Notes from the Underground: Lost & Forgotten Rarities of The Velvet Underground

In 1964, when the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed was still in his early twenties, he moved to New York from his parent’s home on Long Island to work as an in-house songwriter for bargain-bin record label Pickwick Records. That same year, he wrote "The Ostrich," a parody of silly '60s dance crazes like the Mashed Potato. While not technically a proper Velvet Underground song, "The Ostrich" is the first recorded collaboration of Reed and John Cale, as part of a makeshift band called The Primitives. The two would go on to start the Velvets the next year.

Considering that it was a minor hit, "The Ostrich" is shockingly vicious. The song begins with the infamous Ostrich tuning, in which Reed tuned every string on his guitar to the same note, ringing in its hook with repeated pounding strikes as if scoring the tune of an alarm clock. Reed screams, background singers shriek, the surrounding band beats furiously in time, and a wind effect howls underneath it all. While it may be disguised as a simple rip of The Crystals' riff from "Then He Kissed Me," "The Ostrich" contained many of the base elements of the Velvets’ future genius: an affection for cacophonous drone sounds, plenty of repetitive, yet unique rhythms, and a generous portion of controlled chaos.

Although various forms of this song have been released on both Velvet Underground rarities compilations Peel Slowly and See and Another View, "Guess I’m Falling In Love" is yet another track written and promoted just before the formation of the Velvet Underground. It was possibly first introduced under the name of another ad-hoc band such as The Primitives, although the exact information seems lost to history. No copy of the original song exists in any studio recorded form, so only two live recordings and a vocal-less backing track represent its existence for current obsessives.

Regardless, Reed and company liked the song enough to continue to use it in live performances, such as this bootleg from New York’s The Gymnasium in 1967. Again, the song is a simple one, but it denotes a very early personality to Lou Reed and John Cale’s vision, an understanding of the power of volume, contrast, and a simple riff. Bootleggers often knew the song by its colloquial name "Fever In My Pocket," and once it has wormed its way into your brain, that’s exactly what it will be.

Like any angsty 22-year-old, Lou Reed had a Bob Dylan phase in the mid-sixties. In fact, "I’m Waiting For The Man," possibly the the Velvet Underground's most well known and representative tune, began as an acoustic Bob-Dylan-folk tribute complete with Reed’s heavily affected vocal imitation of the singer’s famous inflection. In that same set of demos proceeding the recording of The Velvet Underground and Nico is "Prominent Men" another Dylan inspired ramble.

What’s interesting is the marked similarities and contrasts between the two songwriters. Reed and company mimic Dylan in their harmonic layering, their figurative storytelling, and even the chord structures of the band’s early songs, but Reed seems much more interested in exploring his own abstract imagery than actually exploring the social criticism of the song’s Dylan-inspired concept. In some sense, "Prominent Men" is a song of discovery, in which Reed realizes his proclivity toward sonic—rather than social—subversion.

The staccato riff that opens “There She Goes Again” is a common one, originally used in 1962 by Marvin Gaye on his single "Hitch Hike," and subsequently by Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones for their cover of Marvin’s original. Reed, who likely culled the intro from the Stones’ version, obviously saw "There She Goes Again" as a pop concession, an attempt to make his album more palatable and, more importantly, recognizable to potential listeners.

In this demo from a rehearsal of their early songs at Andy Warhol’s Factory, in a period just before they released their debut album, it’s interesting to hear them struggle with the song’s tone. The first rendition skirts between the sound of their heavier songs, like “Run Run Run" or "I’m Waiting For The Man," and the poppy sunshine of "Sunday Morning" as a tambourine rattles nervously in the background. Next, they add German songstress Nico to the vocals, hoping that her distinctive singing would lift the track up into the air. When the album was released, the band had clearly struck a balance between their experimental noise and the pop tendencies of "There She Goes Again" to the song's DNA, but it’s fun to observe them before they had gotten it quite right.

Before the Welsh experimental musician John Cale left the Velvet Underground in 1968, every song they made, even the calmer and sweeter ones had a decidedly urgent and raw feel to them. Songs like "Sunday Morning" and "I’ll Be Your Mirror" may seem soft and contemplative at first, but a current of chaos runs beneath it all, often supplied by Cale’s signature electric viola. From their first self titled album to their second White Light/White Heat, this vein only thickened, birthing heavier numbers like its title track and the infamous "Sister Ray," which features Cale on an organ that was rerouted through a distorted guitar amplifier.

