Records reviews

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO

Source & author unknown

For a long time we've been hearing a lot of groovy music all about beauty and love from West Coast groups. The Underground is an East Coast - New York - group whose material is largely taken from the opposite side of life - evil and ugliness.
Their music is hard rock 'n' roll brought up to date with electricity. An electric viola adds a distinctive cruel, harsh note - it's particulary evil on "Venus In Furs" and "Heroin," two of the best tracks on the album which are never likely to get played by the BBC. The drummer is a girl, the lead singer often sounds like Dylan and the beautiful Nico sings sweetly on the strange "Femme Fatale" and the lovely "Mirror".

Produced by Andy Warhol, this is the band that was featured in Andy's experimental Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It's rather straight, because the visual and involvement side is lost on record, but musically, it's solid and by no means freaky. In fact, to my surprise, it's actually very pretty. Soft voices singing soft songs, twanging electric picking similar to the Byrds. Tastefull acoustic guitars and some upbeated stuff that never goes beyond sensibility. Great cover with a banana you can really peel.

Seminal decadence, influential stupidity, drugs and groovy death.
Ed.
Whist California basked in an aura of innocence and optimism, the Velvet Underground dwelt on darker atmospheres - drugs, perversion, etc. - all within a shattering, discordant music combining garage-band chords sequences with the avant-garde. This approach proved to be ultimately closer to realism than the hippie San Francisco escapism and also related to the punk of ten years later. As relevant and powerful today as ever it was.
B.H.

Celebrated illustrator-turned-social butterfly in search of teen spirit spots a struggling band at a club, offers to become their manager on condition they accept a young European ingenue into their ranks, only to stand by and watch as the debut album proceeds to sink without trace... It doesn't bode too well, does it?

But Warhol's foisting of the eldritch Nico on Lou Reed's scarifying troupe is the key to this album's classic status. Reed's themes of low-rent-as-high-art - meant to sobotage the west coast hippies' peace 'n' love idyll - work even more powerfully juxtaposed with the nursery rhymes he wrote for Nico. And it's all played with a studied cool a thousands bands have subsequently killed (and justly died) for.

Nico and Warhol departed, Lou got on with perfecting his darkling prose, and rock was left with, if not a blueprint for wild success (pace the Mary Chain), then at least a valuable lesson: if you can't get arrest, get arresting.

WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT

Source & author unknown

With the VELVET UNDERGROUND, you either groove mightly on their music or find it utterly repellent. Their first LP was brilliant and "White Light/White Heat," their second album on Verve, is staggering. It must be the first pop record ever to contain a long horror story -"The Gift" with the group's hard, distinctive music grinding away in the background. "Sister Ray" is the marathon freaky hard-rock track which extends the moods laid down in the first album -an amazingly exciting sound. Produced by Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan, Mothers of Invention), the Underground are a very American, very hip rock band with meaningful and often evil lyrics which combine to exert a powerful hypnotic state on the listener. Hear it -if you dare!

A menacing set of acid-rock tunes from the former Andy Warhol group, which range from the behemoth "Sister Ray", to the rock recital "The Gift", which sounds like something from Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood". All the backings have that repetitive growling blues quality, and the vocals are dead pan. A hippy must.

Utterly pretentious, unbelievably monotonous. It even has one track taken up by a long bit of story-telling.

Group with a reputation that was never matches by record sales. This reissue could do well however as interest in the group seems heavy at the moment and in retrospect the music isn't difficult to get into as it seemed in 1967 when it was first issued. legendary John Cale is here which should add to sales chances.

"White Light/White Heat" is a reissue of an early Velvet Underground album - no doubt coinciding comfortably with their appearances over here. It contains some good material, but not really their best. With John Cale still dominating force in the band at that time, it has all the good, freaky effects it has managed to keep, but though it sounded good the first time round, it can be seen how much they have changed. The later addition to the ranks of Nico makes this pale a little in comparison, but still doesn't sound like they do now, with Nico past and gone. It is a fairly good buy if you are a recent Velvet Underground fan.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (third LP)

Lester Bangs
Rolling Stone, no. 33, May 17, 1969, San Francisco, USA

The Velvet Underground are alive and well (which in itself may surprise some people) and ever-changing. How do you define a group like this, who moved from "Heroin" to "Jesus" in two short years? It is not enough to say that they have one of the broadest ranges of any groupe extant; this should be apparent to anyone who has listened closely to their three albums. The real question is what this music is about - smack, math, deviate sex and drugdreams, or something deeper?
Their spiritual odyssey ranges from an early blast of sadomasochistic self-loathing called "I'm So Fucked Up," through the furious nihilism of "Heroin" and the metaphysical quest implied in the words "I'm searching for my mainline," to this album, which combines almost overpowering musical lyricism with deeply yearning, compassionate lyrics to let us all know that they are finally "Beginning to See the Light."
Can this be the same bunch of junkie-faggot-sadomasochist-speed-freaks who roared their anger and their pain in storms of screaming feedback and words spat out like strings of epithets? Yes. Yes, it can, and this is perhaps the most important lesson the Velvet Underground: the power of the human soul to transcend its darker levels.
The songs on this album are about equally divided between the subjects of love and freedom. So many of them are about love, in fact, that one wonders if Lou Reed, the malevolent Burroughsian Death Dwarf who had previously never written a complimentary song about anybody, has not himself fallen in love. The opening song, "Candy says," is about a young girl who would like to "know completely what the others so discreetly talk about." The fact that this and about half the other tracks on the albums are ballads marks another radical departure for the Velvets. The next track is a deep throbbing thing in which he chides perhaps the same girl for her confusion with a great chorus: "Lady be good / Do what you should / You know it'll be allright." John Cale's organ work on this track is stark and spare and, as usual brilliant - this time as much for what he leaves out as what he puts in.
Then there is "Some Kinda Love," a grooving Latiny thing, somewhat like Donovan but much more earthy, and with words that will kill you: "Put the jelly on your shoulders / Let us do what you feel most / that from which you recoil / Uh still makes your eyes moist."
Perhaps the greatest surprise here is "Jesus," a prayer no less. The yearning for the state of grace reflected their culminates in "I'm Set free," a joyous hymn of liberation. The Velvets never seemed so beautifully closed to the Byrds before.
The album is unfortunately not without its weak tracks though. "The Murder Mystery" is an eight minute exercise in aural overload that annoys after a few listenings, and "Pale Blue Eyes" is a folky ballad that never really gerts off the ground either musically or lyrically. On the whole I didn't feel that this album matched up to White Light/White Heat, but it will still go a long way toward convincing the unbelievers that the Velvet Underground can write and play any kind of music they want to with equal brilliance.

