The Velvet Underground - S/T (aka 'The Third Album') [A failed 33 1/3 proposal, Feb 2009]

In 1968, rock – like the politics of the day – was going through its own revolutionary times. Inspired by the rootsy sound of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding from late 1967 and The Band’s first two albums, rock re-channelled its psychedelic energies into simpler sounds. In October of that year following the departure from the Velvet Underground of his sparring buddy John Cale, Lou Reed looked like he too was heading back to such basics. Cale was the avant-garde heart & soul of the band whose ‘lunacy’ made their live performances some of the most experimental in pop. Differences over “[the] music, or where we intended to go as a group” came to a head in the summer of 1968 and after months of bitter infighting, Reed, the self-appointed leader of the group, decided he “could not work with…[Cale] any longer” . Doug Yule brought into replace him (literally at the last minute) was no classical prodigy or experimentalist at heart but he was someone that Lou could, at least, manipulate (Yule: “he wanted what he said agreed with” ). It was against this background of conflict, a speedy re-positioning of core band values and barely tested brand new songs that one month later Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed, Moe Tucker and Doug Yule went into Sunset and Highland Sound studios in Hollywood to begin work on their third album: The Velvet Underground. No Nico, No Warhol, No Cale and (unusually) no producer to speak of , it was to be a defining moment for the band but the beginning of the end for Reed’s involvement with the group.

Given all the drama beforehand, it didn’t get off to a good start. Despite losing their firebrand experimentalist on September 28th 1968, in their first few days with Yule in the band they more than made up for the loss with rip-roaring performances at the La Cave Club in Cleveland (listen to Reed’s extraordinary solo on the live ‘What Goes On’ from Disc 4 of the Peel Slowly and See box set). But somewhere on the way to the studio that November, the band had the proverbial rug pulled from under them when their equipment was stolen. It’s often been said that this resulted in the oft-quoted ‘cleaner, quieter’ sound of The Velvet Underground but that would be excusing the album in comparison with its predecessors. Reed himself has said that he “really didn’t think we should make another White Light/White Heat…it would be a terrible mistake…we would become this one-dimensional thing” . One must wonder if this reflects his then frustration at the lack of commercial success the band had under Cale’s tenure. Despite the cachet of working under Andy Warhol in 1966-7, The Velvet Underground and Nico took over three or so months to crawl to 171 in the Billboard charts . White Light/White Heat – without Warhol or Nico – fared even worse: stooping at a lowly 199 in the top 200 in March 1968 . There was, according to Boston Tea Party manager Steve Nelson, “pressure on them from the label, from management [to make hit records]” . Yule acknowledges that there was “a move to mainstream acceptance going on” and the band had also been moved up from Verve Records to its bigger sister, MGM “[to]…use a different sales manager” (according to Morrison in 1969) . Live recordings from late 1968 do indicate that although they still had their ‘wild’ side now and then (especially the heavier material from their first two albums), they had now started to sound “more normal… [because] the lunacy factor had gone” . Reed when interviewed later in 1969 about this shift in sound said “we didn’t want to be put in the band of forerunners of the drug maniacs and all that” . Whether all this was a deliberate move to sharpen their commercial nous after years of declining sales isn’t clear but following Cale’s departure, Lou Reed’s song writing productivity was “on a creative roll…by early summer 1969 he had…enough [material] for a double set” . If you include these, the songs for the next album Loaded and other stray songs from 1969 (such as ‘Follow The Leader’ ,) the sheer volume of material suggests Reed felt somewhat liberated during this time. Writing in his biography of Lou Reed, Growing Up In Public, Doggett suggests that “Cale’s departure unlocked a key in Reed’s psyche… [now] relieved of the burden of matching [Cale]…[he] discovered a more subtle way of expressing his feelings” . Victor Bockris, a biographer and long-term acquaintance of the band, backs this up: “Lou was a romantic and an egomaniac….[he] wanted to go mainstream, he wanted people to buy a few records …but in order to do what he had to do, he had to dominate” .

Whether or not Reed was relieved of the burden of catching up with Cale or whether he was chasing commercial as well as critical success, when the band began to record their new album there was a consensus that they wanted it to reflect what they did on stage. Yule confirms that “the album was basically a live album… one of the reasons...it has that particular sound is that it was just pulled out of the band while it was on tour” . This minimalist approach reflected not only the lack of equipment they now had and the lowly financial position they had with MGM, but also – as the publicity for the album would later boast – “something different . As if to make a point to the world that things had changed, the album opens with a lead vocal by its newest member, Doug Yule. One might argue, somewhat cynically, that the use of Yule on this opening track could be interpreted as one great big slap in the face from Reed towards his former colleague. However, Sterling Morrison suggests it was far more prosaic than that when it came to recording the song. When talking about the session for ‘Candy Says’ he explains that “we were in the midst of touring the West Coast….[and] if [Lou] sounded froggy…just to get the track complete….we would have Doug sing” . Yule is somewhat coy about why Reed asked for his contribution to the song but recalls that “he sang one [take] and came back and said ‘why don’t you sing one?’” . The critic Sal Mercuri makes a valid point regarding Reed’s generosity on vocals during The Velvet Underground when he says “[it’s] proof that Lou was much more relaxed with himself and…[not] fighting to be heard and because he knew his songs would be heard, he didn’t necessarily have to sing them” .

