🌊 SURF 'N TURF 🏝️ -THE ISLAND LIFE- https://image.nostr.build/de50ac72df35d60a6e834e9bb54b52db39a9044c7b814edc89e4f5558dd6f367.jpg ON THIS DATE (52 YEARS AGO) November 8, 1972 - Lou Reed: Transformer is released. https://youtu.be/oG6fayQBm9w Transformer is the second solo album by Lou Reed, released on November 8, 1972. It reached #29 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart. The single, "Walk On The Wild Side" reached #16 on the Billboard Hot 100. Unlike its predecessor, Lou Reed, eight songs of which were written during his Velvet Underground days, Transformer contains mainly new material. However, there are four songs that date from his VU days: "Andy's Chest" and "Satellite of Love" (Velvet Underground demos of which surfaced in 1985 and 1995, respectively), "Goodnight Ladies" had been played by the Velvets live in 1970, and "New York Telephone Conversation" had been played in rehearsals during the band's summer 1970 residency at Max's Kansas City. Transformer was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, both of whom had been strongly influenced by Reed's work with the Velvet Underground. Bowie had obliquely referenced the Velvet Underground in the cover notes for his album Hunky Dory and regularly performed both "White Light/White Heat" and "Waiting for the Man" in concerts and on the BBC during 1971–1973. Mick Ronson who was at the time the lead guitarist with Bowie's band, The Spiders from Mars, played a major role in the recording of the album, serving as the co-producer and primary session musician (contributing guitar, piano, recorder and backing vocals) and arranger, notably the lush string arrangement for "Perfect Day". Reed lauded Ronson's contribution in the Transformer episode of the documentary series Classic Albums, praising the beauty of his work and fading out the vocal to highlight the strings. The songs on the LP are now among Reed's best-known works, including "Walk on the Wild Side", "Perfect Day" and "Satellite of Love", and the album's commercial success elevated him from cult status to become an international star. __________ ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW A real cockteaser, this album. That great cover: Lou and those burned-out eyes staring out in grim black and white beneath a haze of gold spray paint, and on the back, ace berdache Ernie Thormahlen posing in archetypal butch, complete with cartoon erectile bulge, short hair, motorcycle cap, and pack of Luckies up his T-shirt sleeve, and then again resplendent in high heels, panty hose, rouge, mascara, and long ebony locks; the title with all its connotations of finality and electro-magnetic perversity. Your preternatural instincts tell you it's all there, but all you're given is glint, flash and frottage. Lou Reed is probably a genius. During his days as singer/songwriter/ guitarist with the Velvet Underground, he was responsible for some of the most amazing stuff ever to be etched in vinyl; all those great, grinding, abrasive songs about ambivalence, bonecrushers, Asthmador, toxic psychosis and getting dicked, stuff like "Venus in Furs," "Heroin," "Lady Godiva's Operation," "Sister Ray," "White Light/White Heat," and those wonderful cottonmouth lullabies like "Candy Says" and "Pale Blue Eyes." His first solo album, Lou Reed, was a bit of a disappointment in light of his work with the Velvets. Reed himself was somewhat dissatisfied with it. Between that album and this one came the ascendancy of David Bowie, a man who had been more peripherally influenced by the cinematic lyrics and sexual warpage of the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed, in turn, was drawn to Bowie's music. Bowie included Velvet tunes such as "Waiting for the Man" and "White Light/White Heat" in his stage repertoire; Reed, last summer, made his first English appearance with Bowie. Now, on Transformer, Bowie is Reed's producer. David Bowie's show biz pansexuality has been more than a minor catalyst in Lou Reed's emergence from the closet here. Sure, homosexuality was always an inherent aspect of the Velvet Underground's ominous and smutsome music, but it was always a pushy, amoral and aggressive kind of sexuality. God knows rock & roll could use, along with a few other things, some good faggot energy, but, with some notable exceptions, the sexuality that Reed profiles on Transformer is timid and flaccid. "Make Up," a tune about putting on make-up and coming "out of the closets/out on the street," is as corny and innocuous as "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story. There's no energy, no assertion. It isn't decadent, it isn't perverse, it isn't rock & roll, it's just a stereotypical image of the faggot-as-sissy traipsing around and lisping about effeminacy. "Goodnight Ladies" is another cliche about the lonely Saturday nights, the perfumed decadence and the wistful sipping of mixed drinks at closing time. "New York Telephone Conversation" is a cutesy poke at New York pop-sphere gossip and small talk, as if anyone possibly gave two shits about it in the first place. Perhaps, the worst of the batch, "Perfect Day" is a soft lilter about spending a wonderful day drinking Sangria in the park with his girlfriend, about how it made him feel so normal, so good. Wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful. And then there's the good stuff. Real good stuff. "Vicious" is almost abrasive enough and the lyrics are great: "Vicious/You want me to hit you with a stick/When I watch you come/Baby, I just wanna run far away/When I see you walkin' down the street/I step on your hands and I mangle your feet/Oh, baby, you're so vicious/Why don't you swallow razor blades/Do you think I'm some kinda gay blade?" It's the best song he's done since the days of the Velvet Underground, the kind of song he can do best (his voice has practically no range). "Walk on the Wild Side" is another winner, a laid-back, seedy pullulator in the tradition of "Pale Blue Eyes," the song is about various New York notables and their ramiform homo adventures, punctuated eerily by the phrases "walk on the wild side" and "and the colored girls go 'toot-ta-doo, toot-ta-doo.'" Great images of hustling, defensive blowjobs and someone shaving his legs while hitchhiking 1500 miles from Miami to New York that fade into a baritone sax coda. "Hangin' 'Round" and "Satellite of Love" are the two remaining quality cuts, songs where the sexuality is protopathic rather than superficial. Reed himself says he thinks the album's great. I don't think it's nearly as good as he's capable of doing. He seems to have the abilities to come up with some really dangerous, powerful music, stuff that people like Jagger and Bowie have only rubbed knees with. He should forget this artsy-fartsy kind of homo stuff and just go in there with a bad hangover and start blaring out his visions of lunar assfuck. That'd be really nice. ~ Nick Tosches (January 4, 1973) TRACKS: All songs written by Lou Reed. Side one "Vicious" – 2:58 "Andy's Chest" – 3:20 "Perfect Day" – 3:46 "Hangin' 'Round" – 3:35 "Walk on the Wild Side" – 4:15 Side two "Make Up" – 3:00 "Satellite of Love" – 3:42 "Wagon Wheel" – 3:19 "New York Telephone Conversation" – 1:33 "I'm So Free" – 3:09 "Goodnight Ladies" – 4:31 Credits Goes to the respective Author ✍️/ Photographer📸 🐇 🕳️ #Bitcoin #Satoshis #Freedom #Apocalypse #Music #Movies #Philosophy #Literature