Lou Reed - Coney Island Baby album

Where has this album been all my life?

One word: KICKS

On a bit of Lou kick(s) at the moment, Bimb?

They said I was to little too light weight to play line-backer
So I say Im playing right-end

Glory of love, honey. It's all about the glory of love.

Listen to the version on Take No Prisoners for illumination. But hear this (album) version first. That's Bimble's prescription for getting out of the blues.

We can all hope for the glory of love, man. Every one of us. We can all hope for at least that much.

BUT REMEMBER THAT THE CITY IS A FUNNY PLACE

Re: the Take No Prisoners' version: what did Lou do at school, was it the long jump or the high jump?

Jesus fuckn christ man I don't know. Why you want to do this to me with this trivia? All I know is he says "pole vault". I don't know jack shit about that stuff. Someone help us. He said he "went out at the sectionals(?) 8 - 6" what does that mean? Hell if I know.

Yes, it might have been pole vault. He says something about how he was crap at it as a result of having no neck.

A good, not great, album. The title track is a great, not good, song.

"You work on an album a friggin' year and get a good, not great from Sotosyn!"

"Kicks" totally freaked me out the first time I heard it.

ha – I'm biased cuz I heard "She's My Best Friend" on VU first.

Both versions are sufficiently different to be appreciated on their own merits. "Charley's Girl" = inexplicably great song.

Where has this album been all my life?

I had a similar reaction. Gift is another great one.

the first Lou Reed album I bought back in 1988 - Kicks literally shocked me.

this is my most-listened-to Lou Reed album, had it since high school.

I think it appeals to me so much because sonically its Lou doing a fairly straight 70s singer-songwriter-ish sound. Lyrically its very clever, a lot of funny surprises, bleak in places, sweet in others. The title track is perfect.

Both versions are sufficiently different to be appreciated on their own merits.

I agree with this, and I appreciate their differences.

yeah, VU version doesn't have great backing vocal tag on the end iirc

http://sp1.yt-thm-a04.yimg.com/image/25/m1/1874962328

Okay, seriously, who has heard the bonus tracks on the reissue and who hasn't?

Oh no, these bonus tracks are to die for. Oh no. You don't even KNOW what you are missing. Jesus. Even "Leave Me Alone" (which I find intolerable on Street Hassle) sounds utterly delicious here.

"Crazy Feeling" (alternate version) = fans of early Violent Femmes can go to hell

I mean, you guys realize there's an alternate version of "She's My Best Friend" on here that absolutely shreds, right?

But you haven't lived until you've heard the alternate version of "Coney Island Baby" the title track. You have not even begun to live.

Ooooo baby ooo baby oooooo baby oooooooooo baby ooooo baby ooooooooooooo shake yo bunz now mama

"Nowhere At All" makes me feel like a little kid just discovering the Beatles for the first time.

CHARLEY'S GIRL = astonishing that this has never been used in a wes anderson movie so far.

Okay who has heard the bonus tracks, though? Seriously?

Because once you hear the bonus tracks, you will never be the same.

alright already, you sold me; i'll be getting the remaster sometime in the near future. sheesh... who's next?

I couldn't find the bonus tracks/reissue version posted anywhere - and I am not buying another copy of this album just to hear them.

this album's great -- and the bonus tracks are worth hearing (dougie yule's on some of them!). i wrote about this reissue (along with cale's paris 1919 reish) here: http://www.junkmedia.org/index.php?i=1959

Where has this album been all my life?

― Bimble, Thursday, October 2, 2008 2:31 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the guitars all over this album reminds me of the shit on the title track of l'homme a tete de chou

(u still need the reissue versh, shakey mo? i found it somewhere)

link?

ilm mail works?

sure - many thanks!!!

hey can you hook me up too

This has some of Reed's best vocals. I like how he's not in the cool, bad ass hipster mode, but just being Lou.

I need to hear those bonus tracks.

whoah some of these bonus tracks are clearly proto-Street Hassle in sound/delivery. Doesn't work so well on "She's My Best Friend", but "Leave Me Alone" is great!! "Downtown Dirt" too. Can't decide if the alt. versino of title track is better than the official one or not - some sweet stuff here, muchas gracias!

lolz this review is great

You can play on my team any day, Lou.

"Keep the fuck away from my ass, Lou."

