Artist.......: Lou Reed
Album........: En Concert aux Vieilles Charrues
Label........: n/a
Genre........: Rock
Catnr........: n/a
Source.......: DVBS
Rip.date.....: 2012-08-19
Str.date.....: 2011-07-17
Quality......: 229kbps/48.0kHz/Joint Stereo
Url..........: http://www.loureed.com/split/
track title time
1. En Concert aux Vieilles Charrues 78:59
* Who Loves the Sun
* Senselessly Cruel
* All Thru the Night
* Ecstasy
* Small Town
* Venus In Fur
* Sunday Morning
* Femme Fatale
* Waves of Fear
* Sweet Jane
Runtime 78:59
Size 129.77
Release Notes:
The career of Lou Reed defies capsule summarization. Like David Bowie (whom Reed
directly inspired in many ways), he has made over his image many times, mutating
from theatrical glam rocker to strung-out junkie to avant-garde noiseman to
straight rock & roller to your average guy. Few would deny Reed's immense
importance and considerable achievements. As has often been written, he expanded
the vocabulary of rock & roll lyrics into the previously forbidden territory of
kinky sex, drug use (and abuse), decadence, transvestites, homosexuality, and
suicidal depression. As has been pointed out less often, he remained (and
remains) committed to using rock & roll as a forum for literary, mature
expression well into middle age, without growing lyrically soft or musically
complacent. By and large, he's taken on these challenging duties with
uncompromising honesty and a high degree of realism. For these reasons, he's
often cited as punk's most important ancestor. It's often overlooked, though,
that he's equally skilled at celebrating romantic joy, and rock & roll itself,
as he is at depicting harrowing urban realities. With the exception of Neil
Young, no other star who rose to fame in the '60s continued to push himself so
diligently into creating work that is meaningful and contemporary.
Although Reed achieved his greatest success as a solo artist, his most enduring
accomplishments were as the leader of the Velvet Underground in the '60s. If
Reed had never made any solo records, his work as the principal lead singer and
songwriter for the Velvets would have still ensured his stature as one of the
greatest rock visionaries of all time. the Velvet Underground are discussed at
great length in many other sources, but it's sufficient to note that the four
studio albums they recorded with Reed at the helm are essential listening, as is
much of their live and extraneous material. "Heroin," "Sister Ray," "Sweet
Jane," "Rock and Roll," "Venus in Furs," "All Tomorrow's Parties," "What Goes
On," and "Lisa Says" are just the most famous classics that Reed wrote and sang
for the group. As innovative as the Velvets were at breaking lyrical and
instrumental taboos with their crunching experimental rock, they were
unappreciated in their lifetime. Five years of little commercial success was
undoubtedly a factor in Reed leaving the group he had founded in August 1970,
just before the release of their most accessible effort, Loaded. Although Reed's
songs and streetwise, sing-speak vocals dominated the Velvets, he was perhaps
more reliant upon his talented collaborators than he realized, or is even
willing to admit to this day. The most talented of these associates was John
Cale, who was apparently fired by Reed in 1968 after the Velvets' second album
(although the pair have worked together on various other projects since then).
Reed has a reputation of being a difficult man to work with for an extended
period, and that has made it difficult for his extensive solo oeuvre to compete
with the standards of brilliance set by the Velvets. Nowhere was this more
apparent than on his self-titled solo debut from 1971, recorded after he'd taken
an extended hiatus from music, moving back to his parents' suburban Long Island
home at one point. Lou Reed mostly consisted of flaccid versions of songs dating
back to the Velvet days, and he could have really used the group to punch them
up, as proved by the many outtake versions of these tunes that he actually
recorded with the Velvet Underground (some of which didn't surface until about
25 years later).
Reed got a shot in the arm (no distasteful pun intended) when David Bowie and
Mick Ronson produced his second album, Transformer. A more energetic set that
betrayed the influence of glam rock, it also included his sole Top 20 hit, "Walk
on the Wild Side," and other good songs like "Vicious" and "Satellite of Love."
It also made him a star in Britain, which was quick to appreciate the influence
Reed had exerted on Bowie and other glam rockers. Reed went into more serious
territory on Berlin (1973), its sweet orchestral production coating lyrical
messages of despair and suicide. In some ways Reed's most ambitious and
impressive solo effort, it was accorded a vituperative reception by critics in
no mood for a nonstop bummer (however elegantly executed). Unbelievably, in
retrospect, it made the Top Ten in Britain, though it flopped stateside.
