LOU REED
WILD SIDE
After Lou Reed’s Berlin concept album bombed, guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner helped him get his groove back. The result was Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, the live classic that redeemed his spirit and saved his career.
BY GARY GRAFF
THE LATE LOU Reed took his walk on the wild side in 1972. But he didn’t become an animal — a rock ’n’ roll animal, to be specific — until the following year.
Recorded on December 21, 1973, before an audience at Howard Stein’s Academy of Music in New York City, Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal was no mere stopgap or contract-fulfilling release. In its definitive performances and forceful renderings of the material, mostly from Reed’s tenure with the Velvet Underground, it had all the conceptual integrity of a studio album. It documented an artist presenting his songs in a fresh manner, using the original versions as source material upon which to build and reinterpret, in this case with the help of an enormously potent band of genuinely animalistic caliber, led by guitarists Steve “The Deacon” Hunter and Dick Wagner.
And while the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East and the Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out planted a flag for the live album as a legitimate artistic effort, Rock ’n’ Roll Animal and its Goldcertified success certainly deserves some credit for a mid-’70s spike that included breakthrough live releases for Peter Frampton, Kiss, Cheap Trick, Lynyrd Skynyrd and others.
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
Rock ’n’ Roll Animal was also something of a career saver for Reed. While his third solo album, Berlin, would eventually come to be regarded as a seminal song cycle/concept album, its unrelenting darkness did not connect with listeners at the time. His label, RCA Records, heard no potential in it — certainly not as a follow-up to the previous year’s Transformer and its Top 20 hit, “Walk on the Wild Side” — and gave the record no support despite a Rolling Stone review declaring it “The Sgt. Pepper of the Seventies.” Berlin was savaged by most critics, and even the burgeoning FM radio stations weren’t about to play its songs about heroin addiction. Released on October 5, 1973, while Reed and the
OPENING PAGE:
Reed poses for the cover of 1975’s
Lou Reed Live, which features additional songs from the show captured on Rock ’n’ Roll Animal.
and Rock ’n’ Roll Animal.
The covers for Berlin
DAVID REDFERN/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
Rock ’n’ Roll Animal band were near the end of a European tour, Berlin peaked at number 98 on the Billboard 200, some 69 points lower than Transformer.
There had even been plans to stage Berlin, initially conceived as a double album, as a musical, but those went unrealized as well. “I had my thoughts that if RCA marketed Berlin and put a single-edge razor blade in the cellophane, it would probably have done better,” cracks Steve Katz, the founding guitarist of the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose brother Dennis was managing Reed at the time. It was this connection that would lead to Katz producing Rock ’n’ Roll Animal.