Once the group hailed as the biggest noise in New York interms of psychedelic musical violence. Now they are into gentleness and beauty. With tunes like "Pale Blue Eyes" and "Jesus" where everything is acoustic and underplayed they make their point much more subtly and effectively. There is very little that is freaky and few moments where anything approaching a strong beat is laid down. on "That's The Story of My life" they set up a kind of jolly two-beat. The organ on "The Murder Mystery" has that strange quality that groups like Pink Floyd and the H.P. Lovecraft often obtain, and the use of stereo in the dialogue is brilliant, if a bit confusing. Not sensational, but interesting.

The Velvet Underground have always been a group who turned as many stomach as they blew minds: not everyone can groove on them. Their attraction or (repulsion) lies in the extreme areas in which they operate: insistent, relentless rythms .... hysterical organ and guitar .... wrecked vocals. A cut like Sister ray on their last album makes a direct bid on the metabolism, you either escape or surrender. Their music is always unsettling and disturbing: their heads adrift in Burroughs-land, a sickly sweet, rotten smell in the air ... songs of Strange Pleasures, subversive and corrupt. Yet here we are with Jesus, a long way from Heroin in the space of one LP. Have they really hung up their spurs and the whip of shiny, shiny leather with the sailor's suit and cap? Have the Flowers of Evil started to bloom?
Perhaps they havn't gone through changes so much as modification; the wolf and the lamb walk hand in hand. For the first time Velvet shares top billing with Underground. They've stopped rushing on their run and slowed the pace to a processional dawdle. But though everything has been toned in low key it's still unmistakedly them. It's got feel allright, but it's a kind of ghoulish corpse-like feel. Gone are the walls of sound and vast textural contrasts, in comes a sad liturgical droning, the wailing of the converted sinner (but with his tongue slyly in his cheek). One doesn't really have faith in their faith, and it's probably wisest to give very early trying. Cop out of value judgements, write it of as some variation on camp (which VU have always been strong on anyway) and you can enjoy it.
Songs on this album are divided between heaven and hell, and the casual listener will be forgiven if doesn't notice the difference. Jesus is pure, simple, moving and undeniably sincere. But then there's Some Kinda Love wich is another thing altogether ... shall we say 'hard core necrophilia'? The lyrics are the filthiest. 'Put jelly on your shoulder - lie down upon the carpet .... or; 'In some kinds of love the possibilities are endless - and for me to miss one would seem to be groundless ....' 'Murder Mystery', in which chick drummer Maureen Tucker takes and the Billy Cotton Band Show, and on White Light/White Heat. Maureen also takes the honours on Afterhours and gets into a nice Vera Lynn bag ... in fact she warbles delightfully.
Velvet Underground don't really sound together on this album, either as a group or individuals, which I have a sneaking suspicion was what they might have been aiming at. Luckily too, for if they made it they would lose their quality as a group ... fragmentation is more their scene. The style of this album is the antithesis of their style before. Be replacing blatant freak value with subtler means they end up sounding more bizarre than ever. Tired cliche, but this album really does grow on you ... like a malignant tumor.

Black and white - soft beaty and unspeakable horror. 'Pale Blue Eyes', the gentlest of love songs, performed with seductive innocence; 'The Murder Mystery', the harshest of hate songs, performed with imperishable cynicism. A group out of anuone else's depth captured at their peak.
Ed.

