Killer line: “Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” Musically straightforward, sensual in tone, Some Kinda Love is a complex business, part seduction soundtrack, part refusal to be hemmed in by standard categories of sexuality – “no kinds of love are better than others … the possibilities are endless / and for me to miss one / would seem to be groundless”. Buried on side two of Loaded was one of the loveliest of Lou Reed’s loving homages to doo-wop, complete with spoken-word section. It is one of the ironies of the Velvet Underground that the most forward-thinking, groundbreaking band of their era could occasionally sound like old-fashioned rock’n’roll revivalists. There is something folky and vaguely Dylan-esque at the heart of The Black Angel’s Death Song, but by the time Cale had finished with it – alternately strafing it with screeching, insistent viola and hissing into the microphone in lieu of a chorus – it sounded, and still sounds, unique. The latter’s cocky strut is disrupted by a desperate lyrical plea: “If Shelley would just come back, it’d be all right.” 20. I Can’t Stand It (1969)Īmid the Velvets’ songs about drugs and drag queens lurked the plaintive sound of Reed pining for his college sweetheart, Shelley Albin, the subject of Pale Blue Eyes, I Found a Reason and I Can’t Stand It. The twist is that her childlike voice and the cute melody conceals an almost unbearably sad song, ostensibly a celebration of small-hours boozing, but filled with longing and regret. The Velvets’ eponymous 1969 album ends, improbably, with the drummer, Moe Tucker, singing a song that could have dated from the pre-rock era. (Clockwise from top left) Tucker, Reed, Morrison and Cale. Take your pick from the world-weary, small-hours rumination found on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, or the more epic studio version that the Velvets biographer Victor Bockris suggested was “an attempt to present some encouraging statements to a confused audience as the 70s began”. “It was fun.” A delightful late Cale-era outtake that inadvertently captured Morrison, Cale and Reed’s giggly backchat as they recorded the backing vocals, Temptation Inside Your Heart bears that assessment out. “It was not Mein Kampf – my struggle,” the guitarist Sterling Morrison once reflected of the Velvet Underground’s career. It boasts three chords, a distinct rhythm and blues influence, Reed in streetwise, so-what punk mode and explosive guitar solos somehow potentiated by the rough sound quality. Recorded at the White Light/White Heat sessions, but never completed, the April 1967 live recording of Guess I’m Falling in Love – taped at the Gymnasium in New York – will more than suffice. “If you’re a mad fiend like we are, you’ll listen to them both together,” offered the producer, Tom Wilson. In which the band set a two-chord grind that may, or may not, have been based on their instrumental Booker T in one channel and a blackly comic Reed short story read by Cale in the other. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy 26. The Velvet Underground on stage with Nico.
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