Disco Mystic – Off The Bells and quite possibly the most annoying song ever writter. Because of the vocal, the groove is pretty good.
Last Great American Whale – Every song around this time was great and everything off New York, “some said they saw him off florida, my mother said she saw him in Chinatown but you can’t always trust your mother” -he speaks sing dead pan.
Vicious – Bowie at his gayest producing Reed at his gayest and this, for the mid-seventies mind, was pretty radical gay lib stuff. Plus in swished and rocked.
Future Famers Of America – Off another killer Reed album (and trust me, they weren’t all), this rocks hard from the nineties. I saw him at the Beacon around this time and Reed was on fire.
Caroline Says 1 – Berlin is one of the most difficult to penetrate albums, you’ll ever here. Everything about this song, even as it rages in impotence and addiction, drags you all the way down.
What’s Good – The Andy Warhol memento mori and very moving stuff. It’s a relatively simple electric/acoustic. “What good is cancer in April? No good, no good at all…’
Rock Minuet – One of Reed’s greatest solo songs: about the future and the past and how death foreshadows it and how sex foreshadows it all: a stunning violin haunts this terrifying song: with cum on your feet and heart attacks on your knees, it carries you to the end.
Sick Of You – New York may well be my fave Reed solo album: a snap shot of my city in the mid-eighties like it was ancient Rome under Caligula: “The ozone layer has no ozone any more and you’re gonna leave me for the boy next door and I’m sick of you”.
Sad Song – Ugh, it’s the middle of winter… do I need to feel any worse? How can such a beautifully orchestrated song feel so damn depressing
Egg Cream – Was this his marriage to Laurie Anderson album? He sounds downright giddy. “I scream, you scream, we all want egg cream…”