The Velvet Underground And Nico.

[warrent]

Sweet Jane.....that's all I got.....AND, I prefer Cowboy Junkies' version.

Well I think Lou liked the Cowboy's version because it paid him the most royalties but the Velvets did a similar version in 69

 

[jhundt]

I kinda liked the electric viola for the early albums, but it was getting a bit screechy... Loaded was like an exercise in trying to write accessible pop songs, but Lou was Lou and he couldn't really do that like other guys did.

 

[nojazzhere]

Well I think Lou liked the Cowboy's version because it paid him the most royalties but the Velvets did a similar version in 69

Yeah, that's nice, but, well, Margo Timmons...ya know?

 

[Bellacaster]

I can’t wait to buy my copy of Loaded!. Excellent.

I'm a big fan of the Velvets. Loaded is probably the VU album that I come back to the most. It's the least VU album that they released. The band had totally changed at that point and Lou attempted to write a record full of AM radio hits. Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll are worth the price of admission. If you're buying it on CD, look for Fully Loaded which has another disc of alternate takes.

Live in '69, Live at Max's Kansas City and the Quine Tapes are all great too. You can hear Jim Carroll order a Pernod at the beginning of Max's KC.

 

[BorderRadio]

Just another dude that likes his VU records. Aloe Blacc's FF cover was on point:

 

[TokyoPortrait]

...Music is a universal expression of humanity so the level of talent attributed to a musician is not the most important thing to me...

Yeah. Not really related to the topic so much, but this brings to mind something I was thinking about yesterday. While I'm often in awe of 'technical ability / chops / etc.,' it's nothing without the song. Like many I suspect, I spend too much time on YouTube looking at ace guitar players showing off pedals and / or there skills, etc. Yesterday I found myself singing* at the guy on the screen the Bob Marley line "Play I some music..."

And, a bit more back on topic, that reminds me of the time a friend heard music off Natty Dread and commented it was like simplistic nursery rhymes. Flip side, she also said it was like nothing she's ever heard before and immediately bought the album. Ah, the power of music...

Pax/
Dean
* very very badly out of tune...

 

[EllroyJames]

The "lost" 1969 album

image removed

 

[jhundt]

somewhere I have a live bootleg of the show I saw in SF in 1969... now I'm gonna have to spend the whole night digging through boxes to try and find that.

 

[Minimalist518]

After being extremely impressed by White Light/White Heat, I’ve purchased albums by this band as soon as I see them in the CD store. Their eponymous third LP is excellent by all means, but is different. It does not include John Cale, who definitely gave their music a wacky, but very enjoyable edge. This debut album has Cale all over it (plus Reed, Morrison and Tucker). It has first rate songwriting, as usual, and also has Nico’s voice. I presume she had to sing outside her natural range, but her vocals are really unique and perfectly fit the proceedings. The album’s fame is 100% deserved. Nothing before, or after, sounds like it (like all VU albums). This hugely influential band really did something entirely different every time they released a new LP (different from their previous work, and different from anything else being recorded at the time). I can’t wait to buy my copy of Loaded!. Excellent.

The Velvet Underground and Nico was the first VU album my sister and I ever heard. She was in High School and I was in my first year of Community College. We knew from Lou Reed, and we had both read interviews with various artists we liked talking about the Velvet Underground, but we had never heard them. I don’t remember which of us bought it, but we found it in the cut-out cassette bin at Jamesway Department Store. I still have it.
I was very much into Punk and Post-Punk while my sister was more into the artier end of what was lumped together as New Wave at the time. We really bonded over this weird and, by turns, noisy and disturbingly pretty album.
Certainly, the lyrical themes were way outside our young white-bread suburban existence, and rightfully so. But there was something in there among the blasts of atonal noise, scratchy-sounding viola and the twisted, delicate chamber pop that just spoke to us. I came away with sense of something lost and longed for; that was the source and the point of harmonization between the beauty and the strident noise…not that I could have articulated that at the time. Over the years that vague sense developed into the conviction, that I still hold, that Lou Reed for all his damage was at heart a deeply bruised romantic.

 

[warrent]

somewhere I have a live bootleg of the show I saw in SF in 1969... now I'm gonna have to spend the whole night digging through boxes to try and find that.

these maybe?

 

[jhundt]

these maybe?

yeah - that's the ones! Thanks, you saved me a whole lot of trouble...

