The Velvet Underground - It Began Here
Published August 15, 2002
After Loaded, Reed was drained: he had acceded to the demands of commercialization, yet not become a commercial success. He viewed the Velvets as a dead end, and after a lackluster '70 residency at Max's Kansas City in New York, he left the band. The second best Velvets album, 1969: Velvet Underground Live - which has some truly stunning moments - was released in the '74, and proves what a powerful, cohesive unit the band still was a year before its demise.
First Nico, then Cale, Reed, and even Mo Tucker embarked upon solo careers. Nico's career was interesting if minor - a continuation of her doomed-romantic Velvets persona with steadily diminishing returns as her dramatic Germanic contralto deteriorated into a croak. She died in '88 following a bicycle accident on the island of Ibiza.
Cale's career has been important and varied as a solo artist (best represented by the Seducing Down the Door double-CD collection and the smoking live album Sabotage) and producer (working with Nico, Patti Smith, the Modern Lovers, the Stooges, and Siouxsie and the Banshees), his own internal struggle between classicism and the avant-garde driving him ever onward.
Reed's solo career has been the most prolific and commercially successful, if bewilderingly uneven. Though he has reached many moments of greatness (including Transformer, Berlin, Rock and Roll Animal, New Sensations, individual songs scattered throughout his 30-year career), his best and most commercially successful work is bunched suspiciously close to his career with the Velvets.
Though he is still recording well, the greatest Lou Reed album is, and will continue to be, The Velvet Underground and Nico, recorded 35 long years ago - hear it anew.
- The Velvet Underground - It Began Here
- Published: August 15, 2002
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- Section: Music: Alternative Rock
- Filed Under: Music: Rock
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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Two of the eleven songs on the most important album in rock history -- "Black Angel's Death Song" and "European Son" -- are among the most unlistenable the band ever recorded; they look forward to the noisy experimentation of White Light/White Heat
with little or none of the interest of the songs on that album, even at their most sonic. This does not undercut the importance of the Nico album -- but it should serve to remind us that great doesn't mean perfect. Great can also mean "wildly uneven." Then again, the other nine songs are classics.
I'm in my 40s, and when I was coming along, the standard opinion for greatest album among the hipoisie was Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, which I contend makes a much more compelling case for the title, and it's influence was at least as monumental as the Nico record. On Blonde, you can really see someone song for song pushing the form as far as he can lyrically and musically, and every great band of the 1960s was listening. Dylan's mid-1960s output was truly the high tide that would raise all boats.
I'll probably wind up buying the deluxe Nico set, but I echo Nigel's comments on its necessity. I bought the deluxe Loaded; it was interesting, but I can't really say it was super-revelatory, except maybe to a complete audiophile -- the same kind of people who would spend a hundred bucks on one of those Charlie Parker box sets so they could compare five or so versions of "In the Still of the Night."
Given that the band intended for the album to be in mono and not stereo (just listen to how bad the stereo mix is in many places), I'd argue that having the mono mix back in circulation does add something, yes.
Raising the question as to which is the "real" record? Reed also had a beef with the mixing of the third LP, The Velvet Underground, yet that's the record people know. Which is the real Beatles record -- the one released in Britain or in the US? Which is the real movie -- the one the studio approved or the director's cut? Which is the real Look Homeward, Angel -- the one Max Perkins edited the bejesus out of decades ago or the restored version that Wolfe wrote and was only released last year?
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Yes, TVUAN is probably the most important album in rock history..... but why did it need to be re-issued in this "deluxe" format? Do the two mixes add anything or is it just exploiting the rocknerd need to own everything? Call me an old curmudgeon, but this release (along with the "rock and roll hall of fame" malarky) just seems to say that the VU has now been declared safe enough for the "star" treatment, cosily set in aspic as a historical artifact in rock's rich tapestry.
You also say that Mo Tucker played "percussion". No, no, no. Tucker played DRUMS, there was nothing tinkly about her work. She either clobbered all hell out of her kit or sat back and watched - no middle ground. I've always thought it was her drumming (and lack of it during those pretty songs that lesser mortals would have messed up) that defines the pure Velvet Underground sound.
A great album, but buy the original version and spend the rest of the money on something you haven't already got twice...