Lou Reed Didn’t Want to Be King

THERE IS SOMETHING RIDICULOUS and even a bit menacing about listening to a Lou Reed solo album while sitting shotgun on a drive up the coast of California along Highway 1 on a typically ideal day, as I did this summer. A sound could hardly be more at odds with its context: the fog lifted off the resplendent ocean waters just as Reed’s domestic violence rock opera Berlin (1973) came to its eighth track, “The Kids,” which features an extended interlude of children wailing.