The album Lou Reed “really, really, really loved” despite it being almost unlistenable
Lou Reed approached interviews the way Charles Bronson approached prisons. Desperate for a way out and with murderous intent towards those enforcing them. The famously cantankerous Velvet Underground honcho bullied journos with an almost sexual degree of relish, and for a rock hack given the unenviable task of getting him in front of a dictaphone, there were only two hopes for you. First, be anything other than a straight man. Secondly and slightly more achievably, talk to him about nothing other than guitars.
The intensely private Reed was as likely to disclose the inspirations behind his songwriting as his PIN number. So, if all you wanted to do with the Transformer was nerd out about pedals, he’d be right there with you. In fact, his fascination with what a guitar could do when pushed far beyond its capabilities gave the world his most controversial and maligned album. Or at the very least, number two behind Lulu. There is barely more to be said about 1975’s Metal Machine Music that hasn’t already been said. 100,000 copies were sold initially and the vast majority of them returned due to believing there was a catastrophic defect with the record. There was not.
The blast of cacophonous noise that begins when the needle hits vinyl and never ends due to the cheeky bastard ending the LP with a locked groove is exactly what Reed wanted the audience to hear. It’s a sound he painstakingly put together along with engineer Bob Ludwig, and it didn’t just kneecap his commercial potency but also his reputation within the music industry. After all, what major label would work with an artist who was willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making a record that most masochists can get through two minutes of before going “nah, I’ll pass ta”?
There are some who maintain that this was a willing and direct act of commercial suicide. That Reed wanted out of his contract with RCA and released MMM as a way of forcing the issue. There’s a quote going around of Reed saying, “Anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am.” This quote is almost certainly apocryphal because whenever Reed himself talks about the record, he does so with the pride of a parent talking about their favourite child. John Doran’s Quietus article about the record is explicitly about separating fiction from fact regarding the album, and while Reed can have a, shall we say, liberal attitude towards the truth in interviews, he does set the record straight on the matter.
When asked if this was a way out of the contract, Reed responds, “No, it’s not the truth. I wouldn’t put out a record I don’t like just to get out of a contract. That’s ridiculous but it is a great story. It’s almost a shame to say it’s not true. But in fact it’s not true. I made it because I liked it not to get out of a contract.”
If anything, he pins its apocalyptic reception on its promotion, saying, “The idea was not to put it out as a rock record and to let people know it was electronic and it didn’t have songs on it. It was going to be released under their Red Seal imprint as a classical record. But then they put it out as a rock and roll album, with a rock and roll sleeve.”
As for everything, though, context is key. It’s taken decades, but Metal Machine Music is finally viewed not as a commercial failure or a spiteful snipe at pop music fans but as one of the most daring and uncompromising pieces of experimental art put out by a mainstream company. To the extent that Reed formed the Metal Machine Trio and toured the record in 2008 to packed houses. Sure, Lou Reed wasn’t always a great interview, but when he told Pitchfork that this was a record he “really, really, really loved”, he meant it.
