I wasn't speaking of the so-called "dark cabaret" subgenre, but Wild Bill of Ithaca College's Sharp Notes blog was on Monday, writing:

Origin:

Debatable. Many fans consider the first cornerstone of the genre to be Nico’s 1974 release The End.

Surely we had dark cabaret before 1974?  I'd point to Scott Walker's Jacques Brel interpretations as the origin, one of the first being "Amsterdam" from Scott's 1967 debut solo album:

12 Amsterdam

Scott Walker

I can't think of Scott Walker without hearing "Montague Terrace (In Blue)," also from Scott:

Scott Walker - Montague Terrace (in blue)

That song seems to be the blueprint for a new type of rock song, the lounge ballad that erupts into a bombastic chorus.  Did Bryan Ferry have "Montague Terrace" in mind when he wrote "A Song for Europe"?

06-A Song For Europe

Roxy Music

Or did Lou Reed when writing "Berlin"?

05-Berlin

Lou Reed

Have you ever heard Lou give such an impassioned performance?  Usually he delivers his lines half-spoken with an air of cool detachment, but his emotional outpouring in this live setting really brings out the heartache at the core of the song.  (I'm not much of a fan of saxophone solos in rock songs--Andy Mackay excepted--but Marty Fogel pulls off a great one here.  And keyboardist Michael Fonfara will return in a future "guilty pleasures" post.)  Contrast with the lethargic version that opens the earlier Berlin, the album (arguably a work of dark cabaret itself):

01 - Berlin

Lou Reed

Maybe that take is just as emotionally valid, a state of catatonia born of depression.  Most of the lyrics heard in the live version are missing here; the entire chorus is gone!  But even this version is a reworking of a song that Lou recorded for his first, self-titled solo album in 1972:

10-Berlin

Lou Reed

This first version strikes the middle ground of feeling, somewhere around melancholia.  The chorus is present here in a slightly different form:

You're right, and I'm wrong
Hey babe, I'm gonna miss you now that you're gone
One sweet day

Which he later changed to:

Hey baby you was right, and I know that I was wrong
I know I'm gonna miss you now (I know I'm gonna miss you anyhow)
Baby, one sweet day

Not that it's significant, it's just one of those things that I notice and can't help pointing out.  I don't want to leave the dark cabaret topic without bringing up the Tiger Lillies, but six songs in one post is quite enough, so they'll have to wait.

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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:

06-Shooting Star

Lou Reed

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.

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