LOADED

Lenny Kaye
Rolling Stone, December 24, 1970, San Francisco, USA

Lou Reed has always steadfastly maintained that he Velvet Underground were just another Long Island rock 'n' roll band, but in the past, he really couln't be blamed much if people didn't care to take him seriously. With a reputation based around such non-American Bandstand masterpieces as "Heroin" and "Sister Ray," not to mention a large avant-garde following which tended to downplay the Velvets' more Top-40 roots, the group certainly didn't come off as your usual rock'em-sock'em Action House combination.
Well, it now turns out that Reed was right all along, and the most surprising thing about the change in the group is that there has been no real change at all. Loaded is merely a refinement of the Velvet Underground's music as it has grown through the the course of their past three albums, and if by this time around they seem like a tight version of your local neighborhood rockers, you only have to go back to their first release and listen to things like "I'm Waiting For The Man" and the "Hitch-Hike"-influenced "There She Goes Again" for any answers.
And yet, though the Velvet Underground on Loaded are more loose and straightforward than we've yet seen them, there is an undercurrent to the album that makes it more than any mere collection of goodtime cuts. Lou Reed's music has always concerned itself with the problem of salvation, whether it be through drugs and decadence (The Velvet Underground and Nico), or pseudo-religious symbolism ("Jesus," "I'm Beginning To See The Light"). Now, however, it's as it he's decided to come back where he most belongs: Standing on the corner / Suitcase in my hand / Jack is in corset, Jane is in her vest / And me, I'm in a rock 'n' roll band...
And once stated, the Velvets return to their theme again and again, clealy delighted with the freedom such a declaration gives them. Each cut on the album, reardless of its other merits, first and foremost a celebration of the spirit of rock 'n' roll, all pounded home as straight and true as an arrow. "Head Held High" is the kind of joyous shouter that just begs to be played at top volume, "Train Around The Bend" should satisfy all you hard blues fanatics out there, while "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" deserves a hallowed place on your favorite AM station. If Atlantic fails to get a Top 40 hit out of any of these, especially the last, they might think well of overhauling their entire corporate set-up.
Commercial potential not-withstanding. Loaded also shows off some of the incredible finesse that Lou Reed has developed over the years as a songwriter, especially in terms of lyrics. It's always struck me as strange that no one has ever attempted to record any of the Velvets' material, though it must be admitted that its previously bizarre nature probably tended to frighten many people off, but there should be no excuse with the present album. Building from chords progressions that are simple innovations on old familiars, Reed constructs a series of little stories, filling them with a cast of characters that came from somewhere down everybody's block, each put together with a kind of inexorable logic that takes you frm beginning to end with an ease that almost speaks of no movement at all.
In "New Age," for instance, he opens with what must be one of the strangest lines that have ever graced a rock 'n' roll song: "Can I have your autograph?' / He said to the fat blond actress" - and from there, mingles cliche '"Something's got a hold on me / And I don't know what") with poignant little details about marble showers and Robert Mitchum, all combined into one of the most beautiful "love" songs to be heard in a while. Instead of taking the song through the standard verse-chorus-verse that might have been expected, the arrangement builds through three separate sections, each following perfectly on the heels of the last, culminating in a rush that takes you out beyond the boundaries of the song into the very grooves of the record itself.
And then there's "Rock and Roll," which tells the story of Ginny who was "just five years old," playing with the dials of her radio until she turned "on a New York station and she couln't be-lieve what she heard at all." Or "Sweet Jane," possibly the Velvets' finest song since the cataclysmic "Sister Ray": "Ridin' in Stutz-Bearcat, Jim," says Reed in the midst of a vocal performance which would put Mick Jagger to shame, "You know those were different times / The poets they studied rules of vers / And the ladies, they rolled their eyes." You can talk all you want about your rock poets, but I can't think of many who could come close to matching that.
In fact, there's so much variety on the album that you could go through any number of the cuts and pick out much the same things, those extra little touches that make each one special and able to stand up in its own right. "Who Loves The Sun," a bouncy little number which opens up the record, closes with a few "Bah-bah-ba-bah's" that are reminiscent of the "doo-doo-wah's" which graced "Candy Says" on The Velvet Underground. "Cool It Down" quotes admirably from Lee Dorsey's "Workin' In a Coal Mine," while "I Found A Reason" contains a recitation straight out of any classic Fifties slow song. There's even a Velvets' hymn to close things out in the properly devotional way: "When you ain't got nothing," they sing in letter-perfect four part harmony, "You ain't got nuthin' at all..."
Yet as a good as Loaded is (and as far as I'm concerned, it's easily one of the best albums to show up this or any year), there are some minor problems which tend to take away from its overall achievement. Namely, and whether it's the fault of the mix or the production is hard to say, it feels as if many of the harder songs on the album lack punch. The group as a whole performs well - Sterling Morrison's lead guitar is unerringly good (especially on the rave-up within "Oh, Sweet Nuthin'"), while Doug Yule's bass work frames each of the songs nicely - but it seems that something has been lost in the transfer of their material to tape.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that Loaded was recorded before the Velvets undertook a summer-long engagement in the upstairs room at Max's Kansas City. There, playing five nights a week on what can only be called their home field, it was inevitable that their approach to the tunes on the album would change, become more refined and pointed as the group settled into what they were doing, giving them time to strech out and expand upon each of the separate pieces.
Brigid Polk, a New York artist whose mediums are the Polaroid camera and the Sony cassette machine, has a series of tapes from those performances, and I would say without exaggeration that the music contained on them is some of the finest rock 'n' roll that has been played in many a year. On a small stage, surrounded by a mass of dancing bodies (and when was the last time you saw that), the Velvets fulfilled all of their early promise, taking even those classics which they had put aside for so long (such as "Heroin" and "Sunday Morning") and turning them out in newer, somehow brighter clothes. It was home-coming, in more ways than one, and there are few who were there that will soon forget it.
At this point, unfortunately, it remains to be seen whether such a thing will ever happen again. Due to a near-textbook case of management hassles, Lou reed left the group toward the end of the Max's engagement, and though there is a possibility of reconciliation at some future date, the present situation doesn't look promising. In the meantime, the Velvets have added ex-Lost bass player Walter Powers to their number and are currently rehearsing for a tour. reed, however, has always been the focal point of the group, the one who wrote their songs and provided their magic, and it is doubtful whether they can overcome his loss.
None of which can detract from any of the power and beauty contained in Loaded. In the midst of Reed's tale of five-year-old Ginny, he notes that, "Despite all the amputations, you know you could just go out and dance to a rock and roll station." And that, I guess, is what it's allways been about.

