By BEN SISARIO
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: December 13, 2006
Lou Reed refers to it with an understatement that borders on dismissal.
“It was just another one of my albums that didn’t sell,” he said dryly at a West Village cafe recently.
But get him talking a little — and a little talk is all one can expect from Lou Reed — and it becomes clear that “Berlin,” his bleak, Brechtian song cycle from 1973, which he is performing in full for the first time at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn for four nights beginning tomorrow, is a treasured high point in a what has been a lifelong project of pushing at the aesthetic boundaries of rock ’n’ roll.
“It’s a great album,” he said. (He has also called it a masterpiece.) “I admire it. It’s trying to be real, to apply novelists’ ideas and techniques into a rock format.” He mentioned William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Allen Ginsberg and Raymond Chandler as literary models.
“But it sounds so pretentious saying that.” he added. “It just sounds too B.A. in English. Which I have. So there you go.”
Mr. Reed has gathered a starry group of friends to help turn “Berlin” into a semitheatrical, multimedia performance. Julian Schnabel has created sets and will be filming the show, and Mr. Schnabel’s daughter Lola has shot film scenes with the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, which will be projected onto the stage. Bob Ezrin, who produced the original album, will be doing musical direction with Hal Willner. The indie darling Antony will appear with a children’s choir and will also sing backup with Sharon Jones, queen of the local retro-soul scene.
For Lou Reed fans it is a dream come true, and the concerts have long been sold out. But Mr. Reed, now 64, said he is surprised that many listeners remember the record at all.
Sometimes called the most depressing album ever made, “Berlin” is the story of Caroline and Jim, a lowlife couple in the title city — she is promiscuous, he beats her, and they both do lots of drugs — and the tragic dissolution of their relationship. The demimonde of drugs and sadomasochism glamorized in songs by the Velvet Underground, Mr. Reed’s visionary 1960s avant-rock band, is shown with miserable consequences, as in “The Bed,” when Caroline commits suicide and Jim remains bitterly numb:
This is the place where she lay her head
When she went to bed at night ...
And this is the place where she cut her wrists
That odd and fateful night
And I said oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling
The album was made at a high point in Mr. Reed’s career. His second solo record, “Transformer,” produced by David Bowie and released in 1972, had become a glam-rock keystone, and the song “Walk on the Wild Side,” from that album, was a major hit. (It remains his only song to have reached the Top 40.) Looking to continue Mr. Reed’s commercial success, his record label enlisted Mr. Ezrin, who, though only 23, had already made several hit records with Alice Cooper.
“The expectation was that I was going to do something very commercial with him,” Mr. Ezrin said from his office in Toronto. “Sort of Alice Cooper-ish, real mainstream. In reality I had become mesmerized by the poetry and by the art of Lou. Maybe I lost sight of my mandate. Honestly I can look back and say I probably didn’t do what I was hired to do.”
Recorded in London with a group of high-profile musicians including Steve Winwood and Jack Bruce, the songs of “Berlin” are rock filtered through a Brecht-Weill sensibility, with piano at the center of arrangements for band, horns and strings. Songs like “The Bed” and “The Kids” are among the most joyless Mr. Reed has ever recorded, but also some of his most delicate and intense.
The album has a narrative that stretches over 10 songs, and Mr. Reed and Mr. Ezrin had dreams of staging it. “We were bordering on genius with this work,” Mr. Ezrin said. “We were doing things that you’re just not supposed to do with rock music.”
But the album was, as Mr. Reed puts it, “a monumental failure at the time it came out — commercially, critically, you name it.” Reviewers savaged it. A reviewer for Rolling Stone, appalled at its seediness, called it “a disaster”; one critic described the vocals as “like the heat-howl of the dying otter.” (Not all writers were so cruel, though. John Rockwell of The New York Times praised it as “one of the strongest, most original rock records in years,” and Rolling Stone took the unusual step of publishing a rebuttal to its own review, saying that “prettiness has nothing to do with art, nor does good taste, good manners or good morals.”)
Though it stalled at No. 98 on the charts and drifted in and out of print, over time “Berlin” has built a passionate cult audience. One of its most ardent fans is Mr. Schnabel, who called the album the soundtrack to his life. “This record was the embodiment of love’s dark sisters: jealousy, rage and loss,” he said. “It may be the most romantic record ever made.”
For the show at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which is being co-produced with the Sydney Festival in Australia (where “Berlin” travels next month), Mr. Schnabel has created sets based on some of his recent paintings, which are meant to evoke the “greenish walls” of the fleabag hotel where Caroline lives. “Lou calls it the Berlin Wall,” he said.
“Berlin” also became a life’s accompaniment of a different sort for 25-year-old Lola Schnabel. “I just remember that soundtrack at the moment my parents were getting divorced,” she said. “It wasn’t that the music was disturbing; it was what was happening with the music. But it’s part of my childhood.”
The album was recorded when Mr. Reed’s own first marriage was collapsing. “This kind of anger didn’t come from a made-up place,” Mr. Ezrin said. “It is from deep within Lou’s psyche. We’ve all been through relationships where we’ve been disappointed by a partner and been hurt and wanted to hurt them back.”
When asked about the circumstances of its creation, Mr. Reed said, “I don’t remember.”
After years of prodding from Susan Feldman, the artistic director of Arts at St. Ann’s, which operates St. Ann’s Warehouse, to perform the album, Mr. Reed relented once he saw how dearly it was loved by Mr. Schnabel and other of his friends. “I just never wanted to do it,” he said. “I wasn’t itching to do anything in particular. I usually just try to do new things.”
As for the title, Mr. Reed is typically blunt when asked why he chose to set the story in the once-divided city of Berlin instead of, say, New York.
“I’d never been there,” he said. “It’s just a metaphor. I like division.”
Linear Mode
