PARENTAL ADVISORY: If you’re a young person, don’t let your parents catch you reading these reviews, because there are occasional references to the illicit use of cannabis, LSD, PCP, quaaludes, meth, cocaine and/or vast quantities of alcohol. The other warning is this: If you consume these things, you will forget a great deal of the fun you had, and that’s no fun.

For a long time there you just never knew what to expect from Lou Reed. His concerts depended on his mood and his mood seemed to depend on the quality of the evening’s pharmaceuticals. Fair enough. Much the same applied to his audience as well.

I saw Lou eight times over the course of 14 years, back in the days when he was still bludgeoning his backup bands into submission, whether through a genuine pursuit of perfection or a messiah complex I’m not positive. Surely he doesn’t still do that today at 60-something, now that he’s into meditation and tai chi?

At any rate, what Lou came to call the “Rock’n'Roll Animal” tour, thankfully and magnificently well-documented on vinyl, was a sight to see and a tremendous thump to the ears as well, due in very large part to what was arguably the best rock band ever assembled.

This was in fact the almost seamlessly melded “Berlin” and “Sally Can’t Dance” tours, and it hit the road with the double-trouble guitarist team that “Berlin” producer Bob Ezrin had hired: Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner from Detroit. These guys had been on the three Alice Cooper records that Ezrin had helmed, and in London he put them together with Jack Bruce from Cream, Traffic’s Steve Winwood on keyboards and BJ Wilson from Procol Harum and Aynsley Dunbar on drums. By the end of the recording sessions, Ezrin was in hospital, both stressed and junked out. The critics trashed the disc. Lou got meaner. (Time always vindicates genius, however. Reed revived “Berlin” in its entirety for a 2006 tour.)

With Hunter, Wagner, New Yorker Ray Colcord on keyboards, and Torontonians Pentti “Whitey” Glan on drums and Prakash John on bass, Reed toured Europe, then North America, selling out every show and leaving behind a fused-glass wake of awe. Using a lighting effect suggested by Warhol, based on Albert Speer’s design for Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies — twin spots on Lou alone, with the stage and the band in black, Reed was the riveting focus, but the band, the band …! The spotlights may have been trained on Lou, but they were firing sonic lasers out of the gloom from stage left and right.

Reed has made clear his disdain for those days, with the way his songs were presented. I think he just doesn’t like thinking about his behaviour at the time, but many say he was simply petulant at being upstaged by the guitarists.

Those guys put so much heavy-metal fire into the music that the two live albums resulting, “Rock’n'Roll Animal” and “Lou Reed Live”, were close to molten vinyl. To me and legions of others there is no better rock instrumental than the Hunter-Wagner intro to “Sweet Jane”, which opened the shows (Hunter actually wrote the intro years before). They wove flawlessly back and forth, building and building, until Lou was cued to the stage and they crunched into the song’s swinging, anthemic triple chording.

It was like that for every track, all of Reed’s stuff, old and new, being reborn in fireworks. “Waiting for My Man”, “Vicious”, “Lady Day”, “Satellite of Love”, “White Light/White Heat”,
“Rock & Roll” and the searingly poignant “Heroin”, which, as Timothy Ferris wrote in Rolling Stone, was “rooted in a treacherous organ and strung tautly on a set of vaunting guitar riffs. The piece has the atmosphere of a cathedral at Black Mass.”

When the smack begins to flow
Then I really don’t care anymore
About all you jim-jims in this town
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all the politicians making crazy sounds
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds.

For the tour, Reed initially cropped his hair close and painted his face white and his eyes and fingernails black, wrapped himself in leather and fired so much methamphetamine into his bloodstream that the concerts couldn’t help but be freak shows. He writhed and jerked about, all Iggy Pop-spastic, and howled like a madman.

By the time they reached Toronto, Lou had divorced his long-suffering wife, recorded the New York show that would become the twin live albums, released “Sally Can’t Dance” (because she’s got no legs) and dyed his hair blond. He’d also become rake-thin with rabid speed use and was fighting running battles with his minders to keep bottles of scotch stashed around the stage.

The Massey Hall gig was straight off the live albums, plus “Ride Sally Ride”, “Kill Your Sons”, “New York Stars”, “Animal Language”, “Sally Can’t Dance” and “New York Telephone Conversation”, segueing into “Goodnight Ladies” before the “Rock and Roll” encore.

There has been much speculation about whether Reed was really injecting drugs onstage when he put on a show of it during “Heroin”, the microphone cord wrapped around his bicep and a hypodermic drawn from his boot. No one’s come up with the definitive answer, but it sure as hell was a scary thing to see. Whatever was in the needle, the effect on the Toronto audience was electric. The screaming, and the disbelief, elevated emotions to a shivering new height. No one single concert moment has ever come close to the impact of this one.

