“Anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am”: the 1975 Lou Reed album even Lou Reed couldn’t stand
You couldn’t ever trust Lou Reed to tell the verbatim truth. There was an art of deception, of ducking and diving, that he had down to an absolute tee.
As a result, there was often little way of knowing whether he was always being entirely serious or not when casting aspersions, particularly when it came to his views on other people and the exploits of his past. However, when it came to the calibre of his own work, that seemed to be fair game, and anything could come to pass.
The legacy of iconic material, such as Transformer, could never be disputed, but the issue lay more with the albums Reed released a little later down the line, when he arguably got a bit too big for his boots after years of obscurity. Take Metal Machine Music as the prime example: the 1975 album which became famous for all the wrong reasons.
If you’re a Reed mega-fan and feel guilty about hating it, then you can now rest assured that he also felt that way. The man himself was retrospectively less than impressed by his indiscernible collection of near-melodies and modulations, so much so that he rather liked to forget that it even existed.
Indeed, with four nearly 16-minute torture chambers of sound to endure, Reed later realised the extent of the excruciation he’d let people in for. “Anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am,” he once smugly snarled, at least being self-aware as much as his comments could be seen as a little self-indulgent.
Even though Metal Machine Music was nothing to be proud of, he could come away with a badge of honour. While it sold 100,000 copies in its first week, it became the most returned record in history, and for absolutely fair reasons. Due to the lukewarm reception, it only lasted on the market for three weeks, and has become an almost impossible deep cut to get your hands on nowadays.
To be fair, no one probably wants to find it for artistic reasons, either. Sure, it’s one of those albums which has gone down in so much infamy that those who haven’t heard it are enamoured by the tales of its notoriety. However, the elders who have had to suffer through it would likely want to use their wisdom to warn anyone worth their salt to stay well clear.
That might have even been a message endorsed by Reed himself, if the man were still around to hear it. In the context of everything he ever was, though, it does make you wonder if he just released the whole thing as one very deliberate, if also elaborate, piss-take. He definitely had the last laugh if so.
While the album was inspired by the experimental work of Iannis Xenakis, it seems Reed was happy to admit that he was merely playing around with the idea of ‘architectural music’ that inspired him passively all the same.
Undoubtedly, noise electronica is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, especially when you’re expecting the usual tropes of a rock legend. The fact that Reed released the soft and tender romantic odes of Coney Island Baby before the end of 1975 tells you that he knew he’d been up to no good, and that album was his attempt to build new bridges after only just burning them down.
