Lou Reed – Rock N Roll Animal

Originally released in 1974, Rock N Roll Animal is a live album featuring five songs from different periods of Lou Reed's creative career. The album includes several songs by the Velvet Underground. All the songs are re-arranged into a powerful glam rock set.

Musicians include Pentti Glan on drums, Prakash John on bass (who would later form the second Alice Cooper band), Ray Colcord on keyboards, and Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter on guitars. The album was recorded live on December 21, 1973, at Howard Stein's Academy of Music in New York.

"In 1974, after the commercial disaster of his album Berlin, Lou Reed needed a hit, and Rock N Roll Animal was a rare display of commercial acumen on his part, just the right album at just the right time. Recorded in concert with Reed's crack road band at the peak of their form, Rock N Roll Animal offered a set of his most anthemic songs (most dating from his days with the Velvet Underground) in arrangements that presented his lean, effective melodies and street-level lyrics in their most user-friendly form (or at least as user friendly as an album with a song called "Heroin" can get). Early-'70s arena rock bombast is often the order of the day, but guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter use their six-string muscle to lift these songs up, not weigh them down, and with Reed's passionate but controlled vocals riding over the top, "Sweet Jane," "White Light/White Heat," and "Rock 'n' Roll" finally sound like the radio hits they always should have been. Reed would rarely sound this commercial again, but Rock N Roll Animal proves he could please a crowd when he had to." - Mark Deming, allmusic.com

AllMusic rating: