Lou is in an elite category of musical heroes for me. Like the Stones, Miles, the Beatles, a few others, I lost all ability to be critical about his catalog of music many years ago. His Velvet Underground and solo records defy my ability to sort them into “good” or “bad" piles. Despite the many opinions offered by critics and fans, to me, they’re all individual chapters in the compelling story of a singular artist I admire greatly. From the deliberately noncommercial experimental rock sound of the Velvet Underground, to his solo albums that addressed complicated adult themes in complicated adult ways, I find all of Lou's albums to be fully realized, deeply creative musical statements. Yeah, a few of them are a little challenging, Lou was always reaching for a lot.
But I do have my favorites, and that’s what this list is about. I decided early in the process to combine Lou’s VU and solo work for this list. To my ears, they’re all part of the same creative story. Eliminating the last few contenders to get to the final list was as difficult as I expected. Every time I decided that a record as beloved as White Light/White Heat or The Blue Mask wasn’t going to make it, I felt like someone was standing behind me (Lou, is that you?), swatting me on the back of the head. Lou’s live albums were an important part of the process, too. Never one to go out and "play the hits," he constantly re-imagined his songs onstage. Lou shuffled the lineups of his bands regularly, making every live album a unique listens in its own right. Compilation albums played a much smaller role. His studio albums are so focused in tone and intent that pulling individual tracks from them to make a greatest hits album never really worked, even when he tried it himself with NYC Man in the early 2000s.
Lou’s life story is a complicated one, from the mental health issues of his youth, to the drug use and unresolved sexuality of his adult years. He was notoriously averse to giving interviews, often becoming defensive or hostile during the sessions. Lou despised music critics but loved and embraced fellow musicians across a wide range of genres. His friend, music writer Anthony DeCurtis, published Lou Reed: A Life in 2017, the definitive biography if you have an interest in Lou’s singular story.
Lou passed away on October 27, 2013 at the age of 71 after undergoing a liver transplant in May of that year. He’s a two-time inductee in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, solo and with the Velvet Underground. A genus of spiders, recently discovered in Spain, was named Loureedia, because they have velvet bodies and live underground. In 2015, the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian announced that Asteroid 270553 would be named Loureed. An archive of his letters and personal effects is available for public viewing at the New York Library for the Performing Arts. Lou will live on in many ways.
• The Lou Reed/Velvet Underground Discography – 85 total releases. 21 solo studio albums, 15 solo live albums, 17 solo compilations, 5 VU studio albums, 6 VU live albums, 14 VU compilations, 7 VU box sets
#1: Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal (1974) - Even when I thought this list was settled and I started typing it up, the top two records kept flipping back and forth in my head. I finally settled on this one at #1 simply because I've listened to it more than any other record in his catalog. There was a period in my early college days when I played it every day, without fail, front to back, for at least a few months. These days, I only play it three or four times a year, but it’ll never completely leave the rotation.
There’s some desperation to these performances, recorded live at NYC’s Academy of Music in December of 1973. Lou’s career with RCA was off to a roller-coaster start. Despite all of the critical cred he had accumulated with the Velvet Underground, his first solo album, Lou Reed, tanked. He followed it with Transformer, one of his biggest hit records, then wasted the career momentum by releasing Berlin next; a claustrophobic, dark record with disappointing sales. RCA’s solution was to smooth out the druggy edginess of Lou’s best songs, especially his best-known VU songs, by sending him on tour with top-shelf classic rock musicians, notably Detroit guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. The band was tasked with creating a more typical arena-rock sound. Lou didn’t play his guitar on the tour, a rarity in his career, his only job was to be the front man.
What they created was a commercially successful arena-rock version of Lou. The music races along with an exquisitely theatrical sense of dynamic tension-and-release and lots of guitar solos, real crowd pleasing stuff. Lou’s nearly monotone street-talk delivery is seamless. He’s in complete control of the mood of his songs, even in the new musical surroundings. Lou cut off most of his hair for the tour, and dressed in black leather and studs, adding to the dark theatricality of the shows.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal sold in gold record numbers but Lou's creative restlessness would cause him to abandon that successful sound as soon as the tour ended. A second album from the same NYC show, Lou Reed Live, was released the following year, but all of the really great stuff was cherry-picked for the first one. The follow-up doesn’t have the perfect, unstoppable flow of R’n’RA. It’s difficult to pick an entry point for his career for the uninitiated, but Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal just might be the best choice.
