FBO: 'Inducts Lou Reed to FBO Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame'

Paul McCartney is in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, but LOU REED isn't. Let's think this through a bit:


Paul has had one of the driest recording spells in the past, oh, 37 years of any supposed genius songwriter since Mozart faked his death and stopped making music for 42 years. (That didn't happen.) 'Ebony & Ivory' and 'Say Say Say' duets are hardly forgotten, or forgiven, nor that disaster 'Give My Regards to Broad Street.' Paul's band Wings -- which have should have no play in his SOLO inductee to the Hall -- guards really his only tolerable post-Beatles work: debatably 'Band on the Run,' 'With a Little Luck,' 'Live & Let Live,' 'Mull of Kintyre' (for the bagpipes). And, again, those do not count.



If the Hall has room for Paul's tedious solo outings, and allows vastly overrated Eric Clapton to get in twice -- as solo artist (which we reluctantly accept) and the two-year-running Cream (unforgivable) -- why can't Lou get in for Velvet Underground (happened; 1996) and his long-lasting, often interesting and challenging solo career? Lou's Transformer album (1972) is his most famous -- produced by Bowie, with 'Walk on the Wild Side' (jazz and drag?), 'Satellite of Love' and 'Vicious,' while the under-appreciated 1973 concept album Berlin is likely the most depressing of all time -- try 'The Kids' or 'The Bed,' where the narrator sits on the bed where his ex 'slit her wrists' and rethinks what went wrong. More importantly, Lou fell into an often hilarious wave of self-destruction, with the incredibly inconquerable double-live album Take No Prisoners, where his 20-minute version of 'Wild Side' lashes out at the audience and never gets into the song, or his double-album noise instrumental album Metal Machine Music (1976). (Later he'd make a video -- 'Video Violence' -- of a Lou Reed 'robot' pulling its face apart...) There are misfires -- and galling disasters (like his most recent Edgar A Poe concept album The Raven), and too many cover shots with his mug on the cover, but his 27 years of solo recordings have been ambitious and way out of the curve.


The FBO asks:


--> Put Lou in now (or take Paul, and Jackson Browne!, out now). Surely his work has out thought, influenced and performed a Bob Seger?











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