Arista's open to the rest of 1976 was with one of its biggest coups: the signage of Lou Reed. Reed had earlier put out a string of successful albums for RCA . . . that is, until 1975, which saw the debut of Metal Machine Music, a critically savaged (and less than healthy) mixture of industrial music, noise rock, and contemporary sound art that RCA (according to some sources) returned to stores by the thousands after a few weeks. Though his next album, Coney Island

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