Loaded: best VU album, rite guys?

"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.

yeah I don't think there's a bad song on the first 3 albums (or vu), a few lol filler songs on this one so it's the 'worst', I don't really have to rank the others, they are all good

http://www.mindovermetal.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Loutallica-Lulu.jpg

I could never figure out who sings "Sunday Morning"--sounds like--the Ghost of Future Lou, just back from all tomorrow's parties? "my brother Doug" 's audition? It should be just a bit unsettling, given the song, and so it is. I'll check out Fully Loaded, but never had a prob w the first version. True pop art, and "Head Held High"' even sounds like a Johnny Winter gay/gabba gabba anthem, early 70s vocal raunch and all. Way back when Creem did a VU commemoration, they quoted Lou: "That's a lot of people's favorite, and I'm not even on it!"

if I had to do it by which songs I listen to most 'vu' would prob win

admittedly Lou does not sound like Lou on Sunday Morning

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

― flopson, Thursday, March 29, 2012 2:00 PM (15 minutes ago)

I think part of the reason they're so widely loved is because of their polarizing versatility, so it's not surprising that diff ppl like diff aspects of what they do. I mean we're not talking about creedence clearwater revival here.

Peel Slowly And See is also great (despite or including some ridiculous early demos/rehearsals)

My main reference point for crazy and destructive were 1966 Who bootlegs and Never Mind the Bollocks.

There's a quote somewhere from Cale or Reed...not long after the Velvets formed, Cale went to Wales and came back with some new singles, "Anyway Anyhow Anywhere" and the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It" among them. Reed said to Cale (or vice-versa) something to the effect of, "We gotta put a record out soon, or everyone's gonna think we ripped these bands off!"

xxp i think people who don't like [velvet underground song] are fronting & if they just jammed it in the right mood they'd come around

great post bendy - I think one's own VU sequence narrative is maybe super important to how one ranks the albums. I became a big fan of Lou Reed in a vacuum, I had no outside information on him other than the records I could find (I was 13) which were Transformer & Coney Island Baby & Rock and Roll Animal. Thought he was the greatest thing ever. Heard about the Velvet Underground and for what seemed like an eternity (was probably 1-2 months, lol teenagers) I was looking for somebody who owned the records so I could hear them. Finally got to a friend's house and heard the first one, liked it, but it was when a friend brought White Light back from France that I really felt floored. Third album took another year to hear (after the same friend went back to France with his family, he brought me a copy). At this point I was pretty excited to hear Loaded, I knew its hits and assumed that the album versions would be great. Instead they sounded - breezy, airy. That was not what I wanted from "Sweet Jane" - I liked the Rock and Roll Animal version. I know that's not everybody's style of "Sweet Jane" but I liked & like crunchy riffy 70s shit like Steve Hunter. I bought Steve Hunter solo albums. And I still prefer Lou & Some Guys Who Can Really Play to Lou And His Artist Friends Who're Also Musicians, that's just me.

I dont think you can really not like a band if you're like "Oh, track 8 on the 3rd album is crap". Sort of implies that you've listened to at least that album a bunch.

in the mid-late 60s, eclecticism became the theme, plus I once saw a Cale quote indicating he and maybe they felt competitive w the Beatles--Lou dubbed acid rock rivals "California Trash," though I've heard Grateful Dead's '66 live versions of "Cream Puff War" which I'd swear were VU, good VU