Top 10 Most Underrated Lou Reed Songs

Lou Reed was more serious than rock and roll, he was darker and more adult than my other heroes. His best songs felt more real than other singers’, like it wasn’t a game anymore, like it wasn’t just a guy in a room making up songs.

I have no idea how lived in Lou’s songs actually were but they sure had a sense of authority behind them. His songs had more detail, more distinguishing characteristics than his contemporaries, and so they had more dimensions. That descent below the surface, that turn for the worse, was the trademark of Lou’s writing to me. The elegance of the drugs, or the champagne by name, that tells you where you are, the momentary stay in confusion even if the vision is bleak and tragic. Among his 22 studio solo albums, 10 solo live albums, 4 Velvet Underground albums, assorted live Velvet Underground and Velvet Underground outtake releases, there are a number of his songs that get overlooked.

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10) Lisa Says - There are a couple studio versions of this song, but the really special one is off the 1969: The Velvet Underground Live Volume 1 album. There’s a hint of prostitution here, “If you’re looking for a good-time charlie, well that’s not really what I am” but it’s just a hint. We’re not getting the full story in this song, it’s like a passing conversation overheard between strangers but the kind that sticks out for a minute, the details strange and distinguishing enough that you feel like you’re in the presence of something. The beauty of this track, though, is 50% song and 50% magic in the night. It’s one of those live takes that adds a beauty and a depth to every word and note.

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9. Cremation - This is Off Lou’s 1992 Magic and Loss album. In this song Lou ruminates over the ashes of someone he knew as they’re thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. “Will your ashes float like some foreign boat, or will they sink absorbed forever? Will the Atlantic Coast have its final boast? Nothing else contained you ever.” The Irish leaning guitar riff feels old and beautiful, Lou’s language in this one is sparse and to the point. A beautiful keening psalm to gigantic death.

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8. Rock and Roll Heart - This is the title track off Lou’s 1976 Rock and Roll Heart album. It’s Lou purposefully and knowingly acting dumb. “I guess I’m just dumb cause I knows I ain’t smart.” It’s a catchy song and the band sounds great on it, but there’s also what sounds like a bitter venom here too. I don’t know what the story behind him writing this was, if someone from a record company was trying to get Lou to write a big hit, or if Lou saw how dumb big popular songs were, or if he was reacting to some sort of intellectual criticism or review he’d gotten. Either way there is a lot of cynicism and spite directed at some audience here, try not to be that audience, whoever it is; try to get in on the joke because it’s pretty good.

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7. Smalltown - I specifically mean the live version of this song, the first track on his 2004 Animal Serenade album, because Lou’s banter with the audience is great. “We don’t have any tapes off stage, we don’t have any loops off stage, every fucking note you hear is us, right in front of you...Nothing up my sleeve baby, I don’t have any”. Whether or not this was indeed a sleeveless night, Lou and the band do sound unmistakably alive and on site for this song. The song is written from the perspective of Andy Warhol, specifically his existential despair of growing up in Pittsburgh and wanting to be a famous artist. Lou sings, as Andy, “There’s no Michelangelo coming from Pittsburgh. If art is the tip of the iceberg, I’m the part sinking below.”

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6. Charley’s Girl - From 1976‘s Coney Island Baby album, this has one of the classic Lou Reed formulas of pop song melody and music with the patented “turn for the worse” in his lyrics. The first verse makes it seem like it’s a love song, or a song about some “femme fatale’ish” woman. The second verse makes it clear that it’s about a girl who turns a band in to the cops and gets them busted, supposedly for drug use I’ve always assumed. “I said if I ever see Sharon again I’m gonna punch her face in” Lou sings. The catchy guitar riff and big cowbell appearance on this song are almost like a trap that catch you when you’re not looking, just like the band in the song, and when you’re spacing out you’re jolted back to your senses with the threat of violence and horror. A great Lou Reed song can always find you right where you’re sitting.

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5. Modern Dance - An ode to the artistic impulse and the constant need to leave before things get boring or static. It’s from his intermittently awesome 2000 album Ecstasy. The modern dance of the title is described by Lou as “where roles are shifting”, “you don’t know who you’re with this week, this month, this time of year”. The artistic hunger to explore and keep moving. It’s a beautiful and slightly sad state of grace though, as Lou says “it’s all down hill after the first kiss”.

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4. Sally Can’t Dance - The title track off of Lou’s 1974 album has a fantastic groove. One of the distinguishing characteristics of a lot of Lou’s best songs is a lack of moral admonition, meaning he doesn’t judge the drug dealers, the prostitutes, the junkies, in his songs they simply exist. He’s either one of them, or he’s a close observer, he’s not the deliverer of a divine judgement or interested in contributing to their “reformation”. This song is taking that lack of moral judgement to a very high extreme. This song may be Lou’s most eminently danceable, and yet it’s lyrics are some of Lou’s most disturbing. Among Sally’s distinguishing claims to fame Lou sings that she was “the first girl in her neighborhood to get raped in Tompkins Square, real good”. It’s an uncomfortably immoral track, it makes you want to dance, and then stops you from wanting to if you listen.

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3. Romeo Had Juliette - This is off Lou’s 1989 New York album. It’s about two characters, Romeo Rodriguez and Juliette Belle, star crossed lovers in the 1980’s era city of New York. This is one of Lou’s most lyrically novelistic songs, the opening lines brilliantly outline just how entangled and enmeshed, faulty, and entrapped, life in the city can be. We get the feeling things have degenerated, we’re not in Verona anymore. And yet, among all the dirt, crime, racism, corruption and epic violence, the same Romeo from way back, now a male prostitute with a long black pony tail, still hears the voice of his Juliet, and from among this dank underground vile enclosure, he hears her voice, and “her voice was like a bell.”

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2. Animal Language - Off of the 1974 Sally Can’t Dance album, this song must be the hedonistic peak of something. First off the track sounds awesome musically, it hits really hard, the horns are great and the background singing soulful and beautiful. I don’t know what the deep message is here but in this song Lou sings about a cat and a dog that are kept apart from having sex with each other by a man who puts a board in between the two. So instead of having sex they take that man’s sweat and shoot it up between them. This is actually what Lou felt like writing and singing about on the date this was recorded in 1974, and thank god he did, I have never heard that topic broached before or since in popular music.

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1. I’m Waiting For the Man (Live version off of his 1978 Live Take No Prisoners Album) - I’m Waiting for the Man is one of Lou’s most famous songs and was on the first Velvet Underground album. It’s not an underrated song, it actually tends to be rated pretty highly. It’s about someone going up to Harlem to buy drugs from their dealer. The original version has a pounding piano line and a driving, almost jittery rhythm, like a junkies nerves exploding. This live version is very different and much darker though. It’s almost like a sequel to the original 1967 record. It’s 11 years down the road and he’s a wasted, burned out, unadulterated, addict. It’s destroyed his relationships, his family, his world, his life. And his rationalization, “it’s just a temporary thing”, re sung and echoed by backup singers that sound like angels, is so sad and bleak it’s like the last merciful illusion before there’s really nothing left.