An Essay On Lou Reed’s CD - Berlin: Live At St. Ann’s Warehouse

February 4th, 2009
by Joe Viglione

On September 1, 1973 Lou Reed unveiled an amazing new band at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, the debut of material from the album Berlin along with nuggets that the singer/songwriter established in The Velvet Underground. To this day it remains one of my all-time favorite concerts up there with The Rolling Stones 1972 Boston Garden show with Stevie Wonder (famous for former Mayor Kevin White’s “My City’s In Flames”)

speech), Queen at the Music Hall (and I was never a big fan of the band, it was just a great night), The Doors on the Boston Common in 1972 without Jim Morrison, Fleetwood Mac/Savoy Brown on the Boston Common, also in 1972, and a handful of others. But Lou’s 9/1/73 show still rates as numero uno in my book, for presentation, drama, craftsmanship and sheer rock and roll energy.

That those vintage shows occurred before rock music became so very corporate, and that the artists were at the peak of their powers, is something to be considered when reviewing reinvention recorded 33 years later. The music of Berlin as unveiled at Tanglewood was pure perfection - it was a warm summer’s night in the open air, a long drive out to Lenox, and Lou Reed in evolution, the transition as he was morphing out of the “Transformer” into his Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal phase.

Less than four months later the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal album would be initiated from concerts taped December 21, 1973 at Howard Stein’s Academy of Music in New York, and Lou was already growing tired of the concept come December. A Boston Phoenix review of the 1974 album asked “Vegetable, Mineral or Animal?” (though not necessarily in that order) in regards to Lou’s performance. It was sad, but true, the majesty of Lenox was not captured when the singer refused to stand up to the microphone to sing his songs on time, at this pivotal point in his career. We caught shows in Rhode Island and Boston just before the New York taping, and with engineer extraordinaire Stuart “Dinky” Dawson capturing the concerts for all time on his stereo soundboard cassettes, one can hear many of the shows of the extraordinary group up on Wolfsgang’s Vault and hear Lou as he performed on different nights - it truly is a study in rock and roll psychology.

BERLIN 2006

The essence of the Berlin album is the first draft itself, the lp released on RCA records. Why the need for Berlin redux? Well, this better-late-than-never affair - Lou Reed Berlin: Live At St. Anne’s Warehouse, is actually the answer to that question - what if Janis Joplin had lived to record another day? What if John Lennon was directing “Instant Karma” on film rather than the myriad tributes to John Lennon which is all we can look forward to. That this is an important addition to the magical myth that is the post-Velvet Underground career of Lou Reed means that it succeeds in adding to, not subtracting from, and has brought long-awaited new attention to the long lost artistic leap that few understood.