Velvet Underground: Live 1969 vs. Grateful Dead: Live/Dead

the true darkness comes in the starship age

In any case, the Velvets didn’t return to California for two years. As Sterling said in his usual manner, “We left California alone for two years, because they’re so determined to do their own thing, their own San Francisco music. We were just rocking the boat – they don’t want to know about that. ‘There’s only one music, and we all know what that is…it’s what the Grateful Dead play. That’s the very best rock & roll can ever get…’ We said, ‘You’re full of shit, your city, your state, and everything else.’”

hahaha love it

wonder what the "I have heard neither of these albums but I'm still voting" split will look like -- I fall into that camp & I vote VU, but only partly out of spite

Wish there was as much VU recorded live between 65 and 70 as there is GD. Especially the Cale years.
Still I do love the GD speshly August 'ö8, Feb '69 and May '70 but there is other really good stuff by them over those years and up to the '74 retirement, beyond to some extent too.

would love to hear the acid test stuff. only really early live dead i've heard are those two lps of 66 live material that came out on (i think) mgm in the early 70's & are pretty ropey performance-wise.

dunno if the vu's rehearsals for the max's kansas city run have been released officially, but there's some great stuff in there from memory.

jefferson airplane's music is a lot darker and more fucked up then they're given credit for, anyways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYr5D4lqC0w

They were sort-of released, they came out as part of the 2 disc promo, but were dropped when the deluxe edition came out.

I never much cared for live VU - better in the studio.

....just the opposite for the Dead.

live VU can be awesome but 69 live is dull as dishwater imo. I know lotsa people love that jangly pastoral VU style but to me it really amplifies a lot of weaknesses in Lou's writing, weaknesses that can be submerged in pure volume.

there are so many other dead live artifacts i never get back to live/dead, so i guess the velvets record

Don't agree that it's just jangly or that there are important weaknesses in Lou's VU songs, but either way, the Gymnasium set is a satisfying Cale-era onslaught, prob still posted here and there.

"heavenly wine and roses seems to whisper to me when you smile"

Delmore Schwartz lols from the grave at that line

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

OH SHIT

yes, from a tremendous height, onto the dead.

I've never owned that VU record, but from the parts I've heard it surely gets my vote. I'm another one of those "I've tried" types with Live/Dead, and it'll never be my thing.

there are so many other dead live artifacts
this is why i voted for the VU ultimately, though Live/Dead is a great example of the classic double live LP.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Quite.

Back in yr stinky hippyhole deadheads

:(

:(

Frank Zappa is rolling over in his grave

Too close

The answer is so obviously live/dead... get with it dorks

rong

I enjoy both but have to go with VU. I also love that Dark Star. I still recall hearing it and thinking, " ohhh, so this is why some people say T Verlaine sounds like J Garcia ". Until then i'd only heard Workingmans and American Beauty, and thought, "wtf are they talking about"? Lol. I know better now. Also I strongly dislike "lovelight".

I'll always choose a group reinventing rock, in their own image, over white boys imitating Otis Redding re "Lovelight".

swiss movement is miles ahead of both of these. i'd still like to hear the velvets' set from the night in '69 they shared the bill with the dead. the dead's set shows a band who were completely put off their game by the velvets, to the point that they said "fuck it, let's just playback 'what's become of the baby'"

oh and of course "at san quentin" is also way better than either of these records

i am solely basing this opinion on the dark star on there also

Man, considering how much I like the Velvets, it's pretty interesting that I have next to no interest in any of their live recordings.

I'll always choose a group reinventing rock, in their own image, over white boys imitating Otis Redding re "Lovelight".

― VyrnaKnowlIsAHeadbanger, Saturday, February 17, 2018 12:53 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Grateful Dead, led by a half-Spanish-American vocalist/guitarist, helped reinvent rock/blues/folk/bluegrass as improvisational and experimental music that was not infrequently equally avant-garde as that of the Velvets, if not moreso. Just as John Cale played with La Monte Young, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten studied composition under Luciano Berio and played alongside fellow student Steve Reich. And just as Lou Reed was a New York (well, actually, Long Island) Jew inspired by African-American jazz musicians, Mickey Hart was a New York Jew inspired by not just the same (though of a less avant-garde ilk than Reed; that interest was more Lesh's domain) but also by Latin-American and African percussion, and who had gone further and actually played with notable jazz musicians before joining the Dead. It was, yes, an Irish-American "white boy," Ron McKernan, who sang that Joe Scott sang made famous by Bobby Blue Bland, among many other blues and r&b classics including an Otis Redding tune, but he did so after being immersed in blues and r&b from a very early age by his father, a dj at a primarily African-American radio station, as well as in African-American society growing up in Palo Alto, CA, whose then-incorporated Eastern half in whose bars he began hanging out as a teenager became majority-black in the early-mid '60s.

except for 'what goes on' 1969 version yep xp

moo vaughn i <3 u

The answer is so obviously live/dead... get with it dorks

otm

Back in yr stinky hippyhole deadheads

― Οὖτις, Friday, 29 May 2015 00:58 (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no u

Live 1969 would be even more perfect had it contained "Foggy Notion."

David Allan Coe's son Tyler on why he hates the Dead--he posts on FB all the time about his love for the Velvets' live recordings, 25 minutes of "Sister Ray."

(And 25 minutes of "Sister Ray" is about 20 minutes too much, even on the studio record, my interest does flag after a certain point, tho some of it's brilliant.)

man I haven't listened to the studio Sister Ray in many, many years but I do remember feeling like it was worth it if you rode it out. when the vocals come back in, the feeling that you've been somewhere very different. not unlike dark star really, only with worse musicians and a harsher vibe

The Grateful Dead, led by a half-Spanish-American vocalist/guitarist, helped reinvent rock/blues/folk/bluegrass as improvisational and experimental music that was not infrequently equally avant-garde as that of the Velvets, if not moreso. Just as John Cale played with La Monte Young, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten studied composition under Luciano Berio and played alongside fellow student Steve Reich. And just as Lou Reed was a New York (well, actually, Long Island) Jew inspired by African-American jazz musicians, Mickey Hart was a New York Jew inspired by not just the same (though of a less avant-garde ilk than Reed; that interest was more Lesh's domain) but also by Latin-American and African percussion, and who had gone further and actually played with notable jazz musicians before joining the Dead. It was, yes, an Irish-American "white boy," Ron McKernan, who sang that Joe Scott sang made famous by Bobby Blue Bland, among many other blues and r&b classics including an Otis Redding tune, but he did so after being immersed in blues and r&b from a very early age by his father, a dj at a primarily African-American radio station, as well as in African-American society growing up in Palo Alto, CA, whose then-incorporated Eastern half in whose bars he began hanging out as a teenager became majority-black in the early-mid '60s.

― Moo Vaughn

to sum up, "live/dead" qualifies as "record collection rock" just as much as any of the velvet underground's records do

Neither are RCR but let's not that start all that again.

The cut of What Goes On on Live 1969 makes me so happy.

Organ doin its thing.

The answer is so obviously live/dead... get with it dorks

― global tetrahedron, Saturday, February 17, 2018 7:08 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We need more provocations like this tho

Thank you. Not sure why I felt like posting that at 6am but here we are

i haven't listened to either of these in a million years but i was listening to a CD of this live stuff a lot last year and if you squint its kinda like VU and the Dead had a baby. in 1966.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr1YzUDPl-E

If David Allen Coe's son is our barometer for divining good music I guess I should stop caring about the whole thing altogether

I also think they'd quite playing it live by '70.

I doubt they played it live after Cale left.