Lou Reed New York

The latest in Ace Records’ Songwriters series takes the listener from a version of ‘Why Don’t You Smile Now’ from Lou Reed’s pre-Velvet Underground days through selections from the band’s albums to three from 1972’s solo “Transformer”.

In May 1965, Lou Reed was a 23-year-old staff songwriter and session musician for Pickwick Records in New York, churning out doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll “soundalike” singles to be sold in drugstores. There he was introduced to his future Velvet Underground bandmate, the Welsh-born John Cale, when the label put the two of them together for a house band called The Primitives. (They would go on to make the jokey novelty song “The Ostrich.”) Reed could write teen pop hits at a rapid clip, but his real creative focus essentially starts with this foundational document, Words & Music, May 1965, which he made with Cale and which includes the first known recordings of some of the Velvets’ most well-known songs. There’s almost nothing thematically linking his former dime-store hits-for-hire and these strands of The Velvet Underground’s underbelly-surveying DNA. But the collection (the first in a series of archival releases) does highlight the songwriting discipline and rigor that would see Reed through countless stylistic changes and a 50-plus-year career as one of America’s most important artists.

2013 five CD box set containing a quintet of albums packaged in cardboard mini LP sleeves and housed in a slipcase. Lou Reed, the former frontman of legendary New York rock band The Velvet Underground, established himself as a solo artist after quitting the band in 1970 and is still active today. The five albums in this collection are his first five with Sire Records.

Walk on the Wild Side: The Best of Lou Reed was the standard record company "hits" compilation surveying Reed's five-year, eight-album sojourn at RCA from 1972 to 1976. Its 11 songs included two from Lou Reed, three from Transformer (among them, of course, this album's title track, Reed's sole chart hit), one from Berlin, two from Rock N Roll Animal (one of which is "Sweet Jane" minus the introductory fanfare), and the title tracks from Sally Can't Dance and Coney Island Baby, plus the previously non-LP B-side "Nowhere at All." It was a bulletproof selection, as unimaginative as it was dependable, which oddly was why it worked so well.

In 1972, Lou Reed was a minor cult hero to a handful of rock critics and left-of-center music fans who championed his former band, the Velvet Underground, but he was unknown to the mainstream music audience. By 1986, Reed was a rock & roll icon, widely hailed as a master songwriter and one of the founding fathers of punk, glam, noise rock, and any number of other vital rock subgenres; he even scored a few hits along the way. If you want to know what happened during those 14 years to make such a difference, the answer can be found in The RCA & Arista Album Collection, a 17-disc box set that brings together nearly all of Reed's recorded work from this period…

Lou Reed was a singer and guitarist best known as a co-founder of the influential rock group the Velvet Underground and later, as a legendary solo artist. He wrote evocative music using his knowledge of poetry while exploring a variety of genres and personas over his career including glam rock and heavy metal. Famous for writing and singing famous classic hits including 'Perfect Day', 'Sister Jane', and 'Rock and Roll', Reed continued to perform and record into his later years, releasing more than 16 albums over the course of his lengthy career.

In October 1990, Lou Reed interviewed Vaclav Havel, playwright, poet, president of the newly emancipated Czechoslovakia, and – surprisingly? – a Velvet Underground fan. During the course of their conversation, Havel handed Reed a book. "These are your lyrics, hand-printed and translated into Czechoslovakian. There were only 200 of them. They were very dangerous to have. People went to jail." Nobody will go to jail for owning Between Thought and Expression, but Reed's lyrics remain dangerous – not, as in Communist Czechoslovakia, for what they are, but for what they say…