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My introduction to Lou Reed’s songwriting had come only a few months prior to the October 19, 1974, concert. I’d run into a bad crowd. Bad in the sense that they were so enamoured of “A Clockwork Orange” (the movie) that a couple of them actually dressed like Alex’s droogs. They played Lou’s 1972 “Transformer” all the time — or at least “Walk on the Wild Side” — as well as “Berlin” and Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust stuff. It would be some years before I finally put all of this and Warhol too into perspective, but at the time the music was precisely the injection I was needing. When “Wild Side” hit the charts, its competition was Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia” and Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein”. The Stones’ “Angie” held its own.

I knew nothing of the Velvet Underground that Brooklyn-born Lewis Allan Reed had called his band from 1965 to ‘73. I’d heard of his volatility on and offstage, his fondness for heroin and the evident bisexuality that he shared with Bowie. “Berlin” brooded mightily, but it seemed like every time Reed was ready to cut his throat, the guitars sailed in like the cavalry to save him. I’d heard nothing before like “Caroline Says” and”How Do You Think It Feels” and I don’t think anyone will ever match them for the haunting inner horror that Lou wrote into them and the opulent grandeur that Ezrin — music’s Kubrick — drew out.

After the Animal tour, Alice Cooper asked Dick Wagner to rejoin him, and he brought along the rest of Lou’s band. They recorded “Welcome to My Nightmare”, easily Alice’s best record, and went on tour with him to sell it. I saw that show at the Gardens on May 2 ‘75 (ironically just four days after Lou played Massey Hall with his new, much tamer back-up musicians). Then Peter Gabriel, bless him, used Wagner and Hunter on his solo debut album and tour. I saw that at the Gardens on March 22, 1977.

Steve “The Deacon” Hunter, who’d started out in Mitch Ryder’s Detroit, also went on to record and tour with Meat Loaf and appeared on albums by Aerosmith, Julian Lennon, Dr John, David Lee Roth, Bette Midler, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Tracy Chapman. Dick Wagner recorded and performed with Kiss, Aerosmith, Hall & Oates and Tim Curry, and has lately been songwriting with Alice Cooper again.

Bombay-born Prakash John, who’d earlier played in the Canadian band Bush with Domenic Troiano and then Parliament/Funkadelic, returned to Toronto in 1979 and formed the Lincolns, with whom he still performs.

Whitey Glan had been in Bush too, as well as Mandala and Steppenwolf, and later helped out Johnny Winter. In 2004 he put some muscle into Downchild’s “Come On In” album, also featuring keyboardist Michael Fonfara from the “Sally Can’t Dance” record and tour.

Fonfara, a native of Stevensville, Ontario, stayed with Reed long after that trip. He’d been in Rhinoceros and Blackstone, touring with Mike Bloomfield’s Electric Flag in between. He got Whitey and Prakash John into the dying Blackstone before Reed tapped them, then found himself playing on “Sally” and leading the tour band, with Danny Weiss on guitar and, after Prakash and Whitey quit, “Mouse” Johnson on drums and Peter Hodgson on bass.

This is the lineup I saw twice in the spring of ‘75, at Massey Hall on April 28 and at Buffalo’s Century Theatre on May 9. There were some great songs on that album, like “Billy” and “Kill Your Sons”, even if Lou put everyone through hell because of his passion for drugs. When I saw him his appearance had “normalised”, but he was apt to yell “Shut up!” at audience members and, in Buffalo, the first thing he did when he walked onstage was fire his cigarette butt into the crowd. I thought it was great.

I also thought “Metal Machine Music”, released later that year, was great, although I don’t think I listened to it more than once. Maybe I was keeping it for when Lou and I got into meditation.

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By the time Lou returned to Massey Hall on October 25, 1976, he’d put out two more albums, “Coney Island Baby” and “Rock and Roll Heart”. Fonfara was still with him, along with Bruce Yaw on bass, Marty Fogel on sax and Michael Suchorsky on drums. It was a wholly different Lou Reed by then, his songwriting opened up and exploring new emotions. They played an amazing set: “Sweet Jane”, “I Believe in Love”, “Lisa Says”, “Kicks”, “She’s My Best Friend”, “I’m Waiting for the Man”, “Sheltered Life”, “The Kids”, “Claim to Fame”, “Vicious Circle”, “Walk on the Wild Side”, “Coney Island Baby”, “Rock and Roll Heart”, “Charley’s Girl”, “Kill Your Sons”, “Satellite of Love”, “How Do You Think It Feels?”, “You Wear It So Well”, “Oh Jim”, “Berlin”, “Ladies Pay”, “Heroin” and “White Light/White Heat”.

A copyrighted photo of Lou in Buffalo in ‘75 by my friend Ross Taylor.

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There’s a pretty upbeat version of “Walk on the Wild Side” live from 1982 on YouTube, and the Rock’n'Roll Animal Web Page is here.

* See #4: Rolling Stones
* See #5: Reggae Sunsplash
* See #6: Neil Young
* See #7: David Bowie
* See #8: The Tubes
* See #9: Pink Floyd
* See #10: Bob Marley
* See #11: Bob Dylan
* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory