Sentimental Journey: A Return to ‘Berlin’ (The New York Times)
By JON PARELES
Published: December 16, 2006
Lou Reed’s album “Berlin,” a song cycle about a romance doomed by drugs, promiscuity and violence, was one of his career’s grand anomalies when it was released in 1973. Instead of the stripped-down rock that made punk archetypes of Mr. Reed’s best-known songs, the sound of “Berlin” was not primal but theatrical, with strings and horns and touches of cabaret. The album was either dismissed as pretentious and overwrought or hailed for its ambition; it didn’t sell, but it garnered some lifelong fans. After 33 years, it had its first staged performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Thursday night. There, “Berlin” was less startling but no less ambitious or, in the end, touching.
The show, directed by the painter Julian Schnabel with Hal Willner as music producer, gave “Berlin” what might be called the Next Wave treatment. Mr. Reed and the musicians performed in front of video projected on a patterned backdrop, creating fragmented glimpses of characters in the songs and giving impressions of the narrative rather than enactments of it. The music stayed rightfully at center stage: close to the album’s original arrangements, but with more room for guitar solos, more clarity and the immediacy and dynamics of a concert. Mr. Reed wasn’t revisiting his songs as oldies or artifacts; he was reinhabiting them.
The core of “Berlin” is the contrast between feelings — love, anger, grief — and the numbness of pills, casual sex and depression. Caroline and Jim, the couple whose story takes place in Berlin, are not particularly sympathetic, even among the many lowlife characters who have populated Mr. Reed’s songs before and since. She toys with him and sleeps around, growing so cool and withdrawn that “her friends call her Alaska.” He’s a speed freak who beats her black and blue. Eventually, after their children are taken from Caroline as an unfit mother, she commits suicide. In the concluding “Sad Song,” Jim shrugs, “I’m gonna stop wastin’ my time/Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.”
But the lyrics wonder, “How do you think it feels?,” and the music answers. At first, there are sarcastically upbeat horns and swaggering guitars; later, as things spiral downhill, it is pared down to unadorned guitar or piano and a voice that, in Mr. Reed’s deceptive deadpan, sounds as if it’s choking back all its rage and sorrow. In “The Bed,” which recalls Caroline’s suicide, the pure voices of a children’s choir float in to join the singer as he muses, “Oh, oh, oh, what a feeling,” and linger after he’s done in ghostly, wordless swoops of dissonance that met a stunned silence at St. Ann’s.
Onstage, the details in “Berlin” grew more vivid. Steve Hunter, who was the lead guitarist on the album, was still brash and bluesy; Mr. Reed took turns of his own on lead, with jabbing single notes and well-aimed distortion. Bob Ezrin, who produced the album, appeared onstage in a white lab coat that read “Berlin” down the back, manically conducting the band as if stoking each crescendo. “Sad Song,” with choir, horns and strings, built up to a perfectly ironic rock anthem — a boffo finale that suggested “Berlin” had been meant for the stage all along.
With his encores, Mr. Reed placed “Berlin” precisely within his career before and since. The three-chord Velvet Underground rocker “Sweet Jane” — recalling the live version featuring Mr. Hunter on Mr. Reed’s 1974 album “Rock N Roll Animal” — presented another kinky couple. The ballad “Candy Says,” which had Antony of Antony and the Johnsons sharing lead vocals in his quivering, androgynous voice, tenderly described another woman caught between longing and self-immolation. And “Rock Minuet,” from Mr. Reed’s 2000 album “Ecstasy,” was a novella of Oedipal fury and nihilistic sex: grimly observant, reticent and occasionally explosive. In its time, “Berlin” carried Mr. Reed’s music to an ornate extreme, but now its trappings are secondary. What comes through is the way it feels.