After Lou Reed’s Berlin concept album bombed, guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner helped him get his groove back. The result was Rock ’n’ Roll Animal, the live classic that redeemed his spirit and saved his career.
BY GARY GRAFF
PLAYERS| LOU REED
THE LATE LOUReed took his walk on the wild side in 1972. But he didn’t become an animal — a rock ’n’ roll animal, to be specific — until the following year.
Recorded on December 21, 1973, before an audience at Howard Stein’s Academy of Music in New York City, Rock ‘n’ Roll Animalwas no mere stopgap or contract-fulfilling release. In its definitive performances and forceful renderings of the material, mostly from Reed’s tenure with the Velvet Underground, it had all the conceptual integrity of a studio album. It documented an artist presenting his songs in a fresh manner, using the original versions as source material upon which to build and reinterpret, in this case with the help of an enormously potent band of genuinely animalistic caliber, led by guitarists Steve “The Deacon” Hunter and Dick Wagner.
And while the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore Eastand the Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out planted a flag for the live album as a legitimate artistic effort, Rock ’n’ Roll Animaland its Goldcertified success certainly deserves some credit for a mid-’70s spike that included breakthrough live releases for Peter Frampton, Kiss, Cheap Trick, Lynyrd Skynyrd and others.
Rock ’n’ Roll Animalwas also something of a career saver for Reed. While his third solo album, Berlin, would eventually come to be regarded as a seminal song cycle/concept album, its unrelenting darkness did not connect with listeners at the time. His label, RCA Records, heard no potential in it — certainly not as a follow-up to the previous year’s Transformer and its Top 20 hit, “Walk on the Wild Side” — and gave the record no support despite a Rolling Stonereview declaring it “The Sgt. Pepperof the Seventies.” Berlinwas savaged by most critics, and even the burgeoning FM radio stations weren’t about to play its songs about heroin addiction. Released on October 5, 1973, while Reed and the Rock ’n’ Roll Animalband were near the end of a European tour, Berlinpeaked at number 98 on the Billboard200, some 69 points lower than Transformer.
There had even been plans to stage Berlin, initially conceived as a double album, as a musical, b
