and shouted” performance.He concluded with words to the effect of “there are some records you want to do physical violence to . Goodbye Lou.”
That extreme aggressive reaction was of course ironic given the themes of the record. And the critical panning at the time fuelled Lou’s resentment of the press for many years, maybe forever. As a teenager I was immediately interested.
It was so dark – the violence, the drugs the storyline, like nothing anyone else would attempt. Lou’s
often monotonal, spoken or semi-spoken and occasionally singing almost sweetly just like he would do occasionally on VU records.
And then there is The Kids it opens with:
” They’ve taken her children away
Because, they said she was not a bad mother”
And ends with kids crying, wailing pleading for their mother. My mother would force me to take the record off at this point. She wasn’t too keen on the Velvet’s Heroin, or Black Angel’s Death Song or Sister Ray for that matter. But I digress. There are various stories about how they got the kids to cry so convincingly. It’s a long way from Our House is a very very fine house, with 2 cats in the yard .
Producer Bob Ezrin said it nearly killed him and he too became a junkie in the process of completing this record ( this is from memory, so I could be wrong).It’s a dense record with a lot of musicians strings, choruses etc. How this for a lineup?
Lou Reed – vocals, acoustic guitar
Bob Ezrin – piano, Mellotron, arrangement
Steve Hunter – electric guitar
Dick Wagner – electric guitar, backing vocals
Jack Bruce – bass guitar except “Lady Day” & “The Kids”
Aynsley Dunbar – drums except “Lady Day” & “The Kids”
Steve Winwood – Hammond organ, harmonium
Michael Brecker – tenor saxophone
Randy Brecker – trumpet
Tony Levin – bass guitar on “The Kids”
B. J. Wilson – drums on “Lady Day” & “The Kids”
Allan Macmillan – piano on “Berlin”
Gene Martynec – acoustic guitar, synthesizer and vocal arrangement on “The Bed”, bass guitar on “Lady Day”
Jon Pierson – bass trombone
Blue Weaver – piano on “Men of Good Fortune”
Steve Hyden, Elizabeth March, Dick Wagner, Lou Reed – choir
Wouldn’t have been cheap ,no wonder the poor reviews rankled.
So today I had another listen after a few years lay off. Previously drawn to the Hunter / Wagner guitaring it was Aynsley Dunbar’s drumming that stood out and the bass of Jack Bruce. I am sure Lou was getting that sort of sound when he had Fernando Saunders in bands after this.
Berlin is challenging, Lou’s voice can be hard work. But it is worth the effort. Rolling Stone subsequentlyu had it in the 300’s out of their top 500 lists and it’s on those annoying lists of records you need to listed to before you die.
Well Lou’s dead. He regarded this as his masterpiece. And it was.
Terrific album. Up there with New York and RARA as Lou’s very, very best.
Was lucky enough to see the Hunter/Wagner band support the Who at Charlton In May 74. Bizarre to see such dark music played on a sunny afternoon.
While my most vivid memory of the set is someone in the crowd chucking a bike chain at the stage and Lou (bleach blond hair with an iron cross) effortlessly caught with one hand, I can find no other mention of this anywhere. Since this was before I got into drugs, it can’t have been because I was stoned or tripping.
Like you, I’d heard the story about the kids. Happily, it turns out to be not true.
We got that tour here. Blonde hair , speed addict thin but only Dick Wagner on guitar. Soon he’d be gone too to join Ezrin’s pet act Alice Cooper.
We were all wanting /expecting Rock n Roll Animal but youtube footage shows that bad was pretty damn good too.
I recently bought the Berlin live blu ray for buttons. Haven’t watched it yet.
Pretty good. Did the same show live in Sydney. Shoulda flown up.
I listen almost obsessively to The Velvet Underground but hardly ever to solo Reed. I don’t really know why. Bowie introduced me to him, of course, then worked on Transformer, making that an essential purchase. I enjoyed it. I do like Berlin too, though I have a natural resistance to albums that tell a story. I’m generally fond of miserable songs, so that’s not a problem for me. My favourite is The Blue Mask, more so than New York, when he duets with Quine.
Coney Island is a great pop album. Streethassle has err Streethassle. Blue Mask he actually lets Quine play. Live in Italy is the best you’ll get of Quine- Reed.
Oddly, I have a soft spot for Sally Can’t Dance.
Me too !
Ennui a favourite.
Ah, Quine – now that’s a whole new thread…
Also one of my first Lou albums. Amazingly a top 10 album in the UK. I loved it for a while, but it’s just too depressing, can’t listen to it anymore.
New York is my favourite. Seemed to come out of nowhere after more than a decade of lacklustre efforts. In general a pretty disappointing solo career, but I think many of the albums after New York are also worthwhile, Magic and Loss, Songs for Drella (with John Cale) Ecstasy and Set the Twilight Reeling
Probably because he cleaned up (allegedly)
After the liver transplant he pretended he stopped drinking, but he didnt.
I heard a biographer claim this, I think on a Word podcast. Would like to know his sources as it is contrary to everything Lou said for 20 years or more, why I used the word “allegedly”
Seem to think it was in a book , maybe Bockris or that other big one. They are in storage.
You wouldnt be shocked that he would do that would you ?
That’s what I said, a biographer. It was a British one. He seemed very sure of it, but I don’t know why
I looked some more – it was Sounes citing members of his final band. But it said he’d have white wine over dinner. Not exactly necking vodka.
Ok thanks
Berlin was one of my favourite albums when I was 16. I was a pretty intense adolescent, but there was some self awareness and I found the gloom amusing. I bought a cheap CD about ten years ago after my first visit to Berlin but only played it a couple of times. It’s not an album that rewards casually listening like Transformer and I couldn’t bring enough concentrated attention to it.
