Lou Reed's solo albums
each have their proponents and opponents, with fans standing up for everything
from the avant-noise experiment Metal Machine Music to the post-Springsteen
mainstream-rock push Coney Island Baby. Reed's 1973 concept album Berlin is especially
controversial among Reed-ophiles, both for its prog-rock pretensions—it's
a song cycle about a drug-addicted German prostitute and her children, with
contributing performances by the likes of Steve Winwood and Jack
Bruce—and for its fashionable nihilism. Lester Bangs dubbed it "a
gargantuan slab of maggoty rancor," and those who enjoyed the more pop-minded Transformer by and large failed to
follow Reed on his journey into the colossally morose. Even Berlin's devotees have
complained over the years about the record's relatively punchless sound.
If nothing else, Julian
Schnabel's concert film Lou Reed's Berlin presents the album's 10 songs with a force
they've rarely shown before. Filmed over five nights in New York, Lou Reed's
Berlin
shows Reed with a lively backup band—including horns, strings, a gospel
choir, and Sharon Jones and Antony as background singers—performing Berlin from start to finish,
then running through a short encore of "Candy Says," "Rock Minuet," and "Sweet
Jane." Berlin's
relatively hooky first half is rendered ferociously, with nearly every song
ending in extended dual-guitar jams. Then the quieter, sadder second half takes
on a mesmerizing spiritual quality, as all the musicians onstage support Reed's
endearingly awkward descriptions of demimonde degradation.
Lou Reed's Berlin can't quite take its
place in the pantheon of great concert films, because Schnabel's cameras rarely
seem to be in a useful place, and his pointless lo-fi recreations of the
album's story look cheap and intermittently pretentious. But for Reed
fans—for rock fans—the movie is an essential document of a noteworthy
event. Reed has always been an ideal case study for rock auteurists, because so
much of what makes him great is bound up in his weird lyrics and lackadaisical
vocals—both of which are particularly off-putting on Berlin. And yet those words and
how Reed sings them make Berlin personal and idiosyncratic. The Reed of the 2000s
still sounds at home mumbling about a girl whose friends all "call her Alaska,"
and describing how the decadent pleasures of one night lead to the desperate
repercussions of the following morning.