When I die, please bury some talisman of Lou Reed with me. Just some symbol of him, anything. A tiny shred of his album cover, anything. When I die, he's going to be there, man. He's gonna wave to me and smile, and I'll know my life wasn't in vain.

^^^

holy shit

aw. poor bim. this album sounded rilly good to me recently. felt like an old friend i hadn't seen in a long time.

Coney Island Baby is probably (at least sometimes) my favorite Lou solo album. And now it means just a little bit more.

Lou is gonna be King Neptune and Laurie Anderson Queen Mermaid in the 2010 Coney Island Mermaid parade

http://www.coneyisland.com/mermaid.shtml

The Coney Island Parade King and Queen, Lou and Laurie look so cute in the photo...

yeah, this is the best Lou Reed solo album, in my opinion.

lol at King Neptune Lou Reed.

Anderson looks adorable. Lou looks like poached salmon.

He is Neptune after all

even after all these years, they still seem like a weird couple. when are they going to do a reality show. "I Love Lou"?

^^^

holy shit

― Here is a tasty coconut. Sorry for my earlier harshness. (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 20 May 2010 00:43 (16 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is too much.

RIP Bimble.

Its always a tough choice for me, but Coney Island Baby is steady in there for my favorite Lou Reed platter. I'm also a supporter of Street Hassle, Sally Can't Dance, the Blue Mask, Berlin, and New York. Depends on my mood I guess. I can also say that I actually LIKE Metal Machine Music. Speaking of Lou & Laurie, their recording with John Zorn is absolutely great, unlike the grande snoozefest that is Lou's recent ambient tribute to a river.

haha waht

Lou's recent ambient tribute to a river

seriously, haven't heard word one about this

it was like music he used for tai chi iirc

He sang Laurie Anderson to sleep by imitating a flowing river.

you know you want it
http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/l/lou-reed/album-hudson-river-wind-meditations.jpg

That font is so 1998.

the album's ok. if it was a stars of the lid record or something, people on ILX would be all over it.

I heard a great Lou radio interview recently. Mostly about his photography, but he spent a loooooong time talking very seriously about how he just got some special shoes that simulate being barefoot. Totally the kind of conversation I find myself in within 3 minutes of meeting a friend of my mom's. Kinda made you realize how dude is pushing 70 hard.

he spent a loooooong time talking very seriously about how he just got some special shoes that simulate being barefoot

http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/Urban-Archaeology/March-2010/The-Next-Horrible-Shoe-Fad/vibram-fivefingers-classic-shoes.jpg

???

those look damn comfy.

omg lou reed is almost 70...that's so scary

Really? I thought he'd be older!

please let him start wearing those shoes onstage

if he's 70, that makes him 27 when VU & Nico comes out - seems about right doesn't it? Maybe a couple of years older and they figure 70's a fair enough cheat

he was born in '42

http://www.loureed.com/new/news/imgs/kungfu.jpg

the secret of hung men

shoes that simulate being barefoot

Well, at least I'm consistent. I find Stars of the Lid a bit boring too. If it sounded more like My Cat Is An Alien, I might've gotten a bit more out of it.. I only gave it one listen [to be fair] & it could well be something that reveals interesting details w/ repeated spins.

ha, yeah, i mean, Lou's ambient album isn't really meant to be *interesting* -- he made it specifically to be background music while he did his tai chi things.

It should be Lou & Rachel in the Mermaid Parade. Laurie Anderson stole Rachel's Coney crown! Lou & Rachel 4eva!

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s1751.jpg

Gay Lou was the best Lou.

This is one of my favorite Lous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeM6UqtGBdM

He scared me away from drugs! and while it doesn't say explicitly that it's anti-drugs, Lou's twitching suggests that he's done enough rails to stab himself.

Also I was convinced at that time that this was what all New Yorkers were like.

this album is still my favorite

yes

glory of love

like a good wine it's better as it grows older

When I first heard the old doo-wop version of "The Glory Of Love" I was taken aback by the bitter speech at the end about the "fine, fine, superfine career" (which I guess Lou arch-enemy Frank Zappa quoted on Ruben and the Jets) but then I realized that this was a perfect Lou antecedent.

Wish I could remember or find the wording of the old Lou quote about how everybody else was playing blues licks but he was more interested in people like The Spaniels.

