It never occurred to me to look for any live footage of mid-career Lou Reed. It must be because it didn't occur to me any would exist. If you weren't a hitmaker, in the pre-internet, pre-cable TV days, there wasn't much of a demand for live footage of lesser know acts, at least here in the states. So this one stuck out like a sore thumb. Live footage from a 1974 concert in Paris. The quality is surprisingly good and it's a good look at Reed trying to figure out where he was going next. From the same year that Rock 'n' Roll Animal, a live album, and Sally Can't Dance were released, this footage is about thirty minutes long with six songs starting with two Velvets songs. A bunch of oddball moments in here, from intermittent Jagger-on-ludes moves, to the instrumentation that barely resembles the original recordings. To wit, within ten seconds of each other, a few seconds that sound like Steppenwolf morphing within a few measures into a riff that sounds an awful lot like the intro to the Talking Heads' cover of "Take Me to the River" and that's just a ten second chunk; this in "Waiting For the Man". The year after this, Metal Machine Music was released. Still trying to figure it out.
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