Transformer

Four of the eleven songs were written in Reed's Velvet Underground days. Andy's Chest had been recorded by the band in 1969 and Satellite of Love demoed in 1970, and both were slowed down for this album. New York Telephone Conversation and Goodnight Ladies were played live during the band's summer 1970 residency at Max's Kansas City. Goodnight Ladies takes its refrain from the last line of the second section of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Reed said Warhol had told him to write a song about someone vicious, and when he asked what that meant, Warhol said it was like hitting you with a flower. The result was Vicious.

Bowie was an admirer of the Velvet Underground and had performed White Light/White Heat and I'm Waiting for the Man in concerts and on the BBC during 1971 to 1973. Ronson, then lead guitarist of Bowie's Spiders from Mars, was co-producer, arranger and main session musician, playing guitar, piano and recorder, and he wrote the strings for Perfect Day. Reed praised Ronson's work in the Transformer episode of the series Classic Albums. The cover is a Mick Rock photograph that became over-exposed by accident in the darkroom. Rock said it took twelve attempts to reproduce the accident for the final print.

The album reached 13 in Britain, 29 in the United States, 12 in Australia and 11 in the Netherlands. The first single paired Walk on the Wild Side with Perfect Day in November 1972, and Satellite of Love followed in February 1973. A 30th anniversary edition in 2002 added acoustic demos of Hangin' 'Round and Perfect Day. Rolling Stone's Nick Tosches was mixed on it in 1973: he said Reed himself thought the album great but he did not think it nearly as good as Reed was capable of. Pitchfork's 2003 review called it startlingly fresh thirty years on. It was ranked 194 on Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums, and in 2018 Ezra Furman wrote a 33 1/3 book about it.