![]() ![]() Others contend that, if you can’t hear The Bells, you never really heard Lou Reed at all. There are cults within the larger cult of Lou, and the most stubborn gathers around this half-forgotten record from the summer of ’79. What bells are these? Are they the same bells the Velvet Underground saw “up in the sky” during “What Goes On” in 1969? Are they the Bells Albert Ayler chased through his fiery free-jazz milestone of 1965? “The Bells” that drove vocalist Clyde McPhatter weeping to his knees in The Dominoes’ unhinged 1952 lachrymose doo-wop classic? “The Bells” Marvin Gaye made The Originals pine after so sweetly on the Motown single of 1970? The Bells that rolled and tolled and throbbed and sobbed through Edgar Allan Poe’s troubling late poem of 1849?Īll these bells ring behind the dense, fizzing grey wash of what might be Lou Reed’s weirdest album (at least with Metal Machine Music, once you settled in, you knew what you were going to get, whereas The Bells just keeps doing things you weren’t expecting), and which, for some, is among his most definitive. ![]()
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