It almost goes off without debate that Lou Reed’s 1973 album, Berlin, is the most ambitiously dour record in the rock catalog. On the heels of a hit single, “Walk On The Wild Side,” and its album, Transformer, Reed delved into a concept album about two drug-addled, bohemian lovers and their story of love, loss, and wrenching sadness. It’s a booming, hollow record; it feels infused with fleeting hopefulness; there isn’t a contrived moment on it.
In director Julian Schnabel’s (The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Basquiat) telling of the album through stage performance, Berlin sounds largely the same. There is nothing radically new except for a few jams, glossed over lyrics. Reed performs, in order, the songs on his dour masterpiece with terse expression, pursing his lips, rolling his eyes as the tale of Caroline and Jim unfolds in a semi-lucid, motif of home movies and swirling color behind him. The always fashionable, morose figure of Reed is flanked by a lively blues-influenced band, a girl’s choir, and as an unexpected highlight, Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons for vocal backup. Reed is at times amazed by Antony (something the audience cannot help but be too), but otherwise, the performance is more brow-furrowing than fist pumping.
After all, Berlin is now, and has always been, a sit down, thinking, feeling person’s record; any honest performer would relish that fact. Schnabel doesn’t stray.
But it isn’t enough to say the songs are frighteningly emotional. It was, for its time, a controversial piece of work. Reed’s lyrics are tinged in mythological images (“I am the water boy / She looked like Mary Queen of Scots,”) and strong poetic devices (“All of her friends call her Alaska,”), but what kills the heart through any telling, or re-telling of Berlin, is “The Kids,” a song of separation haunted by crying children’s voices. In typical Reed fashion, he waxes in monotones back from obscure mythological/poetic images to describe the kids being taken away “because they said, she was not a good mother.” He is hauntingly on his nose there, and at other points too, displaying a small fragment of what has made Lou Reed the godfather of punk, as well as a strange kind of underground, mumbled poetry.
All of Reed is on display in Berlin, both the album proper and this DVD. He is rocker, confessor, poet, and performer. If the question remains, though, about whether Schnabel’s attempt to seize its performance triumphs the album, the answer is resoundingly no; first points of contact with this work should be the proper release. Once that has adequately drawn its dark corners around your eyes, then work to this place and scour its reinterpretation.
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