1972 @ 50: TRANSFORMER: LOU REED

Vicious was suggested by Andy Warhol who, when asked by Reed what he meant, replied: "You know, vicious. I hit you with a flower." That gave Reed his opening lines and one of the funniest and most compelling rock songs he would write and perform. A Velvets style chord riff jumps down and up and down like a restless cat as Mick Ronson delivers screeching lead bursts on his heavily distorted Les Paul. Reed digs into someone who thinks themself hot and tough and urban, all attitude and surface tension but not a patch on the hustlers and trans folk of a later track. The fun of this one is a smirk along with Lou's put down. If you've ever seen an awkward or outright confrontational interview with Reed this song might remind you of it.

Andy's Chest rolls out gently like it's being made up on the spot. "If I could be anything in this world that flew, I would be a bat and come swooping after you." It's like a song for kids but by The Velvet Underground. A light electric guitar and bass plod along below. When the second verse starts the rest of the band come in and it reminds me of nothing so much as the backing track of almost anything from The Man Who Sold the World. Well, the band is almost the same and this is the point at which I need to introduce the producers of this record: David Bowie and Mick Ronson. Bowie was already an admirer of Reed, going back to the Velvets days and Mick had become Bowie's indispensable collaborator, shining through on a heavily individual electric guitar tone, courtesy his venerable Les Paul Custom, various distortion pedals and usually a big Marshall amp. Not only does the band sound like Bowie's, as soon as the baaaaaa baaaaaa ba ba ba ba ba baaaaa backing vocals come in, the sense that Reed is benefitting from the deluxe crest of session players and if there was anything you already liked about Bowie you will like about this record.

Perfect Day.An expanse of piano chords in a minor key but so expansive that it sounds warm rather than sad. A list of pain-killing activities of a loving couple are recounted from a life that sounds comfortable. The chorus swings into the major and everything just gets better. The phrase "you keep me hanging on" is not the complaint from the Motown song but a note of deep gratitude. Why? The second verse, sung in a more choked voice, says what Reed really means when the key line appears: " You made me forget myself. I thought I was someone else, someone good." He has been playing a fantasy to himself. All the Hallmark movie tones, the lingering phrasing that seems to taste the words as though they were the experiences themselves, are just masking the person he knows he is. After a gentle afternoon shower of instrumental drama we close on a coda, all but whispered and in the major: "you're going to reap just what you sow." It repeats until the soft conclusion shuts it down on a lonely figure who spent every last atom of good he ever had. This song is among those that get rolled out when an emotional occasion beckons, as wistfully joyous. I've played it at a wedding for the groom to sing and the guests around us joined in for the chorus. I kept my expression blank. (What's next, Love Will Tear Us Apart?) This remains one of Reed's finest moments where he wasn't shy of creating sincere beauty, even to the point of playing down its thorns.

Hangin' 'Round is a boogie with a glam rock mix of blues accents and 6th chord grind as Reed introduces a list of eccentric socialites whose quirks both amuse and bore Reed. Are they really still hanging around doing all those things? 

Walk on the Wild Side starts and maintains a gentle shiuffle, Bowie style 12 string rhythmic strumming as the signature twin basses play the long looping hook. Reed is almost talking as he recounts the tales of local characters who transformed themselves in personal metamorphoses from their unsympathetic beginnings to a New York demi monde that welcomed them. These modern folk figures, all based on people Reed knew well from the scene around Andy Warhol are not just survivors but stars; they have come through ordeal and emerged in triumph. Reed sings quietly from the sidelines. The freaked out hedonism of Sister Ray and nightmarish world of Lady Godiva's Operation are distant recollections. Their best-revenge good living is celebrated here in one of Reed's most enduring statements. And, lest we forget, it's a ton of fun.

Make Up is a Velvets-reminiscent second person address with an odd mix of strummy electric guitar and tuba. Reed's portraying a crossdresser in matter of fact terms that might have felt adolescently provocative at the time but for the defiant chant of, "we're coming out."

