The Lou Reed album his label thought was the kiss of death and how it defined his career
In any description of Lou Reed’s Berlin, one word comes up basically immediately now: ‘concept’. However, back in 1973, when RCA were taking the chance on releasing the project, they were doing everything possible to keep the word far, far away.
It can’t have been easy trying to manage an artist like Reed. Verve had enough difficulty a few years prior as they tried to keep The Velvet Underground together, but then, when Reed went solo in 1970, labels tenuously fought over the man, knowing he was a revolutionary talent, but also knew he was notoriously difficult.
It was his way or the highway; for a man with vision as strong and singular as that, he’d always made it clear that the artistry would never be changed or impacted, especially not for things as ridiculous as marketing or commercial sales.
RCA took a chance on him, though, and while they were likely left worrying after his self-titled debut didn’t perform too well, Transformer came out in 1972 to save the faith. Anchored by the incredibly successful single, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, and then the now-timeless hit of ‘Perfect Day’, it was Reed at his most accessible, and therefore his commercial peak. Right when the label probably hoped he’d return with something similar, he did the exact opposite. For his next album, he went all in on two things destined to worry a label team: the first was controversy, the second was a concept.
As for the first, the follow-up record, Berlin, is explicit from start to finish, with ‘The Kids’ standing as a true horror show as the sound of children screaming and crying for their mother plays in the background. That ties into the second, as Reed presented a concept album following the story of a couple of drug addicts through their violent relationship, dealing with the topics of abuse, sex work and suicide.
It’s a horror film of a record, but the thing that scared the label most was simply the idea of a concept album. When it comes to marketing, Reed said, “That was considered the kiss of death, ‘the concept album’”. How do you sell a full package that has no key, standalone single to hook people in? How do you convince people to devote themselves to a start-to-finish story that doesn’t really work when split up into easily engaging pieces? Or in Reed’s case, how on earth do you sell people an album that is as endlessly harrowing and depressing as this?
However, Reed believed in it, he always did. “I’ve always been very in love with Berlin,” he reflected in 2007, “Berlin has been around a while, like I have, but the idea of the interconnected songs and trying to tell a little story, we tried very hard to make that work. That particular album has resonance for me.”
It seemed to remain special for him because it represented a goal he’d been wanting to hit for a while. “When writing songs, and a character appears and then disappears forever. We thought, ‘Why does he or she disappear forever? Why can’t they reappear in the next song? Or the song after?’ That was the basic idea,” he said of the process, and instantly, earlier iterations of this appear. Reed’s work has always been populated by a cast of names, with Candy and Stephanie as the two main ones that appear time and time again. He already had recurring figures, so Berlin was simply an intensified version of that.
Even with their hesitation, though, RCA put the record out. At the time, the reception ranged from impassioned hatred to impassioned love, but as if Reed suspected it all along, Berlin eventually settled into its rightful position as a masterpiece.
Fresh out of his run with the Velvet Underground, Reed overcame the sincere degree of trepidation when considering his solo career. After Berlin was released, we imagine most of it melted away. It’s another set of hyper-stylised reworking of songs in Reed’s vault and captures the dark intensity of the man who wrote them. The sex, drugs and the scummy streets that provide them with both are expertly rendered in this album.
Telling the story of a couple’s struggle with drug addiction, Reed is astute and accurate with his observations and marked himself out as one of the finest songwriters in the land by doing so.
