"Heroin" takes the external adventure of obtaining drugs into the internal realm and captures the seduction of addiction with a power, beauty and grace that makes it all the more frightening. To this day the song is equally horrifying and compelling, its structure of intense build and release literally mirroring the drug experience, an experience that the singer makes clear will inevitably end in death.

"Venus In Furs," an unblinking examination of an S&M relationship, captures both the power of the drone and harnesses its ability to convey an ennui of almost black hole density. "All Tomorrow's Parties" is Nico's finest moment: a towering aural monument to ephemeral glamour with the pulse of dread, Cale's supportive rolling piano, and Reed's destabilizing frantic guitar.

Also on the record are two more pretty Reed-penned, Nico sung jewels, "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "Femme Fatale" (which is surely Nico's theme song), and the loveliest song of Reed's career, the preternatural "Sunday Morning," which opens the album. Wistfulness is a very difficult emotion to convey: it has the evanescence of a soap bubble and when one tries to capture it, one is likely to destroy it. Reed captures both the hope and regret of a dawning Sunday with a delicacy that encases the bubble and preserves it for all time. Neither the Velvets, nor Reed, nor very few others have created such an original, complete and satisfying musical statement as The Velvet Underground and Nico in the ensuing years.

It is perhaps inevitable that after recording a collection of truly great songs, the Velvets would lurch in the direction of noise, so integral a part of their live sound and aesthetic. After the first album, the band parted company with Warhol and Nico and recorded White Light/White Heat, a cacophonous, relentless assault on the ears and taste. In the recording process, crack engineer Gary Kellgran repeatedly threw up his arms in disgust as the vicious white noise and fuzz kept frying out the tracks, creating a steamroller of distortion. Only the title track escaped the self-defeating assault and remains part of the group's essential body of work. "Sister Ray," 17-minutes of noise and fellatio, is perhaps the group's most notorious and relentless piece. Reed recoiled from the excesses of White Light, which Cale and Morrison were perfectly content with, and began writing "commercial" songs.

With artistic and personal differences exacerbated by lack of commercial success, Cale left the group and was replaced by Doug Yule. The group became Reed's alone, and while it still produced some great music, it never reached the levels of grandeur and balance that the original group obtained. The Velvet Underground, released in '69, contains three great songs: the stripped down rock 'n' roll of "What Goes On" and "Beginning to See the Light," and the limpid, wan beauty of "Pale Blue Eyes" (which was redone by R.E.M. on their Dead Letter Office collection).

After barely denting the charts on their first three Verve albums, the Velvets switched to Atlantic for their fourth and final studio album, Loaded. Due to pregnancy Tucker couldn't participate and was replaced on drums by Doug Yule's brother Billy. The album was named somewhat sarcastically after a remark made by Atlantic leader Ahmet Ertegun that he wanted a VU album "loaded with hits and not sex and drugs." He got their most conventional album by far, and though not full of hits, it did produce the group's most famous songs: the buoyant and timeless "Sweet Jane," and perhaps the most pure assessment of the genre since Chuck Berry, "Rock and Roll," where "despite all the amputations, you could listen to the rock and roll station, and it was all right." It was, and is.