Remembering Lou Reed: Going solo

Lou Reed was 29 years old, living at home with his parents and earning $40 a week as a typist in his father's accounting firm in the summer of 1971.

He had left the disintegrating Velvet Underground in the hands of Doug Yule and Steve Sesnick, and all he had to show for it was four albums that died almost as soon as they were recorded and a portfolio of dozens of songs he had written that never saw the light of day.

He got a phone call one day from New York music journalist Lisa Robinson -- whose husband, Richard, was a producer for RCA Records who had been working in London with David Bowie. Lisa Robinson told him that Bowie was a fan and had introduced her husband to the music of the Velvets, whose records actually were making a little noise in the London underground.

The Robinsons did a little matchmaking over the next couple of weeks. Eventually, Reed signed with RCA, which sent him to London in the winter to record with Richard Robinson.

The result was the album Lou Reed, recorded with a slew of studio musicians in December and January and released in April 1972.

The album, like the four VU albums that preceded it, failed to generate much excitement on the charts or in the press. But this time the indifference was deserved. The performance as well as the production are uninspired -- not surprising considering that most of the material is warmed-over Velvet Underground outtakes.

"Lisa Says," "I Love You," "Wild Child" and "Ride into the Sun" are the best of these tracks. The VU recordings of all but "Wild Child" surfaced in later compilations. "Wild Child" has never appeared in a Velvets studio recording but does turn up in a couple bootleg tapes from the 1969 tour.

That could have been the end of Lou Reed's career. But Bowie was a believer. And RCA loved Bowie, who had just delivered the company a smash with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. And RCA told Reed to go back to London and hook up with Bowie and try again.

That move worked. Reed penned a few new tunes and rewrote a couple other VU outtakes. Bowie, Reed, Mick Ronson and others spent August 1972 recording Transformer, and RCA released the album in November.

"Walk on the Wild Side" became one of the unlikeliest hit singles ever. And after all those years, 30-year-old Lou Reed became a star -- the stark Mick Rock-photographed portrait the iconic image of the glam-rock movement exploding out of London.

"Vicious" came from a line Andy Warhol fed to him -- "you hit me with a flower." The beautiful "Perfect Day," the "B" side on the "Wild Side" single, has become one of Reed's most enduring songs.

"Wild Side" became an albatross for Reed. He wasn't especially proud of the song -- it was a throwaway he was commissioned to write for a play that never got made. As with most of Transformer, he loved the work Bowie and Ronson did with the recording but didn't feel the material represented his own work particularly well.

"Satellite of Love," featuring soaring background vocals by Bowie in the song's climax, became one of Reed's most-covered songs.

Everyone -- record buyers, critics, RCA -- loved Transformer. Lou Reed had a single on the radio and an album climbing the charts. And the old Velvet Underground records began riding Transformer's coattails into the public consciousness.

But Reed didn't see it as his masterpiece. He had something more profound in mind. Again, he dipped into his bank of Velvets leftovers, drastically reworking a handful of them and shaping them into his overdue grand statement.

Next: The fall of Berlin