EARWORM: “Sweet Jane” – The opening Hunter/Wagner guitar jam is one of solo Lou's most enduring moments.
#2: Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) - I wasn’t buying records yet in 1967, so I got to this one backwards. My first memory of hearing Lou’s music was the “Walk on the Wild Side” single in 1972. I was reeled in by its odd catchiness. Picking up Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal a couple years later started my obsession for real. I started to read everything I could find about the man. Which led me to this one soon enough.
I hadn’t heard a note of the VU’s music the first time I dropped the needle on their debut album, and like countless others my reaction was “what the hell is this?” It seemed intentionally too raw and jittery for radio play, but I realized the songs were seriously sticking in my head and demanding repeat listens. The album was nominally produced by Andy Warhol, but sounds like it wasn’t produced by anybody. Andy’s most important contribution to the record (besides the infamous banana cover art) was insisting the group add German singer/actress Nico. The band wasn’t thrilled, but her dolorous, nearly monotone singing style on three tracks became an essential part of the record’s alchemic magic.
VU & Nico is a difficult album to describe for someone who hasn’t heard it. There are no easy comparisons to other records in the rock era to fall back on. For every moment of outré guitar and viola-led experimentation, like “The Black Angel’s Death Song” and the wonderful “Venus in Furs,” there’s another of delicate beauty like the opener “Sunday Morning” and “Femme Fatale.” “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man” stayed in Lou’s live sets for the rest of his career; the former a long, droning ode to addiction, the latter a slinky piece of paranoid funk describing a drug deal about to go south. Both brilliant songs, and nothing like what was happening elsewhere in the year of their birth, aka the Summer of Love. VU & Nico doesn’t sound like an old record or a new record, it’s a remarkable piece of outsider art that exists out of time.
EARWORM: "All Tomorrow's Parties" - The perfect marriage of the band's edgy propulsion and Nico's chilly monotone.
#3: New York (1989) - Lou’s relationship with commercial success was a rocky one. He was convinced every time that his latest record was going to be a hit, commercially and critically. He spent much of his career frustrated by being wrong. His output in the first half of the 1980s, with a band that included the superb guitarist Robert Quine, got him the critical praise he sought, but not the sales he expected. New Sensations in 1984 finally produced a hit single, “I Love You Suzanne.” The Reed/Quine band was a live powerhouse (check out the amazing Live in Italy LP), but ego clashes between the two principals led to it breaking up, a recurring theme throughout Lou’s career. Lou was prepared for even bigger success with New Sensations’ follow-up, Mistrial, and it actually sold a bit better, but there was no hit single and critics panned it as weaker than the previous albums. The general consensus became that it was a misguided attempt to cash in on current music and social trends like rap music and video games. Lou was once again baffled and pissed off by its reception. New York was the last significant turning point in Lou’s career. He finally accepted he couldn't predict or influence what his albums would do in the marketplace. Starting with New York, he would only record and release music that inspired him, charts and critics (and interviews and publicity) be damned.
Lou did some of his best work with a strong second guitarist to help him flesh out ideas. For New York, he recruited his brother-in-law Mike Rathke. The two would work together for the rest of Lou's recording life. Lou wrote fourteen electric, expressive rock songs for the album, snapshots of various aspects of the city he deeply loved. The lean four-piece of Lou, Rathke, bassist Rob Wasserman, and drummer Fred Maher played them with a no-frills brilliance that recalls the Velvet Underground in its simple, but powerful, directness. The album’s tone is by turns compassionate, angry, and political. In the liner notes, Lou recommended New York be listened to in one sitting, “as though it were a book or a movie,” and there’s a strong argument to be made for that. New York’s overall cohesion and flow were a change from Lou’s typically restless and wandering creative vision. There's definitely a feeling of chapters or scenes from a wider-perspective work.