This is Lou Reed, the Warholian acolyte, doing for pop music what Andy has done for pop art. The songs on this album brilliantly convey that same sense of journalism become art. It's sensationalist, decadent and camp, but like Warhol, Reed always distances himself from his subject matter. For instance, although many of his songs owe much stylistically to early Sixties rock, they are neither parodies, satires, nor loving recreartions of that era. They are impersonal but devastatingly sharp reflections of contemporary life: "New Age" is a frighteningly acute portrait of an ageing blonde film star that evokes an almost evil atmosphere, and "Rock And Roll" is the best summation of rock music lifestyle yet on record.

Having been overtaken back in the early days by the Airplane, the Dead et al as the Most Identifiable sound of the underground, the Velvets achieved a certain distinction in that most everyone knew love and probably had their first album. Only now, with just about every other band hyped/exposed out of any significant existence (it's true what most primitive people believe: that every photograph or recording taken of a person keeps and retains a little of life-essence. Hence ultimately media exposure eventuaually turns a real live man into a cardboard cut-out effigy of himself. Look atEelvis or Tom Jones - they are both, by now, virtually two-dimensional. their vital substance has been extracted painlessly over years of newspaper and magazine pix and articles).
Which is why the Velvet Underground is still a major living force in rock music, and why crosby Stills Nash and Young (and the Monkees) aren't. "Loaded" isn't a patch on "The Velvet Underground and Nico" - but nor were their second and third albums either. Nevertheless it's a fucking gasser of a record... one of the rare ones which get more refined the more you hear of it. At least it never for one moment pretends to be anything other than what it is: good, basic electric rock 'n' roll with some new concepts: "Can I have your autograph/He said to the fat blonde actress/You know I've seen every movie you've been in/From Paths Of Pain to Jewels Of Glory/And when you kissed Robert Mitchum/I thought you'd never catch him" are some of the lyrics to "New Age". Which is where the Velvet Underground hit: no bullshit, instead just the reality of what it is to grow up as a latter-twentieth-century urbanised media-satureted man.
Unfortunately for them, the Velvet Underground is now in danger of being the latest cult band, with features already in IT and Friends. Presumably it won't be long before the MM, Sounds and all the lesser jackals start to gather round the remains (two-page color picture of Maureen Tucker in Disc!). Knowing them, thogh, and on the continuing evidence of "Loaded", they still have the balls to retain their own identity, despite all the media shit which has been and yet will be thrown at them.

The bestest of the best, that's the Velvet Underground. Life hasn't always been easy for them. It's tough being a rock star in an alien culture, but if New York is an asphalt jungle, then it's also a Velvet Underground.
Underground was art jargon when this group started, and verily they were underground. in association with Andy Warhol, they created the first mixed media shows (to our San Francisco friends, that's culture vocabulary for light show), called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. From there it was banana albums and the relative obscurity of being the best group on the MGM label. Oh, occasionally one would hear reports of a Velvet performance in Southampton or Springfield, Mass., but never would they play New York again.
And the things began to get better for the Underground and their hardcore admirers. Atlantic Records of the magic touch signed them and immediatly put them on display at Max's Kansas City, the In New York eatery, where all the rich freaks hang out. All summer long, they showcased their "new" sound, one which was consistently harder and technically more proficient than anything in the past. And we all awaited a new Velvet's album. And waited.
One often finds in Rolling Stone, such ridiculous statements as: "If Rubber Soul was the album of the year in 1965, then Olaf and the Norseman are this year's equivalent... Harvey Forqua."
I will venture an equally ludicrous statement: Any time the Velvets release an album, it's an occasion of joy in the rock world. Louis told me last year that the Velvets were going to concentrate on making top forty singles. Well, that's exactly what they have produced in Loaded, an albums that contains at least seven potential number one top of the pop tunes.
Opening it up on the heavy side, which coincidentally or not is side one, is the "grabber" (that's a word made popular by the inscrutable Bud Scoppa), Who Loves the Sun. An obvious, intentional, readymade parody of the Beatles Here Comes The Sun. The former suceeds unlike the latter because of its very triteness, which is at once as poignant as Paint It Black. Does the sound like quite a trip? Not at all, since Louis is probably the most capable man of letters since World War whatever number. And in the realm of dynamics, there is more texture in three minutes form the Velvets, than there is in that entire side of Abbey Road.
Sweet Jane, which follows, is the good version of All Along The Watch Tower and is far better because it's Wallace Stevens rather than Allen Ginsberg. Both Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll contain a lot of Don Covay and Marvin Gaye type guitar arrangements, so even Vince Alleti, New York's finest soul brother music critic, could dig it. Rock and Roll is the seamier side of Chuck Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen and the New York version of Jig Saw Puzzle and Stray Cat Blues.
My most favorite of all on the album is Cool It Down because of its absolutely fabulous chorus: But I'm down on the corner/Looking for Miss Lida Lee/Cause she's got the power/To love me by the hour. What insanity for rock and roll.
One last note of importance: this album could have been engineered better but it plays well on expensive equiptement. There's more to this story of engineering though than mere mix rooms. Lou Reed is no longer with the group, having been kicked out or whatever during the mixing of the record.
Hence, the guiding touch was gone and so, in places, it's very sloppy. With Lou's departure, we are left with a group more rightly known as the "Velveteen Underground," and again it looks as if the group will be cheated out of the fame and fortune thay so rightly deserve.

When the Velvet Underground's cynical dark visions came together with an increased pop structure and greater studio discipline, it really was the beginning of a new age - or would have been if anyone had paid attention.
Ed.
New York's sleaziest cock a snook at the mellow Sixties with an answer to the Beatles' 'Here Comes The Sun' in a tune that asks 'Who needs it anyway?' A fine aural portrait of N.Y.'s pop-art, music crossover, ripping its own guts out in a glittering shower of methedrine crystals.
C.P.L. & F.K.

