Transformer: a Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed by Simon Doonan

Author:Simon Doonan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Album

Lou Reed performing live in his customized velvet ensemble from Granny Takes a Trip. A Mick Rock photo from this same show became the Transformer cover.

(Mick Rock, 1972, 2022)

It’s the summer of ’72, and the creation of Transformer at Trident Studios in London’s seedy Soho, starring Reed, Bowie, and Ronson, is about to kick off. So what happens when these three glamorous varmints are flung into the collaborative hothouse of the recording studio for two weeks?

Of note are the respective ages of these three feral super-freaks. Bowie is twenty-five. Mick Ronson, aka Ronno, is one year older. These two blokes have barely reached the age when that lumpy bit on the brain has grown that controls judgment and impulse. Though I subsequently became a real Goody Two-Shoes, I myself was busted for reckless driving at the age of twenty-five and was also prone to telling people that I was going to move to Paris and live on the Rive Gauche and sell my body to older men. My point being that Bowie and Ronno are young and wicked.

Lou, at thirty, is the granddaddy of the group. In some ways he has seen so much; in others he is suffering from the arrested development that afflicts so many rock stars. Bowie, the youngest, appears to be the most evolved of the three.

I could lie and tell you that this was an explosive, apocalyptic collision of musical genii—Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner—producing breakthroughs and epiphanies galore.

Or I could tell you it was like the three witches in Macbeth, each hag tossing all manner of musical toads and newts into a roiling cauldron, day after day, colluding on wicked spells and producing mysterious sounds and a new musical goulash that had never been tasted before. The reality is a little more mundane, though certainly not without interest or piquancy.

The earth-shattering, unconventional part of the whole enterprise was the decision to create an album for the LGBTQ+ audience. (They “thought it was dreary for gay people to have to listen to straight people’s love songs.”) Add to this the astonishing concept of marrying Lou’s poetry with Bowie’s production vision, and—bonjour!—how could Transformer ever not have been an interesting album? Lou’s poetry—as per Danny Fields, “the greatest songwriter of his generation”—merges with the explosive new cult of Bowie-dom.

In a Classic Albums documentary on the album, Lou recalled the process as straightforward: “I just ran over the songs with them. By that, I mean the chord structure and the melody.” In his memoir, Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust, engineer Ken Scott—he functioned more like a producer—recalls the system used to lay down the tracks as follows: “Lou would teach Ronno the song, then Ronno would teach the session musicians, then we would carry on as if it were a Bowie record until it was time to do Lou’s vocals.”

With The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, and Ziggy under their belts, Bowie’s team had developed a style, a formula, a winning schtick. Add Lou’s

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