Tracing when exactly Lou Reed became untalented

"Critics…What does Robert Christgau do in bed? You know, is he a toe fucker? Man, anal retentive, A Consumer's Guide to Rock?!? What a moron...A study by me by Robert Christgau...Nice little box and a B+...Can you imagine working for a fucking year, and you get a B+ from an asshole in The Village Voice?” [Wiki]

Lou Reed, Take No Prisoners, 1978

So we can start at 1978 and begin working back. I suppose we'll arrive at whatever he wrote after the last song on Transformer.

Comments

[Elijah M]

I think it boils down to every album that didn’t have a strong collaborator sucked.
First solo album? Crap. Produced by Richard Robinson, who has never done anything more interesting than produce Lou Reed's first crappy solo album.

Transformer? Classic. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, who know a lot more than Lou Reed about putting an album together that actually works, and presumably had no reservations about telling him to go eat a bag of dicks.

Berlin? While hard to stomach for many -- and possibly the most depressing album of all time -- the best album Bob Ezrin ever produced. He made Lou Reed re-write half the album. He was the last person who ever got Lou Reed to re-write anything.

And that’s about it. After that, he managed to turn in a great song here and there (I think you could fill a single LP with them), but every good song that appeared on a Lou Reed album after 1973 was balanced by at least two that were beyond bad.

If he’d kept working with Robert Quine in the 1980s, I think he would have made one more great album. Why did he stop working with Robert Quine? Because Robert Quine had no reservations about telling Lou Reed to go eat a bag of dicks.

[Dave]

I bet convincing Lou Reed to eat a bag of dicks in 1972 wasn't a tough sell.

I listened to Berlin once, just like I watched Requiem for a Dream once.

A fine piece of art .... but...jesus...

[Dave]

also, cristgau gave take no prisoners a c+, so that's funny.

[Elijah M]

I think Take No Prisoners has its moments. The versions of "I'm Waiting for the Man/Temporary Thing" and "Coney Island Baby" are quite good. The quasi-comedy bits are even amusing -- not ha-ha funny, but certainly train-wreck-in-progress funny. They just don't stand up to repeated listens.