Animal Serenade kicks off with the familiar three chords of "Sweet Jane" — but instead of opening his ninth live album with his best-known song, Lou Reed pauses to explain that the intro actually includes four chords, then moves right to his 1990 John Cale collaboration "Small Town." At sixty-four, Reed can do whatever he pleases, and for the rest of the two-disc set he does, jumping from obscurities to up-tempo rockers to dull singer-songwriter-ish fare. On "How Do You Think It Feels," Reed's band works up a nice bar-band rumble; several quiet numbers have a hymn-like grace, with cello, piano and backup singers fleshing out his deep sing-speak. The second disc is uniformly strong, with a climactic "Set the Twilight Reeling" flanked by four well-played Velvet Underground songs, including a nine-minute version of "Heroin." Other live albums have shown that Reed knows how to blast through his impressive catalog, but Serenadeoffers nice glimpses of Reed's laid-back side.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.