The 1973 album Lou Reed worried would kill his career: “If only they knew”
Anyone who chose to associate themselves with Lou Reed at the start of his solo career ought to have known what they were getting themselves in for, and anyone who came out surprised was simply not prepared.
He’d been known to take risks in his work as the frontman and main creative force in The Velvet Underground, and always wanted to have an experimental flair to his work, not to mention his proclivity for writing lyrics about taboo and controversial subject matter.
Reed’s songs were frequently filled with overt references to drug use, themes of sexual promiscuity and non-conforming gender identities, and a generally violent undertone that was exaggerated by the visceral way in which the band behind him performed them.
However, once he entered his post-Velvets career, rather than seeing an album like Transformer as a softening of his approach and him attempting to reshape his image into something more palatable and ‘mature’, people ought to have been wise enough to realise that this was, in fact, the outlier, and that it would only make his urge to experiment even stronger.
After the release of this classic album in late 1972, Reed was eager to move on to something more expansive. Transformer hadn’t been without his aforementioned taboo-breaking lyricism and transgressive nature, but it was certainly delivered in a more musically contemporary style that made it an instant hit. His 1973 follow-up, Berlin, couldn’t have been seen as more of a polar opposite to this.
Alongside producer Bob Ezrin, Reed decided that he wanted to make a concept album that followed the lives of a married couple slowly descending into their own personal hell, losing everything of worth to them in the process. It wasn’t designed to be a pleasant listening experience and was meant to be challenging, but off the back of such a career high, it felt like the absolute opposite of what an artist ought to be doing to capitalise on their success.
Reed knew in advance that this was perhaps going to be a gigantic misfire as far as his commercial prospects were concerned, but chose to shrug it off in typical self-deprecating fashion. “That was the bad move,” he later reflected on the idea behind the album.
“That’s one of those career-ending moments. They said, ‘You want to do what?’”
It may have been a grand concept akin to him choosing to make his own subversive rock opera, but critics weren’t having any of it at the time, almost universally complaining that the album was bleak beyond belief and virtually unlistenable. What’s more, the recent dissolution of Reed’s own marriage to Bettye Kronstad appeared to many onlookers as being a massive inspiration for the album, and while Reed didn’t exactly deny that being the case, he chose to laugh off all speculation with his blackened sense of candour.
“Berlin was real close to home,” he remarked. “People would say, ‘Lou, is that autobiographical?’ Jesus. Autobiographical? If only they knew!” It might be uncomfortable and incredibly morose, but look, it’s Lou Reed – what exactly were people expecting?