I can’t listen to it, a good friend who’s favourite album it was played it more than once every day until the cheap cider he drank listening to it (and other albums) killed him.
The first time I heard ‘Berlin’ was at my mates house, I thought it was the most miserable collection of songs I’d heard up to then and it still is. Even though I own most of Lou Reeds discography every time I play one of them I always here ‘Berlin’ always casts a shadow.
I could understand that, especially given the personal associations – but have you heard The Marble Index?
Love love love it. Basically because I’m the polar opposite of the characters described in it, and I can have a good wallow in “dark me” for 45 minutes.
That and the songs are just phenomenal. Peak Lou, for me.
I don’t find it depressing because it’s a great record, great songs, great playing and production. Because of that it’s uplifting and exciting, regardless of the subject matter. What’s depressing to me is music that isn’t challenging and creative and which has nothing to say.
One of my favourite records of 2020 was Clint Mansell and Clint Walsh’s cover of this whole album. It was born out of grief, after Clint M’s girlfriend died. The last thing they’d watched together was the concert film of Lou performing Berlin in 2006, and from that he got the idea to recreate the album as a tribute and a way of dealing with loss. Sounds like a great way to make a famously depressing album even more miserable, right? But it’s the complete opposite, a synthy jangly rush that evokes great 80s pop.
interview (by Jude Rogers) here
Marc Almond did a magnificent cover of Caroline Says on the first Marc and the Mambas album
Lovely piece on Berlin at 50 here:
https://thequietus.com/articles/33466-lou-reed-berlin-anniversary
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts I think. And it does contain possibly Lou’s worst ever lyric:
“Just like poison in a vial/Hey she was often very vile”.
The nadir for me was Rock n Roll Heart.
I guess I’m just dumb, ’cause I know that I ain’t smart
But deep down inside, I got a rock ‘n’ roll heart
Up in the morning drinking his coffee
Turns on the TV to some slasher movie
Cartoon-like women, tied up and sweaty
Panting and screaming, thank you, have a nice day
(Video Violence from Mistrial)
The head/head rhyme in WOTWS always jarrs with me.
That whole Mistrial album is simply awful.
Yes
No objections, m’Lud.
I find you in contempt, young @fentonsteve
While they do indeed use the term “m’lud” in UK courts, no barrister or solicitor advocate would ever utter the word “objection!”.
With the exception of endearingly waspish telly judge, Robert Rinder, nor would any member of the judiciary have or bang a gavel while shouting “order!, order!”
Having never set foot in a courtroom, I get all my legal mumbo-jumbo from documentaries on the telly. The Old Bill drive their car through a pile of cardboard boxes, pull a handbrake turn outside The Winchester, and shout “Shut it!” as they shove Terry and Arfur into a Black Mariah.
Guv!!!
The Sweeney doing 90 ‘cos they’ve got nowhere to go……….
Reportage in song form, that.
“Just like poison in a vial/Hey she was often very vile”.
Remember only Kurt is Weill
Weill I never!
I thought it was pronounced Wee-ill.
😉
🎶 You say Wee-ill I say Vile.
Let’s call the whole thing off. 🎶
Now try it in Lulu’s voice –
Wee-eee-eee-eee-eee- ill!
Bravo!
Great album Berlin, but I never listen to it really
Same as my other favourite Reed album, Lulu. I’ve a feeling not many people love that one
Lulu was written off before anyone had really heard it, for some reason. Lou himself seemed to rate it.
I’m with Lou – I think Berlin was his mantelpiece.
It was popular with the cool kids in the 6th form common room. I never bought the Lou schtick and had no interest beyond getting it off the stereo so we could put “Burn” on.
Well, I was never a cool kid, nor was I allowed in the 6th form common room…
…but I did attend the physics teacher’s hifi club, where I heard Man, Gong, ver Floyd, Global Village, the Dead, etc. Room was full of proto-hippies and weirdos, eventually it was shut down for “abusing the privilege”, ie, someone was caught smoking.
The physics teacher sounds great. My teachers were 99% pompous wankers. We had one young science teacher who set up a folk club who was a nice bloke.
For avoidance of doubt: he only wanted to hear DSOTM – it was the unruly mob that brought in the more, er, outré examples above. I think he’d built the amplifier from scratch as a project.
Physics teachers, in my experience (of one Physics teacher), are great. Mine created a lunchtime Electronics Club*, and encouraged me to apply to University. So the blame/credit for my ‘career’ goes entirely to Mr Brownlee.
(*) I designed a rubber duck which quacked when the bath water was too hot for a baby’s bath. Professor Heinz Wolff handed out the prizes (I came 4th). A couple of years later I saw, in the Innovations catalogue, a rubber duck which quacked when the bath water was too hot for a baby’s bath…
Fame and fortune could have been yours, Steve – if only you’d learned about patent law at school…
We had a history teacher who fulfilled the mandatory cool teacher vibe. Nicknamed Zappa, because he had an electric guitar. Longish hair but no facial hair, but it still stuck. Can’t remember his real name.
I forgot the fun fact from Berlin
The song “ The Kids” has the line
“ And I am the Waterboy”
Et voila band name for The Waterboys.
I forgot the fun fact from Berlin
The song “ The Kids” has the line
“ And I am the Water boy”
Et voila! Band name for The Waterboys. No idea what attracted Mike to the name.
And I am the Water Boy, the real game’s not over here
But my heart is overflowin’ anyway
I’m just a tired man, no words to say
But since she lost her daughter
It’s her eyes that fill with water
And I am much happier this way