 

[ricknbaker]

I remember being at a party years ago with a friend who was also a big Velvets fan. We'd found a couple of acoustics and were thrashing away at a few VU tunes, when a girl sat up and said to her friend

" 'ere Sandra, they're playing all those songs off of that album I've got what nobody else likes."

 

[LutherBurger]

My hippie aunt gave me her first-edition copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico when she moved away in the late 1970s, when I was 12 or 13. I think she had played it once and didn't like it. I played it once and was amazed, confused, disgusted, and hooked... and so I played it once again to copy it to cassette, so I could listen to it on my boombox. I also bought it on cassette, and then again on CD when it became available. Just a few months ago, I gave the LP to my 16-year-old nephew. Maybe one day he'll give it to his nephew.

I still listen to it sometimes (White Light/White Heat more often, though), and it's still a great, interesting piece of work. Except for Nico; she still blows chunks.

 

[ricknbaker]

that Lou Reed for all his damage was at heart a deeply bruised romantic

I think you're absolutely right there. Listen to Coney Island Baby. The live version on Take no Prisoners is especially emotional.

 

[etype]

I was 17 in 1984 when I first heard the album New Sensations. To a kid being raised on early 80s pop, it was a revelation. I pretty quickly found the VU. I found it poetic and experimental (all in a good way) compared to everything I had known at the time. I loved it then, and still love it now. Although Reed and Cale get a lot of credit, I am consistently amazed at Sterling Morrison's work.


Regarding the quote about everyone who bought the first VU album starting a band.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/01/velvet/

[R]emark made by Brian Eno during an interview published in the “Los Angeles Times” in May 1982. Boldface has been added to excerpts:

“My reputation is far bigger than my sales,” he said with a laugh on the phone from his home in Manhattan. “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways.”

 

[Mid Life Crisis]

You know how some things are just meant to be?

I just knew I would like the Velvets based purely on reading about them in a friend's rock magazine. The description of the music, the look with those wraparound shades...It was the summer holidays and I decided I would get the bus into town and look for that album. I headed straight for the second hand record shop and there it was...gatefold sleeve, mint condition...I couldn't believe my luck.

When I got home I put it straight on and it blew my mind. The most incredible, intense music I'd ever heard.

 

[TeleAndSG]

The Velvet Underground and Nico was the first VU album my sister and I ever heard. She was in High School and I was in my first year of Community College. We knew from Lou Reed, and we had both read interviews with various artists we liked talking about the Velvet Underground, but we had never heard them. I don’t remember which of us bought it, but we found it in the cut-out cassette bin at Jamesway Department Store. I still have it.
I was very much into Punk and Post-Punk while my sister was more into the artier end of what was lumped together as New Wave at the time. We really bonded over this weird and, by turns, noisy and disturbingly pretty album.
Certainly, the lyrical themes were way outside our young white-bread suburban existence, and rightfully so. But there was something in there among the blasts of atonal noise, scratchy-sounding viola and the twisted, delicate chamber pop that just spoke to us. I came away with sense of something lost and longed for; that was the source and the point of harmonization between the beauty and the strident noise…not that I could have articulated that at the time. Over the years that vague sense developed into the conviction, that I still hold, that Lou Reed for all his damage was at heart a deeply bruised romantic.

I hear you. This is what Metalheads call Kerrang: music that really moves you

 

[TeleAndSG]

The Velvet Underground and Nico was the first VU album my sister and I ever heard. She was in High School and I was in my first year of Community College. We knew from Lou Reed, and we had both read interviews with various artists we liked talking about the Velvet Underground, but we had never heard them. I don’t remember which of us bought it, but we found it in the cut-out cassette bin at Jamesway Department Store. I still have it.
I was very much into Punk and Post-Punk while my sister was more into the artier end of what was lumped together as New Wave at the time. We really bonded over this weird and, by turns, noisy and disturbingly pretty album.
Certainly, the lyrical themes were way outside our young white-bread suburban existence, and rightfully so. But there was something in there among the blasts of atonal noise, scratchy-sounding viola and the twisted, delicate chamber pop that just spoke to us. I came away with sense of something lost and longed for; that was the source and the point of harmonization between the beauty and the strident noise…not that I could have articulated that at the time. Over the years that vague sense developed into the conviction, that I still hold, that Lou Reed for all his damage was at heart a deeply bruised romantic.