LIVE AT MAX'S KANSAS CITY

Tony Glover
Rolling Stone, August 3, 1970, San Francisco, USA

Though New York City eventually serves as a showcase for every high-time rock group, it spawns very few - and the Velvet Underground was about the only group that denizens of the ultimate terminal city could call their own.
Andy Warhol found them and put them on tour as part of a show called The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and the Velvet Underground skulked through flower - powered American days like shadows from the dark-side of psycopath fantasy. Many thought their first album downright evil.
Musically they were just your average garage band, but with 42nd Street attitudes towards lyrics and subject matter (remember "Sister Ray"?), a never-scorching feedback guitar style, and the Dylanish leering vocal style of songwriter Lou Reed. The first album featured Chealsea Girl Nico, and the electric violin of John Cale. The second seemed to consist mostly of "Sister Ray," while the third was much more musical, and tunes like "What Goes On" and "Some Kind Of Love" gained a new audience for the group. By this time both Nico and Cale were long gone, as was Warhol. Lou Reed was becoming a legend and was definitely the mainstay of the group at the time this recording was made, in August 1970.
The occasion was a summer-long gig at Max's, a gathering spot for artists, poets, hustlers, queens and princes as well as musicians - in short the perfect place for the Velvet to boogie. The Velvets were working on material for what was to be their final album, Loaded, and Max's consisted of both old favorites and some of the new songs.
This album (in some ways the first authorized bootleg) exists only because scene-chronicler Brigid Polk wanted to make a tape of the band for herself. She took her Sony 124 down to the club a couple of times, and August 23rd recorded an hour and a half cassette, which makes up the bulk of the album. (Other tunes come from earlier weeks in the gig.) Strangely enough that was the last night Lou Reed was ever to play with the group; management hassles had developed and he split.
Brigid's tape was playes for lots of friends (she has extensive documentation of almost everything worth knowing about in New York), and eventually Atlantic heard about the tape and called her up. The result, with a few changes along the way, is this album.
It's not a documentary of the last night; rather the album is arranged (by Lou Reed and Geoff Haslam) into a fast and a slow side. Why is a mystery to me - a bit of variety would've made an easier flowing record.
The sound is remarkably good (comparable to your better Rubber Dubber productions), and the ambience is full-blown Max's. The album opens with Reed inviting audience to dance, introducing a "tender folk ballad of love between man and subway," then stomping into "Waiting For The Man." As with most cuts on the album, the lyrics are a bit submerged, and it helps to have heard the originals. Both "Sweet Jane" and "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" suffer by comparison to the studio versions, but there's an energy charge here that connects in some extra-musical sense... the only comparison that comes to mind is the Stones Got Live If You Want It album, where you could almost smell the sweat and electricity.
Here you have the heavily on-mike voice of a poet in the audience ordering double PPernods and trying to score-downs between songs - it sounds like a put-up job, but Brigid says no. And the odor of this album is something more than English show biz, that's for sure...
The slow side includes "Pale Blue Eyes" (a longtime favorite of mine) and "Sunday Morning" ("this is about when you've done something... so sad," Reed explains). "Femme Fatale" is here, so is the sinisterly innocent, rag-timey "Afterhours."
Despite good choice of material and strong vocal work by Reed and the band (a friend who saw them live said they seemed to be the best rock band he'd ever heard), somehow the album is a bit of a letdown. Velvets fans will have to have it of course, but it's doubtful that this album will score any retrospective sighs the way Buffalo Springfield's Greatest Hits (or-whatever-the-hell-it-was-called) did.
The Velvets occupied a special place in the history of music and the psyches of many, so this album is a welcome artifact of that time (and plus marks to Cotillion for lower price). It ain't great, but it is good, and even though I probably won't listen to it very much, I'll be glad it's there for the times when I want to. And in these days of instant throw-away records, that's saying something good.
(But if you're ever in New York, and run into Brigid Polk, try to get her to play you the original tape of that last night. She says that's how it really was.)

1969 VELVET UNDERGROUND LIVE

Dave Marsh
Creem, Detroit, USA)

Many of Lou Reed's fans continue to believe that his significant achievements came as leader of the Velvet Underground rather than his recent solo efforts. Because 1969 Velvet Underground Live was recorded on a cassette machine, it has technical deficiencies (although they aren't as severe as on Live at Max's Kansas City). But its music and the beauty of Reed's singing sustain the argument for the superiority of his earlier work. The material isn't new but gains from a relaxed, almost languid treatment. On "Heroin" and "Pale Blue Eyes," Reed is revealed as an influence nearly the equal of Dylan on the new East Coast singer/songwriters. On this set, he achieved a complete mastery over raunch classics like "White Light/White Heat," and in general showed himself a more fluid melodist, more effective singer and finer guitarist than he has since become. 1969 Velvet Underground Live is vintage Reed, flaws intact - a profile of a man who put his heart into his music.