When I first heard the old doo-wop version of "The Glory Of Love" I was taken aback by the bitter speech at the end about the "fine, fine, superfine career"

wait... what? whose version of Glory of Love are you talking about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9R9soGl6Yw

must be this one I guess

Yep.

weird, never heard that before

No doubt you were too busy with your fine, fine, superfine career to pay attention.

to me, this record is what real american rock n roll is

yeah, this is pretty much the only lou reed solo rec i listen to with any regularity these days!

so many great lines

I've warmed to this one! Top five Lou.

played this a month or so ago, still holds up beautifully

sometimes I wonder if I will ever tire of the title track

listened to this last week -- such a cool sounding band, so much less cartoony and off-putting than the rest of the 70s for lou.

i love the band on the blue mask, but he doesn't really have the songs to match up imo

i've never heard coney island baby

i can never remember what lous are supposed to be good or bad

is legendary hearts good? i hate the cover with that cheesy motorcycle helmet

title track really is magic---that guitar tone + the backing vocals are sooooo emotional & it's probably a pretty straightforward music trick that he's pulling off, I'd expect nothing less of Lou, but good grief I can barely focus on the drums when I listen, sounds like wailing instead

Blue Mask era band doing Coney Island Baby (maybe? I can't tell. Quine is on it tho)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp-5V3PJ90E

m@tt you should definitely hear coney island baby -- essential lou!

every time I hear the title track come up I think "eh, I've heard this a million times maybe I should skip it" but it always puts me in this weird mental space, it's like a nostalgia for something I didn't actually live through (ie being a gay football player in NY lol)

i'm listening to coney island now

this is good! yeah it's "fun lou" def see the transformer comparison, was this one popular at the time?

don't think it was wildly popular, though i think it got good reviews. more popular than metal machine music, which it followed, anyway.

haha "hey sorry guys, here have a regular record"

yeah pretty much -- there's a great lester bangs interview/article dealing with all of that.

lol @ this song that seems to have only one lyric - "i'm just a gift to the women in this world"

<3 lou

Bangs did not like this album. I think the Rolling Stone review from the time was pretty glowing tho

yeah the RS review is reprinted in the recent CD reish, a rave.
here's peter laughner's review, a hilarious rant that i think reveals more about its author than its subject

IF YOU CHOOSE, CHOOSE TO GO
LOU REED - CONEY ISLAND BABY

Peter Laughner, Creem, 3/76

This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn't go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.) I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record. I came on to my sister-in-law "C'mon over and gimme head while I'm passed out." I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution...I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums (and three vitamin B complexes, so I must've figured to wake up, or at least at the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water...

"Watch out for Charlie's girl...
She'll turn ya in...doncha know...
Ya gotta watch out for Charlie's girl..."

Which is supposed to be the single off Coney Island Baby and therefore may be a big hit if promoted right, 'cause it's at least as catchy as "Saturday Night"...if they can just get four cute teens to impersonate Lou Reed.

Now, when I was younger, the Velvet Underground meant to me what the Stones, Dylan, etc. meant to thousands of other midwestern teen mutants. I was declared exempt from the literary curriculum of my upper class suburban high school simply because I showed the English department a list of books I'd glanced through while obsessively blasting White Light/White Heat on the headphones of my parents' stereo. All my papers were manic droolings about the parallels between Lou Reed's lyrics and whatever academia we were supposed to be analyzing in preparation for our passage into the halls of higher learning. "Sweet Jane" I compared with Alexander Pope, "Some Kinda Love" lined right up with T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men"...plus I had a rock band and we played all these songs, fueled pharmaceutically by our bassist who worked as a delivery boy for a drugstore and ripped off an entire gallon jar full of Xmas trees and brown & clears. In this way I cleverly avoided all intellectual and creative responsibilities at the cleavage of the decades (I did read all the Delmore Schwartz I could steal from local libraries, because of that oblique reference on the 1st Velvets LP). After all, a person with an electric guitar and access to obscurities like "I saw my head laughing, rolling on the ground" had no need of creative credentials...there was the rail-thin, asthmatic editoress of our school poetry mag, there was the unhappily married English teacher who drove me home and elsewhere in her Corvette...there were others (the girl who began to get menstrual cramps in perfect time to the drums in "Sister Ray"). Who needed the promise of college and career? Lou Reed was my Woody Guthrie, and with enough amphetamine I would be the new Lou Reed!

