On the live album Rock N Roll Animal, Lou Reed showed he'd learned how to give his audience what they wanted, and do it well. Sally Can't Dance, on the other hand, was the polar opposite, a remarkably cynical album that pandered to the lowest common denominator of the market that had bought Transformer and Rock N Roll Animal, and didn't even do it with much flair. Reed's performances here are limited to vocals, except for some sloppy acoustic guitar on one track (this from the man who helped reinvent electric guitar with the Velvet Underground), and the sodden, overblown arrangements sink most of these tunes before they get past the first chorus; much of the time, Reed sounds like an afterthought on his own album. And while Reed's best songwriting ranks with the best rock of his generation, Sally Can't Dance is cluttered with throwaways that reach for the boho decadence of Transformer and come up empty (with special recognition going to the bizarre and truly puzzling "Animal Language"). Side two does offer two worthwhile songs: "Kill Your Sons," a powerful and deeply personal remembrance of Reed's bouts with shock treatment and brutal psychotherapy, which he would revisit in a much stronger performance on 1984's Live in Italy, and "Billy," a witty and surprisingly poignant remembrance of an old friend and how their paths in life diverged. But otherwise, Sally Can't Dance has the distinction of being the worst studio album of Reed's career; Metal Machine Music may have been a lot more annoying, but at least he was trying on that one.

01. Ride Sally Ride [0:04:05.52]
02. Animal Language [0:03:05.30]
03. Baby Face [0:05:05.53]
04. N.Y. Stars [0:04:01.52]
05. Kill Your Sons [0:03:40.25]
06. Ennui [0:03:43.15]
07. Sally Can't Dance [0:04:12.00]
08. Billy [0:05:10.25]
09. Good Taste [0:03:30.20] Previously Unreleased
10. Sally Can't Dance (Single Version) [0:02:54.55]

EAC extraction logfile from 21. June 2006, 10:54 for CD
Lou Reed / Sally Can't Dance

Used drive  : HL-DT-STDVDRAM GSA-4163B   Adapter: 1  ID: 0
Read mode   : Secure with NO C2, accurate stream, disable cache
Combined read/write offset correction : 667
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No

Used output format : C:\eac095pb4\Ape\MAC.exe   (Monkey's Audio Lossless Encoder)
                     High Lossless Compression

Other options      : 
    Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
    Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
    Installed external ASPI interface


Range status and errors
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     Peak level 98.8 %
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     CRC 19A0364F
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No errors occured

End of status report