VU

Allan Jones
Melody Maker, UK

Twenty years on, listening to the Velvet Underground is still like dancing with lightning. It would take considerably more space than we could conveniently devote here to fully describe the totality of their impact and influence upon successive generations of aspiring young hipsters over the last two decades, so our appreciation of their enduring legend and continuing fascination of their musical legacy must be outrageously brief.
Let it just be said that not much that has been worth listening to since they made their moentous debut in March, 1967, with "The Velvet Underground And Nico", has been uninformed by the stylistic infatuations and emotional preoccupations they introduced that year to rock 'n' roll's nervously expanding vocabulary. They remain, arguably, the most influential group in the entire history of rock, as widely imitated as they have been misunderstood. Probably because their music was always wilfully opposed to whatever was supposed to be happening around it, they have always sounded utterly contemporary; a beat by which the pulse of popular music has had to be measured. The Velvets were always so far ahead of their time that history's had a torrid old job just keeping up with their tremendous achievements.
No doubt, this is why "V.U." cuts through most of the moment's crap like razor with its blade on fire, even though most of the tracks icluded on this retrospective compilation will allready familiar to the dedicated Velvets fanatic who will have hunted down the majority of them over the years on a variety of bootlegs. These people will, of course, identify more than half of the ten songs that Lou Reed subsequently re-worked during the course of his solo career. I can only hope that these people agree with me when I suggest that all of these original blueprints outstrip their later incarnation, mostly by immeasurable distances.
"I Can't Stand It" opens this album as it did Reed's first solo LP for RCA.
The version here, however, is characteristic of the Velvets' feral attack; not at all like the later, more stilted, uncomfortably stiff resurrection. Similary, "Lisa Says" and "Ocean" are liberated from the starched environment of the RCA album, assume a new, more fertile autonomy, are certainly best heard in this new context - the latter, particularly, is charged with a stirring, authentic chill of suspense and mystery and defined by the kind of startled beauty the Velvets were always capable of bringing to Reed's songs, building to a climax of sepulchral grandeur familiar to anyone who's already heard the monumental live version on the unassailable "1969" album.
The Velvets in full flight, contradicting every existing notion of rock dynamics, with Mo Tucker's enormously dislocated backbeat providing the springnoard for Reed and Sterling Morrison's unpredictable but thoroughly intoxicating guitar abrasions, remains most delirous aural experience in the whole rock 'n' roll. Listen, for instance, to the sheerly erotic textures of "Foggy Notion", surely one of the most sweatily sexy seven minutes ever commited to vinyl.
"V.U." is also a permanent testament to Reed and the Underground's much-overlooked sense of humour; there is much mischief here. Turn an ear to the sidesplitting eccentricities of "Temptation Inside Your Heart" (complete with a running commentary from Reed and others upon what madness the group is currently entertaining) and the cheeky original of "Andy's Chest", a later varsion of which was more pompously produced by David Bowie, who always lacked Reed's devastating wit and commanding irony. Oh, there is so much here that will continue to engross and entertain this listener! So much that reminds me of why this music has a hold of my imagination and will probably never be replaced by anything else. I could go on, as I often do: but as always we must eventually let the music speak for itself, and this music does: more eloquently than any words from any so-called critic.
That's why the music the Velvet Underground created has lasted so long and will in turn, outlast anything anyone has to say about it. They were, and are: that's all, and allways will be. This record, timely as it is, isn't a postscript: it's a new beginning.
New readers will allways start here.

Dating back to 1968 and 1969, though recently re-mixed, VU comprises tens tracks which, whilst perhaps not adding anything new to the Velvet's legend, certainly does nothing to destroy it.
Like most other albums of 'previously unreleased tracks' much of the material here has actually seen the light of day before (though not officially in this country). However, unlike other similar ventures, the tracks here also happen to include some very real gems.
About half the LP is taken up with versions of fairly familiar songs; a raw echoey 'Lisa Says', a more successful version of 'Ocean' than that which also appears on 1969 Live, a version of 'I Can't Stand It' which is substantially better than the future Reed solo release, 'Andy's Chest' which was of course later pop up on Transformer, and a marvellous 'Stephanie Says' which was to appear on Berlin in different form as 'Caroline Says'.
Elsewhere 'She's My Best Friend' and 'Foggy Notion' tend to show their age rather more than other Velvet's stuff more noted for its strangely timeless quality, whilst the latter and 'One Of These Days' testify that the guitar solo was not always boring - indeed 'Days' is unfortunately faded out just when things promise to get really interesting/manic.
Of the two remaining songs, the slightly strange 'Temptation Inside Your Heart' features two vocal tracks that enables Lou Reed to talk to himself; whilst 'I'm Sticking With You' (featuring Mo Tucker as well as Lou Reed on vocals) starts off tongue in cheek and ends up hand on heart, serving as an example of the time when Reed could sing even the most bland and pappy words and still load them with emotion.
Since the various members of the Velvet Underground went their separate ways, the power and influence of the group's music has continued to be felt by thousands. Even a record like this, claimed to be the never released fourth album, though sounding more like a compilation of finished product, demos, out-takes and oddities, serves to prove that they were in fact the original and best.

Ah! Some real grist for the long-starved Velvets maniacs. Some of these tracks have already surfaced on high-class bootlegs (the 'And So On' pair from Australia spring to mind), but that's not the record compnany's fault. There is much more worthwhile than another greatest hits package.
In the 60's The Velvets recorded a number of tracks which became famous as the Great Lost Album because, for some reason, they were shelved. Maybe the label (MGM) bottled out when the third album didn't sell. Anyway, this is the missing link between "The Velvet Underground" and "Loaded" and it's a corker.
You might recognise some of these titles as Lou Reed recut them for his albums, but here we go. Underway with "I Can't Stand It", which appears on Lou's first LP in much harder form. On 'Lou Reed' it stomps on neurotic frenzy, here it floats, with a new very West Coast vocal bridge and some remarkable guitar. Into "Stephanie", another prototype which I can't reveal because it's in this month's competition. I will say it's one of Lou's most tender ballads and Marc Almond covered it once!
"She's My Best Friend" popped up several years later on 'Rock 'n' Roll Heart' much slower and heavier, while "Lisa says" was on Lou Mark One. As was "Ocean", interestingly whacked in at the last moment in place of the hectic "Ferryboat Bill". This might be the third version to be released but it was the first to be recorded.
"Foggy Notion" was on an EP in '76-'77, but here it is again with better sound. You know when the Velvets lock into that relentless Reed stun-groove that don't quit? This is one of the best examples of that speed-trash I've heard. Lou was one mean rythm guitarist. "Temptation Inside Your Heart" is a bit flimsy but "One Of These Days" glides along at a fair trot, good solid song, then IT TAKES OFF! Guitar heaven overdrive. "Andy's Chest" puts on Bowie panstick and lipgloss for "Transformer" - here it's rougher... and better. Finally, the chidlike tones of Mo Tucker take it out with "I'm Sticking With You". A nursery rhyme.
A great album. A historical document that still knocks spots off all the imitators. The Velvets power at its most controlled... and deadly.