I left home. I wandered to the wrong coast. (Can you imagine trying to get people in Berkeley, California to listen to Loaded in 1971? Although maybe they all grew up and joined Earthquake...) When Lou's first solo album came out, I drove hundreds of miles to play it for ex-friends sequestered at small exclusive midwest colleges listening to the Dead and Miles Davis. Everyone from my high school band had gone on to sterling careers as psych majors, botanical or law students, or selling and drinking for IBM (Oh yeah except the drummer became a junkie and had a stroke and now he listens to Santana). All the girls I used to wow into bed with drugs and song married guys who were just like their brothers and moved to

Florida or Chicago, leaving their copies of Blonde on Blonde and White Light in some closet along with the reams of amphetamine driven poetry I'd forced on them over the years. By the time Metal Machine Music came out, I'd lost all contact. The only thing that saved me from total dissolution over the summer of '75 was hearing Television three nights in a row and seeing The Passenger.

So all those people will probably never pay any attention to Coney Island Baby, and even if they did it wouldn't do much for what's left of their synapses. The damn thing starts out exactly like an Eagles record! And with the exception of "Charlie's Girl" which is mercifully short and to the point, it's a downhill slide. "My Best Friend" is a six year old Velvets outtake which used to sound fun when it was fast and Doug Yule sang lead. Here it dirges along at the same pace as "Lisa Says" but without the sexiness. You could sit and puzzle over the voiceovers on "Kicks" but you won't find much (isn't it cute, the sound of cocaine snorting, and is that an amyl popping in the left speaker?). Your headphones would be better utilized experiencing Patti Smith's brilliant triple-dubbed phantasmagoria on Horses.

Side two starts off with the WORST thing Reed has ever done, this limp drone self-scam where he goes on about being "a gift to the women of this world" (in fact this whole LP reminds me of the junk you hear on the jukeboxes at those two-dollar-a-beer stewardess pickup bars on 1st Ave. above 70th). There's one pick up point, "Oo-ee Baby" with the only good line on the record "your old man was the best B&E man down on the street," but then this Ric Von Schmidt rip-off which doesn't do anything at all.

Finally there's "Coney Island Baby." Just maudlin, dumb, self pity: "Can you believe I wann'd t'play football for th' coach"...Sure, Lou, when I was all uptight about being a fag in high school, I did too. Then it builds slightly, Danny Weiss tossing in a bunch of George Benson licks, into STILL MORE self pity about how it's tough in the city and the glory of Love will see you through. Maybe. Dragged out for six minutes.

Here I sit, sober and perhaps even lucid, on the sort of winter's day that makes you realize a New Year is just around the corner and you've got very little to show for it, but if you are going to get anything done on this planet, you better pick it up with both hands and DO IT YOURSELF. But I got the nerve to say to my old hero, hey Lou, if you really mean that last line of "Coney Island Baby": "You know I'd give the whole thing up for you," then maybe you ought to do just that.

August 1976
Peter Laughner

Similarly, Coney Island Baby, fine and indeed heartfelt as it is, is a downs LP. Not putdown involved- Lou's favorite old Velvet songs were always the ballads, and he's got a right to get sweet on himself. Love is silt. Anybody who has ever taken Quaaludes and wound up loving the rest of the human race so much they ended up in bed with a human turnip knows that. The lyrics are better than any Lou-nee Tunes in a while, but not that not since Transformer have so many of them been explicitly preoccupied with the, er, ah . . . "gay" scene. Which certainly can't be said of CIB's immediate predecessor. Me, I like sex with vegetables, but I nurse this lingering paranoia that someday, some drunken night, I may get a radish between the sheets and discover it's homosexual. Thus I feel threatened by Coney Island Baby, just as I feel threatened by Valiums, Tuinals, Seconals, Quaaludes, and Compoz. Metal Machine Music, on the contrary, reinforces my sense of myself as a man. Under my blacklight presidential campaign poster of Hunter Thompson, I bolt upright in repose, my rifle casually draped cross my lap, listening to MMM and dreaming of My Lai as starring Fritz the Cat. So fuck downs, avoid Coney Island Baby like guys who wear green on Thursdays, and keep it (your fist) up tight.

bad show, Lester

Finally there's "Coney Island Baby." Just maudlin, dumb, self pity: "Can you believe I wann'd t'play football for th' coach"...Sure, Lou, when I was all uptight about being a fag in high school, I did too. Then it builds slightly, Danny Weiss tossing in a bunch of George Benson licks, into STILL MORE self pity about how it's tough in the city and the glory of Love will see you through. Maybe. Dragged out for six minutes.

lol this is so wrong

ha yeah -- i mean, same thing with lester, whenever a lot of these dudes start writing about lou, they just end up writing about themselves. it is interesting -- is CIB a "gay" record? The cover is camp, there's his shout out to Rachel, there's the "you really are a queen" line, but w/o context you might not even think about the gay aspect. would you?

it's funny, i have a recording of laughner where he opens with "crazy feeling." maybe he changed his mind.