I remember when I first heard the record, my initial reaction was “finally.” It hit me as a no-bullshit, no role-playing, straight-ahead rock and roll record, exactly what I had been wanting from Lou since his VU days. Lou was leaning in this time, rocking out with great guitar work and loads of memorable lyrics; funny, edgy, humane, and confident. And, as happens so often when an artist quits trying to please others, New York was a resounding success, commercially and critically. Another gold record for Lou when he wasn’t expecting it.
EARWORM: "Dirty Boulevard" - A crunchy, catchy piece of rock and roll that became one of Lou's rare hit singles.
#4: Transformer (1972) - I don't remember the exact moment, but I'm certain my first awareness of Lou's music was hearing “Walk on the Wild Side” on the radio somewhere. It was a pretty big hit at the time. I’m also certain I wasn’t aware that Lou had gotten away with something scandalous by introducing the phrase “giving head” to AM radio stations. Things were different back then, there was no internet to keep everybody current on sexual slang.
Lou’s career was in a dodgy place in late ’72. After the Velvets folded, he signed a solo contract with RCA and released his first solo album, Lou Reed, in April. RCA knew that Lou had gobs of critical acclaim from his VU days. They also knew their records hadn't sold worth a damn, and they were looking for return on their investment. The label sent him to London to record the album with a group of U.K. musicians they decided he should work with, including two members of Yes. Of Lou Reed’s ten songs, eight were leftovers from the Velvets. It was a bad fit for all concerned, nobody enjoyed the sessions. The album was panned critically and sold poorly.
But Lou’s time in England had a major upside. It allowed him to meet one of his biggest fans, David Bowie. Bowie, and his Spiders from Mars guitarist Mick Ronson, invited Lou back into a London studio that August to make his second album, with Dave and Mick producing. By November, Transformer was finished and released.
Bowie’s semi-glam rock production was light years away from the sound of Lou’s first solo album, and sounded nothing like a VU record, either. The songs are punchier, hookier, more radio-friendly, with great slashes of Ronson’s guitar all over the place. Unlike Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, released in June and taking the world by storm at the time, Lou wasn’t writing friendly sci-fi fantasies. The songs on Transformer take a street-level look at drug use, gender identity, and prostitution. The unlikely success of “Walk on the Wild Side” made RCA happy, the album made the U.S. top 30, presumably making Lou happy. Besides “Wild Side,” the record introduced long-time staples of Lou’s live repertoire like “Vicious” and “Satellite of Love.” “Perfect Day” was another breathtaking example of his seemingly incongruous mastery of plain-spoken love ballads, the secret weapon of the Velvet Underground. Transformer is Lou’s most blatantly pop record, but one only he could have made. It’s full of wit, charm, sarcasm, and surprises. It’s the catchiest album he ever made and it made him a commercial rock star, like his new pal Dave. So, of course, being Lou, he never made another album like it.
EARWORM: "Perfect Day" - Very near the top of my favorite Lou songs list.
#5: Street Hassle (1978) – The years following Transformer’s success are a prime example of Lou’s roller coaster career. He was often the reason for the dips. He truly believed he had made an equally commercial follow-up album with Berlin, but you gotta wonder what the hell he was hearing. His newest fans, the ones who found him via “Walk on the Wild Side,” wanted nothing to do with the claustrophobic, depressing follow-up. The only good thing (career-wise) to come out of the recording sessions was his next touring band, featuring Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, who backed Lou on the successful Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal live album. Three more albums for RCA, including his middle finger to the label, Metal Machine Music, and he found himself on the verge of bankruptcy without a recording contract.
He was rescued, financially and creatively, by Clive Davis, who signed him to his Arista label for four albums. The first, Rock and Roll Heart, was the simplest and most straightforward rock album of Lou’s career. Short, catchy songs that glide by without tackling any of Lou’s thorny lyrical issues. Undoubtedly, he was trying to generate some sales for his new boss. His plan didn’t work, neither fans or critics liked the new, toothless Lou much. Lesson learned.
Street Hassle used most of the same musicians, but Lou’s songwriting took a sharp turn back to the gritty streets of NYC, accompanied by a harder, edgier rock sound. Street Hassle is easily the most Velvets-sounding solo record Lou ever made, which puts it high on my list. Part of that sound came from Lou’s fascination with a process called binaural recording. The songs were captured in the studio (or onstage) using a mannequin head with a microphone in each ear to simulate the stereo feel of actually being in the room with the band. The effect works much better over headphones, listening through standard speakers it sounds echo-y and slightly out-of-phase, adding to the VU comparisons.
All pre-history and sonic quirks aside, it’s the songs that make this one an unwavering favorite for me. Lou was fed up with writing what he thought others wanted to hear. “Gimmie Some Good Times” is a chugging, ragged opener, followed by the grimy “Dirt,” a slam at his ex-manager. The title song at the end of side one is one of Lou’s masterpieces - an eleven minute, three part musical suite about an overdose at a lower Manhattan party. Despite the dark subject matter, the song is delicate and touching, gently moving forward on a framework of circular melodies accented by a sweet, stabbing cello. Oddly, just because he happened to be working in a studio in the same building, Bruce Springsteen has a uncredited spoken-word cameo in the final section. The two didn’t know each other well, but Lou thought Bruce’s voice would be perfect for the brief segment and he was right.
Side two doesn’t quite match the brilliance of the first side, but it’s full of excellent crunchy rockers and dark humor, including a powerhouse live version of the Velvet-era “Real Good Time Together.” The album ends with the wistful “Wait,” Lou’s nod to his love of street corner doo-wop music. Lou would make two more very fine albums for Arista (The Bells, Growing Up in Public), using the core of the Street Hassle band, but neither had the ballsy risk-taking of this undeniable career highlight. Lou at his Lou-est.
EARWORM: "I Wanna Be Black" - Parental guidance suggested. A prime example of Lou's darker than dark sense of humor.
#6: Coney Island Baby (1975) – The album that immediately preceded this one, Metal Machine Music, was Lou pissing on his label by exploiting a clause in his contract. RCA had agreed, in writing, to release any album Lou turned in to them, whether or not they saw any commercial potential. What were they thinking? He'd had enough of the pressure RCA was putting on him to record another album similar to Sally Can’t Dance, which had gone gold. Lou went up to his loft and recorded an hour’s worth of guitar feedback and electronic noise and handed it to the label. RCA had no choice but to release it and it was one of the biggest bombs in their history. The only thing I can say about Metal Machine Music is that I’ve listened to it all the way through exactly once, and there’s no reason to ever do it again.
So, by 1975 Lou was fed up with RCA, they’re weren’t digging him too much, and he owed them one more album. Once again, demonstrating that trying to guess what he would do next was hopeless, Lou recorded Coney Island Baby, the warmest, most romantic album of his career. The title song alone would guarantee the record a spot on this list, that the rest of it is nearly as wonderful cements it in place. The songs sound marvelous, Lou and Godfrey Diamond’s production is precise and inviting. No abrasive rockers here, the fast ones swing along gracefully and the ballads hit the ears gently. Which is not to say this is Lou-lite. Lyrically, the album digs deep into Lou’s world-weary cynicism and so-dark-it’s-almost-black sense of humor. But it’s all tempered by accessible melodies and beautiful playing by the studio band. In the lovely ballad “A Gift,” Lou describes himself as a “gift to the women of this world,” especially intriguing considering he was in a much-publicized relationship with a trans woman named Rachel at the time.
