“Coney Island Baby” (Lou Reed)
I do own a copy of Metal Machine Music, forever branding myself as a either a sucker for buying it, or a pretentious twit for sometimes liking to hear the squall. Or even trying to make my own version of a Metal Machine-esque song, albeit as filtered through Sonic Youth.
Lou Reed's oeuvre is complicated: a few magnificent albums, a few albums with a couple of great songs and the rest filler, and some real duds. Haven't heard Coney Island Baby in many, many years, maybe the distance will have done us both some good.
Lou Reed: Coney Island Baby: Pitchfork Record Review
...Thirty years ago, this is where Lou Reed went to bottom out and cash in his chips. Even if he wasn't dead, his career pretty much was: While hindsight has granted 1975's electronic-noise experiment Metal Machine Music (Amazon link) a contrarian classic-- celebrated more as a symbolic “fuck you” than as a musical composition-- the reality was it forced him into a precarious financial position where he was being sued by his ex-manager and living day-to-day in the Gramercy Park Hotel, with the bill footed by a sympathetic RCA boss who forced Reed to, in his own words, “go in and make a rock record.” But when he did, creating what was to become Coney Island Baby, instead of referring to his usual inspirations-- transvestites, junkies, the underclass-- Reed exposed a far more shadowy, fascinating entity: his heart.By 1976, we had already heard Reed do pretty much everything that could be done in a pop song: shoot heroin, suck on a ding-dong, kiss shiny boots of leather. And yet nothing he had done was quite as shocking as the revelation on Coney Island Baby's devastating title track that he always “wanted to play football for the coach.”
Tags: rock_snob
