![]() | t wilcoxĭownload: Move Right In: The Velvet Underground At The Boston Tea Party, 1968-1969ġ. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page.Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (3,669 words) Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. The Velvet Underground album VU is the binding agent in a career of releases that differ so dramatically one from another as to be almost artistic reversals. VU has the dark majesty of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the neurotic strut (if not the head-wrecking dissonance) of White Light/White Heat, the tenderness and emotional insight of The Velvet Underground, and the pure pop sensibility of Loaded. In its 10 tracks, it contains refined versions of what the band did well during the four years they lasted. The irony is that VU wasn’t released until more than a dozen years after the Velvet Underground disbanded. Recorded primarily in 1969, after the ouster of multi-instrumentalist John Cale, and later cannibalized by principal songwriter Lou Reed for his solo career, the recordings that make up VU were shelved for 16 years. They stayed in the MGM vaults, mostly unmixed, until discovered during the process of reissuing the band’s catalog in the early 80s. As a result, VU benefitted from much improved audio technology and was released to a world not only better prepared for the Velvet Underground, but one that had largely absorbed its lessons. The album made a beautiful tombstone for the band’s career, at a time when all the members were alive to see it. Texas lightsmith catalog series#The Velvet Underground were a series of improbables. In 1964, 22-year-old Brooklyn-born pharmacological omnivore Lou Reed was a staff songwriter for Pickwick Records, churning out B-rate singles in an attempt to take advantage of the latest dance craze. One of these, called “ The Ostrich,” caught fire locally. To capitalize on the success, Lou pulled a band together that included Welsh expat John Cale, normally an avant-garde violist, who showed up to the rehearsal for a laugh and the vague possibility of payment. “The Ostrich” did not impress John Cale much, but the fact that Reed had tuned every string of his guitar to A-sharp did. This type of alternate tuning was well-known among the anti-art Fluxus crowd that Cale ran with. ![]() ![]() ![]() As he once said, “I was playing with La Monte Young in the Dream Syndicate, and the concept of the group was to sustain notes for two hours at a time.” But the way Lou Reed latched onto it interested Cale much more than his lame dance single or the sketchy Pickwick operation. ![]()
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