Although, this footage of Lou Reed performing live in Paris in 1974 on his celebrated Rock n Roll Animal tour has been around for years, it’s always been pretty much unwatchable tenth generation VHS garbage. In the early 90s I was thrilled to buy a bootleg copy of this for $16 from a street vender on Fifth Avenue only to get it home to find that it was a “one” on a scale of one to ten. Ten years ago I found a DVD boot at the Pasadena Flea Market, but that turned out to be bad quality, too. It’s been posted various times on YouTube in the past, but none of these versions were much of an improvement… until this one.

It wasn’t as if a freak like Lou Reed would have gotten on television all that often in the 1970s, and of course European audiences often accepted America’s wildest performers with open arms long before we ever did, so this could probably be counted as only Reed’s second major TV appearance (the first having been the Velvet Underground mini-reunion at the Bataclan nightclub with John Cale and Nico that aired on French TV’s POP2 series in 1972).
 

 
And then there is this. The infamously smartassed ‘74 Australian press conference has been on YouTube for years, and will be familiar to many readers, but take a gander at the live footage from Down Under that comes after that, at the 5:27 mark: An excellent “Walk On the Wild Side” (complete with Uncle Lou’s spazzy dancing) and “Rock and Roll.” And it’s great quality.
 

 
Thank you Chris Campion of Hollywood, CA!