“I’ve been working on doing a sequel forever”: The album Lou Reed believed was impossible to recreate
When you look back at his whole career, the decision to release an album as divisive and uncommercial as Metal Machine Music is an incredibly Lou Reed move. Never one to buckle to the pressure of giving all of his records a sense of mass appeal, Reed was far more concerned with allowing himself the capacity to fully express himself artistically. While albums like Transformer were full of hits such as ‘Perfect Day’ and ‘Satellite of Love’, there was always the possibility that he’d ditch that on a future project in order to pursue whatever the hell he wanted.
It takes a lot of bravery to be able to commit to making something that might alienate fans and have you considered as the pretentious sort for pursuing an inner desire, and while some might consider Metal Machine Music to be career suicide, the reality is that Reed didn’t care about winding people up and simply wanted to release a harsh noise album that shuns all sense of conventional melody, structure, and the songwriting chops that he had displayed on all of his previous records.
If releasing Metal Machine Music in 1975 was on brand for Reed, then peak Reed would be the fact that he spent years attempting to make a sequel to the album, and while it never actually came to fruition as such, parts of his attempt were repurposed and incorporated into a song called ‘Fire Music’, which featured on his 2003 album The Raven.
A dissonant and abrasive sound collage that immediately disconcerts the listener with its piercing noise and clattering metallic sounds, ‘Fire Music’ would not have been out of place on the original Metal Machine Music, and instead found a home on the second half of a concept album that repurposes the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe.
Reed has always talked up his own brilliance when it comes to defending Metal Machine Music, and even he was acutely aware of how difficult it was to follow up an album so ambitious and challenging. Despite having been approached by Walter Krieger and Rheinhold Friedl to have a live version of the album performed by an 11-piece ensemble, he initially shut the idea down, saying that it would be “impossible”.
“I’ve been working on a sequel for it forever,” Reed explained to Classic Rock in a 2004 interview. “I couldn’t imagine anyone possibly being able to play it live.” Despite his protestations about the reimagining of his most polarising album, he would soon realise that the Zeitkrater ensemble’s interpretation of the record was more true to the source material than he could possibly have imagined.
“They sent me an example of it and it was fantastic,” he enthused. “They had the melodies and the harmonics, everything in it. I was astonished by it. So I said okay, and it was performed in Berlin at the Opera Halle and I performed in the third part of it.”
While it might not be to everyone’s tastes, and with understandable reason, Metal Machine Music is still one of Lou Reed’s most daring statements in a career of defying musical norms and persistently chasing true artistic freedom. With ‘Fire Music’ being the closest thing ever seen to be a true sequel, this chaotic and cumbersome album released at the apex of his career still stands alone untouched as a standalone moment of inspired madness from one of music’s greatest mavericks.
