The Velvet Underground

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Loaded (Remastered)
    Loaded (Remastered)
    Loaded (Remastered)

    Of The Velvet Underground’s four albums (discounting 1973’s in-name-only Squeeze), Loaded is the straightforward one: The songs are short, the writing is direct and the feel is closer to something you might hear on classic-rock radio than at a downtown happening. Aren’t they supposed to be transgressive and avant-garde? And here they are singing about cowboys (“Lonesome Cowboy Bill”) and trains (“Train Round the Bend”) and young girls who are lifted by the spirit of rock ’n’ roll (“Rock & Roll”)? Is this the counterculture, or is this “American Pie”? Listen to Loaded expecting White Light/White Heat and you might be confused, even disappointed: There’s nothing that bites or tears at the fabric of what rock music can be. But listen to it as part of the band’s broader creative journey and it offers a kind of wholeness: Whereas The Velvet Underground’s quiet balances White Light’s noise, Loaded’s simple American pleasures not only balance the progressive, arty quality of The Velvet Underground & Nico, but they’re also a reminder that for however far out the band got, they were still the children of doo-wop (“I Found a Reason”) and Chuck Berry (“Head Held High”), of energy and rhythm and a music that put its audience first. Lou Reed was never shy about his criticism of hippie culture. But one of the best comparisons for Loaded is the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, which came out two weeks earlier, in late 1970. Both are examples of radical bands growing into something accessible. But they’re also instances of a moment in rock culture when even radical bands were embracing the myths and imagery of early rock ’n’ roll as fertile ground—not just The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band”, but The Stooges’ Fun House and, eventually, New York Dolls. They were plenty radical in their way, but listen to Loaded and you realise that The Velvet Underground weren’t trying to destroy rock ’n’ roll—they were trying to keep it alive.

  • The Velvet Underground
    The Velvet Underground
    The Velvet Underground

    Listening to The Velvet Underground can feel like walking into a small, late-night gathering with close friends: It’s warm, it’s fuzzy, it’s a little imprecise. But in that imprecision is a sense of quiet epiphany, the feeling of revelation that forms around moments you might otherwise miss. There’s laughter in it (“Beginning to See the Light”), and there’s tenderness, too (“Pale Blue Eyes”). But there’s also a reckoning with big questions about doubt (“I’m Set Free”), purpose (“Jesus”) and how we share our inner selves with the outside world (“Candy Says”) that runs deeper than the album’s sweetness lets on.  Lou Reed said that White Light/White Heat was, in part, a reaction to the delusions of hippie culture—the way free love led to broken hearts and supposedly innocent drug use devolved into people too disconnected from reality to function. But if the band has a psychedelic album—not in the carnivalesque sense, but in the sense of pointing one on a strange personal journey—this is it. The shift is radical: After two albums of noise and rebellion, they sit down on the carpet and open themselves to quieter thoughts. Sterling Morrison said part of the change had to do with the departure of John Cale, which left Reed free to explore his sensitive side: If Morrison had written something as romantic as “Pale Blue Eyes”, he teased Reed, he wouldn’t have forced Reed to play it, but he also wouldn’t fight with him about it. He later described Reed’s original mix of the album (included on the deluxe 45th anniversary edition) as the “Closet Mix”, because it made the music sound like it was recorded in a closet: safe, private, secret. And Reed described “Some Kinda Love” as a conversation between two very drunk people who talk their way through the fog to some obvious conclusions. The Velvet Underground is music made at a close distance, but just out of focus enough to keep mystery intact. “I don’t know just what it’s all about,” he sings. “But put on your red pyjamas and find out.” 

  • White Light/White Heat (45th Anniversary Edition)
    White Light/White Heat (45th Anniversary Edition)
    White Light/White Heat (45th Anniversary Edition)

