Lou Reed and the death of glam rock

I've been meaning to post Lou Reed's "Shooting Star" for a while, and now Platters That Matter has given me the impetus to actually do it.  He's just posted a song from Squeeze by "The Velvet Underground," i.e. Doug Yule, Ian Paice, and not a single original Velvet.  The critical consensus is that this 1973 album is a big steaming pile of crap; see The Flowering Toilet for a more detailed excoriation.  Platters, on the other hand, contends that it "is certainly much better than 99% of LOU REED's solo output."  It is not better than Street Hassle, Lou's 1978 comeback album (coming back from some pretty awful albums).  And on Street Hassle, nothing is better than "Shooting Star," one of the album's live recordings:

One of the better features of glam rock was the use of a saxophone section as a rhythm instrument, and here Marty Fogel's "amplified sax" serves the same purpose.  But the dirty, fuzzed-out guitar, and Lou's world-weary singing, give the song a dirgelike feel; it sounds like the death rattle of glam rock, the last gasp of a musical subgenre that partied too hard and is fading away (which of course it was); like a shooting star.  Even so, the song attains a sort of decadent majesty, akin to what the Stones achieved on Exile on Main Street.  As for the lyrics, beyond the chorus they're pretty much incomprehensible.  Look them up on any lyrics website, and you will find the same transcription: some of it is obviously guesswork, and some of it is left unattempted.  But I think we get the point: "You're just a shooting star."  Finally, am I hearing things, or do some of Lou's melodies and vocal inflections in this song echo Bryan Ferry's in "Mother of Pearl"?  And if so, was it conscious?  They both chronicled decadence, albeit on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum: Reed the gutter decadents, the washed-up, society's cast-offs, those who have lost their morals in their bid for mere survival; Ferry the idle rich, society's entrenched overlords, who came to their amorality through privilege and ennui.

The teenage me was fascinated with Lou Reed; his albums were dispatches from a world of vice and vitality far from the suburban confines I grew up in, something I longed to experience firsthand.  I even went so far as to make "Take a walk on the wild side" my senior yearbook quote, to my eternal chagrin.  I did eventually come into tangential contact with the "wild side," and tangential contact was quite enough, thank you.

I haven't kept up with Lou Reed's career for nearly twenty years; I saw him at the Warner Theater in 1988 on his tour for New York, the album where he decided to stop singing altogether and just talk the lyrics over the music.  He played the whole album first, then some crowd-pleasing hits, and that was that.  I see he's all Arty Establishment now; good for him.  Even better: he and Andy Warhol inspired the Lou and Andy characters on Little Britain.  And for a parting thought: as Lou Reed ages, does he look more and more like Joe Piscopo?

As for Squeeze: I listened to it today.  It is competent, unmemorable 70s rock.  Not so bad as to be unlistenable, not so good that I want to listen to it again.  In other words, not unlike many Lou Reed albums.