Lou Reed - Street Hassle (1978)

I've heard this is a great album. I've heard a lot of things.

Lou Reed is an enigma. He sucks in nearly almost every way, yet he has a career and I am buying his albums. The world is a mysterious place. And maybe, just maybe, that's why we all don't go jump off a cliff somewhere. There would be no mystery in it.

The album opens with a jumbled up mess of Reed's Velvets classic Sweet Jane juxtaposed onto something new, intersecting and overlapping incoherently like some kind of speedball-induced psychosis. And given the subject of this story, maybe that's exactly what was happening. I have no problems with that. But it's a shaky start.

The album takes a left turn after the narcotic late-night rock dirge Dirt with the 11-minute title track, and this is when I started to get it. A meandering Heroin-styled untethered exploration for the 70's coked up denizens of the underbelly of society.  Side 2 continues on the drunken, drugged up journey, with the songs lurching and staggering, sweaty and clammy as Reed himself looks on the cover. Wasted, but not elegantly.

And there you have it. You hate it, you love it. Life and Lou Reed. Both are mysteries wrapped up in riddles wrapped up in enigmas. I wouldn't recommend this album to anyone. But I'm still going to buy more of his albums.

Lou Reed - Coney Island Baby (1976)

Very much a spiritual heir to Transformer, Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby is a warmly recorded gem featuring Bob Kulick on guitar. I'm never sure about Lou Reed. Most of the time I think he is tone deaf and marvel at how such an awful, out-of-tune warble could have sustained such a storied and successful career. Then sometimes I hear it and think he is brilliant, a true maverick. He's peculiarly fascinating. And he just recorded an album with Metallica! The wife asked if he was gay. I said I didn't really know, but I was pretty sure he was in a long-term relationship with a transvestite in the 70's. Does that make him gay? I'm not so sure.