Lou Reed 11: Take No Prisoners

Arista knew that Lou’s live albums sold the best, so a residency at the Bottom Line led to Take No Prisoners, a two-record set with a fairly apt title. This album presents Lou as his generation’s Don Rickles, paying the barest attention to the songs, choosing instead to bark at or about whoever’s pissing him off at any given moment.

The biggest nose-thumb is “Walk On The Wild Side”. Rather than the snappy beat poetry that was a radio staple, here he begins by complaining about the sound crew, club management and promoter, moving on to his critics, and finally starting the song before distracting himself (and the crowd) with the intention to go into further details about how the song came to be and the people inside it. Even that’s barely accomplished, and for sixteen minutes he talks and talks, occasionally punctuated by an actual chorus. Like the best comedy albums, it’s actually pretty entertaining.

But in between the crowd-baiting and general ranting you can hear a patient band keeping up with him, and pulling out some truly amazing performances. He does inhabit each of the monologues on “Street Hassle” for a performance that rivals the original. (We could be wrong, but the band vamping around the six-minute mark does seem to be killing time while Lou beseeches Bruce Springsteen to come up and recite his part. A voice like Bruce’s guffaws nervously, to which Lou replies, “Damn! Close but no [intelligible].” Since Bruce is called out in the audience during “Walk On The Wild Side”, this may be what actually happened.) “Coney Island Baby”, so pretty in its gentle studio cut, is stretched even further here, complete with a few more lines taking about his high school intramural sports experience, getting completely worked up for each lead-in to “the glory of love”, and letting the band drive him for a slamming end. “Berlin” is patterned after the version on his debut, using the chorus but also tapping into the anger of the album the song inspired. And he slows “Satellite Of Love” down to a more leisurely pace, even strapping on a guitar for the distorted chords at the end. (Those last three tracks would comprise one side of 1985’s Arista “hits” collection City Lights, while “Coney Island Baby” was featured on the career-spanning Rock And Roll Diary a few years earlier.)

Take No Prisoners should only appeal to diehard fans, or at least those who like their Lou snarling. Even the packaging played up this side of him, with collages of “shocking” articles about the boy decorating the inner sleeves. If anything, looking at the actual vinyl makes for an interesting comparison with, say, Barry Manilow Live. (Addendum: one of our faithful readers informed us, in a comment since deleted, that the cover itself caused a bit of controversy, being stolen from the work of a Spanish comic book artist.)

Lou Reed Take No Prisoners (1978)—3