Style: hard rock
Label: Panorama
Year: 2000
Home: New York, New York
Concert location: The Bottom Line, New York, New York
Year Recorded: 1983
Length: 60 minutes
Bonus Features: none
Members: Lou Reed ~ vocals/guitar
Robert Quine ~ guitar
Fernando Saunders ~ bass
Fred Maher ~ drums
He's off drugs & maybe alcohol, too. He's got a new band with an amazing guitarist pulled over from underground punk legends Richard Hell & the Voidoids, an amazing bass player who would stay with him in the years to come & a drummer who had just the right sound with not too many flourishes. He just stands there in jeans & is anything but visually exciting or sexy as he was years earlier. He's also taken off the make-up. He's playing guitar after years away with his modest guitar skills fully in the spotlight showing what they truly are. He's got a set of songs including Velvet Underground classics & stuff from his stellar new album The Blue Mask which is a new & very personal mask for him to wear ... & Andy Warhol is in the audience. Are these ingredients for a classic rock show or a bomb? In this case it's probably one of Lou Reed's best live productions, not eclipsed until his revival of Berlin 2 decades later. This live concert begins a new story for Reed, one where he is reinventing & essentially rediscovering himself. On stage he's intimate & almost self-depreciating without being too interactive with the audience. He's more mature here, now sober, & sliding into his role as elder statesman of the punk generation which has already come & gone. He's still not fully comfortable with his guitar playing after a decade away & has yet to push his solos upfront as would soon be the case, thus what he plays may be technically unchallenging but it's raw, naïve & an experiment in just pure sound in a way only Reed can & would not do so again. Plus, he's got the amazing Robert Quine on guitar who was not just a diehard fan of the Velvet Underground & Reed but comes from the school of Jeff Beck guitar where the guitar sounds anything like a guitar. I became a fan of Quine's style after this as I'd never heard solos so ... cold & haunting ... and I've never heard anyone else even get close since. Sadly, The Blue Mask would also be his best outing with Reed of three albums before he'd contribute a box set of early Velvet Underground recordings & then commit suicide after the death of his wife ... remaining a true legend to all who know his playing. I should also confess that this video made me a bigger Lou Reed fan, too. One of the best parts comes at the end in a brief backstage clip when Reed talks about having one his his guitar notes reach all the way to the back wall of the space & then angularly bounce back. You completely believe that he heard this & want to go back and find it for yourself. Highly recommended as an introduction to Reed.
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