3. The Velvet Underground1969: The Velvet Underground Live
At the time when this was around in the early seventies, this was readily available and something that people would reference a lot. It’s almost like a ‘Best Of The Velvet Underground’ but with Lou Reed singing all the songs. You know, there were songs on Loaded that Lou didn’t sing because he supposedly had laryngitis on the weekend when they did they vocals for them so Doug Yule sang the vocals on some of those classic Velvets songs. So oddly, versions of those classic Loaded songs end up on 1969… with Lou singing them – and I mean this as no offence to Doug Yule! And Lou also sang some of the songs from the first album that Nico sang so it kind of condenses the whole thing about them. And of course it’s got ‘Ocean’ and ‘New Age’ which are just classic, classic songs.
I kind of felt that I had to put a Velvets album in here and this one has a really amazing version of ‘What Goes On’ which does go on and on and on! Really, this is such a great record and I’m not a fan of live albums, generally. It goes beyond being a live album and it has so much to recommend it that you don’t really get on other Velvets records. If I had to choose one of the studio albums then I’d have gone for either the first one, the banana album, or the third one. But yeah, they were a great band without John Cale as well.