The absence of Cale not only allowed Reed’s song writing to blossom but also allowed Morrison’s guitar playing to come to the surface. Morrison, often buried beneath the cacophony of Cale/Reed’s sonic battles, was to feature more prominently on The Velvet Underground than on its predecessors. Both his rhythm and lead playing was to come to the fore on tracks like ‘Beginning to See The Light’ and ‘I’m Set Free’. On ‘What Goes On’ Reed even allows himself to duel alongside Morrison in the song’s main solo. Again this was as much to do with the limitations the band were under during the session: “ [the engineer said] ‘if you do one more [guitar track on the tape] we’re going to have to take off one of them [because] we’re running out of space…why don’t you just play them together?’” The result is a thrilling play-off between the two guitarists that made the track an obvious pick as the album’s lead single (although MGM only went as far as releasing DJ promo discs) . Reed later picked out Morrison’s ticking performance on ‘Some Kinda Love’ as “one of the greatest parts he ever did…everything revolved around that part” Reed in his new ‘relaxed’ attitude to vocals went even further and gave Morrison (alongside his colleagues) a speaking role on the album’s penultimate track ‘The Murder Mystery’.

The sessions wrapped up in mid-December but not without one further twist in the tail. Sometime between then and March 1969, Reed went back into the studio to create an alternate version of the album – the infamous ‘closet mix’ as it has come to be called. Currently available on the Peel Slowly and See box set, the emphasis of the mix shifts the band instrumentation down and the vocals up giving it an intimate feel (hence the ‘closet’ moniker given to it by Morrison ). Bizarrely, ‘Some Kinda Love’ was not even remixed and an alternate take was preferred to the one the band had finalised at the sessions. This ‘mix’ was used for the first few pressings of the album in the U.S.A. but it did not travel as the mix created by engineer Val Valentin was used everywhere else instead. No-one seems sure as to why he did this although some – like Morrison – have inferred that “[Reed] felt the real essence of the tracks…[were] the lyrics” and hence the change in emphasis. As Bockris has already pointed out he did “[want] people to buy a few records…but in order to do what he had to do, he had to dominate” . Perhaps maybe this was why he wanted his songs, his lyrics and his mix to be the one that flew off the shelves when The Velvet Underground was released in March 1969.

Despite all these shenanigans, when the album’s release date did approach, the band took the unusual step of upping their promotional work rate to a scale not seen before. Prior to 1968, promotion of their material – outside of touring – was minimal unless it fell under the category of ‘Factory’ work. For The Velvet Underground the band made an effort to appeal to the myriad of radio stations across the U.S.A and their audiences. Reed himself volunteered on a number of occasions to talk enthusiastically about the album and its ‘unity’. He often referred to the sequence of the album as exploration of thought from the self-doubt of the opener ‘Candy Says’ to a form of resolution at the end with ‘Afterhours’ . To back up the band’s effort for this album to be a ‘hit’, MGM also provided a press-kit with glossy photos, a bumper sticker (!) and a sheet of some of the better reviews the band had garnered . A promotional single was issued too with Bill Mercer camply endorsing the album’s “expressions of….honesty, purity and feeling” to the radio masses. The band also stepped up its touring schedule throughout 1969 to bolster this renewed push – around 100 or so gigs in comparison with 75 or so the previous year .

But it was all in vain. The album was the band’s first total flop – it didn’t register at all on Billboard’s top 200 albums chart that year. This disaster cast a shadow over the wealth of newer material Reed had written during 1969. The band was “convinced that… [MGM]… had lost interest in them and… [they] faced the prospect…[of] completing their four-album contract with little enthusiasm” . Their suspicions were partly right: they were dropped by MGM head Mike Curb sometime before October 1969 but not to cut losses – more as part of a clear out of everything counter-culture within the label. The fifteen or so titles they enthusiastically recorded in spurts that year didn’t materialise until Polygram compiled them into the VU and Another View albums in 1985-6. However, despite personal disappointment at the failure of The Velvet Underground and their exit from Verve/MGM, Reed and the band ploughed on and made efforts to woo the behemoth Atlantic Records for what would be their final album, Loaded. Sadly, even though it was more commercially oriented than its predecessor (even to Reed’s dissatisfaction), it too died a death and shortly afterwards a dishevelled Reed left the Velvet Underground for good.

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Coming next: Duke Ellington - The Reprise Studio Recordings.