The Fat Angel Sings

Originally recorded in 1983 for the album “Infidels”,Foot Of Pride” had been dropped from that album because neither Dylan nor the album’s producer, Mark Knopfler, seemed particularly happy with it, even though they’d recorded more than a half-dozen takes of it. Perhaps their dissatisfaction with it had to do with the song’s lyrics, which were a stern warning, couched in religious terms, to a woman who was full of the sin of pride, and/or with the way the song was performed, which was rather restrained, even disinterested (the harmonica solos were especially weak).
According to his “Great Lyrics and Jukebox Hits” list, on which he’d placed Dylan’s “Foot of Pride,” Lou said that he found the song “fucking funny” because “there’s a lot of anger” in it. And there is indeed a lot of anger in it, at least on the part of the song’s narrator (and presumably its author, too). But isn’t this seeing the finger that points instead of what the finger is pointing to? What about those who have let “the foot of pride” come upon them? Lou himself could certainly be accused of taking a great deal of pride in himself and his accomplishments. “My week beats your year,” he’d boasted in the liner notes to Metal Machine Music. “My bullshit is worth more than other’s people’s diamonds,” he’d told Lester Bangs. And so, when Lou Reed got onstage to sing “Foot of Pride,” it was more than not obvious and more than a little anomalous. Performed at the Bob Dylan Tribute Concert, Madison Square Garden, NYC, 16 10 1992
His version of the song was not a careful handling of a fragile museum piece. In fact, he made a couple of important changes to it. He changed “when your foot of pride comes down” to “when the foot of pride comes down,” which shifted not only the agent of this action, but also its meaning: instead of it being the woman who was taking a step full of pride, it was now God who was crushing her underneath His foot. And he changed the sound of the music: instead of being a restrained piece of folk rock, with a harmonica taking the solos, it was now a forceful rocker, with snarling guitars boiling and soloing.
But the biggest change – the thing that made Lou’s version unforgettable – was his singing. More than just animated or even agitated, it was ferocious, and not just in the choruses, when he sang “Hey, hey, hey, hey,” but also in the verses and especially in the second half of the song. When he thundered “No!” in answer to the question “Will they teach you how to enter into the gates of Paradise?” – when he broke up the line “Struck down by the strength of the will” into “Struck! Down! By! The! Strength! Of the will!” – he didn’t sound like a self-righteous rock singer or a preacher hypocritically predicting ruin for some other person. He sounded like God himself.