Wotta betrayal: after the exquisitely miserable Berlin absolutely obliterated the mainstream goodwill that its predecessor Transformer could’ve built a bigger-than-Bowie star around, Lou Reed had to go flirt with mersh again, releasing a live-LP followup that turned four VU faves and one of Berlin‘s most tragic outings into guitar-histrionic arena glam. But decades of lo-fi fusspots and solo-allergic punks trying to treat this set like it’s Frampton Comes Alive have done it a huge disservice, even if you don’t hear Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter’s soaring twin-guitar attack as a raunchier precedent for Marquee Moon‘s more refined Lloyd/Verlaine exchanges. Fair enough, there might be something a bit off-putting about the juxtaposition between Lou’s semi-detached yet still given-to-intensity voice (cf. “Lady Day,” where he sounds like he’s absolutely disgusted with the characters he’s created) and the “let’s see Mott the Hoople top that” tenor of the cheap-seat-pleasing arrangements. But that just adds a different cast to Reed’s material, a way of making decadence and ruin sound practically inextricable. The Loaded stuff isn’t quite as stark as all that — in fact, it sounds like the ultimate revenge for “Sweet Jane” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll” not taking the world by storm, as if Lou went fine, we’ll brute force this stuff into the dirtbag hard rock The Kids like and really give ‘em something to lose their stoned minds to. It’s the two cuts from the first two VU albums that face the most irreverent treatments, with “Heroin” being hammerlocked into an ironic quasi-triumphalist proto-power ballad and “White Light/White Heat” ramped up into a “you call that glam?” retort to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era live-set renditions. In a post-punk milieu where indie rock bands that sound like early VU vastly outnumber any rock bands that sound like this, the transgressions of this set actually feel newly exciting in a shamelessly bombastic kind of way.