Lou Reed's Berlin

 

An uncomfortable truth about art: well told lies reveal more than any documentary.

Lou Reed recorded his album Berlin in London and New York during 1973, a tragedy set in a city he had never visited. Meanwhile, his disciples, Bowie and Iggy Pop, would flee years later to the real Berlin to save themselves from self destruction. The paradox couldn't be more perfect: Reed's mind imagined the hell that others needed to inhabit in order to survive. Berlin was a black comedy according to Reed.

Canadian producer Bob Ezrin was intrigued. He asked Reed about what had happened to the couple described in the song "Berlin," from his failed first solo album. Reed didn't give him the expected answer. Instead, Ezrin received ten chapters of emotional collapse where Jim and Caroline destroy each other in an apartment that could very well be anywhere in the world.

The Berlin Wall functioned as the perfect metaphor: two people sleeping in the same bed but separated by miles of hatred and rotten secrets. Reed chose that divided city because it represented perfect isolation, an island of Western decadence surrounded by communism, where everything was possible but nothing had a future. For him, Berlin was not geography but the mental cartography of claustrophobia.

The reception was a massacre. Rolling Stone called it the "greatest disaster" of 1973 (9 years later, critics would name Reed's album The Blue Mask the best album of 1982). RCA Records barely promoted it because nobody wanted to hear an album where a mother loses custody of her children while they scream calling for her in a harrowing way in the song "The Kids."

That recording generated the myth that Ezrin tortured his own children by telling them their mother wouldn't come back. The truth was much less cinematic: he simply recorded a bedtime tantrum. The fact is that Ezrin and Lou wanted to replicate the harrowing screams of primal scream therapy that John Lennon used on his solo debut album.

Reed was coming off the massive success of "Walk on the Wild Side" and responded by delivering an opera about domestic violence, prostitution, and suicide. Ezrin thought the result was close to Puccini's operas. Commercial and artistic suicide, everyone thought. Absolute freedom, Reed thought. Lou was decades ahead of the stories of abuse and suicide turned into MTV hits in the nineties, in an era still inhabited by the ghosts of flower power.

What's extraordinary is that Reed materialized his phantom Berlin with an orchestra of virtuosos: Jack Bruce from Cream, Steve Winwood from Traffic, B.J. Wilson from Procol Harum, Tony Levin from King Crimson. Ezrin, who had turned Alice Cooper into a mass phenomenon post Woodstock era, designed a production where the sound of breaking glasses and slamming doors places you inside the apartment, spying on a tragedy you shouldn't be witnessing.

While Reed was composing without knowing Berlin, Nico, the ice cold German muse who sang with the Velvet Underground, unknowingly contributed Caroline's face: that decadent and distant beauty that embodied all the European mystery Reed needed for his doomed protagonist. It's also said that Caroline was the sum of all the women Reed had been with until then.

Reed wanted the musical "punch" that Ezrin had given to Alice Cooper's albums. Ezrin wanted a Reed more literary than Dylan and closer to Leonard Cohen. In the end, they didn't understand each other. Ezrin should have produced Lulu, that collaboration between Reed and Metallica from 2011. Ezrin would have been fascinated with Lulu's libertine stories and surely would have given that "punch" that Metallica's music so desperately needed then, just as he gave it to the veteran heavy metal gods, Deep Purple, in recent years.

The historical irony came years later, in 1980. German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder used "Candy Says" in the hallucinatory epilogue of his monumental television series Berlin Alexanderplatz, validating that the sensibility of New York dirty realism, the Johnny Boy of Mean Streets or the Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, in the midst of American New Hollywood, which would influence the British band Genesis for their The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, was the twin sister of interwar German tragedy. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder showed us the descent of protagonist Franz Biberkopf who, after accidentally murdering his girlfriend and getting out of prison, plunges toward an even worse fate.

Both artists understood that love doesn't save, it only tortures. That fragile masculinity becomes ruthless violence. That cities are not stages but prisons for souls. Fassbinder, a confessed fan of Andy Warhol's Factory and the Velvet Underground, recognized in Reed a chronicler of his same darkness. Laurie Anderson, his last partner, would confirm decades later: for Lou, watching Fassbinder's series was like contemplating that cursed album projected on screen. Lou's words were now images in a real Berlin.

In 1976, while Reed's album was already considered an absolute failure, Bowie and Iggy arrived destroyed in West Berlin seeking anonymity and cleansing. They recorded the Berlin Trilogy and The Idiot at Hansa Studios, near the Wall, living in a simple apartment in Schöneberg, pedaling bicycles like ordinary citizens. They were inhabiting the city that Reed had dreamed as a nightmare.

The sonic difference was brutal: where Reed built operatic symphonies of misery, Bowie and Iggy found the cold minimalism and krautrock electronics of Kraftwerk and Neu!. Two opposing visions of the same infernal void.

In Reed's mind, his previous albums were always the worst garbage imaginable, while his new albums were the best creation ever imagined. Berlin was no exception. Reed refused for decades to play the album in its entirety; going that deep had left him emotionally exhausted. It wasn't until 2006 that he agreed to perform it complete in a series of concerts documented by filmmaker Julian Schnabel, accompanied by singer Anohni Hegarty, guitarist Steve Hunter, and Ezrin himself.

By then, critics had rewritten history: the "pathetic disaster" appeared on every list of masterpieces. Bowie approached Laurie Anderson after Lou's death to tell her that Berlin was Reed's absolute peak, comparable to Brecht or Fassbinder, that art which the world took decades to catch up to understand and appreciate.

Bowie and Iggy Pop understood why Reed had chosen Berlin as his great literary metaphor. Being situated on the Western frontier and isolated from the rest of the world, Berlin was anything our imagination thought it to be.

Reed built the definitive Berlin without ever setting foot in it because he understood that the geography of pain doesn't need a passport. It only needs enough honesty to stare directly into the abyss and describe it note by note, without blinking.