Lou Reed has had a roller coster of a career. Spanning from the 70’s to this very day. He’s come up with some disasters and some masterpieces.
The Blue Mask
Released in 1982 and supposedly after his drug addiction. This is Lou’s greatest album. It was done late in his career, and weird considering most artist do their best work early on. Of course not every song is great. Actually this album has fewer “good” song than “bad” ones. But the “good” songs are just too good to be over looked by a slew of “great” songs.
Two songs make this album a masterpiece. The first one is the Blue Mask and second is Waves of Fear. Both song are not anything pretty. Ones about a individual who just out of the norm, and the second is a nice explanation of fear.
The Blue Mask is also a return to noise for Lou Reed. It definitely bought the feedback back. It’s great to see this return. He bought Robert Quine to play with him. Quine was the one who encourage him to actually play guitar on this album. He stopped playing guitar on his albums in the mid-70’s. Quine was also a big fan of VU, so this must have been fun to play with Lou. Sadly Quine past away last year by committing suicide, after his wife died.
Berlin
Released in 1973 and with the help of billion people.
A lot of people worked on this album. It had everything from saxophones to pianos. This is not a Rock n’ Roll album but still good.
Berlin is supposed to be a concept album about two drug fueled lovers in Berlin. If your a fan of VU, you would have notice that most of these song were written at different time and even rereleased in a different forms. For example Caroline Say’s 1 & 2 were originally Stephanie Say’s just changed by adding a Nico liked character called Caroline instead of Stephanie. Also Sad Song was a song written during Lou’s VU days and in my opinion The VU’s version is way better. Another song change from Lou’s old days was Oh, Gin into Oh, Jim. This song was actually better in Berlin. Now the song Berlin was actually written in 1970 not 1973. It was on Lou’s first album(Self-Titled). The first version of Berlin is better, a more rock song than the Berlin(Album) version which was weirder than the original version.
Lou Reed (Self Titled)
Released in 1971 and recorded in London.
Almost ever song in this album was written on the VU’s loaded sessions. The only real song that was written by Lou for this album was Wild Child, Berlin and Lisa Says. Supposedly this album was anticipated by many people, but failed to be a hit, because of what was consider an “average” album.
Transformer
Released in 1972 with help from David Bowie and Mick Ronson.
Lou career was dead with his first release. It failed to live up to the hype. David Bowie a friend of Lou decided to help. David Bowie was at his awesome Ziggy Stardust period, and he used his popularity to help Lou out. So he co-produced his album with Mick Ronson. This all led to a glam album called Transformer. This gave Lou first top 40 hit, Walk on the Wild Side.
All the songs here except for satellite of love were written for this album.
P.S.
Rock n’ Roll Animal doesn’t count becuase it a live album. It good, but it live so it doesn’t count. It’sLou Reed best selling album by the way. I also didn’t add any other live works. I should probably do that next. 
Also, I haven’t really paid much attentions to Lou’s later work so take that into consideration.
Fact: Lou Reed was called LuLu in the mid-sixties.
