Loaded: best VU album, rite guys?

Flagged for craziness.

POLL: How many times does Lou Reed say "suckin on my ding dong" in "Sister Ray"?

POLL: Why don't you count 'em up?

'how many times was she on that POLL?'

we've definitely had this argument before

o come on there's no way the third album is better than the banana one? congrats on challops

"Some Kinda Love" = 4 mins of straight garbage

Some Kinda Challops

Between thought and expression lies 4 mins of straight garbage

First time I listened to Loaded I fell asleep about half way through.

Lou probably did as well, depending on what medication he was on at the time

Put garbage on your shoulder.

"Some Kinda Love" = 4 mins of straight garbage

gtfo that song is awesome!

yes it is one of the best songs.

some kinda troll

tyler between 3rd album & debut which do you take?

xp I mean third album is not awful but I feel like SKl right on top of Pale Blue Eyes kills momentum dead; What Goes on is top 10 VU for me, and the Jesus => That's the Story of My Life sequence is perfect, but I mean banana album is unfuckwithable, an album that has room for "Black Angel's Death Song"/"European Son" along with "Sunday Morning" and "Femme Fatale" is such a better candidate for alltimedom imo

not that you asked me, but I'll take the 3rd. I have no use for Black Angel's Death Song or European Son, really.

yeah SKL is way great

Just re-listened to Rock N Roll. Lou does such a funny Dylan impression.

xps probably the debut because of the all-important cale-iness, but it's neck and neck really.

The production's all kinds of wrong on this one and it's got more filler than the others.

"Some Kinda Love" may have more good lines than any song not written by Holland-Dozier-Holland.

^^^otm
off topic kinda, but everyone should watch this thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Et1ceU09_c

BTW It's fun to sing VU songs like you are Bob Dylan.

"Baby be gooood
do whatcha shouuuuld"

"Rock & Roll" is one of the reasons I don't rate Loaded very highly. It was the first VU song I ever heard (used to be on classic rock radio where I grew up) and it bugged me. Still bugs me. I skip it every time if I can get to the controls.

Just re-listened to Rock N Roll. Lou does such a funny Dylan impression.

much better than the execrable Dylan impression Lou attempts on "Prominent Men"

true story: "Some Kinda Love" helped me come out.

Lou's cover of "Foot of Pride" rules though.

I might be well-served to read the lyrics before spouting off in here, sorry guyz

true story: "Some Kinda Love" helped me come out.

that is way cool imo

banana album is unfuckwithable

it would be impossible to overstate how huge lou reed/the velvets were for me in high school & the first year after high school but I always felt like the 1st album (though loved/love it) was a little over its head. I don't really love 'Black Angel's Death Song' or 'Femme Fatale' at all. Or honestly "there she goes again" tbqf

yeah I love all of those; if I had to pick a song to not love wholeheartedly it's probably "Run Run Run"

Femme Fatale was the first song I figured out vocal harmonies for. Not that they're complicated... when I was 14 or 15 I sat down with two boomboxes, recorded one vocal line on one boombox, then played that back while singing along and pressing record on the other boombox, then kept doing that until I had all the parts together. Blew my little mind.

xp

yeah femme fatale is soooo pretty. the guitars on that song.

The first album, particularly "Waiting for the Man," still carries the most inscrutable resonance with me - probably just because I discovered it first.

also: just listened to Some Kinda Love for the first time in a long time and it still seems to me the one song on the third album that misses Cale the most, but as I said before, I probably am missing the point wrt the lyrics and was excessively rash with my entrance into this thread

1st was hugely influential to me but for listening pleasure nothing beats 3rd

some of the greatest songs ever written rubbing shoulders, material is varied but never feels cobbled together like the first 2, more unified somehow

are you guys even, like, fans of this band??

maybe not..?

I'll never forget hearing "Sunday Morning" the night after that robo trip, it was the most gentle, celestially beautiful song I will ever hear in this life or the next.

My 6+ hours of "Sister Ray" bootleg performances say maybe just a bit.

I don't really love 'Black Angel's Death Song' or 'Femme Fatale' at all. Or honestly "there she goes again" tbqf

"Rock & Roll" is one of the reasons I don't rate Loaded very highly.

"Some Kinda Love" = 4 mins of straight garbage

3rd and 4th ones are boring... and responsible for more bad music than anything this side of Led Zeppelin.

if i could keep Sister Ray i would pretty happily say goodbye to WL/WH

worst day of my life was the 3rd time I went to jail. 2nd worst day was when I heard the Loaded version of "Sweet Jane"

each one has songs i love and songs i very nearly hate.

wtf!

