Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

fatigue and desperation become sexy. It’s Reed’s
most famous album but it’s also his best. There have
been musically more interesting and lyrically more
poetic or wittier songs on other Reed records (“The
Power of Positive Drinking” from Growing Up in
Public, and “Romeo Had Juliette,” which opens New
York, come to mind) but Transformer, even more
than its follow-up, the bona fide concept album
Berlin, is its own desolate sonic planet. “Mick was
very proud of the Transformer album,” says Suzi
Ronson today. “He knew the songs were fabulous
and was given a free hand. When you’re a musician,
that’s what you want. You don’t think about ‘When am
I going to get paid?’” Ronson was paid under his
MainMan contract and has no points on the record,
which has sold consistently over the last four
decades. Nobody really expected Transformer to be
a smash anyway, but early in the new year, it
became Reed’s first recording to chart, cracking the
American Top 30, and remained on the charts for
most of ’73. “Walk on the Wild Side” was all over the
radio.
“When you think about it, it was one of the quoteunquote
unlikeliest hits in the world,” Reed once
mused to me in an interview. “As far as my abilities
in that direction, you don’t notice ‘son of “Wild Side.”’
There hasn’t been a sequel. These really simple
things are really hard. As far as I’m concerned,
there’s this thing you managed to grab hold of for a
second and then it’s gone. You can’t do it again
’cause it’s not there to do. Very strange process. I