(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 16 September 2025 22:00, UK
Live music has a unique power and atmosphere that, try as the music industry might, can never be recaptured within a recording. Still, if you missed out on a show – either because you weren’t born at that time, or you were simply too stingy to fork out for a ticket – live albums have become an incredible resource for looking back at the golden age of artists like Lou Reed.
Going right back to his Velvet Underground heyday back in the 1960s, Reed was routinely noted for his incredible, subversive, and often confrontational live shows. In one of the music industry’s greatest tragedies, though, The Velvet Underground went woefully underappreciated in their time, and any live shows or live albums the band put out during their relatively short tenure went largely unnoticed.
In fact, it was only during the following decade that The Velvets earned the cult reputation that made Reed an indisputable king of the underground and alternative. Part of that blossoming reputation came from the outspoken adoration of folks like David Bowie, who used The Velvet Underground as a basis for his earth-shattering output during the early 1970s, in addition to the explosion of punk rock, which owed a lot to the subversive power of the New York outfit. Either way, it was too little too late as far as The Velvet Underground were concerned.
Reed had already immersed himself in a solo career which took his songwriting in entirely new directions, moving on from the comparatively lofi, primitive output of The Velvets, and carving out a space for himself among the greatest solo performers of the time in the process. Even still, the power of the material he wrote alongside John Cale during those early years never really subsided, particularly in the hearts of Reed’s cult following.
Seemingly, Reed was first inspired to include some of his old compositions in his solo setlists by the little-known Michigan outfit, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. “Well, I had a lot of time to think after the Velvet Underground broke up and here were these songs of mine,” he told Classic Rock in 2004. “And then I heard Mitch Ryder’s Detroit Wheels, produced by Bob ‘Wonderboy’ Ezrin, doing ‘Rock And Roll’ and I said, ‘Aha, that’s fun.’”
That initial inspiration led Reed to rediscover his old work, and adapt it to fit his own solo sound, with the addition of a few helping hands. “So Ezrin got Alice Cooper’s band for me. I can’t play that way, I don’t wanna play that way, but they were as good at ‘that way’ as anybody else around. So I said, ‘Okay, here’s the material.’”
He explained, “They didn’t know it from the Velvet Underground, they’d never heard it, so I just taught them the whole thing.”
Eventually, this unexpected collaboration led to the creation of a legendary live album, Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal. “Now we’ll try it again, see what happens five years later. Duh. Let’s see if they [the record-buying public] get it this time around. Change the presentation,” Reed recalled of the album’s motives.
“I mean, it is not something that I would want to keep doing, but it was probably one of the greatest live records ever made,” he boldly declared. “So there you have it.” You could call Lou Reed a lot of things, but modest isn’t one of them.
Still, he is not far off in his claim that his 1974 record is one of the greatest live albums ever recorded. Not only did the album witness the kind of commercial success that was never afforded to The Velvet Underground, but it also perfectly captured the trailblazing spirit and enduring appeal of Reed’s early material, albeit rendered in his distinctive solo style.
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