"If you play the albums chronologically they cover the growth of us as people from here to there, and in there is a tale for everybody in case they want to know what they can do to survive the scenes.... you should be able to relate and not feel alone. I think it's important that people don't feel alone."
Thus Lou Reed, dopily pinpointing the greatness of The Velvet Underground, a greatness that condemned them to misunderstanding in their day but thereafter to an ever-widening resonance and influence amongst those of us who take our rock 'n' roll seriously. They never fitted a showbiz slot, never sold the same parcel of prechexed and compartementalised ideas. The Velvet Underground were the most human of groups, and there's nowt so queer as folk.
Or indeed folkies. Or junkies. or brutalists, romantics, documentarists, perverts, poets, intellectuals, maniacs, sophisticates, primitives or any of the other labels attached to their, ahem, unique genius. For The Velvet Underground were all of those. Misfits in the Woodstock generation, they belonged far mor in a literary tradition, the dialectic of two imaginations engaging in privacy. You listen to the Velvets as you would read a book: Lou's voice - sardonic, mischievous, sometimes yearning - confides the strangness on his mind, conspires that you turn over his words. You are his analyst, his friend: and thus he is yours. You're never alone in a crowd with The Velvet Underground.
'VU' comprises ten tracks recorded between February '68 (with JohnCale) and September '69, forming the core of the 'lost' fourth album refused release by their label, MGM. The Velvets then joined Atlantic, made 'Loaded' in 1970 and promptly broke up. Many of 'VU''s songs have surfaced on lo-fi semi-bootlegs, a few were rewritten into Lou's solo career and a couple feature on the epic '1969'. So...
1. 'I Can't stand It': a lover's plea couched in whimsy yet a much harder, more amped-up song than any to be found on the third album, 'The Velvet underground'. featuring controlled feedback guitar, the garage sound, as with all of 'VU', has been remastered to upfront crispness and punch: no travesty of original intentions, I'm sure.
2. 'Stephanie Says' (Feb '68, see also 'Caroline says' from Lou's 1973 'Berlin': the bittersweet mood of 'Sunday Morning' reprised in a sad account of emotional numbness. "It's so cold in Alaska" indeed.
3. 'She's My Best Friend' (see 'Coney Island Baby', '76): curiously evoking Lennon circa 'Rubber Soul', a cryptic, mildly deranged beat number.
4. 'Lisa Says' (see '1969'): Lou caresses a small-hours casualty in the tradition of 'All Tomorow's Parties'.
5. 'Ocean' (see '1969'): a surrender to the elements and reflection on personal failure. Slightly reminiscent musically of The Doors' 'The End', this awesome song stands without comparison in the Velvets' canon.
6. 'Foggy Notion': son of 'Sister Ray', crazed narcosis finds expression in loopy Lou, neural ostrich guitars and go-go rocking driven mercilessly by Mo tucker's vicious snare-crack.
7. 'Temptation Inside Your Heart' (Feb '68): father to Television's 'See No Evil'. A cruel sermon hilariously undermined by studio high-jinks, bongos, spoof harmonies and wheedling geetar.
8. 'One Of These Days': like The Beatles' 'Run For Your Life' slowed down to bar-room slur. Just when you think it's going to drink itself to death, the song speeds up into an exultant roar of slide guitar and drum-battering.
9. 'Andy's Chest' (see '72's 'Transformer'): a ramshackle hootenanny wherein Warhol's menagerie gets royally fingered (I think).
10. 'I'm Sticking With You': chid-like, zany yet charming testimony to simple lurv. Mo quavers vocally in 'Afterhours' mode to Sunday school piano (?) weighs in manfully, the whole taking off as a full-blown epiphany a la 'New Age'. Song and album fade out on an optismistic note.
Ten tales for everybody, ten songs to shake the world. 'VU' belongs right up there between the third album and 'Loaded' - a masterpiece, and a good friend. Adopt it today.

LIVE MCMXCIII

Paul Williams
Crawdaddy, new #4, Winter 1994, US

LOADED (FULLY LOADED EDITION)

Peter Doggett
Record Collector, no. 212, April 1997, p. 162, UK

ETC

KN
Source unknown

From Australia (therefore pretty dear on import) a collection of Velvet curios. It always seems to be the right time for a Velvets revival, like the Doors, but this was done with fans in mind, not cash. I mean only a fan is going to want 'Noise', the talking-and-muffled-soundeffects artifact from the 1966 ESP Electric Newspaper, or 'Conversation', which is basically a tape of a high-voiced Nico rabbiting with Warhol and cronies that appeared to be a picture flexi-disc given away with his 'Index' mag. They're the two main items of interest in this collection, being extremely hard to find (never even seen 'em). the rest has all appeared on not-so-rare bootlegs.
There's 'The Ostrich', Lou Reed's legendary dance craze stomper, which is really just a ropey 'Louie Louie' trash with a charm of its own as he sings about putting your head on the floor and getting somebody to step on it. That was done by a very early Velvets lineup called The Primitives. Undoubtely the best track is the six-minute 'Foggy Notion' (not about the cartoon rooster, Leghorn-fans) which rattles along in the velvets inimitable late 60s style. There's others from the same session as that, and other group pseudonym's from Reed's days as a conveyor-belt songwriter (The Beachnuts!). As I said, for Velvets fans.

