HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Sally Can’t Dance – Lou Reed

Lester Bangs once said of LOU REED “He’s a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh. A panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn’t have the energy to commit suicide.” The same year that he said so, Sally Can’t Dance released which he also had some choice words on.

He also admired him more than anything for his self-destructive traits — many of which he himself was a fan of. A true LOU REED fan in the 70s. In fact, the idea that he was due to verbally brawl with him again in 1974 turned him on saying “So I was gnashing ready to pound Lou to a snivelling pulp the minute he hit town. THIS WAS IT! THE BIG DAY! THE ONLY OLD HERO, MUCH LESS ROCK MUSICIAN, LEFT DOING BATTLE WITH!”

But what does that have to do with Sally Can’t Dance turning 50? Instead of seemingly painting REED in 1974 as a bottom of the barrel act that wasn’t worth his salt, and to be truthful, by listening to Sally Can’t Dance it’s safe to think that he wasn’t. It’s never this album in particular that got the Tumblr kids of this generation hooked on REED, it’s not sexy like Transformer, it has next to no allure about it and when he tries to instil even an ounce of energy into the recording it falls flat. 

Listening to opener Ride Sally Ride the backing vocals that are full of glee, sounding like they want to be there, LOU REED feels forced to be there as if someone had to strap him to a chair in the recording booth. It’s the sort of thing that will irk you on an opening track, it’s not a good omen to say the least. 

For much of the record, he exists in engaging spaces totally disengaged, often his vocals withdrawn from the energy that surrounds them. He seems most authentic on Animal Language, where the campiness of the chorus sees him release himself from the restraint that the rest of the album has. 

As for omens, they’re mostly bad. People loved LOU REED for being such a contrarian and his edge, it’s safe to say he really did not care about what people thought or what others wanted from his work, take his album Berlin for example; a bleak affair that completely subverts everything RCA were looking for after his hit Walk On The Wild Side.

The times where he created art out of spite seem to be his lowest moments, they’re reactionary and become an ugly reflection of those moments. For example, Metal Machine Music musically is his most leftfield record of horrible feedback and distorted loops over the course of four 15 minute tracks, and all for the sake of pissing critics and others off. For that, you have Sally Can’t Dance to blame due it’s confusing commercial success despite it being LOU REED’s most boring outing. 

There’s one real crime in music, or maybe you’d call it a rule, don’t be boring. Be anything but boring. It’s not worth anything if it’s boring. It’s a waste of time, a reason for a label to pump money into another rock star’s thin veneer. Good music should blur the lines between objective and subjective opinion, forcing you to tangle with one another. But LOU REED doesn’t come anywhere close to that, Sally Can’t Dance is disrespectfully bad due to his own arrogance. 

LOU REED is lauded so much because of how mystifying he was, it’s near to impossible to nail down who he really was, every tantalising story about him has another attached to it in the form of an anecdote, which who knows how much truth could be in any of it. Of course it’s easy to become enchanted by such an eccentric character like Reed, especially now after his passing trying to get answers to the questions that rack up in your head about him is like trying to grab at smoke. 

But, Sally Can’t Dance dampens that mystery about him, it just makes him much more recognisable as someone that when things wouldn’t be his way he’d throw a tantrum. Subjecting everyone else around him to his nonsense, or there’s the possibility that he was never as good as people made him out to be so he just made it up as he went.

As much as his life as been written about, tribulations whether inflicted or received, nobody properly knew who LOU REED was, reduce the cause of his actions to cynicism driven by his own suffering, why he made records a certain way to grind on people, there’s no concrete answer because so much of what makes Reed up is his own flux. It’s impossible to imagine a LOU REED fan in the year 2024, because what is it that connects someone to a man who was at best belligerent, and at worst an alleged domestic abuser? Is it being so contrarian that you make odd decisions just for the sake of it, or that you think having an album like Transformer or Sally Can’t Dance in your vinyl collection might make you more interesting. 

Here’s to 50 years of suffering Sally Can’t Dance.

Sally Can’t Dance was originally released in September, 1974 via RCA Records.

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