FROM WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT: THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND DAY BY DAY
Mid-to-late November 1969
RECORDING
The Matrix, 3138 Fillmore, San Francisco, CA.
Plenty of tapes are made of rock bands at the Matrix in the 60s,
including some immensely valuable recordings that will later be
released officially (Live At The
Matrix by The Great Society, Grace Slick’s pre-Jefferson
Airplane band) and unofficially (a boxed set-length bootleg of March
1967 shows by The Doors, about half of which are given an authorized
release in November 2008). According to Peter Abram, the venue’s
coowner, the Velvets “were booked for as long as they were ’cause I
always liked them. So I wanted to get as many recordings of them as I
could.”
During the first half of their run at the club,
numerous tapes are made of the group on the venue’s own four-track
recording equipment. Selections from these tapes form the bulk of the
classic double-LP that will be assembled in 1974 for official release
by Mercury Records, 1969 Velvet
Underground Live. (The rest of the material is taken from a show
recorded on October 19 in Dallas; the Matrix tracks should not be
confused with the tapes recorded at the same venue on different
equipment by Robert Quine and later issued on The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series Vol.
1: The Quine Tapes.)
The exact dates on which the Matrix tapes used on
the Mercury LP are made are unclear (which is why these recordings are
discussed here rather than within entries for the specific concerts at
which they were recorded, as is the practice throughout the rest of
this book). Documentation about when, why, and how they were recorded
is distressingly skimpy, particularly given that these songs form the
heart of 1969 Velvet Underground Live. In his brief blurb on the
back jacket, Paul Nelson, who compiled the LP, says only that the
material was recorded live in Texas and San Francisco in late 1969 and
compiled from “over eight hours of
performance tapes.” The pool of material certainly draws heavily on the
November Matrix shows, but the only known specific detail is that ‘Rock
& Roll’ is from November 25. (In 2006, Nelson will pass away
without ever having shed further light on the sources.)
The music itself matters much more than any dates or
locations, however. In that regard, the San Francisco recordings on 1969 Velvet Underground Live have a
glorious significance that transcends their cloudy origins. Paul Nelson
gets at least one thing right in his brief liner note: this is “the
band at the peak of their power.” Everything about these performances
shows the group to be at the top of their game, jelling together and
reaching new levels as individual players. Lou Reed sings with the
conviction of a demon possessed by rock’n’roll’s holy spirit; the lead
and rhythm guitars are interwoven with both virtuoso skill and deft
taste; Doug Yule’s organ swirls to dizzying heights on ‘What Goes On’;
and Maureen Tucker hits the drums with more propulsive, primitive
weight than she has ever managed in the studio. Even the Velvets’
habitually ragged backing-vocals have a forceful confidence and charm.
All the while, Reed has somehow continued to pump out new songs, some
of which have been roadtested and reshaped in front of live audiences
this autumn.
“I recorded them every night and I marked down the
numbers that I thought were the best performances,” Abram recalls.
“After we had about a month’s worth of tapes, I went through them and
edited the stuff down to about the four hours that I’ve got. The 69 Live [material] was only [drawn
from] the tapes from the first two weeks,” he adds, suggesting that the
Matrix tracks on the LP come from mid-to-late November, during the
first half of the group’s semi-residency.
The Matrix recordings on 1969 Velvet Underground Live are
not the original four-track tapes, but two-track mix-downs. “Those
recordings were really quick mix-downs of a four-track tape that my
assistant did in the middle of the night because Lou Reed wanted to
hear some copies,” Abram continues. “They’re not the best
representation, really, of the tapes. The guy who did the mix-downs
always had a tendency to over-equalize things. They’re okay, but [not]
really terribly good.”
Side one of the original double-LP features three
songs from the Matrix (following a Dallas recording of ‘I’m Waiting For
The Man’). The first, ‘Lisa Says,’ is clearly the best version ever
taped of the song, either by the Velvets or Lou Reed solo. The band
grinds along with just the right amount of sensual grit; Reed’s singing
is about as well-pitched between crooning and shouting as it ever is;
and the song itself is one of the group’s most beguilingly romantic –
not to mention one of their catchiest, particularly when bolstered by
backing harmonies in the chorus. This version includes an unrelated yet
nifty, good-time bridge not heard elsewhere; one suspects that it’s
actually an entirely different Reed song, edited in from another
performance.
