"I do Lou Reed better than anybody." The truth can hurt, but with that remark Lou Reed turns what might otherwise be a painful memory into an enlightened and amusing study of the rock-and-roll animal in the wild. Live Take No Prisoners, a double album culled from a five-night residency at New York's Bottom Line that Reed played in support of his 1978 studio album Street Hassle (Arista), stiffed at the time of its release. As David Fricke points out in his liner notes to the BMG Heritage CD re-release of the long-out-of-print recording, Take No Prisoners never even entered the Billboard 200 album-sales chart. What Fricke neglects to mention is that there's every reason to believe that Reed's label at the time -- Clive Davis's Arista Records -- would have had little or no interest in seeing the album succeed, since the 10-song Take No Prisoners has a high-strung, possibly amphetamine-addled, aggressively (and uncharacteristically) loquacious Reed going off half-cocked about such sacred cows as New York Times critic John Rockwell, the Academy Awards, and fellow Arista Recording artist Patti Smith. And though FM radio in those, uh, heady days found room to program prolonged live recordings like the bombastic "Sweet Jane" of 1974's Rock n Roll Animal (RCA), the rambling Lenny Bruce-style monologues that adorn key tracks on Take No Prisoners push the envelope of acceptability a bit too far. Reed himself, in Victor Bockris's 1994 biography Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (Simon & Schuster), would come to characterize Take No Prisoners as "a comedy album."

Yet as amusing and reckless as his shtick on Take No Prisoners is, the album is no comedy of errors. And though it's too off-the-cuff at points to be a staged musical comedy, it certainly is theatrical. As Reed finally lets on at the beginning of side four -- now midway through disc two -- everything about his performance here is part of an act. "Watch me turn into Lou Reed before your very eyes," he jokes as he gets into character to deliver what's become his themesong of sorts, "Walk on the Wild Side." But he's not really kidding. He's just letting the audience in on the essential charade that's always been at the heart of the rock-and-roll experience -- the fabricated reality a performer inhabits in order to put across a song, whether it's as blatantly fantastic as David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, as earnestly homespun as Robert Zimmerman's Young Bob Dylan, or as plain and humble as Bruce Springsteen's Bruce Springsteen. As many people have observed, it may be one hell of a song, but John Fogerty wasn't born on the Bayou.

Lou Reed, however, did hang around Andy Warhol's Factory. And as he goes to great lengths to point out on Take No Prisoners, at the expense of making it through even a single verse without interrupting himself, the song "Walk on the Wild Side" is populated with real people. "Little Joe was an idiot . . . ," he remarks so offhandedly that it's amazing he even remembers to cue the "colored girls" to do their thing. (At one point, though, he and the band seem to lose track of where the song's ascending bridge belongs.) And there are plenty of places on Take No Prisoners where even Reed seems to buy into the illusion that he's just having a conversation -- a very one-sided conversation -- with some friends rather than performing for a captive, paying audience. "Coney Island Baby," for example, finds him reminiscing casually about his exploits as a high-school athlete.

In contrast, the set's radically reworked version of "I'm Waiting for My Man," which has been slowed down to a dirty, shuffling blues, no longer comes off as Reed's own first-person account of a determined hipster scoring smack on the street. Instead, he takes on the hollowed-out mono-drone of an aging, world-weary junkie -- a fictional persona akin to the tragicomic drug addict Richard Pryor role-plays on That Nigger's Crazy -- and develops it into a deadly serious character study for the close-to-15 minutes that are preserved here from what was reported to be a full half-hour version. Although it might have been nice if the CD reissue had featured an extra take or three from the five-night stand, the one major disappointment is that it doesn't include the other half of this unique and compelling "I'm Waiting for My Man."

But just having Take No Prisoners back in print -- along with a newly mastered version of Reed's first and only real hit album, the David Bowie-produced 1972 disc Transformer (BMG Heritage), replete with bonus demo versions of "Hangin' Round" and "Perfect Day" -- and on CD for the first time addresses what would otherwise be a major oversight. Because after decades of accumulated word-of-mouth buzzing among fans, Take No Prisoners had become one of those rare commercial flops that just wouldn't go away -- tales of Reed's outrageous behavior had made the album almost as notorious as the all-feedback Metal Machine Music (with the bonus of being infinitely more listenable). What makes Take No Prisoners special is that it captures the essence of Lou Reed in the '70s -- the combustible mixture of arrogance and intelligence, foolishness and wit, grit and pretension, artifice and artfulness -- the way no other album could. Not Transformer, with its neatly packaged portrait of Reed as a counterculture poet with a rock-and-roll heart, and not even the more idiosyncratic and defiantly uncommercial Street Hassle, an album bookended by one of Reed's most overtly offensive songs ("I Wanna Be Black") and one of his most successful fusions of rock and poetry ("Street Hassle"). (Although it's easy to overlook the relatively musical performances in the midst of all the over-the-top verbiage, both of these Street Hassle tracks, as well as the Velvet Underground tune "Pale Blue Eyes" and the title track from Reed's 1973 album Berlin (RCA), are given relatively straight readings on Take No Prisoners.)

Reed, like a lot of "difficult" artists, has had a tendency to be wrong in his assessment of his own work as often as he is right. But he was dead on when, as quoted in the Bockris bio, he noted at the time of Take No Prisoners' release that "if I dropped dead tomorrow, this is the record I'd choose for posterity. It's not only the smartest thing I've ever done, it's also as close to Lou Reed as you're probably ever going to get, for better or worse." Reed has managed to soldier on as an aging rock-and-roll icon and even gain the kind of respectability that the Lenny Bruce in him loathed on stage at the Bottom Line in 1978 -- "Fuck Radio Ethiopia, man," he snarled in reference to Patti Smith's 1976 album. "This is Radio Brooklyn . . . I ain't no snob." And for better or worse, he's certainly no longer the loose cannon he once was. In fact, he may not even do Lou Reed better than anybody anymore. But there are moments on Take No Prisoners that stand alone as documents of Lou Reed doing Lou Reed better than anyone will ever do Lou Reed again.

Issue Date: December 6 - 12, 2002