Lou Reed
Coney Island Baby

THE REVIEW

I would like to identify, and therefore review, a beautiful album by Lou Reed in just one magnificent piece, the one that gives it its title, and not because the rest is inferior, but rather because this title contains the strength of the artistic and human rebirth of a man now on the brink of self-destruction.

After the dreadful "Sally Can't Dance", a work entirely highlighted by Lou Reed's drug-ridden condition, barely aware of what he was recording, he goes on to release "Metal Machine Music", the most absurd album of his career, even though he continued to fiercely defend it until the end: a double LP composed of four pieces that basically reproduce feedback on vinyl (the return of the speaker's sound into the microphone that the listener perceives as a shrill and unbearably annoying whistle) for about 80 minutes.
Stuff for suicide even for the experimental years that were indeed the seventies, although this record would become fundamental, years and years later, for the "noise" exploration of bands such as "Sonic Youth".

With "Metal Machine Music" however, he had played all his bonus earned with RCA thanks to "Transformer" and "Sally Can't Dance" which, despite its undeniable neglect, turned out to be the best-selling album of his career; the record label had deeply invested in him with heavy advances in US dollars only to have a troublesome, drug-addicted, unstable, and almost out-of-control character on their hands.

He was at loggerheads with everyone when suddenly he remembers being a New Yorker, tough, unsinkable, born in Brooklyn and a son of Coney Island and decides to propose perhaps his most intimate and personal album ever where the very song that gives the album its title, "Coney Island Baby", is a song of fierce affection, gratitude, stones in the shoe thrown beyond any obstacle... and of love... above all love.

Ken Glancy, RCA’s president, perhaps one of the few people he could rely on, made him promise never to replicate similar works like "Metal Machine Music" again, and Lou, undoubtedly reluctantly, agreed as the only possible way out. The sound becomes softer, and it flies back in time, like what he used to listen to in college campuses when the Velvet Underground were just an evolving dream, and in full doo-wop style he introduces his teenage days and devotion to the protective figure of the football team coach.

On the other hand, there is loneliness, the soul sold for commercial purposes, the false friends who were primarily the Katz brothers, Lou Reed's manager and producer, who had sued him for the copious returns of Metal Machine Music, the compromise to commercialism he hated, as he hated his fans at concerts who kept asking him for "Walk on the wild side" as if it were the only good thing he had ever written.

"Coney Island Baby" however had one extra gear, probably unexpected, that of love because alongside Lou Reed in those days is Rachel, a transgender partner who opens up his feelings, the deepest ones, the most unconfessable ones. We are in 1975 and the track "Coney Island Baby" which gives the title to the LP becomes a sort of anthem to homosexuality, but at the same time celebrates love 360° without compromises and without inhibitions in a city that if you're lucky is a circus and if you're unlucky is a filthy sewer.

"Coney Island Baby" would be the album of his definitive rebirth if not quite of his consecration, but there would be much space and a lot of time ahead to get there, with one, in my opinion, of the three best rock albums ever: "New York"; dedicated, for better, but especially for worse, precisely to that city of the boy born in Brooklyn and son of Coney Island.