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Last week I was on a house call, looking at a collection. It was a fairly standard, if slightly boring, collection, but there were a handful of classic rock titles that would sell well for us. What I usually do on a house call is put the more valuable records together in a stack so that I can look at their condition more closely and pay the seller a better price for those titles, but as I started going through my “good stuff” stack on this buy, pretty much every record was scratched up. Which was weird because the jackets were in perfectly fine shape… I’ll never understand how that happens. Do some people wipe their LPs with sandpaper before each play? I ended up passing on the collection, but I noticed a copy of this LP that didn’t look too bad, so I gave them a few bucks for it and took it home for myself:
The Velvet Underground: Loaded 12” (Cotillion, 1970)
When I gave them the money, they thanked me and asked, “what is that record?” They did not know who the Velvet Underground were, LOL. Which is probably a good thing, because this LP avoided the sandpaper treatment the rest of their records got. After clearing the dust off with Sorry State’s VPI machine, it sounds fantastic.
I don’t think I’ve ever owned a copy of Loaded, but when I took it home and played it, none of it was unfamiliar to me. I guess I just absorbed all these songs through the cool music zeitgeist, hearing them on bootlegs, compilations, through cover songs, in DJ sets, or wherever else it is you hear non-mainstream music. It’s crazy how a record can be part of your consciousness like that without ever having deliberately listened to it.
I don’t think I really listened to the Velvet Underground until well into my adulthood (probably my 30s, TBH), but once I listened closely, I recognized right away how deeply they had shaped so much of the music I loved. If I had to summarize the Velvet Underground’s historical significance to someone who knew nothing about them, I’d say they were the first band to bring together the worlds of rock and roll and fine art. To many people, this is probably a bad thing. Usman always says he hates art, which is an absurd statement, but what I take him to mean is that he hates the culture around fine art: museums, galleries, dealers, institutions of higher education, etc. I understand hating that world, but also that world is a big part of who I am. Starting in the 10th grade, I attended a magnet school for the arts, and the teachers there indoctrinated us into the art world’s ways of seeing, interpreting, and interacting with the world. I was discovering punk rock at the same time, so my connections to the art world go just as deep as my connections to punk. Actually, for me, the two are inextricably linked. My peers in my hometown were all listening to whatever horrid post-grunge was on the radio, but the cool older kids at my magnet school were listening to underground punk. I saw listening to cool music as part of the same maturation process that would (hopefully) make me a “real” artist.
I’d be curious if any readers pop up with examples of earlier rock and roll / fine art crossover than the Velvets’ first album. The obvious candidate would be the Beatles, but I’d argue they’re not precisely the same thing. John Lennon went to art school, and it’s clear he absorbed many of the same things I did when I went to art school half a century later. But, for me, the Beatles made music that was art_ful_, but not really art per se. They elevated pop music above the level of disposable trash / popular culture where it had (arguably) previously resided, but even something as daring as “Tomorrow Never Knows” goes down relatively smooth. It’s not “Venus in Furs” or “Black Angel’s Death Song,” much less “European Son.” The Velvets challenged their listeners aggressively, in the same way that the most daring modern painters and sculptors did. They felt no responsibility to keep your toe tapping. They were doing something else entirely. And the path they opened up is walked by so many of my all-time favorites, from the Stooges to Can to PiL to Siouxsie and the Banshees to Wire and all the bands they influenced. Any time I listen to music that has one foot in rocking and one foot in this other (higher?) artistic impulse, I feel like the Velvets are right there.
Back to Loaded, though, where you don’t really hear any of that. By this point in the group’s history, they had fired Andy Warhol as their manager, Nico was long gone, John Cale was out, and Mo Tucker was on a leave of absence from the band for maternity leave. Guitarist Sterling Morrison and guitarist / vocalist / songwriter Lou Reed were the only holdovers from the band’s early artistic peak. I’ve read enough books about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground to know Lou Reed’s connections to the art world and the avant-garde run plenty deep, but by the time they made Loaded, he didn’t seem interested in exploring that in the Velvet Underground. Famously, they titled the record Loaded because they thought it was loaded with hits, and indeed it’s a tight, snappy collection of rock and roll songs that doesn’t sound, on the surface at least, all that different from what was happening in the mainstream in 1970. If anything, it might have sounded a few years out of date. I mean, Fun House also came out in 1970!
But despite it’s conventionality, Loaded still sounds like a great record to me. It also reveals part of the secret sauce that made the Velvet Underground’s early records so special. They weren’t just a collision of fine art and rock and roll… they were a collision of fine art and fucking great, top-shelf rock and roll. I can’t imagine John Cale’s screeching viola or Nico’s deadpan vocals would have sounded 1/10th as brilliant if they weren’t delivered within the context of Lou Reed’s songwriting. I guess it makes sense that, at this point in his career, Lou Reed would want to dispense with all the artsy-fartsy crap and place the focus squarely on what a brilliant songwriter he was. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more tightly packed string of classic melodies than the first three songs on this album: “Who Loves the Sun,” “Sweet Jane,” and “Rock & Roll.” His lyrics remain daring, particularly on character sketch songs like “New Age.” And I love the loose, exciting little touches he injects into his songs (the kids might call it yolo), like the silly falsetto when he sings “fine, FINE music” in “Rock & Roll” (a trick he probably picked up writing novelty songs for Pickwick Records early in his career). Lou was a genuine artist and craftsman who understood how pop songs work and how they might channel something deep and significant, much the same way a painting, novel, or film can.
I feel silly writing about the Velvet Underground because they’re one of the most obsessively documented and dissected bands in the history of popular music. There are countless people who know more about them and have thought about them more deeply than I have. But whereas I have a hard time hearing records by obsessively deconstructed bands like the Beatles or the Stones with fresh ears (to where I can’t imagine feeling compelled to put on one of their records ever again), the Velvets’ records remain vital to me, even an arguably lesser one like Loaded.