his audience with contempt. He's also a person with deep compassion for a great many other people about whom almost nobody else gives a shit. I won't say who they are, because I don't want to get too schmaltzy, except to emphasize that there's always been more to this than drugs and fashionable kinks, and to point out that suffering, loneliness and psychic/spiritual exile are great levelers.

The Bells isn't merely Lou Reed's best solo LP, it's great art. Everybody made a fuss over Street Hassle, but too many reviewers overlooked the fact that it was basically a sound album: brilliant layers of live and studio work in a deep wash of bass-obsessive noise. Most of the songs were old, and not very good, with a lot of the same old cheap shots.

The first indication that we've got something very different here is the no-bullshit cover art; the second, a cursory listening to the lyrics. Immediately, one notes the absence of mirror shades, needles and S&M. Lou Reed is walking naked for once, in a way that invites comparison with people like Charles Mingus, the Van Morrison of "T.B. Sheets" and Astral Weeks, and the Rolling Stones of Exile on Main Street. The Bells is by turns exhilarating ("Disco Mystic," an exercise in churning R&B that should be a hit single, if there's any justice), almost unbearably poignant (all of the lyrics) and as vertiginous as a slow, dark whirlpool (the title opus).

Throughout, the sound is dense, as dense as Street Hassle with at least double the content. When Reed began to move toward jazz on Rock and Roll Heart, I just figured he was going to close his career with the same shuck that people like Stanley Clarke used to open theirs. I underestimated him. There's a real band on this record, and these musicians are giving us the only true jazz-rock fusion anybody's come up with since Miles Davis' On the Corner period. They're often doing several interesting, unusual things at once: on cuts such as "Stupid Man" and "Looking for Love," they swing with a vengeance. "City Lights" teems with little whistles, bells and noises that buzz around each other like sad fireflies. And all through the LP, Reed plays the best guitar anyone's heard from him in ages.

As for the lyrics—well, people tend to forget that in numbers like "Candy Says," "Sunday Morning" and "Oh! Sweet Nothing," Lou Reed wrote some of