Satellite of Love starts all at once, a piano-led ballad observes a sex magnet who gets around and just keeps going. Reed confessed this song to be about his own jealousy, watching from afar a figure whose power he could not claim and get away with it. If anything was Bowie-ish before this track this arrangement wipes the floor. The falsetto bom bom boms in the chorus and then the mighty wolf howl in the coda bring this close to being a Bowie song that Reed was guesting on.

Wagon Wheel starts with more of the glam rock but comes to a sudden stop so Lou can kneel in an empty church and confess to a painted wooden Jesus. Back on the wagon we keep up with the rockiness. Lou is zonked or just high on an occasion but he seems on the verge of collapse. But danger is just part of it all. He pleads for a hand to stop him rolling over and going before he's ready.

New York Telephone Conversation is a 2/4 piano vamp with electric bass. Gossip, night life, social life, what to wear and who to care? Bowie descants Reeds almost spoken vocal, sometimes in perfect pitch but when necessary more dissonant, whispering like wasps for the lines about scuttlebutt. It's zingy but it's fun.

I'm So Free is bright rock and roll with percussive backing vocals. The narrator is skipping along the pavement carefree, drugfree, responsibility-free and everything he's celebrating starts to sound like he got there through helping hands less sympathetic than the ones in Wagon Wheel but from richer bodies. Is he a prodigal hippy back in the fold? A reformed junkie? Wherever he's been all he seems to have learned is not to go there again but nothing of why or how he got there in the first place. It's not exactly denial but the zinger is that he will probably never live to regret the strain he gave to others. Mick Ronson's decidedly sour lead bends in the joyous coda provide a kind of witness to its shallow triumph.

Goodnight Ladies. Another tuba bomping on with a slow 2/4 from the days of jazz in the Big Easy. When we hit the verse a toodleydoo clarinet rises behind him like a last call at a bar. Soon enough we have a trumpet wailing along. It's the kind of lament of loneliness belied by the philosophical acceptance of the tone and the sweet beauty of the music that is made to be played live in bars filled with smoke and shots of rye. If we're paying attention as we smirk at the tv dinners or appointment with the late night news we might catch the quote from made Ophelia in Hamlet as she bids adieu to the court and makes her way to her suicide in the river. See ya.

By the time I heard this I was much more familiar with Bowie who seemed to be both historical and present. I knew he'd produced it and that it had come out the same year as Ziggy Stardust. Those facts were unremarkable when hearing the arrangements here but the portraits of the human marginalia here feel more intimate and lived than anything about moving like tigers on Vaseline. The thing that struck me first when I played it all the way through the first time was how much older Reed seemed than Bowie. 

There were only five years (!) between them but Reed's experience weighed so much more heavily on his invention than Bowie's. Unlike the attempts at conventional and then whacky character-based pop that led to the 1967 debut under the Bowie name, Reed had already lived the material with his tribe that had informed the first Velvet Underground record and when the noise breaks out in Black Angel's Death Song and European Son they are already saying no to the honest world. When Transformer came along to be recorded Bowie bestowed Reed's archness and daggers with tinsel and grease, offering a blanket of brightest pop music to throw over the darkest of Reed's observations and the corrosion of his humour.

This was Lour Reed's second solo album. The first is self-titled. It's ok. There are some great songs like Ocean but there's a problem. It's been arranged and produced by thought trains that led to the singer songwriter end of the top forty, the Jackson Browns or Albert Hammonds. Whether it's a Stonesy groove (Walk it and Talk it even borrows and mortgages Keith Richards' riff from Brown Sugar). That was the day but this sounds less like its time that that of musicians who'd earned that kind of identikit rock to play for the balance of their careers. Bowie added fun so if the tone was camp it would have extra mince or if cinematic and tragic it could swell into a landscape of sound to make the hardest swoon. Bowie read Reed in a way that bypassed a hipster knowledge of the charts and what the adult oriented radio was playing and played the record right into where the kids lived.