But, once again, that title song. Right near the top of any possible list of Lou’s best songs, “Coney Island Baby” starts as an oddly sweet bit of nostalgia about his public school days and wanting to “play football for the coach,” before it bursts into a meditation on old flames and the “glory of love.” Lou knew his own electric guitar style wasn’t sweet enough to add the lead guitar he could hear in his head so he hired session guitarist Bob Kulick to play on the track. Kulick’s work became the stuff of legend, a delicate spiderweb of melodic playing that darts in and out of the mix and around Lou’s vocal like a caress. Six and a half minutes of one of the most beautiful rock songs ever put to tape. Despite positive reviews, Coney Island Baby didn’t sell well enough to sooth RCA’s hurt feelings over Metal Machine Music. After its release they chose not to renew Lou’s contract.
EARWORM: "Coney Island Baby" - Because it gives me frisson every time I hear it.
#7: 1969: The Velvet Underground Live (1974) – This was one of the biggest surprises for me in a career full of them. 1969 saw the last significant tour by the group, about 70 shows in smallish music clubs around the U.S. The band took the Grateful Dead approach of allowing fans to tape the shows if they brought in a portable tape recorder. At two of the clubs, the Matrix in San Francisco and End of Cole Ave. in Dallas, the shows were recorded semi-professionally but the tapes sat in storage somewhere until after the Velvets were no more and Lou was a solo star.
When the recordings were compiled and edited into this album, I grabbed a copy immediately. I was already reaching uber-fan mode. Even though John Cale and his yowling viola left the year before, I expected these shows to sound kinda like the records – tuneful but edgy, droning, a little spiky. The cover certainly promised a degree of their confrontational attitude. What I heard instead was Lou and the band playing with a remarkably musical, relaxed vibe. Lou is talking and joking with the fans in a way that could be described as warm, even friendly. Not exactly his public persona in '74.
The big surprise is the performance, of course. The band strips away all of the arty arrangements and avant-garde production of the records and reveals the terrific, grooving rock songs underneath. They sound like a jam band in spots, stretching out several of the songs so Lou and Sterling Morrison can have some fun trading killer guitar licks. The setlist includes songs from each of their albums and a small handful of tracks the band had written but not recorded, so 1969 appealed to both the casual fan and diehard. There’s no pretending a song like “Heroin” is a love ballad, of course. These are still VU songs, but performed in the most accessible form they’d ever see.
I keep reading in the music press that this is the ideal starter album for those unfamiliar with the Velvets, and I get that. It sounds more like commercial rock music than anything else in their catalog. The problem is, as user-friendly as the album is, there’s no clear path from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live to their other albums. Thinking you kinda dig this swinging version of the Velvet Underground sound is not going to prepare you for your first listen to White Light/White Heat, or any of the others, really.
EARWORM: "Sweet Bonnie Brown (It's Just Too Much)" - A VU song fans hadn't heard before the album came out. The label's posthumous excavation of their tape vaults showed the world the band had recorded a pile of fantastic songs that never saw an official release.
#8: Set the Twilight Reeling (1996) – After New York became an unexpected hit record, Lou turned seriously inward for a couple of albums. Songs for Drella, a reunion with John Cale, was a suite of theatrical set-piece songs about the life and death of their friend and mentor, Andy Warhol. Magic and Loss went even deeper, a tasteful but mournful reflection on death, inspired by the loss of two close friends to cancer. Four years later, Lou came out rocking again with Set the Twilight Reeling, his finest late-career batch of songs.
There’s no overriding theme on the album, the songs range from Lou’s grinding ode to the uniquely New York soda fountain treat “Egg Cream,” to the anti-conservative political rant “Sex with Your Parents (Motherfucker), Part II.” Having sex is covered by “Hookywooky,” possibly never having sex again by “NYC Man.” Lou dedicated the album to his new partner Laurie Anderson (their union would last the rest of his life) and ends it with the title song, another of Lou’s beautifully unique ballads. By this point in his career, Lou had set aside the desire to shock or alienate his audience. Set the Twilight Reeling is simply a very enjoyable, mature rock and roll record from a master, no small thing.
EARWORM: "Hookywooky" - A fun, upbeat rocker about having sex. What more could you want?
