Throughout the annals of musical history, there have always been controversies, composers leaving traditional paths to explore new kinds of music, often to the bewilderment of audiences and scorn of critics. There was a time when Stravinsky’s “Sacre du printemps” shocked audiences, or Schönberg’s twelve-tone-technique challenged the way of composition. Pop music is no exception. In fact, it thrives on scandal and controversy, from Elvis’s hips being censored on TV to punk rock, the excesses of gangsta rap and beyond. Music once seen as a public menace has gone on to become classic. There are no lists of “100 Greatest Albums Ever” without “Never Mind The Bollocks”; no one would question the lasting influence of The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”, despite (or because of) the Charles Manson connection.
But there is one album that still divides to this day. To many, it’s mainly a meme, a punchline, and its content is known only as “unlistenable noise”. The album in question is Lou Reed’s 1975 double album “Metal Machine Music”, a record more people have talked about than actually listened to.
“Metal Machine Music” is a record more people have talked about than actually listened to.
The commonly known story goes as follows: in 1975, Lou Reed (1942-2013) was riding high on rock stardom and living off a diet of amphetamines, Marlboros and scotch, but felt bored by the music he had put out. To get out of his contract with RCA Records by fulfilling the required number of albums, Reed recorded about one hour of guitar feedback and released it as an ear-splitting, nerve-wrecking double album. The record-buying public recoiled in horror and returned the album in record numbers. RCA fired Reed, who had to swear to his new record company Arista to never make “Metal Machine Music II”. Thus was born the Worst Album Of All Time. Yet, as these things often go, there was more behind this “Rockstar goes mad”-anecdote. What reads like caricature was in fact the story of a man who was tired of being a caricature of himself. To understand “Metal Machine Music”, one has to understand Lou Reed’s situation at the time of its release.
What reads like caricature was in fact the story of a man who was tired of being a caricature of himself.
From a professional standpoint, Reed was at a high. The David Bowie-produced glam rock of “Transformer” and especially the single and enduring pop classic “Walk On The Wild Side/ Perfect Day” had made a global rock star out of the erstwhile underground icon. The live album “Rock’n’Roll Animal”, which re-imagined Velvet Underground classics as glittering heavy metal, complete with dueling twin guitars, and “Sally Can’t Dance” had been his most lucrative works so far. His image was that of the excessive rock star, clad in black leather, as cool as he was arrogant and every journalist’s worst nightmare, since Reed had the ability to verbally roast anyone to ashes.
Despite his success, Lewis Allan Reed was not a happy man. On the contrary, Reed deeply resented his new image. In fact, he had sabotaged it since the beginning. When “Transformer” hit the shelves and the charts, Reed adapted to the glam rock trend by appearing on the stage in black and white kabuki-style make-up—until he very quickly got fed up with that. His next album was no “Transformer 2”, but the dark and serious masterpiece “Berlin”, which owed much more to Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil or Franz Wedekind than to David Bowie—and which, by the way, also received some damning reviews, only to be counted some decades later among the best albums ever made. Still, what the audience wanted was Lou Reed, the rock star speed freak from New York’s mean streets. As the people cheered, the artist himself felt increasingly drained, keeping himself energized with strong amphetamines while crashing out of his first marriage.
The recording sessions for “Sally Can’t Dance” marked Reed’s breaking point. The sound was slick and extremely marketable, with infusions of soul and funk, but Reed failed to muster up any enthusiasm for the project. He spent years afterwards claiming that he couldn’t even remember making it. It was under these circumstances that he decided to set up two giant amplifiers in his apartment, plug in two guitars and record the ensuing feedback. Had he finally lost his mind from overuse of amphetamines? No, instead this was Lou Reed going back to his roots.
Reed always maintained that he never moved beyond the four chords he had learned from Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes”, and that all a rock record needs are “voice, two guitars, bass and drums”. However, this is just half the truth. Throughout his life, he had a love for the experimental and unusual. It is true that Reed, who grew up on Long Island, loved the doo-wop of the likes of Dion & The Belmonts, rhythm’n’blues and early rock’n’roll, but he also witnessed in person the rise of free jazz. As a young college student at Syracuse, he visited the jazz clubs where giants like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman created a new, free-flowing form of music. He had a special fascination with Ornette Coleman, whose “Lonely Woman” was his all-time favorite song, and years later he had Coleman’s original band member Don Cherry (Neneh and Eagle Eye Cherry’s dad) join his band. How greatly Reed was influenced by musicians like John Coltrane or Coleman can be heard in his wild soloing on the various Velvet Underground live recordings. Later on, while working for Pickwick Records as a songwriter churning out pastiches of current pop trends, he wrote a satirical “dance song” called “The Ostrich”, which employed the “Ostrich guitar”, all strings turned to D—a few years later, this technique would be re-employed to chilling effect in “Venus In Furs”, a song that is simply unimaginable without the contributions of another avant-gardist, the classically trained and yet highly adventurous Welshman John Cale. When Cale came to New York in the early sixties to further his musical studies, he joined the circles of avant-garde composers like John Cage and La Monte Young. He brought the edge to the first two Velvet Underground albums, adding classical influences as well as the drone sounds he’d been experimenting with. Noise, atonality, distortion and its possibilities always informed Lou Reed’s work.
