Ride Sally Ride

Lou Reed - "Sally Can't Dance" (1974) - RCA

Hello Friends,

Well it seems like we've been on quite the Lou Reed kick lately.

Sally Can't Dance is Reed's fourth solo LP.  Riding the commercial success of Transformer and Rock And Roll Animal, record exec's at RCA thought the time was right for Lou Reed to release a sharp and polished Rock & Roll record that would become an FM radio staple.  But for all his artistry, one thing that sweet Lou never comfortably embraced was the mainstream.

Reed took a backseat when it came to producing the record and only played guitar on one or two tracks.  The result, oddly enough, was his most successful LP yet.  (A trend that would abruptly end with his next release, the feedback/noise opus, Metal Machine Music.)

His harsh, cynical and world-weary lyrics clash with the record's glossy and slick production.  Reed captures the sleaze and grime of mid-1970's New York city better than any other artist.

The characters in his songs have all the familiar Reed traits: men and women who have fallen from grace, who have flown to close to the sun and are now just barely scraping by.  Their experiences have left them completely jaded, cynical and worse-for-the wear.    

Side One kicks off with the Bowie-sounding, "Ride Sally Ride"-- starring another of Reed's  ever popular tortured female characters with a "heart made out of ice."  Plus, we love the line, "Take off your pants, don't you know this is a party?"  Now if I had a nickel for every time I head that...

"Ride Sally Ride" is followed by the over-produced "Animal Language", the homo-erotic, "Baby Face" and the acerbic, "NY Stars".

Side Two kicks off with the super-cynical, sad and autobiographical, "Kill Your Sons", written about Lou's time spend in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager:

All your two-bit psychiatrists are giving you electroshock,

They said, they'd let you live at home with mom and dad instead of mental hospitals,

But every time you tried to read a book you couldn't get to page 17,

'Cause you forgot where you were so you couldn't even read

Don't you know they're gonna kill your sons

Don't you know gonna kill, kill your sons

They're gonna kill, kill your sons 

until they run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run away...

Creedmore treated me very good but Paine Whitney was even better, 

And when I flipped out on PHC I was so sad, I didn't even get a letter,

All of the drugs, that we took it really was lots of fun

But when they shoot you up with thorizene on crystal smoke you choke like a son of a gun

"Ennui" sounds like "Like A Rolling Stone"-era Dylan on some strong, strong downers and sung by a strung-out Leonard Cohen.  

Sally is back on "Sally Can't Dance", now a former-model, she's strung out on meth and no longer living the high life on the Upper East Side.  Instead she's bumming around St. Marks Place and getting raped in Tompkins Square Park.  Ugh... lighten up Lou.     

The final song is the great, "Billy" (featuring Reed playing acoustic and the Velvet's Doug Yule on bass duties), about a childhood friends-- one who gets good grades, plays football and goes to med school (Billy) and the other who drops out of school, plays pool and really doesn't give a fuck (presumably, Lou.)  Ah, but there's a twist.  Billy is drafted to Viet Nam, while the narrator is declared mentally unfit for the Army.   When Billy returns, he is unrecognizable, with shattered nerves, "like talking to a door."  The narrator is then left to ponder, "which one of us was the fool"? 

Forget about dancing, I'm not getting off the couch after listening to this record! 

RATING: 4.5 Dances with Picasso's illegitimate mistresses out of 5