Along with all my Halloween horror posts, I’m going to dedicate some of this month’s content to Lou Reed who left this plane three years ago on October 27, 2013. This year we’re also celebrating the 40th anniversary of Lou’s sixth solo album, Coney Island Baby, released in February, 1976. Here are some words from a Pitchfork review published on the album’s 30th birthday…
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.” But as the song drifts along its elegiac six-minute arc, the idea moves from the ridiculous (Lou as linebacker?) to the sublime (nothing fuels a young man’s burgeoning homosexual impulses like getting pat on the butt by brawny alpha males in tights) to the unspeakably poignant: rock’s reigning iconoclast admitting that he just wanted to fit in all along.
Coney Island Baby was the Lou Reed album that introduced me to the artist’s music beyond “Walk On The Wild Side.” When I was a freshman in college I borrowed lots of music from a friend down the hall in my dormitory. That education included most of Lou’s wider catalog, but Coney Island Baby was my first deep dive, and it’s still one of my favorites. Here’s Coney Island Baby…
Stay Awake!
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.