So, with “Metal Music Machine” Reed was remembering his roots. But he might also have been on the cusp of something very new. When “Metal Machine Music” was created, a new kind of sound was making its way through the musical world. New electronic noises were coming out of Germany, with Kraftwerk revolutionizing pop music, composing long, synthesized odes to the German Autobahn. The duo Neu!, hailing, like Kraftwerk, from Düsseldorf, showed what could be done with the usual rock instrumentation, creating innovative, sometimes energizing, sometimes ethereal and repetitive soundscapes. In Reed’s native New York, Alan Vega and Martin Rev of Suicide were shocking the most hard-boiled audiences with their pulsing, stripped-down, electronic rock. Just two years after “Metal Machine Music”, David Bowie, who brought Reed back into the limelight in 1972, would perform a similarly drastic career turn by releasing “Low”, delving deep into new electronic music, while his collaborator Brian Eno (at the time still in Roxy Music) introduced the concept of “ambient music” just a short while later. Meanwhile young composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich or Glenn Branca developed ideas not so different from Reed’s. There was something in the air in those days, and Reed caught it.
Why, then, did everything go wrong? Reed insisted it was due to bad marketing. “Metal Machine Music” was supposed to be released as a work of neo-classical music, preferably on the classical label Red Seal. Instead the record was sold to a rock audience, as a genuine rock record. Examining the record, one must concede that Reed had a point. The album cover is simply one of the most iconic images in rock history: Lou Reed in full black leather Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal gear, ominously displayed in front of a black background, with “METAL MACHINE MUSIC: AN ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTAL COMPOSITION—*THE AMINE β RING ” in silver letters. The listener would expect a heavy rock album, with hard, driving rhythms, and endless guitar solos. But don’t judge a book by its cover. Rather, take in the rest of the packaging, because Lou Reed did not engage in false advertising. In fact, the composer lays the plan out in detail in the self-penned liner notes. “This record is not for parties/dancing/background romance”, they read. “Most of you won’t like this and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you. At the very least I made it so I had something to listen to”. In the text, very obviously written under the influence of speed, Reed touches upon various topics, from his initial goal of infusing rock’n’roll with the same intelligence as books or films, to the dismissing of “Rock’n’roll Animal” and “Sally Can’t Dance” yet again, and life with amphetamines. The text closes with one of Reed’s most famous lines: “My week beats your year”. The liner notes make it clear to the prospective listener: this is not what you expect.
The music is organized like a classical work, in four movements, each of them 16 minutes long. On the original vinyl edition, the last movement ends with a “locked groove”, meaning the record only stops when the listener lifts the needle. Endless noise, to make the “joke” even more unbearable? That is not the case. What might be most baffling about “Metal Machine Music” is that there is actual music on it. Listen with an open mind and ear, and you’ll recognize musical patterns. According to the composer, he even hid some homages to various works by Beethoven within the sounds. This was achieved by Reed not simply recording feedback, but working with the material, slowing and speeding the sound up and down, playing it forwards and backwards. Afterwards, the record was mastered like a “regular” album, with the help of Bob Ludwig, a master of his craft. Reed put more work and ambition into “Metal Machine Music” than into several of his earlier albums. The album also proves two things about Reed as an artist: his love for technology, and his rediscovery of the guitar. He was always a “gearhead”, endlessly fascinated by new developments in audio and recording technology. On the original sleeve, Reed even lists his equipment, such as 7-string Gibson stereo guitars, Ampex 440 tape recorders, Fender Twin reverb amps or Pultrec filters —although it is doubtful how much of this really existed. Secondly, “Metal Machine Music” is an unorthodox guitar album. At this point of his career, Reed largely abandoned the guitar in live settings: he was, according to some biographers, “trying to be James Brown”. Still Lou Reed was always obsessed with guitars, constantly on the hunt for better and new guitar sounds. So “MMM” is also Reed engaging with his beloved instrument in a new way. Years later, he would call it “the ultimate guitar solo”.
What might be most baffling about “Metal Machine Music” is that there is actual music on it.
Of course, this record was never destined for commercial success. RCA Victor took the record off the market after three weeks. Lou Reed was branded a lunatic, and the album became what now might be called a meme. Changing record companies, Reed released his next album, “Coney Island Baby” (1976) on Arista. The successor to “Metal Machine Music” was a “classic album”, with far mellower sounds, a return to traditional songwriting and some of the best songs of his career, especially the longing title track. Something similar had happened just a few years before, when the Velvet Underground followed the noisy excess of “White Light/White Heat” and the forced departure of John Cale with the melodic melancholy of 1969’s “The Velvet Underground”.
But Reed would never abandon “Metal Machine Music”. The record developed something of an afterlife. For example, it found its way to a young Thurston Moore, who later went on to form New York’s noise-rock legends Sonic Youth. Many others came to see it as a milestone in electronic music. It wasn’t even universally loathed by critics: Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke called it the “purest Lou Reed album”, while rock writer Lester Bangs, who had a lifelong love-hate relationship with Reed, praised it (with some irony) as a great example of artistic integrity. Gradually the electronic drone of “Metal Machine Music” made its way into the world of pop. It can be heard in industrial music (the German band Die Krupps even named an album “Metallmaschinenmusik”) and challenging electronica by the likes of Aphex Twin. Reed himself did the unthinkable in 2002: together with the ensemble Zeitkratzer he performed “Metal Machine Music” live on stage, with strings, piano, wind and accordion, in a one-time gig.
In 2008, Reed formed the “Metal Machine Trio”, where he performed improvised free-flowing music, informed by his various influences over the decades. In his last years, he even set out to make yet another divisive album, the 2011 heavy metal long-player “Lulu”, which demoted Metallica to his backing band and confronted their fanbase with the themes of German playwright Franz Wedekind.
Lou Reed never dismissed his 1975 double album. According to Reed’s acquaintances from that time, he held private listening parties, playing the album in full. There was even a remastered re-issue in 2011. Today, “Metal Machine Music” is still not the first Lou Reed album you reach for. Or the second. Or the fourth. It is still “extreme music” to listen to. But as a “pure” artistic statement, it is one of his most important and influential works.
Nonetheless, I still haven’t managed to listen to it all the way through.
