Happy 50th Anniversary to Lou Reed’s second studio album Transformer, originally released November 8, 1972.
In the summer of 1972, Lou Reed found himself two years removed from the Velvet Underground with a self-titled debut solo album that was a critical and commercial failure. The LP consisted of two new songs and eight unreleased Velvet Underground tracks. After going solo, expectations for Reed’s debut were quite high.
Despite the lack of commercial success, Reed did manage to catch the attention of one high-profile admirer: David Bowie. At the time, Bowie was in the midst of his Ziggy Stardust phase and he openly credited the Velvet Underground for inspiring his work. Take a good listen to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972)and you can hear The Velvets’ influence throughout the album. I guess you could say the group had their fingerprints on the glam rock movement. Oddly enough, the decadence, grit, and sexual fluidity of the Velvets was missing from Reed’s debut.
After many false starts, Bowie and his guitarist Mick Ronson met Reed and boldly offered to produce his next record. Reed agreed to it and created the stellar Transformer. It was a clear divide between his stint with the Velvets and his solo career. Reed steered away from the avant-garde leanings of his former band and embraced the production work and song arrangements orchestrated by Bowie and Ronson.
“Vicious,” the lead track, came about through a conversation Reed had with Andy Warhol, who he remained close with after The Velvets disbanded. In a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, Reed recalled Warhol suggesting, “’Why don’t you write a song called ‘Vicious?’’ And I said, ‘Well, Andy, what kind of vicious?’ ‘Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower.’
Just as he did with his debut LP, Reed re-worked some songs he did with the Velvet Underground that would later appear in their original form on compilations like VU and Peel Slowly and See. “Andy’s Chest” and “Satellite of Love” were uptempo songs that were slowed down considerably and were vast improvements from their predecessors.
Listen to the Album:
As with many great songs, there has always been some great mythology as to the meaning of its lyrics. “Perfect Day” was rumored to be about heroin, and that story stayed decades after the song was released. It was famously used in the 1996 movie Trainspotting during a montage featuring the heroin addict Mark Renton, played by Ewan McGregor. In a 2000 interview, Reed laughed off the notion that “Perfect Day” was about heroin. “No. You’re talking to the writer, the person who wrote it. No, that’s not true,” he explained. “I don’t object to that, particularly…whatever you think is perfect. But this guy’s vision of a perfect day was the girl, sangria in the park, and then you go home; a perfect day, real simple. I meant just what I said.”
“Perfect Day” was released as a double A-side with “Walk on the Wild Side,” which cemented Reed’s place in musical history. No song before it had touched on topics like male prostitution, sex, drugs, and the transgender community in the vivid way that Reed’s did. “Walk on the Wild Side” remains an ode to a New York that’s long gone, and when you listen to it now, you can still picture the characters in the song. Holly, Candy Darling, and Joe Campbell (“Sugar Plum Fairy”) were regulars at The Factory, Warhol’s studio. “Walk on the Wild Side” is as “New York” as a song can get.
Transformer was sort of a coming out party (no pun intended) for Reed. Tracks like “I’m So Free” and “Make Up” address sexuality in a way he hadn’t with The Velvet Underground. Reed would famously not talk about his sexuality outside of his music and not many artists at the time did back in 1972. He let the songs do the talking, as evidenced with the lyrics of “Make Up” (“Now we’re coming out, out of our closets / Out on the streets, yeah, we’re coming out”).
Initially, Transformer received mixed reviews from Rolling Stone’s Nick Tosches, but fifty years later, it was ranked #109 in the magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. If you knew nothing about Lou Reed or his music, this would be the place to start.
LISTEN: