Lou Reed - 1971 Acoustic Demos (1971)

I recently posted an acoustic version of Lou Reed's first solo album, the 1972 album simply titled "Lou Reed." That material came from a bunch of acoustic demos he did in 1971. There are enough demos for a second album of all the other songs he had written at that time. This is that album.

As I explained with my post about the "Lou Reed" acoustic album, in 2021, an album called "RCA Acoustic Demos" was released. However, it was only on sale for one day in Britain, in order to retain European copyrights to the performances. The sound quality from this source is excellent. I've used that source for the first 23 minutes here. That includes a version of "I Love You." I put a different demo of that on the "Lou Reed" acoustic album, since I found two good ones.

That leaves six more songs at the end. These all come from bootlegs of his acoustic demos, which have been publicly circulating for years. Unfortunately, the sound quality of these are okay, but not as good as what has recently come out via the "RCA Acoustic Demos." So I've edited all of them to try to improve their sound quality a bit. That's why they all have "[Edit]" in their titles. The main thing I did was increase the volume of the lead vocals relative to the music. That way, you can more clearly hear what he's singing.

The sound quality of those six songs is variable. Generally speaking, they start sounding fairly good and then the quality declines towards the end. So if high sound quality matters to you, you might want to bail out at some point. For me, these all sound good enough for repeat listenings.

In terms of musical content, Reed put out two albums in 1972, "Lou Reed" and "Transformer." All the "Lou Reed" songs are on the other album I recently posted (with the exception of the second version of "I Love You" here). So it's not surprising that there are a bunch of "Transformer" song here - six out of the eleven songs from that album. Note though that this version of "Walk on the Wild Side" is very different. I suspect this was an early version with placeholder lyrics, since the lyrics are so strange, and clearly inferior to the final version.

Reed was on fire as a songwriter, building up a stockpile of songs he would draw on for years to come. For instance, "Kill Your Sons" would go on a 1974 album, and "Follow the Leader" would go on a 1976 album. But he also looked backwards, in that "What Goes On" and "I'm Sticking with You" were Velvet Underground songs. "I'm Sticking with You" is particularly interesting, because the Velvet Underground version that was officially released had most of the lead vocals by the band's drummer Moe Tucker, whereas here you get to hear the song's author sing it. But perhaps most interesting of all is "So in Love" because this song has never been officially released in any form.

There are many more acoustic demos Reed recorded that are on bootleg and I haven't included here. That's because the "RCA Acoustic Demos" versions sound much better, and the performances are only slightly different. I included all the songs I could find that weren't on that release.

This album is 39 minutes long.

01 Perfect Day (Lou Reed)
02 I'm So Free (Lou Reed)
03 I'm Sticking with You (Lou Reed)
04 New York Telephone Conversation (Lou Reed)
05 I Love You (Lou Reed)
06 She's My Best Friend (Lou Reed)
07 Kill Your Sons (Lou Reed)
08 Hangin' 'Round (Lou Reed)
09 Goodnight Ladies [Edit] (Lou Reed)
10 So in Love [Edit] (Lou Reed)
11 Oh, Jim [Edit] (Lou Reed)
12 The Kids [Edit] (Lou Reed)
13 Walk on the Wild Side [Edit] (Lou Reed)
14 What Goes On - Follow the Leader [Edit] (Lou Reed)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15250295/LouR_1971_1971_AcoustcDmos_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I wanted a photo of Reed from the time period that fit with the acoustic demo nature of the album (as opposed to him being on stage with an electric guitar and glam make-up). I didn't find any really good color ones, but I found a black and white one I liked that comes from an interview he did in January 1972. Since I try to avoid black and white album covers, I colorized it.