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.
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.
Article comments
1 - Nigel E. Richardson
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...
2 - Rodney Welch
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."
3 - James Russell
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.
4 - Rodney Welch
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?