The fight started before anyone heard a note. Lou Reed and Metallica were in a studio in San Rafael, California, and Reed had pushed drummer Lars Ulrich far enough that Ulrich talked about settling things in a street brawl. That tension became the defining mood of Lulu, the double album by the New York songwriter and the biggest metal band on earth, released on October 31, 2011.
From benefit show to demos
Why would Lou Reed and Metallica make a record together at all? The two worlds had first touched at a benefit concert in October 1997, but the real spark came later, after a shared appearance at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame anniversary show. The original plan was modest: Metallica would re-record some unreleased songs from Reed's archive. Then they heard the demos.
Among those tapes was a song cycle Reed had written for a theatre production of Lulu, based on two plays by the German writer Frank Wedekind. Metallica did not simply polish the material. The band made sweeping changes to the arrangements, and the result was a strange hybrid: Reed reciting his lyrics over the band's churning, avant-garde metal. In a few places, James Hetfield's voice rises behind him.
The View and the album's terms
The lead single, 'The View', arrived on September 27, 2011, and it made the terms clear. This was not a rock collaboration in any familiar sense. It was eighty-seven minutes of spoken word and distorted guitars, a double album that asked listeners to accept two uncompromising artists pulling in the same difficult direction.
Critics did not accept it quietly. The album drew wildly contradictory reviews: one outlet gave it a single point out of ten, while Drowned in Sound awarded a perfect ten and called it the second greatest album ever made by anyone, behind only Reed's own Metal Machine Music. The review aggregator Metacritic landed on a score of forty-five out of one hundred, based on thirty-one notices.
The hostility from some fans was sharper. Reed said Metallica's followers threatened to shoot him over the record. Ulrich compared the backlash to the fury that had greeted the acoustic turn in 'Fade to Black' back in 1984, and Hetfield dismissed the harshest critics as people typing from their mother's basement. The band stood by the work, but the noise around it drowned out almost everything else.
Commercially, Lulu was a strange success and a quiet failure at once. In the United States it entered the Billboard chart at number thirty-six with thirteen thousand copies sold in its first week. That was Reed's highest chart position since Sally Can't Dance in 1974. Yet three years after release, American sales had not quite reached thirty-three thousand copies.
Reed made no more full-length studio albums. He died in October 2013, and Lulu became his final statement, a record that still divides people who hear it. Ulrich later wrote that the album would age well and that, given time, millions would claim to have loved it from the start. Fifteen years on, the fight over Lulu remains as unresolved as the music itself.