Transformer

by

Lou Reed

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Lou Reed staring from the cover of this album like Frankenstein in mascara gives us a feeling we are going to be in for a rough ride of the heavy metal kind. Nothing could be further from the truth. The album is probably most famous for the seventies hit "Walk on the Wild Side". However most of the album is unlike that classic rock song. The songs seem like somewhat sweet ballads that lull us almost into complacency until they slap us in the face. One of the great things about this album is how the music is so sweet and somewhat like show tunes and the lyrics are so subtly deviant and oh so clever.

Take for example the song vicious. These days a song called "vicious" would have speed metal guitars. But that would be much too heavy handed for Lou Reed.

Here are a few selected lines from that song.

"You hit me with a flower

You do it every hour

Ohh, baby you're so vicious"

But Lou Reed does not stop there as he brings up the lyric a notch or two a few lines later.

"Hey, why don't you swallow razor blades

You must think I'm some kinda gay blade

But baby, you're so vicious"

In the next song "Andy's Chest" (most likely referring to the scars Warhol received after the attempt on his life) Reed again accompanies his slightly twisted lyrics with sweetly sounding music.

The song begins just like a love song with the line

"If I could be anything in the world that flew"

But is followed by a line that leads us into a type of horror movie

"I would be a bat and come swooping after you"

One of my favorite songs is Perfect Day. And it is a love song (if a some what twisted one) with a swelling chorus

"Oh it's such a perfect day,

I'm glad I spent it with you.

Oh such a perfect day,

You just keep me hanging on,

You just keep me hanging on."

On the surface it seems so wholesome but the perfect day includes drinking sangria in the park as well as the wonderfully twisted line

"You made me forget myself.

I thought I was someone else,

Someone good."

It is an incredible album well worth owning and savoring.

Is that guitar lick in "Vicious" just a bit familiar? I think Boston might have something to confess. Right, well, anyway. This album is nowhere close to the level of genius Reed accomplished when he was with the Velvets. This is the one that made him the second-in-command of the Glam Movement back in the day.

"Perfect Day", the soft ballad of self-loathing and "Walk on the Wild Side", a motown serenade to Warhol's Menagerie are the songs you know. But the ones that really make me listen to this album over and over are the rocking, proto-straight edge "Hangin' 'Round" where wise old grampa Reed looks down and mocks the people who'd have felt right at home in Sister Ray's apartment, and the yearning, spaced-out "Satellite of Love". "I'm So Free" sounds like it means the title sentiment far more sincerely than the VU track "I'm Set Free", even if it does go on a little bit too long. "Make Up" is a pretty boring cookie tossed to the glam kids and really grates on one's nerves, as does the weightless "NY Telephone Conversation". The rest of the tracks really stand out in no way.

Basically, "Transformer" is a plain-old pop record, with the 'hits-and-filler' formula that that implies. But the fact that it remains listenable and even, at times, brilliant, thirty years later, is only a testament to the genius of the men (Reed and producers David Bowie and Mick Ronson) who made it.