From that experience, Reed never turned back. He'd already done much to break the mould of what rock bands should sound like and that first disc slotted him right back into the machine. You might have noticed the debut and nodded but you could love this album the way you loved White Light/White Heat and the teens who liked the snappy choruses and singalongs could love it, too. And it was still Lou Reed, the same Lou Reed who subverted the sombreness of Lady Godiva's Operation with intervening anti-pop interjections or took a side of an LP to describe a debauched party, but also a Lou Reed who stood up from the Rolling Stone photo shoot as a has been on page 20 and walked into the kind of stardom he could only fantasise about back in the bad days.

Transformer doesn't just describe the characters in these songs, it is a fanfare announcing a new career which Reed maintained credibly to the last. What are friends for, eh?

1972@50: DAVID BOWIE - THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS

The procession arrives slowly, crisp footfalls on the snare drum and, as it gets closer, the kick playing a pulse between it and the snare. When it reaches us, a huge, bright acoustic chord rings across all six strings as Bowie enters to tell his tale. The news is out: Earth has five years of life left before its destruction from an unidentified force. Chaos fuels desperation in the city and a groundswell of violence begins to simmer as the narrator falls in love at first sight with someone he sees in an ice cream parlour. He declares his love as the chorus follows the same '50s progression, bursting into life with a call and response between backing vocals and Bowie's impassioned lead. A bolt of sci-fi horror has become a teen anthem and, for a moment at least, things seem beautiful again. Well, they would if we weren't being continually reminded by droning voices that we're on a clock. The strings light up like fireworks and the whole city is singing it until they can no longer whereby the drums softly pull their retreat.

Soul Love begins as a more sprightly acoustic number with a vaguely latin beat. Until you read the lyric it sounds like an innocuous filler there to put the word love into an LP side. But it does go to strange places. A mother grieves over her son the soldier, the intensity of young love to the complicated love that religion preaches without always practicing. And the chorus, a tugging electric barre chord fest and higher vocal, sings of love as a mass of contradictions. It's bizarre until you consider that it's the observations of a starman, Ziggy, who understands romantic love and a kind of universal variant but understands the limits. Love is not loving the same way that a painting of a pipe is not, itself, a pipe. These are the observations of a stranger noting what the doomed earthlings might only know as mundane. The song fades on a lazy swinging playthough of the verse as instrumental.

Moonage Daydream bashes to life as a pair of industrial strength power chords. "I'm an alligator," Bowie wails and keeps up the imagery of dreams and fantasies as the tone changes from the love of the last track to big grinding sex. A near contemporary review I remember from the late '70s looked back to this song as being cobbled by a bag of cliches from the bubblegum sci-fi tradition: space face, 'lectric eye, ray gun etc. But what Bowie is doing here has much more to do with Ziggy coping with sex. And not just sex, but big, explosive carnality that might as easily eviscerate as transport its players to ecstasy. Two verses and many choruses take us there, at least to watch and listen as Mick Ronson's screaming solo soars and his orchestral arrangements spread out in glittering splendour. The song was good enough to serve as a capsule for Bowie's decades of fame and invention in one of the most powerful documents of his life. Not bad for cheesy imagery.

The gentle strum and airy vocal of Starman takes wing with drums, close voice and arresting chord progression, going from shared teenaged intrigue to a soaring rocket of a chorus in which Bowie leaps an octave between the syllables star and man. The guitar riff that leads from the chorus is like a fanfare of joy. Ziggy has come down and only the kids know about it, keeping their treasurable knowledge to themselves as they end on the same fanfare as before but now it's sung across the teens of the world as they join the party.

It Ain't Easy was taken from the bin of Hunky Dory but you wouldn't know it. From the strident, protest march, strum of the acoustic and harpsichord and the bluesy vocal that give way to the giant chorus this piece is made of a lot of work. It's a cover, so while it might feel like a good side closer musically, its lyric has no purpose built through line. Then again, as a tale of grinding work to get to the top of the fame mountain it fits fine and works in the sequence. It's the end of side one and Ziggy is a real rock star glorying in his celebrity but not without a knowing wince of the temptations of corruption.

