Lou Reed Inducted Into Hollywood’s RockWalk

The great iconoclast Lou Reed will be latest inductee to Hollywood’s RockWalk Tuesday, June 24, at noon. Sweet Lou Reed will also appear at Tower Records Sunset for an in-store signing on Monday, June 23 at 7 p.m. and will perform at The Wiltern Theatre on Tuesday, June 24. The RockWalk is at 7425 Sunset Blvd.

Reed’s classic Transformer reviewed by Bill Sherman here:

His second solo release since the break-up of the Velvet Underground, it is also the most thoroughly pop album that Lou would ever release – thanks in part to producer David Bowie, smack dab in his Ziggy Stardust persona. Purists may grouse at the results (even Reed himself has sniped about the recording experience over the years,) but in the end the release has held up better than many of his more serious works. It also, of course, yielded Lou’s big pop hit, “Walk On The Wild Side.”….

The Velvet Underground album by Michael Finley here:

Sweet Jane, what a record this is, the Velvets’ best by my reckoning, which makes it perhaps the best rock and roll record ever. Slow lovely doowop numbers, the chunky rhythms of “What Goes On,” the delicate lyrics of “Some Kind of Love,” and others. Tunes that get inside you, like “Jesus,” and “Candy Says,” and “Pale Blue Eyes.” You feel like you’re disappearing into Lou Reed’s appalling yet nevertheless still-redeemable soul.

The Velvet Underground and Nico here:

One of the greatest rock albums of the ’60s and the very first alternative rock album ever, The Velvet Underground and Nico has finally been given the Deluxe treatment it so richly deserves on a new two-CD set that includes the original album in both stereo and mono, the singles, and five tracks from the first Nico solo album, Chelsea Girl.

….Recording a mere four studio albums (only two with the original lineup) in the late-’60s, the group established an aesthetic so extreme and alien that it has taken three decades for the world to catch up. The essence of that aesthetic is an unapologetic embrace of the opposite poles of the musical, emotional, and thematic spectrum: naked power on the one end and exquisite beauty on the other – squalid Saturday night nihilism followed by pristine Sunday morning reverence, yin and yang at their widest reach conjured from the urban essence of New York…..

The new New York City Man collection is an excellent sampler of Reed’s RCA work, and includes a few VU songs as well.