I believe they belong to the 1960’s in many ways. There are clear psychedelic moments in their first two albums, and in the first album at least, raga rock influenced guitar solos (All Tomorrow’s Parties comes to mind). That’s purely 1960’s. They also did things differently, like any self respecting 1960’s artist. However, they really became (and still are, a class on their own. Their lyrical content, still controversial today, must have been unbearably transgressive for the flower power youth. And those walls of feedback and screeching distortion didn’t help their record sales either. Their instantly recognizable sound has a lot to offer to anyone willing to be surprised, even a Metalhead like me. I first heard European Son in ‘93. Back then I listened to Death Metal a lot (I still do), and I found European Son to be very abrasive (in a very good way). Grunge was fashionable, and many extreme metal bands then were incorporating hardcore punk and D beat in their music. Feedback and screeching distortion were commonplace in ‘93, but this was really something else. I guess they have fans from all backgrounds

 

[chris m.]

it riles up too many highbrows who are ready to strike you down if you "don't get it"....

OK, I admit it I mostly don't get it. I also take back what I said about John Cale and Lou Reed possibly not being "real musicians".

Here's the thing. I tend to automatically be skeptical of any somewhat obscure (to the general public, anyway) band that the critics and cognoscenti rave about.
So shame on me for having that cognitive bias. Maybe the cognoscenti are really onto something this time.

Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side and VU's "Sweet Jane" are obviously fully legitimate hits that are also well-crafted songs. I'm sure there are other well-crafted songs as well.

So my bad for lumping them in with Nico. Perhaps that's like saying the Beatles suck because Yoko sucks and she played with them. My bad. But seriously, anything I've heard with Nico
singing has not impressed me at all.

Call me stupid, but I tend to be more fascinated and amazed by really commercially successful musicians. Somehow they and their producers managed to tap the zeitgeist, sometimes for
many years. And many of them were also blessed with utterly amazing chops (for example, Whitney Houston). The small market, avant garde scene can accept and retain almost all comers. Big time
commercial music is much more Darwinian-- only the truly strong survive (for long, anyway). So someone like Johnny Cash impresses me all the more because he was extremely
influential, popular, avant garde (in his time), and long-lasting.

I guess I'm suggesting that rather than wondering why someone as influential as Lou Reed never really made it "BIG", the critics may have more insight into society and culture if they spent
more time thinking about why someone like Katie Perry became HUGE. To be fair, some critics think about both. To make an analogy from cinema, I think there's a reason why Marvel and Justice League
movies have completely taken over the box office. People crave an escape from the chaos of our modern times, and want simple plot lines where the good guys win by beating up the bad guys.

 

[TeleAndSG]

it riles up too many highbrows who are ready to strike you down if you "don't get it"....

OK, I admit it I mostly don't get it. I also take back what I said about John Cale and Lou Reed possibly not being "real musicians".

Here's the thing. I tend to automatically be skeptical of any somewhat obscure (to the general public, anyway) band that the critics and cognoscenti rave about.
So shame on me for having that cognitive bias. Maybe the cognoscenti are really onto something this time.

Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side and VU's "Sweet Jane" are obviously fully legitimate hits that are also well-crafted songs. I'm sure there are other well-crafted songs as well.

So my bad for lumping them in with Nico. Perhaps that's like saying the Beatles suck because Yoko sucks and she played with them. My bad. But seriously, anything I've heard with Nico
singing has not impressed me at all.

Call me stupid, but I tend to be more fascinated and amazed by really commercially successful musicians. Somehow they and their producers managed to tap the zeitgeist, sometimes for
many years. And many of them were also blessed with utterly amazing chops (for example, Whitney Houston). The small market, avant garde scene can accept and retain almost all comers. Big time
commercial music is much more Darwinian-- only the truly strong survive (for long, anyway). So someone like Johnny Cash impresses me all the more because he was extremely
influential, popular, avant garde (in his time), and long-lasting.

I guess I'm suggesting that rather than wondering why someone as influential as Lou Reed never really made it "BIG", the critics may have more insight into society and culture if they spent
more time thinking about why someone like Katie Perry became HUGE. To be fair, some critics think about both. To make an analogy from cinema, I think there's a reason why Marvel and Justice League
movies have completely taken over the box office. People crave an escape from the chaos of our modern times, and want simple plot lines where the good guys win by beating up the bad guys.

No problem . They are not everyone’s cup of tea. And I don’t care about many critics’ and congnoscenti’s opinions. They frequently rave about albums that say nothing to me. I just know what I like, and The VU’s music really impresses me.