AND SO ON

Sandy Robertson
Sounds, UK

What goes on? The Velvets do, for ever and ever.
In the wake of the recently Sounds-reviewed boxed set - now selling widely in a slightly less classy package, also minus the free 45 and the booklets but at about half the original price - comes the second part of a planned trilogy of delvings into the murk of Velvetdom, plus a groovy bash from the ex-member you thought never do now't again.
'And so on' follows 'Etcetera' and precedes the forthcoming 'Et Al' in the pantheon of faded tapes of Lou and his pals. If the quality of the actual recordings leaves much to desire, the value of the material silences all whines.
'Guess I'm Falling In Love' is a ruff'n'red-eyed rocker, known to buyers of the de-luxe boxed set at 'Fever In My Pocket'. Yikes! But luckily, such duplication is not rampant here.
Indeed, the black box could benefit by dipping into what's at hand: 'It's Allright (The Way That You Live)' and 'I'm Not Too Sorry' are the early Velvets demos of 1966 vintage, sweet melodic kisses of such power that one reels at the idea they might never have been heard were it not for this disc.
An even more amazing treat is 'One Of These Days', a sleazy guitar raid in the vein of 'Rock 'n' Roll' recorded 'tween' the third LP and 'Loaded'. Its fire makes even more tantalising the news that a whole rough album was waxed at the time, featuring toons that later emerge as Reed solo work like 'Andy's Chest'. Where is it?!?
A delicious, studio cut with bells and viola completes the major thrills to be found here: 'Stephanie says' is an early try at what became 'Caroline says II' on 'Berlin'. From May '68, It's superior to the later effort in every way.
Lesser bonbon, live versions and things you've heard fill out the deal but 'And So On' remains a model of what an archive album should be.

EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER HEARD ABOUT...

Sandy Robertson
Sounds, UK

The legend rolls and on, the more it grows the more it encourages. In the context of semi-legal this was the one we'd been waiting for, even more than volume two of that australian 'ETC' thingy, which Virgin have sold out of at pres.
Real labels, all royalties paid, so crumbled oxide becomes legit: A black cloth box with gold lettering, the funereal quality upset by the yellow stick-on banana. Inside an info sheet, free discography plus a book of reprints of various Velvets articles, including G Dadomo's history from this very organ. Yikes! Even a free Immediate Nico 45, as recently reviewed in our Singles page by L'il ol' me! But then the plummet...
'Everything' had benn rumoured to be the three albums of outtakes from that hallowed first LP, plus a swath of lesser delights. Sadly, all is less than lesser. The best parts are already available in one quasi-legit form or another: The tacky bubblegum by Lou Reed's dayjob outfits, all that delirious '(Do) The Ostrich' and 'Sneaky pete', that Primitives beat. All of that. even more than usual, which would be OK but for the fact that the newly unearthed bits like 'Leave Her For Me' by The Shades have no audible Reed content, either in writing or in singing.
It's so circumstancial. Like: 'After Hours' by The Carol Lou trio, a jukebox anomaly allegedy written by Reed and published by the same publisher who handles the MGM Velvets stuff. And there's that 'Lou' in the band title! Wow!! And remember Lou wrote a tune called 'After Hours' on the third LP! None of this will compensate for the seventh rate cocktail lounge jazz bit that the record turns out to be.
There's 'Loop', 'Index' and 'VU Noise', the first two being early flexis from magazines, a Cale-penned cousin to 'Metal Machine Music' and a boring snip of velveteens yapping. The other 'un is from the infamous conceptual 'East Village Electric Newspaper' LP, with the VU cut competing with Lucy Byrd Johnson on her wedding day and coming off the loser. But the ultimate loser is you, el punter. What remains is the real grist. Or shoulda bin.
A side with the 'Foggy Notion' EP slips because that fab number's axe torture is listed but mysteriously absent from the actual grooves. The complaint fades when we find we also get the previously unheard 'Fever In My Pocket', a fuzzy rave riff of Reed on speed guitar. Now, the other three sides is mainly live latterday VU of the kind offered on '1969' and 'Max's': nice to hear 'Cool It Down' and 'Who Loves The Sun' and even the Velv's tackling 'Wal And Talk It' which has only been available in this version on that impossible-to-trace Skydog ripoff disc.
But search in vain ya will for those promised outtakes from the official sessios the grapevine suggested would be here. 'White Light/White Heat' may be one, bu it sounds jest like the cut is straight off the MGM LP that bears its name, and a 'Some Kinda Love' studio take feels un-new, though it may be a tad beefier. But for this you'd pay £15 to £20??!
I have tapes of the Velvets live in '66 burned in my eers, seering improvs that cut MMM to ribbons. Why not bung these out above ground? But the present package is ultimately honest. Wouldn't you think it'd be called 'Everything You Ever Wanted To Hear...'? 'Everything You've Ever Heard' is right. You have heard it all before. Let's hope we never hear it again.