Covered #10: Lou Reed – Walk On The Wild Side
This series is not just about featuring hits and evergreens, that wouldn't be enough. It aims to present songs that have succeeded not only in their original version but also in many other renditions. A lot of covers are described as "better than the original" and in many cases, only a few people know the original. Sometimes there is even a dispute as to which version came first. The songs we are going to talk about and, more importantly, whose cover versions we are going to present, won't be based on the place or time of their creation, and definitely not on their original musical genre. Folk, jazz, blues, rock, pop or musical, we can find interesting songs anywhere.
Even if someone has never heard any other song by Lou Reed, they will know “Walk On The Wild Side” – it is undoubtedly the biggest hit of his solo career. It comes from the famous album Transformer, recorded in England and released in 1972. The album was produced by David Bowie, who, not everyone knows, also played acoustic guitar on “Walk On The Wild Side”. The iconic bass figure was played by Herbie Flowers, a well-known London session musician, who four years after the creation of this album became a member of the band T. Rex. No less famous is the closing baritone sax solo, the work of British jazzman Ronnie Ross.
“Walk On The Wild Side” is famous not only for its inventive musical side, which could be used to teach how even the simplest song can gain an incredible flair thanks to great arrangement and production, but also because of the lyrics, which feature several personalities from Andy Warhol's New York "studio of fame," The Factory. It also touches on scandalous topics for its time, such as drugs, transgenderism and various sexual practices. It's quite unbelievable that the song was already played on the radio at the time of its release and made it to #16 on the Billboard charts. In Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, “Walk On The Wild Side” is placed almost exactly in the middle.
To begin with, let’s recall the original version, accompanied by an unofficial but wonderfully thought-out music video, which includes authentic footage of the people mentioned in the lyrics.
“Walk On The Wild Side” has, of course, been a long-time and much-loved part of Reed’s concert setlist. He performed it in various arrangements. A particularly interesting one is from the 1985 Farm Aid festival, where this mostly ballad received a relatively upbeat tempo, and in the first half, it had a nearly joyful expression.
As for cover versions, “Walk On The Wild Side” has had dozens, just like any worldwide hit. In 1973, Italian singer Patty Pravo recorded a version of the song in Italian, titled I Giardini di Kensington.
When we look at the cover versions of this song, it’s quite interesting that among those who have interpreted it in one way or another, there are many women. For example, Vanessa Paradis included the song on her early album Variations sur le Même T’Aime in 1990. A more remarkable version, however, is her collaboration with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, where they performed it with just an acoustic guitar, which some say evokes the partnership of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.
A really lovely version, accompanied by a fantastic animated video, was sung by Suzanne Vega as a promo for her album An Evening of New York Songs and Stories in 2020.
Interestingly, unlike male artists who perform “Walk On The Wild Side” and mostly maintain the musical form and feeling of the song, female artists have been much more inventive in their interpretations. A great example is South African singer Alice Phoebe Lou, who added her own melody to Reed's essentially recitative line.
American jazz singer and pianist Nicole Zuraitis, as her genre suggests, gave the song a smoky club atmosphere and added jazzier passages to let her band play a bit.
And when it comes to women, one of them recorded a rather strange version back in 1984, and the circumstances are equally peculiar. The recording by Gerty Molzen, a German actress and cabaret artist from the 1930s, who, hold on to your hats, started her career as a pop singer at the age of seventy-eight with “Walk On The Wild Side”. She then recorded several other singles (including songs by The Troggs, Culture Club, and James Brown), toured the world and her musical career sparked a new phase in her acting career before she passed away in 1990 at the age of eighty-four.
Before we move on to male performers of “Walk On The Wild Side”, and see that the interesting part of their versions is more about who sings them rather than how they sing them, we can enjoy a rather charming male-female duet from 2009, where Moby sang the song with Belgian singer Selah Sue, who was a generation younger.
Now, let's talk about the men. Unlike the multi-genre women, the male interpreters of “Walk On The Wild Side” are mostly rockers, somehow emotionally connected to the original artist, Lou Reed. Sometimes even more than just emotionally. When Lou Reed’s former alcoholic and drug partner Iggy Pop performed the song last year with his band The Losers in Los Angeles, the media went wild.
Of course, Reed had a lot in common with Joe Strummer, the former frontman of the punk band The Clash, who performed “Walk On The Wild Side” at late concerts.
The American band The Strokes has always been associated with the Velvet Underground as a clear audible influence, which was mainly due to their singer Julian Casablancas having a voice and expression very similar to Lou Reed’s. In his version of “Walk On The Wild Side”, it feels like the original performer truly comes to life.
The song is also great material for a jam, even a stage jam, as demonstrated by Anthony Kiedis, Dave Navarro and their friends. This is exactly one of those cases where the names of the performers overshadow the recording itself...
We’re slowly reaching the final bizarre versions of the song. A sort of interlude can be a 1990 recording by the British project Beat System, which made a dance version of the song that even appeared in the UK singles chart. Today, honestly, no one would probably care about it.
And at the very end, here's an example of what can be done with a nice song – and this is a real bizarre one that doesn’t need any commentary...
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