Glam rock, which first sashayed onstage in the early 1970s, rebuked rock music's customary machismo, and no album did the job better than former Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed's second solo effort, 1972's Transformer. On the occasion of the record's 50th anniversary, the perceptive and consummately witty Simon Doonan (Beautiful People; Drag: The Complete Story) presents Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed, in which he asks the musical question, "How did Lou become the guy who decided to fill the LGBTQ+ void and skew an entire album toward me and my cohort?"
To answer the question, Doonan double-tracks his own story with that of Reed's trailblazing album. Doonan was born in England in 1952; after he came of age, he didn't fully see himself reflected in rock music until he encountered Transformer, whose "Walk on the Wild Side" was a veritable roll call of real-life challengers to heteronormativity. The song was just one of the album's salutes to gender noncompliance. Doonan reports that Reed explained his intentions with the record a few years later: "I thought it was dreary for gay people to have to listen to straight people's love songs."
For Doonan and his friends, Transformer was "like a giant gold and black piñata.... Out poured kink, poetry, glamour, trash, drag queens, hustlers, dope, genius, originality, and--drumroll--validation, confirmation, and encouragement for a broad swath of young people who were figuring out how to be themselves." While Reed had a series of wives--he was married to artist Laurie Anderson at the time of his death in 2013--he had a transgender girlfriend in the late 1970s, bolstering Doonan's claim that Reed's "fluidity and his gay solidarity--wildly at odds with midcentury America--aligns him more with today's youth, who embrace pansexuality and queerness with casual élan."
Doonan's book builds to a song-by-song anatomization of Transformer. He's a fount of swashbuckling hyperbole, and hardly a sentence wouldn't work as a pull quote. Of the track "Perfect Day," Doonan writes, "Lou's lyrics do not specify gender, allowing us gays to see ourselves, guzzling sangria and chucking nuts at the Central Park squirrels with the best of them." Of "Andy's Chest," an homage to Warhol, friend and mentor to Reed, Doonan writes, "The subtext in the mood of this song is clear: Being groovy will not save you." But Lou Reed's Transformer might. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: The perceptive and consummately witty Simon Doonan toasts Lou Reed's Transformer on the occasion of the classic album's 50th anniversary.