Flip to the old side two and we finally get to see Ziggy on stage. A gentle lilting piano figure gives way to a sweeping chord like a parting theatre curtain. It's being told in the third person. It's being told by a fan. Ziggy transfixes his small first audience into a collective swoon with songs of darkness and disgrace and dismay and disgrace again. There is a rushing climax before the final chorus where Bowie swoops down through a falsetto arc and sings: "how I sighed when they asked if I knew his name." Like other songs on this set, this one is repurposed from a grab bag of songs either unrecorded or unreleased (at least under his own name). Lady Stardust originally bore the title He was Alright (for Marc) and was Bowie's hymn to the pioneering star. Adding "lady" to the title and the character was Bowie's cheek but it is also central to the self-othering of the Ziggy persona. Is he a she a he or what? Do we care now? It's better that we don't care and instead celebrate the range and diversity. But fifty years ago under the overcast sky of the high street the ambiguity bore real power, power to disgust, certainly, to a culture that had turned fab pop into cock rock, but also power to defy every newsreader, columnist, mum, dad, and steel capped bovver boy outside the glittering walls of the venue. Once inside, the great ugly shrivels to invisibility.

Star begins with growling power chords and percussive piano that's less trad rock than Velvet Undergbround. It sounds like one of the Spiders rather than Ziggy as he lists earthly friends and their fates variously as joining the army, starving at home (as an artist, a junkie, both?), turning the the world or going into politics. But the narrator of the song knows that he wants to become a rock star. He could make a transformation or play a wild mutation, could do with the money and everything else a teenager in the '70s might dream is an achievable end. The urgent music of the stripped back rock band is cleanly lined and solid before the wistful finale where a big slide guitar figure comes back down on him. It might be the the bummer of reality or how seriously he's taking it as he ends with two bluesy repeats of the words "rock and roll star" and then as the post song fade he speaks: "just watch me now." At the end of an extremely busy '60s and the beginning of the stadium rock world of the '70s, the dream would have felt gigantic.

A fuel injected version of the Eddie Cochrane riff (bending from the fret below for one and half bars followed by two lashing chords, repeat). Things are getting fast. The band is playing and touring and reaping the wild booty o' the road. The stage whisper chorus is comes in close after the echoing tin of the verses and urges the band to hang on to themselves despite the sensual blitzkreig charging at them. This was another song Bowie wrote before the Ziggy project. Google Arnold Corns (there's stuff on YouTube, as well). The guitar figure's insistence creates drama from contemporary listeners who were also hearing the retooling of classic rock by glammers like Marc Bolan or The Sweet. It also unwittingly presages the barnstorming style of the punks four or so years later.

And then after the rise comes the fall. Ziggy Stardust begins with a fanfare figure played by Mick Ronson on his overdriven Gibson as it falls from a blod G chord to a trill on D and a loping downward motion back to G. It stops all the urgency of the last two tracks as Bowie takes the mic for the story of the star. "Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly and the Spiders from Mars...." After all that jamming he was the one bagging all the attention, the press, the groupies, the eyes and ears of the planet. Everyone else just got jealous. The grandeur is cut by a slashing descent as the others plot and grumble. Ziggy plays for time and jibes, knowing he's the star. But in the second darker passage it says "when the kids had killed the man they had to break up the band" while the chord descent thunders. Are the kids the rest of the band or the fans? To my mind the mass adoration kills the star's uniqueness, his glamour and mystique, so that he just becomes another strumming junkie sold on the packaging of pimple cream. The killing is told in the sour section of the song and always sounds dark and severe. We go out on the fanfare again, at least there was that, before it ends with an aching repeat of the first line: "Ziggy plaaaaaayed guitar." Whatever was great about it has gone.

