THE VELVET UNDERGROUND ~ "LOADED"

Original released on LP Cotillion SD 9034 (US 1970 - November 15)

The VELVET UNDERGROUND 3rd Album

Original released on LP MGM SE-4617

(US, March 1969)

Upon first release, the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album must have surprised their fans nearly as much as their first two albums shocked the few mainstream music fans who heard them. After testing the limits of how musically and thematically challenging rock could be on "Velvet Underground & Nico" and "White Light/White Heat", this 1969 release sounded spare, quiet, and contemplative, as if the previous albums documented some manic, speed-fueled party and this was the subdued morning after. (The album's relative calm has often been attributed to the departure of the band's most committed avant-gardist, John Cale, in the fall of 1968; the arrival of new bassist Doug Yule; and the theft of the band's amplifiers shortly before they began recording.) But Lou Reed's lyrical exploration of the demimonde is as keen here as on any album he ever made, while displaying a warmth and compassion he sometimes denied his characters. "Candy Says," "Pale Blue Eyes," and "I'm Set Free" may be more muted in approach than what the band had done in the past, but "What Goes On" and "Beginning to See the Light" made it clear the VU still loved rock & roll, and "The Murder Mystery" (which mixes and matches four separate poetic narratives) is as brave and uncompromising as anything on "White Light/White Heat". This album sounds less like the Velvet Underground than any of their studio albums, but it's as personal, honest, and moving as anything Lou Reed ever committed to tape. (Mark Deming in AllMusic)

The VELVET's "White Light White Heat"

Original released on LP Verve 

V-5046 (mono) / SVLP 9201 (stereo)

(UK 1968, January 30)

The world of pop music was hardly ready for The Velvet Underground's first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while "The Velvet Underground and Nico" sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968's "White Light/White Heat" was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety. Recorded without the input of either Nico or Andy Warhol, "White Light/White Heat" was the purest and rawest document of the key Velvets lineup of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, capturing the group at their toughest and most abrasive. The album opens with an open and enthusiastic endorsement of amphetamines (startling even from this group of noted drug enthusiasts), and side one continues with an amusing shaggy-dog story set to a slab of lurching mutant R&B ("The Gift"), a perverse variation on an old folktale ("Lady Godiva's Operation"), and the album's sole "pretty" song, the mildly disquieting "Here She Comes Now." While side one was a good bit darker in tone than the Velvets' first album, side two was where they truly threw down the gauntlet with the manic, free-jazz implosion of "I Heard Her Call My Name" (featuring Reed's guitar work at its most gloriously fractured), and the epic noise jam "Sister Ray," 17 minutes of sex, drugs, violence, and other non-wholesome fun with the loudest rock group in the history of Western Civilization as the house band. "White Light/White Heat" is easily the least accessible of The Velvet Underground's studio albums, but anyone wanting to hear their guitar-mauling tribal frenzy straight with no chaser will love it, and those benighted souls who think of the Velvets as some sort of folk-rock band are advised to crank their stereo up to ten and give side two a spin. (Mark Deming in AllMusic)

Andy Warhol Presents VELVET UNDERGROUND

Original released on LP Verve V6 5008

(US 1967, March 12)

A singer who'd previously been jobbing as a songwriter for a record label so renowned for its small-budget copycat recordings that Les McQueen's Creme Brulee were signed to them in The League of Gentlemen. A drummer that makes Meg White looks like John Bonham. An actress and model with a voice so offputting that over 40 years later, even with our knowledge of Perry Farrell and Fred Durst and Neil Young and Alec Ounsworth and whoever the hell else, some still find her voice offputting. A viola player who had studied with such populist, rockist figures as LaMonte Young and John Cage. A debut recording constructed almost entirely of feedback, with a locked groove, that people now consider a precedent to industrial music. A manager who was mostly famous for painting a can of soup. How on earth did they become the most influential rock band of all time? Lord knows, but that's the facts. Every time a band wants to make some noise, the Velvets are there. Every time somebody specifically sets out to have simple drumming, the Velvets are there. Every time a pervert grabs a microphone, the Velvets are there. Every time somebody confronts their audience with any remotely unusual ideas about gender roles, the Velvets are there. Every time somebody sings an unambiguous song about drugs, the Velvets are there. Every time a rock band imagines themselves as an idiosyncratic cult act rather than as cookie-cutter megastars, the Velvets are there.

Most of music's most notable innovators since - David Bowie, Public Enemy, Patti Smith, Slint, The Stooges, Suicide, Talking Heads, King Crimson, Pixies, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Joy Division, Can, John Zorn, Brian Eno, even bloody Burzum - owe them something. It really is astonishing what this album started. The simplest explanation is that the Velvets sang about dirty drugs and dirtier sex, and that's ultimately what everybody wants from rock music. The truest, however, is that it's just an incredible album. To this day it holds the power to shock and enthrall. Has anybody ever truly written a song like "Venus in Furs" since? And have they put it on an album that also has a love song as sweet, sincere, and unpretentious as "I'll Be Your Mirror"? How about following up a ballad as woozy and lazy as "Sunday Morning" with a rock'n'roll anthem about hooking up with your dealer? Then there's the necessary ballast provided by the solid, driving rock'n'roll of "Run Run Run" and "There She Goes Again"; songs that are perennially under-rated in the way that they make this an album, and render its visions complete - without these obviously 'rock' structures, a generation of listeners might not have considered that the subject matter of songs like "Heroin" could be placed into them, and without this kind of subtle innovation to go alongside the brutal leaps forward of "The Black Angel's Death Song" and "European Son", the album might simply have disappeared. Yet it didn't, this album still slays millions and attracts a new fan base each year. Indefatigably awesome. (in RateYourMusic)

WALLPAPER: "Peel Slowly and See"