‘What Goes On’ is played with magnificent verve,
particularly when it locks into the hypnotic interplay between Yule’s
incandescent organ and the most furiously pumping rhythm-guitar ever
caught on tape. Unlike the shorter studio version, the song ends so
suddenly and unexpectedly that one wonders if the power has been cut.
(This effective conclusion is one the group had already worked out for
live performance, as shown on other surviving tapes.)
According to Lou Reed, the tentative ‘Sweet Jane’
that closes side one of the LP was captured on the very day he wrote
the song. (Sterling Morrison will later suggest that it was written in
Reed’s loft.) While later versions – by The Velvet Underground, Reed
solo, or Mott The Hoople – are faster and sassier, the song is
presented here as a sweet, low-key ballad, but with enough grunge in
the guitars to remind us that this is the VU. For that alone, it would
be of considerable historic value, but in its
own way, it’s also as good as any of the more celebrated versions.
There’s a sap-free sincerity to Reed’s delivery, and an almost divine
humility to the band’s graceful touch, marking this out as one of
Reed’s (and the group’s) greatest and most melodic songs. The lyrics
are pretty different here, too: there’s no mention of Jane or Jim, and
the thing as a whole sounds like more of a love song – albeit a pretty
enigmatic love song – here than it will on Loaded. There’s also a gorgeous,
mellow bridge of sorts, in which Reed croons about heavenly wine and
roses, that won’t make the Loaded
version at all.
All but one of the five songs on side two (‘Femme
Fatale’) are from the San Francisco shows, and all are superb. ‘We’re
Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together’ has by now become a real
barn-burner, with the Velvets doing more with its ultra-catchy
three-chord riff and amphetamine beat than almost any other band could.
Reed, always a master of the vocal aside, tosses off a line for the
ages when he nonchalantly boasts “Oh now watch me!” before launching
into one of his patented speaker-shredding solos. ‘Beginning To See The
Light’ and ‘Rock & Roll’ both surpass the previous studio versions
– a track on the group’s third LP and a
June ’69 out-take respectively – without radically reinventing the
songs. Both are played with much greater force and edge than on the
studio recordings, and are longer, but purposefully and concisely so,
never lapsing into meaningless or unnecessary improvisation or
repetition. ‘Rock & Roll’ in particular sounds like it’s been more
carefully honed to razor sharpness. (The group will do the song proud
on Loaded, too.)
‘New Age’ is a major Lou Reed composition, and one
probably penned shortly before it is taped in late 1969 – it would
surely otherwise have been worked on in the studio by now. “When he
originally presented me with ‘New Age,’” Yule recalls in a September
2001 Record Collector
interview, “he told me what it was about – which was the only woman he
ever loved. I knew he had had an affair, but she [Shelley Albin] was
married … That song was essentially about that relationship. I think it
was only in retrospect that he expanded the meaning of the song and
made it into something more intellectual.”
It’s not elitist revisionism to hail the 1969 Velvet Underground Live
version of ‘New Age’ as indescribably superior to its studio
counterpart on Loaded, which
is nothing less than a letdown by comparison. Firstly, you get to hear
Reed sing the lyrics, not Doug Yule, who will take the lead vocal on Loaded; secondly, the lyrics
themselves are almost completely different, and take the song into
uncharted psychological (and perhaps sexual) territory. The Loaded version takes the narrative
over a hill; here the characters cross a bridge, which provides a more
memorable image and fits better with the rest of the song. There’s no
fat blonde actress in this version, either, but there is a mysterious
yearning for both Frank and Nancy that will be cut out of the Loaded version. (For all the
subsequent attention given to Reed’s bisexuality, there are very few
direct allusions to it in his VU songs, suggesting perhaps that
somebody – maybe someone at Atlantic Records – got cold feet about
including them on Loaded.)
Throw in the fact that the band is tougher and better on this
performance than on the more clinical Loaded
version – which doesn’t feature Maureen Tucker – and you have a
recording that outstrips the more familiar studio cut from every angle.
(According to Steve Nelson, the song often went on far longer on stage
than it does on record, particularly during the “soaring and anthemic”
closing section.)
