Berlin Finally Gets Its Due

Oh how I wish I was in New York right now.
In 1973 Lou Reed stepped into a studio with producer Bob Ezrin to cut the follow up to his surprising smash album Transformer. RCA had been pleased, and perhaps stunned, enough by Transformers success to give Lou and Ezrin complete control in make the album they wanted to make. Lou Reed not content with making Transformer Two recorded a song cycle set in the divided city of Berlin chronicling the lives of a Caroline and Jim. It would take the earlier ideas of divorce and separation from Sinatra's Watertown and plunge as deep as possible into the depths of abuse, addiction and finally a strange sort of redemption.
Upon hearing part of an early mix Rolling Stone proclaimed it to be 'The Sgt.Pepper of the 70's' and a perplexed RCA gave it a royal red carpet arrival with ads and a beautiful fold out sleeve and full lyric sheet. This was beyond Rock and Roll, this was Lou Reed's Brechtian masterpiece that would shove him so far ahead that a new genre was created, 'Lou Reed music'.
The album was lambasted upon first release. Rolling Stone retracted it's initial praise in a scathing review. Lester Bangs famously called it 'The most depressing album ever made.' and it was a commercial bomb.
Swiftly though the album became something of a legend and it's influence starting reaching. David Bowie and Iggy Pop would relocate to Berlin just a few years later to record a mind bending genius set of albums including The Idiot and Low that would reshape rock as we knew it. Berlin as a divided city became a constant reference point for the punk and post-punk movement and it seemed as though Lou Reed's overly ambitious failure had had more influence than anyone could have imagined.
Then the 80's and it was gone again.
I first heard Berlin on it's first cd release in the late 80's. It was the second cd I ever bought, right behind Deborah Harry's Def Dumb and Blonde, and I got it before I even had a player. I remember very clearly taking it to a friends house, who had a player, and the first spinning of that dark and intense tale had a major effect on me.
It would slip in and out of print through the 90's until RCA finally saw fit to remaster it properly at the turn of the decade. Seemingly the story would end there as it's always been an album that divided people but Lou Reed always seemed to know what he had made was something special.
Lou Reed's Berlin lives again at St Ann's Warehouse in New York where it's being performed in it's entirety by Lou for the first time. Directed by artist Julian Schnabel and featuring film scenes projected behind the band by Lola Schnabel of the lovely and talented Emmanuelle Seigner the album is getting performed straight through followed by a short encore.
The reviews have been nothing short of ecstatic, everyone from the New York Times to Rolling Stone is pouring out praise to a piece of art that has deserved it for a very long time.
While I am not in New York to see it I have been fortunate enough to hear an audio recording of the first night and it is majestic. The band featuring Steve Hunter is playing like their lives depend on it and Lou himself seems energized by it. From the first line of 'In Berlin by the wall' to the very end of Sad Song he hits that perfect passionate monotone tone that he became so legendary for. Along with jaw dropping stabs of lead guitar it is to quote culturebot.org, 'One of the greatest performances in the history of live music.'
I hope the praise keeps coming because as legendary as he is Lou Reed the solo artist is still underrated. Dylan, Cohen, Waits....love em but ultimately keep em as I have a date with a tall strung out Germanic Queen and it's been a long time coming.

Sinatra's Watertown Finally Gets Some Due

The newest Mojo (issue 165 with The Police on the cover) has a huge article detailing Frank Sinatra's massively underrated period on Reprise records in the Sixties. While I haven't had a chance to read the article I was interested in their listing of his key tracks from that often overlooked period.
I suspected the list would have the usual suspects like IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR and SUMMER WIND but I was surprised and happy to see that Fred Dellar and Andrew Male had been savvy enough to include such treasures as THIS TOWN and A MAN ALONE'S lovely LONESOME CITIES. I was extremely happy though to see them paying tribute to the astonishing FOR A WHILE from my favorite Sinatra album, WATERTOWN.
The first album that I ever wrote about on this blog was WATERTOWN and this small mention in Mojo, where they call it "a brave, contemporary concept LP", is one of the first times that a mainstream publication has gone out of their way to praise this much maligned and misunderstood album.
I went back and re-read the piece I wrote on the album and was struck by how different it was to anything else I have written here so I thought I would reprint it for any that might be interested. I will be doing a proper look at the album eventually as I think it is one of the most overlooked in popular music. As Lou Reed is touring his very similar BERLIN record right now, the time for WATERTOWN to resurface seems right.

