Reed’s band for the performance included guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, bassist Prakash John, drummer Pentti Glan, and keyboardist Ray Colcord. The album remains my all-time favorite Lou Reed product: a digestible, tuneful epic dipped in equal parts grime and glitter, featuring just five songs-“Into/Sweet Jane,” “Heroin,” “White Light/White Heat,” “Lady Day,” and “Rock and Roll”-culled from a December 21st, 1973 concert at the East 14th Street Palladium in Manhattan.

I first discovered Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal on weathered vinyl sometime in the late ‘90s, excavating the used crates at Park City, UT’s dearly departed Orion Music. So! For our inaugural column, let’s cram in the earplugs and continue babying our $12 stadium kiosk beer as we travel back to the gritty streets of “Me Decade” New York City, to Lou Reed’s and the 1974 glam rock masterpiece, Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal.

My hope with this column is to explore the many different types of live albums-compilations, condensed surveys of a single performance, complete concert documents, etc.-as well as the entire gamut of live concert (and concert album) experiences, from “This sounds exactly like the record!” to “This sounds nothing like the record!” and when each of those things may be good or bad. But usually there’s at least some variance-whether intentional or not. And some sound exactly the same no matter whether they’re strumming into a laptop in their bedroom, sitting behind an expensive microphone at Abby Road, or plugging in in front of 17,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl.

Some are the same amount of good or bad, just in a different way. Every live album asks the question: “How does this artist’s recorded work stack up against their ability to recreate it, as mediated by the imperfections of tangible reality?” In other words: How good is the artist at reproducing the music you love through their excitable and possibly drug-addled fingers, throats, and feet, all while sharing the same physical space as other people (fans) like you. Of course, one place where songwriting, recording, and live performance all collide-not always well-is the live album. After all, the architect doesn’t pour the concrete herself, and even celebrity chefs usually delegate the messy chore of execution to their sous foot soldiers. We’re so used to this being how it is that no one ever stops to think how weird this auteur-driven, “all-in-one” approach to creating and disseminating rock product truly is how hugely inefficient and sub-optimal, this idea that the person coming up with a song should also be the person tasked with presenting it on record and in concert. Ever since Beatlemania, it’s been standard operating procedure for rock bands to write, record, and perform their own music.

Lou Reed Transformer Zip