Is "The Bells" (the song, not the entire album) the last truly majestic thing Lou Reed ever did?

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m16zyn17vz1qzr1ago1_500.jpg

haha

lol @ Bangs calling it his best solo album (after hating on Coney Island Baby!)

Not only did he hate on it, he hated it too.

That review was the last Reed piece Bangs published in his lifetime.

bangs is so emotionally tied up with reed i'm not sure i'd trust him on what's good about reed's music. his writing about lou sure is entertaining though.

inspired by that magnificent advertisement, I listened to The Bells this week. what a weird record! Lou's vocal approach is so weird and off-putting on a lot of it. Don't know what he was going for. Title track is classic, but I'm not sure how much I like the rest of it. Disco Mystic and Boogie With You are good for the lols.

disco mystic is great!

The last really great Lou Reed song I heard was "Strawman," from New York.

― pdf (Phil Freeman), Friday, September 24, 2004 8:20 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalin

^ very odd choice as the song to single out from new york

haw, i like strawman's rocking-ness, if not the lyrics. weirdly i just heard a tape of Yung Wu covering that song at a show this year.
has phil freeman heard LULU yet i wonder.

and disco mystic is good just for its boneheadedness. if i had to pick a second favorite song from the bells it'd be disco mystic.
"families" is pretty intense, seems like a crazy personal song for lou to write.

I like strawman fine, but halloween parade and romeo had julliette are so much better

agreed.
pretty sweet that now the answer to this question: "What do you think is his last brilliant (not merely good) song?" is "the closer on his last album"!

"There Is No Time!"

last lou reed album i loved was songs for drella, so something off that, "nobody but you" let's say.

Bangs approvingly quoted his friend Ivan Julian's reference to the Lou vs Lester saga as "wrestling scripts." But they were always pretty convincing, incl his Rolling Stone savoring of The Bells. Long after, an interviewer asked Reed about his on-the-record encounters with Bands, and he winced: "That was the liquor talking." Meaning the way he came off in print--apparently not remembering the one where he was the one telling Bangs, "No more for you, you can't handle it." Also looked worried when he said something to the effect about wanting Bangs to respect him, once they both cleaned up their acts. Guess he didn't see this review. The Bells, which might be an example of the binaural sound he'd tried before, seems like the synesthetic equivalent of what Sin City and A Scanner Darkly went for cinematically. It's funny too: I like the quacking sounds that will not be denied in "Disco Mystic," and the elegant near-burp-singing (beats scat-singing)in "City Lights." Title track of The Blue Mask, also "Waves of Fear" were pretty awesome, but overall think I prefer Legendary Hearts and Ecstasy. Still wann hear The Raven, esp, the two-disc version, with Ornette Coleman. Although I also remember the Voice's adaptation of a classic headline: "Reed Loves Poe! Poe Not So Sure."

lol at that headline. wouldn't say the raven is a masterpiece, but it's got some great stuff on it.
this is sort of awesome, if you're interested in hearing lou + ornette. as lou says: "THIS IS ONE OF MY GREATEST MOMENTS."

is Don Cherry on there with them too, like on The Bells and Between Thought And Expression? And Charlie Haden, since The Raven is a Hal Willner production? (Ah, "Speak Low," bonus track on Lost In The Stars, one of the first CDs I bought)

the Voice briefly reviewed the one-disc version of The Raven.

oh sorry, here's the link for that ornette thing: www.loureed.com/guilty/
don cherry's ghost does not appear, sadly.

Thanks!(oh yeah, think it was Kevin Whitehead who once referred in passing print to Dylan claiming he'd recorded w Ornette & co.)

o shit dude! Lou say:

This is one of my greatest moments.
I had Ornette Coleman play on my song Guilty. He did seven versions- all different and all amazing and wondrous. I put up these different takes so you could share. Each take is Ornette playing against a different instrument- ie drum, guitar 1 guitar 2 etc. Listen to this!!!
LOU REED///////ORNETTE COLEMAN

Remember an interviewer when this came out saying "Some people say this is a rejection of everything you've ever done" and Lou saying "Rejection? It's a culmination of everything I've ever done"

"I wanna boogie wit' choooooww"

Love that song!

"The Bells" (the song) is awful, but probably appeals to those who deem "Venus in Furs", "Heroin" and "Sister Ray" as anything but unlistenable noise.

The "New York" album was mostly rather nice though.

how many words did it take for you to guess that was a geir post? i had it at "deem".

Listening to this album for the first time in decades, what a mess! Some truly awful songs here ("With You") and it lacks the coherence of albums like Coney Island Baby... and yet it's ultimately kind of likeable. The weird thing is that the title track seems to be a thing of itself, totally unconnected to the mood of the rest of the album. It's got a mystery and an ambiguity that harks back to VU and that we don't really see in the later Lou. I mean I kind of agree with the OP, although there are swathes of later Lou that I don't really know.

https://damienlove.com/writing/through-the-ringer-lou-reeds-the-bells/

Wow, thanks for posting that, what a fantastic write-up of the album! And I agree that this is in some ways the last of the 70s drug-fucked Lou, after which he becomes the self-important and more boring Lou-the-artiste. But in one way it's something of a beginning too. All through the 70s, he's been regurgitating VU. Transformer is a VU album manque, there are several VU songs on Berlin, on Coney Island Baby too and as late as Street Hassle he's still recycling VU (Real Good Time Together). But The Bells has no VU, he's finally scraped the bottom of that barrel and has had to rely on something else. I like that interpretation in the article you posted of The Bells being about a 'good suicide"!

This is wonderful:

"But the last time I remember talking to Lou was a few years later. It was 1994, and I had just had 90 days sober, and he was sober. I was playing a blues gig in a little jazz bar in New York that was right under 53 Christopher Street, where I used to live with Lou. And I was loading in to play that gig, and Lou just happened to come walking by – at that time, I think he was living on the same street again, I think. Hey, you know, at one time, Lou had Walt Disney’s old apartment? This loft. And Walt Disney had done all these sketches and paintings of characters on the walls.

Anyway, Lou was living in there, and he said, “Moose, I’m right down the street, come by and see me.” And I said, “Well…you know, Lou: it’s one day at a time for me.” And Lou said, “One day? It’s one second at a time!” And we hugged each other on the street. And that was the last time I talked to him."

Not sure what to make of the Walt Disney part.

I once passed Lou Reed on a NY street sometime in the early noughties. He hadn't aged well, he was this fragile, shrivelled up little man... never pass your heroes in the street!

Am now listening to Station to Station - obviously a phenomenal album in a way that The Bells just isn't... and yet I see some similarities, in the way both are overpowered by their title tracks, opener and closer respectively... and the complete goofiness of TVC15 finds a kind of analogue with Disco Mystic...

Am listening to "The Bells" and "With You" is probably the single worst thing Lou Reed ever did. "Looking For Love" is funny though - though I'm unconvinced that's intentional. The vocal on "City Lights" is hilarious too, had Lou never heard of the concept of tranposing songs that are in the wrong key for you to sing?

“The Bells” that drove vocalist Clyde McPhatter weeping to his knees

Classic Lou interview here:
https://trouserpress.com/magazine-covers-4/
TP 36, February 1979