Side three of the original 1969 Velvet Underground Live appears to have been
designated for slow epics. Its three tracks run to more than 26
minutes; the two recorded in San Francisco, ‘Ocean’ and ‘Heroin,’ are
both stretched out to around the ten-minute mark. ‘Ocean’ is the more
interesting of the pair. It’s better and more dramatic than any other
Velvet Underground or Lou Reed solo version, particularly the keening
organ and splash-like percussion, but is perhaps one instance where the
group might have kept playing for just a little bit too long. Tucker
hits her cymbals harder here than on any other VU recording – so hard,
in fact, that road manager Hans Onsager had to sit under her drums and
hold the stands to keep them from falling over. And if the long version
of ‘Heroin’ included on the original double-LP isn’t enough, there’s a
second, slightly shorter version of the song (probably also from the
November San Francisco shows) on 1969
Velvet Underground Live Vol. 1, the first of two single-disc
reissues released on CD in 1988. It’s actually a worthwhile counterpart
to the first version, with its pounding, dissonant guitars more
pronounced during the final accelerated rave-up.
All but one of the five tracks on side four of the
original LP are taken from the San Francisco tapes. The first is ‘Some
Kinda Love,’ and is yet another performance that’s similar to but
better than the one on the Velvets’ third album. There’s simply less
inhibition to the groove and swing of both the playing and Reed’s
exuberant vocal delivery, which is lascivious yet joyful at the same
time. The second track, ‘Over You,’ might be a throwaway ballad with
echoes of Tin Pan Alley sentimentality, but it’s a darned good one,
with an attractive sequence of descending chords, an appealing crooned
lead-vocal by Reed, and a jazzy guitar-solo. (In all, it’s certainly
better than many of the similarly lightweight tunes the group recorded
earlier in the year for a possible fourth studio LP.)
Strangely, the recording of ‘Sweet Bonnie Brown’
included on the LP is the only released version of the song, a
fabulously sly, kinky rocker that’s an ideal vehicle for Reed’s
ad-libbed nonsense vocals. (Why there’s no studio counterpart is
unclear, but perhaps the line about coming all over the narrator is
thought too hot to handle when the songs are being selected for Loaded.) ‘Sweet Bonnie Brown’ would
be satisfying enough on its own, but the pleasure is doubled when it
segues almost seamlessly into ‘It’s Just Too Much,’ which has left its
rather sluggish blues-rock origins behind and become a prototypically
jittery rocker. The resulting eight-minute medley is not just a
rousing, jubilant performance – it’s also a testament to the group’s
talent for taking a humdrum filler (‘It’s Just Too Much’) and
ingeniously combining it without another semi-throwaway into something
much greater than the sum of its parts.
The San Francisco recording of ‘White Light/White
Heat’ included on 1969 Velvet
Underground Live might well be the tour de force not just of the
album, but of the Velvets’ entire live career. It’s no exaggeration to
state that it utterly dwarfs the studio prototype in quality, and not
just because it goes on for a good eight-and-a-half minutes. There’s
not a wasted second in this masterfully taut yet explosive performance,
from the cockiness of Reed’s vocal and the slightly sardonic high
harmonies in the choruses to the way Doug Yule’s bass surges to the
forefront as a sort of announcement for the instrumental break. And
what an instrumental break
it is.
There’s no other Velvet Underground recording – even
from the Cale era – that finds so ideal and brilliant a middle ground
between white-hot rock and white noise. The guitar work is stunning,
the ripping leads and dive-bombing howls simulating the searing highs
of the ‘white light’ drugs the songs allude to just as effectively as
‘Heroin’ does the rush of a heroin injection. The Velvets don’t overdo
it, but instead come back with a vocal reprise just at the moment when
the guitar duel can’t get any more intense. A brief instrumental tag
ratchets the tension higher and higher until it almost literally runs
out of frets, bringing an end to a track as rivetingly magnificent as
anything in the group’s formidable catalogue.
That’s it as far as the original double-LP is
concerned, but there’s yet more Matrix material than that, including
the previously unheard eight-minute recording of ‘I Can’t Stand It’
included on the 1988 CD release 1969
Velvet Underground Live Vol. 2. It’s not quite the best ever
live performance of the song to have been captured on tape – some of
the guitar soloing is a little dotty – but it is the best from an
audio-fidelity standpoint. And it’s still a good, exciting romp, and
thus a good addition to the VU canon.
As good as 1969
Velvet Underground Live is, it’s worth reiterating that none of
the Matrix cuts are from the original four-track tapes, for which all
the instruments and vocalists had a mic. As far as Peter Abrams can
remember, “the vocals are on one track, and bass and drums are on a
track, and each of the guitars is on a track. [The tapes] were recorded
at 15 inches per second, so that makes them very clean.”
