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Lou Reed's music continues to play around the world.
This month of November marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the most unorthodox, dazzling and wild records in the history of pop music,
Transformer,
which was released in 1972 and elevated Lou Reed to rock and roll star. , and not by critics, but by the public.
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In the complex world that the music and poetry of our New York rocker would become,
Transformer
occupies the starting position of a career unlike any other rock musician.
Transformer
was unlike anything else, and his success was a miracle.
It was the first time the classic Walk on the wild side
had been recorded
,
which was released as a single and climbed the best-seller lists.
The bet for that song is due to David Bowie.
In 1972, the lyrics of
Walk on the wild side
Very few people understood it, but that didn't matter because the song got into your mind and you couldn't forget it.
They played it on the radio without knowing that the characters the song was talking about were real and belonged to the people who hung out at Andy Warhol's Factory, where the artistic avant-garde was shown through an exploration of sexuality.
And that is
Transformer:
a hymn to sexual promiscuity and the liberation of instincts.
The men became women and the women became men, and they did so with the most unbridled joy.
Lou Reed's voice was built on this record.
And this record wouldn't sound like it does without two wizards of acoustic invention: Mick Ronson and David Bowie, who were the producers of this gem and the inventors of that voice.
Lou Reed's voice never sounded live like it does on this vinyl from 1972. In that sense, conceptual art was also created here, art that evaded the real referent and could only be heard in the virtuality of a record player.
In my opinion, that is the great wonder of this album: a sound that, starting from rock and roll, reached unknown regions, to which bassist Klaus Voorman also contributed.
My great disappointment when I heard Lou Reed live for the first time in Madrid, forty years ago, was that
Walk on the Wild Side
did not sound like it did in
Transformer.
It would never sound like that, because that voice was an artificial creation.
That voice was a utopia.
Another of the great songs on the album was the song
Perfect day,
a melancholic hymn to the placidity of a walk through Central Park, which we never knew if it spoke of love for a human being or love for heroin shots, perhaps both are the same.
In any case, it doesn't matter because the song is exceptional.
And another of the critics' big mistakes was to classify the album as belonging to the
glam rock trend,
a bad label.
I think this album is very literary.
The title alone already evokes the great novel by Franz Kafka.
It is not a decadent record or a record of homosexual claims or a hymn to transvestism.
It is pure beauty.
Sound free.
It is the creation of a voice that claims its right to exist on its own, for its mystery, for its vocal clarity, for its simplicity.
The song
Andy's chest,
dedicated to Warhol, is an almost dreamlike poem inspired by the assassination attempt that the painter suffered at the hands of the actress Valerie Solanas.
Lou Reed performing in 1972 at the Carre Theater in Amsterdam.Gijsbert Hanekroot (Redferns)
In
Transformer,
Lou Reed elevated rock to a form of literature.
There is more poetry on this record than in a thousand poetry books put together.
Here there was a miracle of modernity.
New York City was expressed in a way that lasts and will last.
Rock plundered the ancient forms of literature and poetry.
This is an infinite disk.
This album is the birth of a nation of free minds.
Everyone who heard it in 1972 became someone else and took a walk on the wild side of life.
Because without the wild side, life is not worth living.
The message still stands.
And it continues to be revolutionary, provocative, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and anti-communist, nihilist and vitalist at the same time, liberating, romantic, sordid and utopian at the same time, and of a recalcitrant individualism.
Transformer
was a beauty scream.
And that wonderful cry is still with us.
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