Lou Reed's ‘Berlin,’ St. Anne's, Brooklyn, 2007

At St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn last mid-December, it was the sense of event that lifted every aspect of Lou Reed's first-time staging of his notorious 1973 album Berlin up to the ceiling—where Julian Schnabel had hung a huge, ugly green couch scored by a broad swath of white paint, presumably to signify the divided city Reed named the music for.

It wasn't the conceit that the songs made up Reed's own sort of Threepenny Opera. Seconds into the first encore, "Sweet Jane," it was clear that what the audience had just heard was a set of songs as stiff, boxy, and senti­mental now as they were three decades ago. It wasn't the story of a love affair so cruel that when the woman finally loses her children and kills herself, there's a sense of déjà vu—didn't that already happen?

It was the array of men and women gathered around the music—Reed, trading lead and rhythm guitar with the original Berlin guitarist, Steve Hunter; bassists Fernando Saunders and Rob Wasserman; drummer Tony Smith; trumpeter Steven Bernstein, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, saxophonist and flautist Paul Shapiro, and clarinetist Doug Wieselman; cellist Jane Scarpantoni and violists David Gold and Eyvind Kang; backing singers Sharon Jones and Antony; arranger and keyboard player Rupert Christie; and Bob Ezrin, the original producer of the album, dressed in a ridiculous long coat with "Berlin" spelled out vertically on the back, ostensibly conducting the ensemble but really playing his own version of air guitar.

It was the sight of a whole village of musi­cians poised for the night to begin, their bod­ies all but glowing with an eagerness to plunge into something that had never happened before. "Sometimes things have to sit in the cooker for decades before the world is ready for them—or before they're ready for the world," a friend said: Here everyone present was all but consumed by readiness. The music they were about to play might as well have never been played before, at any time, in any form. It was the way no one ever relaxed into the night, each musician as poised on the edge of his or her chair or on the balls of his or her feet at the end as at the beginning.

No one dramatized this feeling more than the 12 young girls and boys in the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. More than anyone—more than Reed, reaching for fuzztone solos so twisted it seemed he might never get out of them; more than Christie, suddenly rising to his feet behind his piano, as if he were a flag unfurling; more than Scarpantoni, bent over her instrument so forcefully you could imagine she might crawl into it—they communicated the luckiness everyone felt at being present. There wasn't a vileness in the tale Reed was telling to erase their smiles. There wasn't a stuttered beat to block the way they bobbed their heads and moved their bodies—not in tandem, really, but each person just barely looking in his or her own direction, finding his or her own steps, each one responding to Reed's music as if he or she were as much the author of the night as anyone else.

That same month, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, one could have walked into the exhibition "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s" for a far stronger dose of Berlin decadence, depravity, and death than Reed had to offer, then or now. There was a hor­ror in Otto Dix's enormous cartoon sketch for his 1928 Metropolis, a nearly 6-by-14-foot street-life triptych of prostitution, dope, dandyism, and disfigurement, a mutilated war veteran in one dank corner, a syphilitic in another—a picture of a whole society fetishizing its own ugliness—that reduced Berlin to a postcard. But the glamour of the event that Reed brought to Berlin in Brooklyn made a stage where everyone present could believe that anything was possible—and so, when something extraordinary finally happened, it was possible to hear it for what it was.

It was the second encore: The downtown cabaret singer Antony stood up. He's very tall; his feet seemed too small to support his height. He seemed about to totter—and out of his mouth came the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says," a suicide song poised over the abyss as no song in Berlin is, and the ions froze in the air. The empathy in Reed's lyrics is as deep as the disgust in Dix's picture, but, in this moment, Antony's tone was too clear for ordinary life; when Reed took the song, you were back on real streets, in real time. But that was just for a few seconds; Reed handed the song back as if it were a promise. "If I could walk away from me," Antony sang, letting the last word go into the air like a firefly, letting everyone in the audience watch as, across an unbearably sustained note, it flickered out.

That wasn't Berlin—but it was the fruit of the event that, for four nights in December, Berlin and all that it drew from those drawn to it made.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, April 2007 (Elephant Dancing column)