Addressing mature issues in stark fashion, the rock opera blends autobiographical reality, poetic license, and ambitious arrangements to tell the story of a couple’s toxic relationship and its fallout. Produced by Bob Ezrin and featuring an array of ace musicians, Berlin is an emotionally harrowing and sonically eclectic journey into the many of the worst tendencies of the human condition.
Sourced from the original master tapes and housed in mini-LP-gatefold-style packaging, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of Berlin presents the landmark recording in audiophile quality for the first time. The scope, balance, and reach of Ezrin’s explosive production comes to the fore. As does the ample spaciousness and separation that help give the songs breathing room even when the music builds to an orchestral pitch.
Reed’s distinctive voice — central to every track — sounds direct, immediate, centered. The realism and clarity of his tone make it appear as if he’s entered the room. You can trace his breath control, reserved coolness, and commanding phrasing. And sense the implied violence, delusion, and sorrow in the questions and statements he issues in the persona of the protagonist Jim — as well as the empathy, fatigue, confusion, and frustration he projects in his guise as Caroline.
Mobile Fidelity’s reissue also puts into a new, improved light the brilliant contributions of the standout session players. Steve Winwood (Hammond organ), Michael Brecker (tenor saxophone), Randy Brecker (trumpet), and Procol Harum drummer B.J. Wilson play key roles. The core band assisting Reed and Ezrin on a majority of Berlin — Alice Cooper guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, drum maven Aynsley Dunbar, Cream bassist Jack Bruce — turn in a collective performance for the ages. None more so than Bruce, whose bass lines resonate on this reissue with a roundedness, fatness, tautness, and control that give songs added depth and foundation. Ezrin’s restrained piano, full of body and decay, performs a similar function.
Expanding on the gritty themes he explored with the Velvet Underground, and arranging them into a conceptual tale, Reed transforms Berlin into a candid report of what was happening behind closed doors everywhere. Deemed by the Chicago Tribune as “a spare, understated song cycle of nearly suicidal intensity about a crumbling marriage,” it deals head-on with heavyweight topics such as domestic abuse, drug addiction, mental illness, custodial rights, prostitution, and depression. Reed’s purple narratives detail issues that would attract mainstream attention many years later — and which continue to spur vital conversations.
Akin to a classic film noir or hardboiled novel, Berlin skirts any attempt to varnish its rough interiors. Functioning as both a contrast and counterweight, the record's beautiful, symphonic-leaning exteriors somehow both heighten and lessen the severity of the vignettes. The theatrical swells of woodwinds, strings, and brass feature the same streaks of black humor that inform Reed’s writing. That edginess and eccentricity, and Reed’s investment in the album’s three characters and situations, function as magnets that draw us in even when the sadness, meanness, and darkness prompt us to look away.
Save for the opening romance of the title track and false hope of the damning (and downright nasty) “Sad Song,” Berlin largely trades in doom and depression. A record that starts off with a muted celebration and fond recollection ends with motherless children, slashed-wrists suicide, and a callous partner who feels no remorse for his brutal actions but professes gratitude for what becomes an unmitigated disaster.
“Life is meant to be more than this,” Reed sings in combination protest and resignation on the ironically gorgeous “Caroline Says II.” Before the next song finishes — a bleak chronicle of behaviors and decisions relayed with intentional misogyny, hatred, and shaming, and whose subdued tenor gets fractured by the sounds of wailing children crying for their mother — that life has gotten far worse. Minutes later, when Reed and company shape the swirling fever dream called “The Bed,” that life is snuffed out. Oh, oh, what a feeling, indeed.