And as also noted earlier, there’s definitely yet
more material recorded on the Matrix’s four-track equipment. Abrams
retains four hours worth of recordings, and notes, “’69 Live was only the tapes from the
first two weeks. When they came for another two weeks, I got some more
material, and cut out some of the [recordings] that are on ’69 Live. Some of [them], I improved
on; I found better performances, so I deleted ones that I had saved
from the first two weeks. At the time, our budget was very small;
I couldn’t afford to save all the tape. It was just too much tape; it
was half-inch tape, and rather expensive. So I edited it down to the
four hours that I ended up keeping.”
Those four hours of half-inch, four-track tape
amount to 42 songs, including versions of a few tunes that don’t appear
on 1969 Velvet Underground Live, among them
three takes of ‘There She Goes Again,’ two each of ‘Venus In Furs’ and
‘After Hours,’ and one apiece of ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song,’ ‘I’m
Set Free,’ and ‘Sister Ray.’ There are also additional, as-yet
unreleased versions of most of the songs that do make it onto the LP,
including no less than four takes of ‘Heroin.’ According to the notes
of one listener who has heard the tapes, most of these 42 unissued
tracks fall into the good-to-excellent category; some are great and
inspired, and there are only a few weak or flawed performances.
Two-to-three minute excerpts of nine of these songs
and a seven-minute segment of ‘Sister Ray’ (all of which start at the
beginning, and fade out mid-performance) have since leaked into
circulation and verify that the sound quality on these recordings is
outstanding, and in fact notably – if not hugely – superior to the
tapes used for 1969 Velvet
Underground Live. Of even more interest is the fact that the
performances themselves are good-to-superb. They include a version of
the rarely heard ‘There
She Goes Again’ with more jagged rhythm-guitar than is heard on the
studio cut; ‘I’m Set Free’ with a magnificent Lou Reed lead vocal; a
really slow ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ with curling, bluesy guitar-riffs
and a cool interjection of ominous chords right after the white boy is
asked what he’s doing uptown; and a version of ‘Sister Ray’ that starts
off slow and bluesy but just keeps accelerating in rhythm and intensity
until the tape cruelly cuts off. The other excerpts – ‘Ocean,’ ‘Some
Kinda Love’ (introduced as “an alcoholic’s dream”), ‘The Black Angel’s
Death Song,’
‘After Hours,’ and two versions of ‘Venus In Furs’ – aren’t quite as
novel, but will likewise make the Velvet Underground fan yearn for
the day when the tapes can be released.
Also of great interest to VU fans are the spoken
intros to a few of these excerpts, including the lengthy show-opener
during which Reed says he is particularly glad, “on a serious day like
today, that people could find a little time to come out and just have
some fun to some rock’n’roll. ’Cause these are serious times, or I’ve
been told they are. And, y’know, since they’re serious, we felt
impelled to do a very serious set. So this is gonna be a very serious
rock’n’roll set. And I don’t want any of you to enjoy yourselves
frivolously. Because it’ll run against national policy!” Furthermore,
he reveals ‘I’m Waiting For The Man” to be a song “written under the
influence of dreams”; ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ to be one they
haven’t done for “a really long time, ’cause it used to empty clubs …
as a matter of fact, when a club wanted to close for a while, they used
to get in touch with us and ask us to play this song”; and calls ‘Venus
In Furs’ “a song that gave us a very bad reputation, so we stopped
doing it for two years … It happens to be one of my very favorite songs
of all time, but I got sick of doing it in public, ’cause people got
the wrong idea. Not about me, but about them.”
The question remains: will either the unissued
material or the original four-track recordings of the 1969 Velvet Underground Live songs
ever be made commercially available? “The guy that put out those
audience tapes on records spoke to me, and I told them about the
tapes,” comments Abram. “But for whatever reason, probably his own
financial interest, he put out the audience tapes that he had. He had
some kind of a notion that he was gonna put his tapes out first and
then come around to my tapes
later, when I kind of nixed the idea, feeling that there’s only so much
of a market for any 60s band. If my tapes are gonna come out third in
line, there’s not gonna be much of a market left for them.”
But, he says, “They’re beautiful tapes. We listened
to some playback of a little bit of the tapes about a year ago over at
some studio in Berkeley, and they sounded just great. One of their fans
who was [there] said, ‘Oh, these are the holy grail of Velvet
Underground tapes.’ If there’s a market for them, they should come to
me.”
Even if nothing else is ever issued or found,
however, what survives on 1969
Velvet Underground Live
is not just The Velvet Underground at the peak of their powers: it’s as
good as any rock group has ever sounded live, and the bedrock of what
might be the finest live rock album of all time.
