The Yule, With Lou.

For this weekend's show, check out one of the best concerts ever recorded. On December 21, 1973 - the solstice, the darkest day of the year, Lou Reed played two Yuletide sets at the Academy of Music in New York.

Oh, to have been there.

The backing band featured the twin guitar attack of Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, who producer Bob Ezrin had tapped to back on Lou's Berlin album, released earlier that year. The rest of the band consisted of Prakash John, Pentti Glan, and Ray Colcord on bass, drums, and keyboards, respectively.

Sadly, for Lou, the band - minus Colcord - went on to back Alice Cooper on Welcome to My Nightmare. You can here them in a live setting on The Alice Cooper Show.

Most of the show (all but two songs) was subsequently released as two albums. The first, Rock n Roll Animal, came out in early 1974 and featured four re-workings of Velvet Underground tunes and one song of the recently released Berlin. The second, 1975's Lou Reed Live, contains another Velvets number, with the rest of the album split between Berlin and Transformer tracks.

A later, expanded edition of Rock n Roll Animal on CD - remember CDs? - featured the two missing tracks, "How Do You Think It Feels" and "Caroline Says I". The show would have made a great double album. Somehow it exceeds the sum of its parts when the songs are restored to their original running order. Why it wasn't released that way is a mystery. Even stranger is the fact that the two bonus tracks are no longer available on Spotify. What is more, the live version of "How Do You Think if Feels" has been blocked on YouTube. I would upload a file ripped from my CD, but I don't need industry lawyers going after Dadrock 101's deep corporate pockets.

This leaves us with a few options for this show.

The first is a Spotify playlist comprised of the two original albums, without the bonus tracks, which opened the set. Pretend you were at some sort of party and got to the show late.

Our second option, uses a version of "How Do You Think it Feels", recorded by pretty much the same lineup (different bassist), at a show in Amsterdam earlier in the year. The video for Sweet Jane is a different band (except for John and Pentti) from the Sally Can't Dance Tour of Europe. The music is from RnR Animal.

The last track here is a soundboard recording of the second set from the Academy of Music show. We hear almost the whole show, but the first half of the intro to "Sweet Jane" is missing. Also missing are some of the studio overdubs which polished off the album.

Here is the soundboard mix of both sets. The first cuts in during "Heroin", the fifth song.

Why did they pull the two bonus tracks? Maybe a release of the complete concert is in the works. We can always hope.

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