Reed's first solo album, Lou Reed, might have been a fifth Velvets album–indeed, many of the songs eventually surfaced on outtake albums such as VU–but the studio pros sounded hollow compared to the band. It went nowhere. 

 For Transformer Reed cashed in on producer David Bowie’s trendily androgynous glam rock with “Walk on the Wild Side.” But there’s actually much more to enjoy on the album: the intro riff on “Vicious,” the maturing “Hangin’ ’Round,” and the tricked-up “Satellite of Love." 

 With a hit single Reed started looking to move into the arenas, so he recruited Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin and cut his ambitious, gloomy, brutal song cycle Berlin–his most controversial album: strong songs, weak stories. 

 Rock 'n' Roll Animal is a live album. The arena-sized renditions of Velvets standards ("Sweet Jane," "Heroin," "White Light/White Heat," and "Rock & Roll") work remarkably well.  

 Sally Can’t Dance was effectively presold on Reed’s recent successes and his ever-growing Velvet Underground fame, so it shot straight up the charts. And then promptly flopped like a duck. It is at best a confusing album, laden with blaring horns. But there are two nice ballads (“Ennui,” ... 

 Lou Reed entered the Seventies hankering for success, but when he found some, he didn’t seem to care for it much. In fact, his next move was a double album of amplifier feedback called Metal Machine Music. Even his most devoted fans cried uncle. 

 The next few years were nasty, but the first whiffs of Reed comeback hype surfaced with Street Hassle–some old Velvets-era songs and a long suite built around a violin riff, ambitious but cold and inconsistent.  

 The Bells was another twist in Reed's long career. Cut with jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, it offered exceptionally dense but not really jazzy music. 

 Growing Up in Public returned to simpler songs and much more straightforward writing, such as his mother's admonition not to smile, and his petrified marriage proposal. 

 Reed's 1980 marriage to Sylvia Morales was a turning point for him. Reed wrote better songs for The Blue Mask but the most impressive cuts were guitar raveups such as “Heavenly Arms,” “Waves of Fear,” and especially the title track, which showed off the chops of ace guitarist Robert ... 

 Legendary Hearts and New Sensations had less guitar flash but, if anything, even better songs–for example, "Don't Talk to Me About Work," "Bottoming Out," "Doin' the Things That We Want To," and "My Friend George." 

 Legendary Hearts and New Sensations had less guitar flash but, if anything, even better songs–for example, "Don't Talk to Me About Work," "Bottoming Out," "Doin' the Things That We Want To," and "My Friend George." 

 If Reed's early-Eighties album streak did anything it was to get him out from under the ever-growing VU legend and establish a new standard for him to fail to meet (but a more benign one). Reed's albums ever since have been marvelously diverse. New York is his acidic hometown tourist fl... 

 If Reed's early-Eighties album streak did anything it was to get him out from under the ever-growing VU legend and establish a new standard for him to fail to meet (but a more benign one). Reed's albums ever since have been marvelously diverse. Songs for Drella was an elegy for the late... 

 Reed's three-CD box set, Between Thought and Expression, is the sort of mess you'd expect from such an inconsistent, idiosyncratic artist. 

 If Reed's early-Eighties album streak did anything it was to get him out from under the ever-growing VU legend and establish a new standard for him to fail to meet (but a more benign one). Reed's albums ever since have been marvelously diverse.  

 RCA's two 1972-76 comps are decent samplers, with only five cuts in common–Different Times gets the nod for being longer and more adventurous.  

 If Reed's early-Eighties album streak did anything it was to get him out from under the ever-growing VU legend and establish a new standard for him to fail to meet (but a more benign one). Reed's albums ever since have been marvelously diverse. 

 Ecstasy is probably the best of Reed's confusing streak of late-90s, early-00s recording streak, mainly because he brings back the guitars. 

 Reed's most recent releases show he's been thinking about his legacy. NYC Man is the artist's own idea of an epitaph: an unobvious but smartly sequenced two-CD retrospective that tightly binds together his every twist and turn. 

 The Raven, Reed's reworking of Edgar Allan Poe, is further proof that reading is fun (although rock & rollers are advised to stick to the single-CD version, story line be damned). 

 Animal Serenade plumbs his songbook, in the guise of a live album. Like Rock 'n' Roll Animal, it recasts old songs on a new soundscape–this one staged to draw out the drama of the words, framed starkly with guitar and synths. 

 Hudson River Wind Meditations proved that Reed was still unpredictable–it's an album of meditational electronic music that Reed says he composed "as an adjunct to meditation, Tai Chi, bodywork, and as music to play in the background of life 

 Berlin: Live at St. Ann's Warehouse came out of a series of New York concerts where Reed performed all of Berlin for the first time in 30 years; the live versions sounded rough and featured Reed on electric guitar.