Here is my slightly re-edited original look at WATERTOWN for anyone interested.
...
Dust Off Those Grooves (Chapter One)

It's 1970 and Frank Sinatra has had enough. He's spent the last few years attempting to deal with the youth culture that has overtaken him and he is exhausted. The albums that he gave his all to like A MAN ALONE and the Jobim collaboration were relative commercial failures and he's watched some of the worst shit he's ever recorded find acceptance. Within a few short years he's gone from being the coolest man on the planet to appearing with The Fifth Dimension wearing love beads. He's had it and the world's had him. Retiring seems the only logical thing to do, step back and let all of this just pass him by until the world catches up again.
He has one final statement though, one final glance through that wall of isolation that he had visited time and time again. He had created the concept album when The Beatles and Pete Townshend were still getting their chins wiped by their parents. One more album pallie and let them all burn, their pinball wizards and lovely meter maids never meant anything to him. His was a world of pain, isolation and separation. He'll make an album about the new modern obsession, divorce, and if it fails then all the more fitting as he stopped caring long before.
He gets Gaudio and Holmes to write it, hell he might even make a TV show out of it and really stick it too them. He'll play a father and husband abandoned by his wife and left to take care of his sons alone. The album will trace this dissolve and it'll be a broken man he'll leave for us to find. No Ring a Ding, no Rat Pack, No more Chairman, that's all behind him and he knows it.
He steps into Columbia Studios with a sore throat from a cold and a weary heart from a cold world, and lays down 11 of the most gut wrenching powerful performances of his career, of any ones career. Take that he thinks as he leaves, the lights dimming behind him as the master tapes continue rolling.
The record fails, it fails big time, and he slips away into his memories and ours. He will make more records later, some good, some not, but he'll never make another statement like WATERTOWN. He'll never chronicle pain and what it is to be alone, really alone, again.
He closes out his career pissed and pissing it away surrounded by whatever trendy 'artist' he's grouped with but always in a separate booth, in a separate town because he never forgot that it was separation that he truly knew. It was separation that he embraced and WATERTOWN was his true last statement, his Waterloo and the last time he would raise his middle finger to a world that had forgotten just how much they needed him.
...

Dust Off Those Grooves (Chapter One)

It's 1970 and Frank Sinatra has had enough. He's spent the last few years attempting to deal with the youth culture that has overtaken him. The albums that he gave his all to like A Man Alone and the Jobim collaboration were relative commercial failures and he's watched some of the worst shit he's ever recorded find acceptance. Within a few short years he's gone from being the coolest man on the planet to appearing with The Fifth Dimension wearing love beads.
He's had it and the world's had him. Retiring seems the only logical thing to do, step back and let all of this just pass him by until the world catches up again. One final statement though, one final glance through that wall of isolation that he had visited time and time again.
He had created the concept album when The Beatles and Pete Townshend were still getting their chins wiped by their parents. One more album and let them all burn.  Their pinball wizards and lovely meter maids meant nothing to him. His was a world of pain, isolation and separation. He'll make an album about the new modern obsession, divorce, and if it fails all the more fitting as he stopped caring long before.
He gets Gaudio and Holmes to write it.  Hell he might even make a TV show out of it and really stick it too them. He'll play a father and husband abandoned by his wife Elizabeth and left to take care of his sons Michael and Peter. The album will trace this dissolve and it'll be a broken man he'll leave for us to find.
No Ring a Ding, no Rat Pack, no more Chairman, that's all behind him and he knows it. He steps into Columbia Studios with a sore throat from a cold and a weary heart from a cold world and lays down 11 of the most gut wrenching powerful performances of his career. Take that he thinks as he leaves, the lights dimming behind him as the master tapes continue rolling.
The record fails, it fails big time, and he slips away into his memories and ours. He will make more records later, some good, some not, but he'll never make another statement like Watertown. He'll never chronicle pain and what it is to be alone, really alone, again. He closes out his career pissed and pissing it away surrounded by whatever trendy 'artist' he's grouped with but always in a separate booth, in a separate town because he never forgot that it was separation that he truly knew. It was separation that he embraced and Watertown was his true last statement, his Waterloo, and the last time he would raise his middle finger to a world that had forgotten just how much they needed him.