#9: Animal Serenade (2004) – Another one from the live archives, with Lou, again, re-imagining his catalog in surprising and deeply moving ways. The show, recorded at L.A.’s Wiltern Theater, is from his tour for The Raven, a dark and moody exploration of Edgar Allen Poe. Lou had given himself a new palette to work with (the band had a cellist but no drummer) and performed classics from the entirety of his career in highly stylized, theatrical arrangements. Lou and Mike Rathke handled the guitars (Mike also played a bit of guitar synthesizer), the wonderful Fernando Saunders is on bass, and Jane Scarpantoni’s cello is breathtaking. The only other musician onstage was Anohni, lead singer for Antony and the Johnsons, adding her high, eerie backing vocals to three of the songs.
All of the songs are dramatically rearranged to fit the new sound, and Lou is in especially fine voice. There’s a delicacy to the songs that feels perfect on his many ballads and completely immersive on the tracks that were originally more aggressive. The intertwining of Lou’s guitar and Jane’s cello on “Tell It to Your Heart” is sublime, the gentle but insistent drone on a ten-minute “Venus in Furs” makes clear what a lovely, emotional song was hiding beneath the Velvet Underground’s stomp and squeal. Lou’s intense guitar strumming and Anohni’s spectral singing bring “Set the Twilight Reeling” to a whole different place.
I can’t think of a better description for Animal Serenade than chamber rock. Throughout his career, if Lou needed a new genre to explore, he just invented one. It’s become one of my go-to late-night, lights low records, completely absorbing and transportive. If there's one record with the potential to move up a few spots on this list as time goes on, it's this one.
EARWORM: "Sunday Morning" - A lovely reading of the Velvet Underground and Nico album opener.
#10: I’m So Free: The 1971 RCA Demos (2022) – This one was a Record Store Day limited release this year and was my hands-down, gotta-find-it, #1 choice on the RSD list. A lot of my excitement had to do with the guitar sound. Lou was a bold, creative, uniquely gifted guitarist from the first VU record to the end of his life, but almost exclusively an electric guitarist. Even as a diehard fan, calling to mind instances of him playing acoustic guitar on a record is difficult. So when RCA announced they were releasing the audition demos for his first solo recording contract, with Lou accompanying himself with only an acoustic guitar, I had to hear them.
To say the record doesn’t disappoint is a huge understatement. I loved it on first listen. Lou plays the acoustic guitar on this amazing batch of songs, some new, some leftovers from the Velvet Underground, like one of the trippiest, out-of-left-field singer/songwriters you ever want to hear. His acoustic playing, like his songwriting, is only tangentially related to the types of folk, blues, and rock styles that inspired most of the pop stars of the era. Lou treads, as always, an utterly unique path. A few of these songs made it onto his first solo record. Several of them, like “Perfect Day,” Kill Your Sons” (about his experience receiving electroshock therapy as a young man), and “New York Telephone Conversation,” would find their way onto later albums. Lou’s tone and performances are appealingly relaxed, almost casual, with his biting sense of humor poking through here and there. The story is that RCA only released the album to extend their copyright on Lou’s early songs, but I don’t care. For me, it instantly became an important part of his catalog. A side of Lou not available on any other record.
EARWORM: The album's not available on streaming services, sadly. Another strong argument for listening to vinyl.
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I’ll wrap this up with a quick look at Lou’s last recordings. To the end, he never stopped confounding his fans’ expectations. In 2007, he released Hudson River Wind Meditations, gentle music he had composed to accompany his passion for Tai Chi. (I’m told there was a very limited vinyl release of the album and I’d really love to find one someday.) The following year he addressed the frustration he had lived with for decades over the lack of critical and commercial love for Berlin, his follow-up to the smash hit Transformer. Lou put together a big A-list band, including strings and a conductor, and performed the entirety of Berlin at St. Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. A live album and film were released to immensely positive reviews and a critical reassessment of the original album that Lou must have found very satisfying. For his last project in 2011, he collaborated with Metallica on Lulu, a dissonant spoken-word album based on a couple of obscure avant-garde German plays. In typical Lou style, it had zero commercial potential. Metallica fans hated it with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. To long-time fans like me, it was just Lou being Lou.
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