90% of the gay stuff certainly went over my teenage head, although I did obviously register "Kicks" as transgressive, if not explicitly gay

being a really serious Lou Reed fan in the 70s must've been weird.

then again, being a serious lou reed fan is weird in any decade.
Lou Reed/Metallica Collabo Anticipation Thread

Peter Laughner really must've thought being an alcoholic loser asshole was the coolest thing in the world.

yeah he really sounds like an idiot. good guitar player though.

(She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.)

yeah the idea that this is even remotely funny is just... man

i just read this anectdote about Sterling Morrison, i'll throw it here:

When his denied brother wrote Sweet Jane and premiered it to him, in a hotel room while on tour, Sterling's first reaction was the usual in him, to answer a question with another. "So what's with the fourth chord, Lou?".

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5prkgget11qzvcy3o1_400.jpg
i've seen this photo before, but never this caption.

They said I was to little too light weight to play line-backer
So they put me on the track team. Goddamn assholes...

Those older guys, they said he was mean and cruel.
And you know something? They were right. What a bastard...

I am the waterboy

I love women, I think they're great

and, naturally, girls...

As for the immediate future, Lou has no plans, EXCEPT GOING TO SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

And attending several sessions of electro-convulsive therapy in a bid to curb his aberrant sexual desires, unnaturally boys

Sent that yearbook entry to a friend, who emailed back:

"How tall is he really? The internet suggests 5ft 3, 5ft 4, 5ft 5, 5ft 8, 5ft10, 5ft 11. Some of those figures are not so tall. He does act a bit short, sometimes, I think, but maybe he hunches intermittently."

Let us no praise famous death dwarves... who might actually be tall.

now praise
gah, Freudian

"How tall is he really? The internet suggests 5ft 3, 5ft 4, 5ft 5, 5ft 8, 5ft10, 5ft 11. Some of those figures are not so tall. He does act a bit short, sometimes, I think, but maybe he hunches intermittently."

Yes, I've always assumed he was quite short tho I remember reading an interview where he said he was 5ft 11 - but, hey, it's Lou Reed, that's no guarantee of veracity.

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/500/16210467/The+Velvet+Underground+VU05.jpg

About 3-4 ins taller than Warhol.

And if Lou is 5ft 11, John Cale is 6ft 5

https://www.morrisonhotelgallery.com/images/medium/146-006-MIKE-ROCK.jpg
Reed seems to be about the same height as Bowie in this picture, and his height is usually quoted as 5'9" or 5'10".

GrowYouQuicklyBoots.

Wait, are you suggesting that people in the glam rock era might have worn platforms?

Next you'll be claiming that's not Iggy's real hair colour.

i 'served' david bowie in a shop, once, and can confirm that he is really quite short (i wld guess abt 5ft 5). he wasn't wearing platforms.

5' 7" is usually quoted for Bowie

His passport (from 1969) says 5'10"!http://www.davidbowie.com/bin/images/html/1969_passport_open_480w.gif

That includes his hair

this album rules

ooh baby ooh, baby oooooh, baby ooh ooh ooh

Morgan M. Page has a promising new podcast series on transgender history, and her first episode focuses on Rachel, Lou's partner in the mid-70s, to whom he dedicated the title track: https://soundcloud.com/onefromthevaultspodcast/oftv-1-whatever-happened-to-rachel-1

nice, thanks for the heads up

i wanna play football for the coach

kicks is so weird still

so, the morning of the show

when will we get the isolated tracks of "kicks" so we can find out what happened on the morning of the show.