    If you want to be simple about it, White Light/White Heat is The Velvet Underground’s noise album: The performances are aggressive, the sound is broken and  overdriven, and the mood is perpetually tense. Even its quieter songs—“Lady Godiva’s Operation” and “Here She Comes Now”—sound like they’re covered in grime that can’t quite be scrubbed away. It can be ugly and confrontational, and it might make you wonder, ‘Is this any fun?’ Lou Reed says the album’s engineer was so put off by the 18-minute “Sister Ray” that he left to get coffee, complaining that no amount of money was worth listening to that crap. But in the same way that some Japanese pottery makes its warped edges and rough surfaces part of the spirit of the bowl, the revolution of White Light/White Heat is how it makes the grime inseparable from the music itself—the object that becomes perfect in its imperfections. The album’s influence on punk is profound. But it also put into the air the concept of rock music that finds freedom in extremity and sees no fault in doing things wrong—a legacy that runs through home-recorded indie rock, experimental noise, left-of-center heavy metal and just about any other style that uses abrasiveness as a gateway to the sublime. Bassist/organist/violist John Cale later called it “consciously anti-beauty”. The reality is more profound: White Light/White Heat doesn’t destroy beauty; it redefines it. 

  • The Velvet Underground & Nico (45th Anniversary Edition)
    The Velvet Underground & Nico (45th Anniversary Edition)
    The Velvet Underground & Nico (45th Anniversary Edition)

    100 Best Albums The first show The Velvet Underground played under the management of Andy Warhol was in January 1966, at a psychiatrist’s convention in New York. Warhol had been asked to give a lecture but suggested screening a film instead. The doctors consented. After all, Warhol was, at the time, arguably the most famous and vociferously debated artist in America—at the very least, he’d do something interesting. The music was crude and droning and strange: rock ’n’ roll but laced with something daring. By some accounts, the performance was a generational clash: Hip, young downtowners versus uptight squares. But others remember it more mildly, and—for a band whose legacy didn’t become clear until years after they broke up—more poetically: The Velvet Underground stepped onstage, played a set of radically innovative rock music and nobody really noticed.  Even when compared to one another, they were distinct: Lou Reed, a creative writing student from Long Island who’d taken a job out of college composing novelty songs; Sterling Morrison, who’d drifted toward Reed’s Syracuse dorm room after hearing the sound of bagpipe music at top volume; a Welsh violist named John Cale; the German singer and actress Nico, who’d been recruited by Warhol; and drummer Moe Tucker, a small, androgynous woman who played standing up. Cale had a classical pedigree and connection to the avant-garde; Tucker played with the primitive energy of a child. Reed loved doo-wop and R&B and free jazz; Nico sang in a heavy, deadpan German accent that captured an almost expressionless whiteness. They didn’t mix—but they balanced. When The Velvet Underground & Nico came out in early 1967, it was part of a continuum with Beat poetry, Pop Art, and French New Wave filmmaking—movements that stripped away myths about expertise and put art in the hands of whoever wanted to make it. It can be noisy and confrontational (“European Son”, “Black Angel’s Death Song”), but it can also be sweet (“I’ll Be Your Mirror”). They sound sure of what they’re playing, but don’t try too hard to make it perfect. And even when their subject matter gets dark, they never make it too difficult to grasp (“Heroin”, “I’m Waiting for the Man”). Producer and ambient-music pioneer Brian Eno famously said that the album may not have sold many copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. He was talking about the influence of their music, of course. But he could have also been talking about the attitude with which they made it. They didn’t really sound like normal people, but they didn’t sound like professionals either. And at a time when the American counterculture was drifting towards psychedelia, the Summer of Love and vague dreams of how the world could be, they embraced a frankness that still sounds revolutionary. If people who heard them started a band, it wasn’t just because they thought the music was cool, but because it made them feel like making cool music was something they could do, too. 

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About The Velvet Underground

No band in the late ’60s was more radical than The Velvet Underground. Beginning with their 1967 debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, the group founded in New York City by guitarist Lou Reed and experimental violist John Cale democratised the avant-garde while simultaneously elevating rock music to art status. Peak moments like “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, “Heroin”, “White Light/White Heat” and the searing “Sister Ray” folded minimalist drones into Bo Diddley chugging to forge a startlingly new language. Reed’s lyrics—especially while the band were under the mentorship of Andy Warhol—exposed the rock world to underground art and queer culture. Yet he also penned prosaic love songs and primal proto-punk with equal brilliance. Punk soaked up VU’s street-bred attitude, indie rock absorbed its feedback hypnotics and goth borrowed wholesale from Nico’s intensely forlorn ballads. Ultimately, though, The Velvet Underground’s biggest gift was to give future generations of arty weirdos and outsiders the permission to create music that proudly defies mainstream conformity.

ORIGIN
New York, NY, United States
FORMED
1964
GENRE
Rock

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