Having been given a cold shoulder for some of his most serious (if chilling)
work, Reed apparently decided he was going to give the public what it wanted. He
had guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner give his music more of a pop-metal,
radio-friendly sheen. More disturbingly, he decided to play up to the cartoon
junkie role that some in his audience seemed eager to assign to him. Onstage,
that meant shocking bleached hair, painted fingernails, and simulated drug
injections. On record, it led to some of his most careless performances. One of
these, the 1974 album Sally Can't Dance, was also his most commercially
successful, reaching the Top Ten, thus confirming both Reed's and the audience's
worst instincts. As if to prove he could still be as uncompromising as anyone,
he unleashed the double album Metal Machine Music, a nonstop assault of
electronic noise. Opinions remain divided as to whether it was an artistic
statement, a contract quota-filler, or a slap in the face to the public.
While Reed has never behaved as outrageously (in public and in the studio) as he
did in the mid-'70s, there was plenty of excitement in the decades that
followed. When he decided to play it relatively straight, sincere, and
hard-nosed, he could produce affecting work in the spirit of his best vintage
material (parts of Coney Island Baby and Street Hassle). At other points, he
seemed not to be putting too much effort into any aspect of his songs ("Rock and
Roll Heart"). With 1978's Take No Prisoners, he delivered one of the weirdest
concert albums of all time, more of a comedy monologue (which not too many
people laughed hard at) than a musical document. Reed had always been an enigma,
but no one questioned the serious intent of his work with the Velvet
Underground. As a soloist, it was getting impossible to tell when he was
serious, or whether he even wished to be taken seriously anymore.
At the end of the '70s, The Bells set the tone for most of his future work. Reed
would settle down; he would play it straight; he would address serious, adult
concerns, including heterosexual romance, with sincerity. Not a bad idea, but
though the albums that followed were much more consistent in tone, they remained
erratic in quality and, worse, could occasionally be quite boring. The
recruitment of Robert Quine as lead guitarist helped, and The Blue Mask (1982)
and New Sensations (1984) were fairly successful, although in retrospect they
didn't deserve the raves they received from some critics at the time. Quine,
however, would also find Reed too difficult to work with for an extended period.
New York (1989) heralded both a commercial and critical renaissance for Reed,
and in truth it was his best work in quite some time, although it didn't break
any major stylistic ground. Reed works best when faced with a challenge, which
arrived when he collaborated with former partner John Cale in 1990 on a song
cycle for the recently deceased Andy Warhol. In both its recorded and stage
incarnations, this was the most experimental work that Reed had devised in quite
some time.
Magic and Loss (1992) returned him to the more familiar straight rock territory
of New York, again to critical raves. The re-formation of the Velvet Underground
for a 1993 European live tour could not be considered an unqualified success,
however. European audiences were thrilled to see the legends in person, but
critical reaction to the shows was mixed, and critical reaction to the live
record was tepid. More distressingly, old conflicts reared their head within the
band once again, and the reunion ended before it had a chance to get to America.
Cale and Reed at this point seem determined never to work with each other again
(the death of Velvet Underground guitarist Sterling Morrison in 1995 seemed to
permanently ice prospects of more VU projects). In 1996, the surviving Velvet
Underground members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
performing a newly penned song for their fallen comrade, Morrison. Reed closed
the '90s with an album that saw him explore relationships, 1996's Set the
Twilight Reeling (many speculated that the album was biographical and focused on
his union with performance artist Laurie Anderson), which didn't turned out to
be one of Reed's more critically acclaimed releases. He also found time to
compose music for the Robert Wilson opera Timerocker, and in 1998, released the
"unplugged" album Perfect Night: Live in London. The same year, Reed was the
subject of a superb installment of the PBS American Masters series that
chronicled his entire career (eventually released as a DVD, titled Rock and Roll
Heart).
2000 saw Reed's first release for Reprise Records, Ecstasy, a glorious return to
raw and straightforward rock, a tour de force that many agreed was his finest
work since New York. Another collaboration with Robert Wilson, POE-try, followed
in 2001 and continued its worldwide stage run through the year. Including new
music by Reed and words adapted from the macabre texts of Edgar Allan Poe,
POE-try led to Reed's highly ambitious next album, The Raven. Animal Serenade, a
double-disc set recorded at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles during his 2003
world tour, was issued in spring 2004. The live effort is Reed's tribute of
sorts to his celebrated Rock N Roll Animal concert album, which was released 30
years before. In 2007, Reed released Hudson River Wind Meditations, a four-song
experimental sound collage that celebrated both the best and worst aspects of
Metal Machine Music. In 2011, he joined forces with heavy metal legends
Metallica to create Lulu, an album of fresh studio material. Written by Reed,
with James Hetfield et al providing input on arrangements and dynamics, Lulu
blended Lou Reed's trademark monotone vocals with the power and ferocity of
Metallica's musicianship.