"dudes you guys gotta hear this band, they're gonna change music as we know it"
(puts on 'lonesome cowboy bill')

― iatee, Thursday, March 29, 2012 12:50 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

suggest banana

The only VU song that even mildly annoys me is "The Murder Mystery," and I think I'd like it a lot more if it was shorter. Love everything else (wait, except for that horrible first disc of the box).

xp hahaha tylerw

but seriously folks it's ok if people don't want to put the VU on a pedestal. still my fave band though!

I'll stan for all their albums. whichever one is being slagged off at any given time is the one I'll defend

i listened to white light/white heat THIS MORNING

I started with Loaded too, because the Rolling Stone record guide rated it so highly, and the rest were out of print (this was just months before the 80s reissues). Total head scratcher as to why this band was considered so radical, and I was surprised I knew that "Rock 'n' Roll" song; I figured they'd be so crazy and destructive, it would never show up on AOR. My main reference point for crazy and destructive were 1966 Who bootlegs and Never Mind the Bollocks.

Then the reissues happend, so I went straight to WL/WH, and was much more satisfying, but I thought "Sister Ray" was plodding and boring- I was expecting that anything described as that assaultive would have to have some tempo to it. Then I got Nico, and really started to understand the appeal. "European Son" was pretty much what I *thought* "Sister Ray" was going to sound like, based on the RS description.

Then I got the third, expecting that it would be too reserved, and it quickly ended up my favorite. "Murder Mystery" felt like payoff for my young adolescent efforts at listening to "Revolution #9", an experimental collage I actually enjoyed!

It was so much easier to read about a band than hear them then. I didn't have great access to record shops, and other founding punk documents like Funhouse and Black Generation were out of print too. So I'd read about this stuff for a year before I could track down a copy.

It's a good reminder of how hard it is to write about music, and how age and context play into that. I can see if I was of Dave Marsh's generation, and lived through 60s rock, where VU were on the periphery, Loaded would have seemed like a vindication of their experimental work: they were completely capable of make solid singer/songwriter oriented rock, they just chose to push boundaries. Which is very much in line with the old Rolling Stone point-of-view, that weird puritanical streak that discounted bands that were intentionally crude or ugly or not everyday Joes. Meagre star ratings for you, Black Sabbath, X, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Lydia Lunch.

at the university gym last night, the 18-year-olds on the climbing wall were blasting this album, so it must be cool with the modern youth of today

xp haha, thorough msg board this

The original version of the album is unfortunately a travesty

Pardon my French, but this is utter bollocks. Also have never bought the idea that there's some sort of tongue-in-cheek laughing-up-their-sleeves Zappa/Mothers thing going on with this album.

If there is, it's limited to "I found a reason"

Good work on this thread by my friends from the Lou Guest DJ's on WPIX-FM Listening Thread, tylerw and Tom D.

xp agree I never thought of it as an ironic record, not at all like Zappa to me, on the contrary it has a lot of emotional and sincere statements

It seems to be their most mainstream record. Most conventional pop but still has something of a subversive edge.

I have the Fully Loaded version but might grab some version of the forthcoming one.

So once they've got through this they've reissued all the official during the lifetime Lps, or even slightly posthumous in this case. At least of the Lou years. Wonder what they will go onto next? Is there going to be anything further?

Might be nice to get some of the live stuff issued legitimately separately. Not sure on the legitimacy of the old bootleg stuff that has been put out outside of the boxsets. Has any of that been legit or all boot? Just seem to be selling through supposedly legit sites like Amazon.

yeah there are random bootlegs (boston tea party, la cave etc) that seem to be just selling in an "import" kinda way on amazon and elsewhere. not sure if there's some kind of grey area there or if no one cares at this point. I imagine the next thing will be an expanded Live 69, w/ the complete matrix tapes + end of cole avenue. think there's still at least 45+ minutes (maybe more?) of the matrix stuff they annoyingly left off of the last 45th anniversary box set.

xpost yeah I'm probably over-emphasizing the irony, and in half the songs there is definitely no irony things like "Rock n Roll" and "Reason" are as vulnerable as VU have ever been. But I tend to write off the country rock songs and yesterday they seemed a bit sped up and more of a caricature, like mutant versions of songs off "American Beauty", than just deadpan dad rock. I would still recommend the album over any other VU to Grateful Dead fans. Not sure if that was on purpose (I can totally picture Lou being told to write some commercial tracks and sneering at west coast rock "I'll show you how to write a choogle") or VU just has this underlying sinister beauty that shows up no matter what.

Yeah, I sort of think of Loaded (outside of "Rock n Roll", "Reason", and maybe "New Age") as the apotheosis of Lou's Pickwick period tendencies, where questions of sincerity are beside the point.