Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby (RCA Records) was one of the first major albums I worked on as an Assistant Engineer. We began recording it in ’75 when I was only 19 years-old. Senior engineer and co-producer Godfrey Diamond was 21 at the time. While hanging around Andy Warhol and his entourage, Diamond happened to catch the fancy of Reed who then asked him to co-produce the record. He had that kind of charisma and it didn’t hurt that he already had a number one single, ‘More, More, More’ with The Andrea True Connection. Because of Diamond’s rock star looks he was often referred to as the ‘Mick Jagger’ of recording engineers. For short I called him ‘God’.

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Although we were near the same age, I always felt as though Diamond was much older than me. He was so confident. As producer/engineer he was hi-energy—not for one second could I do what I was prone to do—daydream. In many ways, Diamond was a ‘troubadour’, very spontaneous, almost emotional, in his approach as a producer. At the time, Reed had a live band consisting of Bruce ‘Moose’ Yaw (bass), Michael Fonfara (keys), Marty Fogel (sax) and Michael Sikorsky (drums). It was Diamond’s idea to bring guitarist Bob Kulick into the fold once the songs were finished.

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“With most of the songs, I would sit with Lou at his place usually pretty late at night after I worked all day at Mediasound,” God recently recalled. “Just the two of us would go over the songs way before bringing them to the band. We would work out the song structure, chords [when the] lyrics were almost all finished. And once we were happy with the basic form we set up the rehearsals. These nights were filled with very strange looking and interesting friends of Lou’s that would drift in and out of his apartment throughout the evening. Then we would usually end up at Max's Kansas City or The Ocean Club.”

 

Once the songs were decided upon, rehearsals commenced at RCA Studios on West 44th Street and since Reed was signed to RCA Records, rehearsal time was free—a perk label-mate David Bowie also took advantage of. The band practiced four hours a day for about ten days.

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In the studio, Reed and Diamond were kindred spirits in their experimental approach to making a record. It was, by and large, a collaborative effort based on gut feeling but Diamond generally called the final shots. “Lou gave me a lot of rope on Coney Island Baby,” noted Diamond, “In fact, he allowed me to do everything I wanted to try.” For Diamond, the ‘trying’ consisted of spontaneous and creative approaches that added to the music. Sound effects previously recorded at one of Reed’s parties, for example, were laid into the song ‘Kicks’ and brought up randomly to different and sometimes even annoying volumes. Diamond gave me plenty of opportunity to work the board. We were two young kids at the helm of an expensive record making machinery.

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During the Coney Island sessions, Reed was generally subdued and quiet. I wondered if he was just a very intense listener or totally uninterested in his own project. Reed’s previous avant-garde album, Metal Machine Music, was most likely his preferred direction. However it didn’t chart and if he wanted to stay in the game, he’d have to somehow appease the record executives with something more ‘commercial’. I remember well Reed sitting at the console, head bent over a small white pad doodling for hours with a leaky black ball point pen. He wasn’t too animated nor did he interact with anyone much while his tall, lanky, transsexual love interest, Rachel, waited patiently for the session to en

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Cut to Genya Ravan’s Urban Desire (20th Century Fox, 1978) and the unlikely pairing of Reed and Ravan on the song, “Aye Co’lorado”.  The two of them couldn’t have been more opposite. Reed was minimalistic; Ravan grand, especially in the studio where she was a commanding and intense presence as a songwriter, singer, blues harpist, and record producer. She was also a natural pitch-perfect, one-take singer with a gutsy, bluesy, gritty voice the size of an entire horn section. Reed was a ‘talk-singer’.

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It was John Cale’s guitarist, Ritchie Fliegler, who suggested Reed duet with Ravan even before the song was written. Ravan penned ‘Aye Co’lorado’ (Spanish slang for the color red, about her very first boyfriend, a redheaded Puerto Rican) during the Urban Desire sessions expressly with Reed in mind. The melody came to her in her sleep. She woke up in the middle of the night and sang it into a bedside tape recorder. Reed was her first and last choice as a duet partner because she felt his singing style would pair well with the wordiness of the song.

 

Reed and Ravan met for the first time on the very day of the recording session. He arrived alone with a neck full of ‘hickies’, and as he walked into the studio Ravan recalls him saying, “My grandmother used to listen to you!” However, I recall him saying, "I used to listen to you in high school.” Either way, cracks about her age didn’t exactly bode well with Ravan who was 37 at the time—Reed was only two years younger than her. Ravan would have normally clobbered him with a seething comeback but instead, she wisely ignored it.

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With Reed out of earshot, Ravan instructed us, “No matter what, everything he does from sneezing to talking to farting gets recorded. Never let him know you’re taking it!”  After rehearsing the song a few times in the control room, Reed and Ravan faced each other in the studio and on separate Neumann U87 microphones sang the song live. The very first take, still considered practice, was in Ravan’s opinion—the ‘it’ take. However, Reed insisted on singing the song a few more times. Each time his performance declined, which can be typical of non-singers under pressure. Once Reed felt that he got it, we all listened back but as already determined by Ravan, the first take, the practice take, was it.

 

Reed was thrilled to have been asked to duet with Ravan. He even performed live with her in support of Urban Desire. It wasn’t until years later that I came to appreciate their impeccable union. Written by Ravan and keyboardist Charlie Giordano (E Street Band), ‘Aye Co’Lorado’ is today one of my all-time favorite songs and a great acoustic rock duet for JANTURAN.