I was pondering Lou Reed and his struggles after I posted Bowie's Station to Station, but some back history might be in order: My brother, who happened to be seventeen years older than I, turned me onto Lou Reed at a very early age. The two albums he played the crap out of most (not counting Berlin or Rock and Roll Animal), and that stuck out most in my mind through the years were Sally Can't Dance and Coney Island Baby. From a sales standpoint, the albums were abject failures. But this is what formed my taste in music. So, sit yourself down and enjoy some Sally Can't Dance. Don't you know this is a party?
Lou Reed - Ride Sally Ride
From Michael Hill:
Internationally known avant-garde impresario Robert Wilson, who collaborated with Lou Reed on a musical theatre piece called Time Rocker, has developed another with Lou called Poe-try, about the writer Edgar Allan Poe. Wilson told a reporter, "There's a lot of darkness to Poe, but there's also a lot of light, a lot of tenderness. His work can be touching and funny. And I think the same of Lou."
Sally Can't Dance takes you right into the heart of Lou Reed's darkness, back to a period when his most decadent, dangerous behavior, staged and otherwise, had improbably brought him great commerial acclaim (along with the skepticism of critics). His work from the time is definitely funny -- "Take off your pants," he suggests on the opening track, Ride Sally Ride, "Don't you know this is a party?" -- and it's even touching at times, though there's scant tenderness in it. Lou once described the album as "cheap and nasty," and he wasn't talking about the recording budget. It was shocking and sleazy, full of contempt for the characters Lou had conjured up in his songs and self-loathing for the persona Lou had created for himself. It managed to piss off a lot of people who had followed his career since the Velvet Underground days but it also drew the largest audience of Lou's career. Sally Can't Dance was his first and only Top Ten album.
After the record was released, Lou would often tell journalists, in his disdainful manner of the time, that he hadn't really done much more than write the songs and show up and sing. He left the dirty work to others, the brash horn charts, the faux-bluesy arrangements, the blaring choir of "colored girls." This was the first album he was recording in New York City with a crew of sesion dudes. All his previous solo work had been cut in London, with production help from the likes of David Bowie and the late Mick Ronson and the playing of starts like Steve Winwood, Jack Bruce, and Aynsley Dunbar. By all accounts, the recording sessions, helmed by producer Steve Katz, were continually troubled and Lou's showstopping extracurricular activities, while producing more grist for the mill, wereadding to the studio difficulties. He famously quipped to writer and scene-maker Danny Fields, "This is fantastic -- the worse I am, the more it sells. If I wasn't on the record at all next time around, it would probably go to number one."
Looking back on that period during a 1996 interview with an English journalist, Lou confessed, "My problem was just to survive me."
Technical Information:
Artist: Lou Reed
Album: Sally Can't Dance (2001 Remaster)
Year: 1974
Audio Codec(s): FLAC
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: EAC split tracks
Avg. bitrate: 917 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 259 MB
Length: 0:39:29
Personnel:
Lou Reed: vocals, guitar
Danny Weis: guitar, tambourine, backing vocals, horn arrangement
Paul Fleisher: saxophone
David Taylor: horns
Lou Marini: horns
Trevor Koehler: horns
Jon Faddis: horns
Alan Rubin: horns
Alex Foster: horns
Steve Katz: harmonica, horn arrangement
Michael Fonfara: keyboards, backing vocals, horn arrangement
Prakash John: bass, backing vocals
Doug Yule: bass
Ritchie Dharma: drums
Pentti "Whitney" Glan: drums
Michael Wendroff: backing vocals
Joanne Vent: backing vocals
Tracklisting:
01. Ride Sally Ride (4:06)
02. Animal Language (3:05)
03. Baby Face (5:06)
04. N.Y. Stars (4:02)
05. Kill Your Sons (3:40)
06. Ennui (3:43)
07. Sally Can't Dance (4:12)
08. Billy (5:10)
Bonus Tracks:
09. Good Taste (3:30)
10. Sally Can't Dance (Single Version) (2:55)
Sally Can't Dance Megaupload Link