Kicks vs. All Through the Night vs. the Murder Mystery

Never heard this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOYO3F1oNkA

Oh yeah.. me either. It has a touch of extra guitar and a different lead vocal take? Also those strange whispered bits, don't care much for them. I think i prefer the LP mix, i always loved the song. I always wondered if the 'punch her face in' line was what kept it from the radio/ being a hit. Actually it's weird with Lou, from the mid 70s onwards no-one bought his singles at all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Reed_discography#Singles

Yes, LP version is better, but this is the sort of thing you'd expect to turn up as a bonus track on a CD somewhere... maybe it will now Lou is, uh, out of the picture. I was going to say "Crazy Feeling" might have made a better single - because of the punching Sharon in the face bit - but then I remembered what that song is about!

wow bizarre that that wasn't included on the expanded CD reissue w the demo tracks. agree that the whispered bits don't add much. thx for posting tho, I've never heard this either.

Huh
http://r.duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fm.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-KgKs0OY4tQ

Goddammit
https://youtu.be/-KgKs0OY4tQ

Lou Reed - "Coney Island Baby Album"

guy's vocals don't do the material any favors but it is kinda cool to hear something with that same sound as Coney Island Baby

yeah, i've given this album a try and haven't really loved it ... weirdly alex chilton covers a song from it on a recently released tape from 1976.

missed that single version of "charley's girl" -- pretty good!

when you're all alone and lonely
in your midnight hour
and you find that your soul
it's been up for sale

and you begin to think 'bout
all the things that you've done
and you begin to hate
just 'bout everything

but remember the princess who lived on the hill
who loved you even though she knew you was wrong
and right now she just might come shining through
and the
glory of love
glory of love
glory of love just might come through

Man, I'd swear, I'd give the whole thing up for you

When you’re all alone and lonely
In your midnight hour

Something like a circus or a sewer

I thought it was "something like a circus or a zoo"?

I hear sewer and that’s what written someplace as well

Yeah it’s sewer (tho I’m the guy who thought for 25 years that the man up on Lexington & 125 wore “Dior shoes”)

Ha, I sometimes think that. I believe it is "New York shoes" but can never be too sure.

It’s apparently “PR shoes” (a term I had never heard).

oh yeah, that too. PR meaning Puerto Rican, I believe.

Funny thing is that at least one music streaming service has the lyrics to Lou’s song attached to the other song with this name by The Excellents.

Heh, more than one. This song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Vr4hEo6Vs

i wanna play football for the coach

Actually I was a pole vaulter.

I went out of the sectionals at 8' 6''... that's pathetic!

^this

Loving his “Foux du Fafa” nasalization near the end.

About a minute before the end

something like a circus or a sewer

Never knew Bob Kulick’s name until just now. RIP a year and a half late, Bob.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2012/11/a-look-at-the-poems-of-louis-reed-in-an-old-issue-of-the-harvard-advocate

https://blog.theharvardadvocate.com/blog/post/2012-11-13-from-the-archives-lou-reed-the-velvet-u/

Can’t remember if I wondered yet on this thread about which version of “The Glory of Love” Lou was referring to, always thought it must be this one, which also seems to be referred to by his arch-frenemy and erstwhile label mate Frank Zappa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-prFT-eLxY

HI DERE

a little too lightweight to play linebacker

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOz5Dv1WQAUqOWa?format=png&name=small

Nothing says "Rock'n'Roll Animal" like a tuxedo t-shirt and a free hot dog.

I do wish Coney Island Baby had better/different cover art.

There are other shots from the Mick Rock photo session that I think would have been better, but I like how on the actual cover shot Reed looks simultaneously 20 and 90 years old.

the bad cover is pretty perfect

I like the ones that Reed described as "look(ing) like an android, programmed to assassinate", but the carnival barker shot fits the mood of the album better.

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/22/a9/fc/22a9fc9a5fe2dd051e4e0d2f7b9b0872--source-of-inspiration-private-life.jpg

^You’d like to send this one out to them, right?

Well, yeah.

Actually I just picked up another used vinyl copy of this album to replace my already pretty tapped out $1 garage sale one, and found that shot while trying to find a pic of the former's back cover, which is one of those budget versions that's different from the original in kind of a dumb way.

My new used copy used to belong to this radio station, which apparently has gone under a format change since then:

https://www.radiolineup.com/stations/WPRG-FM

I feel like its pretty clearly a joel grey reference

I’d like to send this one out to HOOS and Jor-El.

"your old man was the B&E man down on the street'