After the elegy, if we are still following the story, the next one wrenches us from our silence with the same kind of rock as the early songs on this side except that now it's bigger, much bigger, stadium sized. Life as a superstar is a blur of the big three which are coming in floods (in more ways than one). "Hey man..." the nagging vocal won't leave him alone as the big guitar riff goes from A to a very cool F which is never where you expect before opening wide on a classic bluesrock chorus "don't lean on me, man..." Bowie's own quote about Suffragette City has to do with the opening apocalyptic prediction, the kids are post rock and roll and go on the rampage for everything they want. To me, it's the aftermath of the post-glamour star touring city after city, getting zonked on anything on offer, playing again, drowning in sex and attention, day after day after day, like the closing minutes of the song as the A-F progression goes on and on, joined by an insistent sax riff, comes to a false ending before gearing up again and rushing to big slipped stop with one last screech: "suffragette!"

The silence hasn't quite set in before the gentle strumming of Rock and Roll Suicide begins. "Time takes a cigarette. Puts it in your mouth." Bowie's voice has aged the way anyone does when they've lived a whole life in a year. As the song builds and Ziggy's thousand kilometre stare burns holes in the hotel wall, a jangling arpeggio on a clean guitar joined by a sax, the urgency of the pathos takes solid form until he can't even stand the thought of daylight (those lines about the day breaking and hurrying home always made me think of a movie vampire). As we build and rise the narrator who has been describing Ziggy's fragility starts talking straight to him, screaming for him to stand, hold his hands, and walk because he's (and a dark chorus appears behind him for it) he's won-der-ful. A string section we've hardly noticed appearing swells with the pleading voice until, after a thunderous climax, it has the last word in a quiet and short major chord. Has Ziggy made it? The brevity and suddenness of that last sound might mean either. Don't know? Well, you'll just have to go back to the start and listen to all of it again.

Which is what I did. August holidays 1977, hogging Dad's recliner in the family room, playing that tape over and over again. Sometimes I played along, with the nylon string piece of junk my sister had offloaded on to me when she got a better one, and learned the easier songs but mostly I just stretched back and took it in. Between about six of us at school we had the major records by Bowie and completed the list with some home taping. Ziggy was an oldie by this time, Bowie was already on to Station to Station and about to get weirder still. I didn't know much about that, yet, and in the meantime there was this mix of familiar, even homely, rock music and ideas and characters that felt yummy and dangerous.

From the grime and dust of the city streets of Five Years to the frail vampire of Suicide I followed Ziggy the Starman down to an earth that swallowed him up like dessert ... then crapped him out. The dread and the wonder weave an intriguing picture: rock stars get everything their fans want for themselves, the sex and the drugs and the rock and the roll. In the tropical winter of 1977, with punk already making it seem easier, anyone of us could get there. Bowie even looked punky on the cover when I finally got the LP; not bin bag and safety pins punky but of his own tribe and ready for whatever he could get.

Would there have been a punk rock without Ziggy Stardust? I think so. So much of it had to do with what happened when the boil of Britain's grinding fortunes in the '70s was popped and the rockstar dream looked fake. But I can say that the search and destroy of Ziggy paved the way for whatever we were calling (I'm) Stranded or Anarchy in the UK. It prepared me so that when punk turned up on the pages and the waves I knew it was where I was and I embraced it. And as I closed my eyes, held my breath and felt the world changing around me, even in this little, personal way, at that small and sluggish pace, the secrets that darted around in the sounds of a great record, the grinning whispers that grownups could never pick up, spoke to me directly and they said: welcome.

Then again, this is a record we're talking about. Yes, it's one of the greats from one of the greatest's extraordinary decade-long roll, but just a record. After that holiday fortnight, I had played it so often, rubbed its neuronal receptor so raw, that it takes conscious thought, even now, to play again. When I do it is with pleasure but the sense of thrill I still get from my very favourite records is not part of that. We all grow up and find our own special ways of being boring. It doesn't have to be anything imposing or even irritating to others but it always, when noticed, strikes anyone who has known any of us for years, as a choice towards comfort and safety. I can still hear the glide of the wink in these sounds today but I think I've chosen against the wink.

Listening notes: I strolled around with the flacs of the legit download of the Five Years set from early last decade and sat myself before the wide and beautiful surrounds of the multi-channel SACD from the decade before. I really will never regress to vinyl.