John Cale would often push the band’s songs into a tremulous and purposefully awkward place, where it seems like at any moment the music might fall into discord. Their first album without Cale, simply titled The Velvet Underground, formed with Reed solely at the helm and his leadership showed. The songs are centered, soft, contemplative, and comfortable. Even when they rock, they rock in ecstasy rather than agony. This rehearsal demo of "Walk Alone," a song that would never be properly recorded, is the earliest existing evidence of this form of songwriting in Reed, that even in 1966, Reed’s side of the songwriting partnership helped to hold the band to the ground.

In 1966, Columbia Records rejected an initial version of The Velvet Underground and Nico the band had submitted to them, deeming it impossible to market and difficult to enjoy. For years, this version was lost to the sands of time, until a record collector discovered an acetate copy of that album being sold on a New York City sidewalk in 2002. The differences between this early version of the album and the one that was eventually released by Verve are actually pretty minor, outside of the addition of the more pop oriented songs "Sunday Morning" and "There She Goes Again."

The early version of "Run Run Run," however, is a particularly driving and bass heavy rendition of the already intense song. Its riff seems to be flipped upside down, the quick rhythmic highs are now slow plodding lows. The rhythm section thumps underneath Reed’s vocals with impressive force, turning the song bluesy at-the-crossroads song into something much more proto-metal.

The song "Sister Ray," the famous conclusion to White Light/White Heat, is eighteen minutes of roaring, distorted jamming that, at least in legend, made an engineer storm out of the studio in a huff, was also one of the band’s favorite live staples. The song would often stretch to thirty minutes or more, allowing the band to explore widely various interpretations of its flexible riff and moody, lurid storyline, often in ways far less heavy and compressed than their corrosive studio rendition. Performances range from theatrical to bluesy to proto-punk.

This version of "Sister Ray," however, performed at one of their favorite venues, Boston’s The Boston Tea Party, may be more loosely constructed than the original, but it runs neck and neck in volume. While the original uses noise to lend weight to the song’s melody, this time the band makes noise just for the love of noise itself. This is a performance that really gets at part of what made them such a great band, because even in their indulgent jamming, even when Reed is simply letting his guitar roar for four minutes at a time, you can hear how complex his love of the sound is. They were the first to make something this noisy sound good only because they knew what good noise sounded like.

In 1969, after the release of their third, self-titled album, the Velvet Underground took a year off. As much as they could anyway. They spent most of 1969 touring the country, playing their now significant well of songs for various small audiences in underground venues across America. During this time they were in and out of the studio, recording pieces of their fourth album. Due to problems with the label, however, these tracks that had been recorded in this interim period were not released. Bits of these sessions have been released over the past few decades as parts of special editions and rarities compilations, the most condensed of which is 1984’s VU. These songs reflect the transient feel of that specific time in the band’s life: they are fleeting, playful, and off the cuff. One can imagine the band cramming into the studio one day to record a song based on a riff that had just come to Reed’s mind the day before. "She’s My Best Friend" is one of the highlights, a Beatles-inspired rattler with a honky-tonk twinge.

Unlike more "mainstream" cultural counterparts, the Velvet Underground never really had a kind of White Album moment, where they explored their specific musical talents through various genres. Instead, they were experimental in a much more personal way, trying on various topics, moods, rhythms, and sounds with a touch lighter than full genre cosplay. Instead of spreading their talent from country to pop, they traveled themselves between extremes of tone, from the harsh and glaring to the quiet and thoughtful. The 1969 studio sessions, recorded between trips touring across America, seem to be the most subtle in this regard, belying a triumph of collective creativity and friendship amongst the band members than any kind of grand artistic vision. The song "Foggy Notion" is one of the best examples of this attitude. The song is quirky and unassuming. Moe Tucker’s drums snap, the Doug Yule’s bass wanders, but all circle around Reed’s half-sung have monologued vocals.

"Ride Into The Sun" is a song that simply never seems to have gotten its due. There are a handful of recordings, one or two demos, a studio-recorded backing track, and a couple of live bootlegs. The song is in the quiet and contemplative vein that Lou Reed’s songwriting began to drift into in the later part of the the Velvet Underground’s career, a mode that can be seen more fully illustrated in songs like "Pale Blue Eyes" and "I Found A Reason." "Ride Into The Sun" however, tries to trump the tremulous, gauzy quality of both of these songs, with Pachelbel’s-canon-style chord structures, layered falsetto vocals, and sparse arrangement. Unfortunately, the song never hit its sweet spot in the studio. The demos are stilted and buffed to a shine, lacking the very emotion that the song seems to be written to convey. This vocal-less recording of the song’s backing track, which never seems to have received official vocals, shows what the song could have been, a raw, circular elegy that you never want to end.

As a music nerd today might idolize the early days of hip-hop and obsessively collect 12’ singles and records from obscure and forgotten artists, in the 1960s Lou Reed was a doo-wop nerd who love to listen to and collect the works of obscure doo-wop combos. This might come as something of a surprise, as the Velvet Underground was a rock band and their music didn’t involve the same kind of multi-part harmonies and acapella singing that makes doo-wop. One can, however, see its traces in many of the band’s arrangements, such as on the song "One of These Days," another track recorded in 1969 that went unreleased until 1985. The song merges country twang with complexly-layered falsetto harmonies, reminiscent of Reed’s obsession. While it might be interesting to hear a version of the Velvet Underground that fully embraced Reed’s passion for this retro sound, it’s this kind of hidden influence that made the band legendary. Influences came from all angles, but in the end, they coalesced so completely that they are unrecognizable.

The Velvet Underground had a few songs like "I’m Gonna Move Right In," bluesy, rolling rockers that make you want to roll down the windows and drive into the sunset that marks the beginning of a particularly depraved night. This song in particular only officially appears as a vocal-less backing track on the spotty, second wave rarities compilation Another View, but luckily an unknown bootlegger was present on one of the nights that they performed the song, probably sometime in 1969. Maybe they never fully recorded "I’m Gonna Move Right In" in a studio because it seemed to thrive so much more in a live setting, when the band could spread out unhindered and feel the throbbing pulse of the song and its rumbling, distant undertones. In the studio, it sounds uniform and clean, but on stage, it ebbs and flows with the energy of the band as a unit.

When the Velvet Underground was on tour in 1969, they stopped in San Francisco to play a number of shows at a club called The Matrix. One of the shows comprised a third of the recently released Quine Tapes, famously bootlegged by Velvet Underground superfan Robert Quine. A number of other recordings were made that month as well and they are the majority of the band’s best live compilation 1969: The Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, released in 1974. The most impressive recording on that album by far is the band’s nearly nine minute rendition of "What Goes On."

"What Goes On" is probably the loudest song on the Velvet Underground's third self-titled album, and even then, it’s remarkably subdued. At The Matrix, it’s another story: a slow build leads into a heavy revolution of the song’s painstakingly abstracted chord progression. Moe Tucker pounds the beat, Doug Yule swirls the organ into unmatched fury, and Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison grind away at their guitars like their scratching an unsatisfiable itch. The performance is something on an enigma. The song is relatively simple, and the playing is strangely uniform, but it's an undeniably explosive listen. One wonders how The Matrix’s ceiling hadn't come to pieces by the time they were done.

The studio recording of "New Age," released in 1970 on Loaded, the band’s last album with any of its original members, is yet another example of unrealized potential. The recording lacks a central rhythm or any sort of spirited energy, two elements that the Velvet Underground typically carried in spades. While the album has numerous highly redeemable tracks, this is not one of them. To hear "New Age" live, however, is to listen to the song as its writer intended it, as a vaulting and overwhelmingly touching song. It is composed of a handful of distinct segments that segue one into the next, building tension until the ultimate release of the transition from "Something’s got a hold on me and I don’t know what" to "Oh it’s the dawning of a new age." The sections rise and fall, gaining momentum and adding height with each rotation. Its climax is the ultimate in rock catharsis, an emotional release that mirrors the personal rebirth in the song’s lyrics.

Songs like "Heroin," "Sister Ray," and "I'm Waiting For The Man" gave the Velvet Underground a strong reputation for drug abuse and depravity, but close listening will make it hard to find any distinctly negative, sad, or angry tones in these songs. "I'm Waiting For The Man" in particular, although it is a song about an addict in search of his fix, proceeds through a story with wide-eyed wonder, a love for life that seeps into every aspect of experience, even that of drug addiction. "I’m feeling good, I feel oh so fine, until tomorrow, but that's just another time," says the narrator, dismissing the cycle of addiction to enjoy the pleasure of the present. The studio recording ends with the band pounding away at the song’s riff in ecstasy, as if its narrator had finally gotten what he wanted and was walking blissfully home as the journey stretched ahead of him and the buzz took hold. The joy, the peace, the bliss of "I'm Waiting For The Man" lends it to a number of different interpretations, to a famously stadium-sized cover by David Bowie to this particularly touching live rendition by the band at San Francisco’s Matrix. It’s an especially slow, long version, leisurely and bittersweet. Reed even improvises a mournfully whistled solo in its middle. It's a version that says, yes, this is a song about heroin addiction, but thank God I’m alive to enjoy it.

When the original Velvet Underground broke up in 1970, they were essentially forgotten by all but the most devoted fans. Their albums went out of print and mainstream rock music moved towards the stadium. At the urging of famous rock critic and A&R Paul Nelson, in 1974 Mercury Records released a compilation of live recordings brought together by Nelson himself entitled 1969: The Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed. At the time, Lou Reed was more recognizable as a solo artist than a member of the original band. This live double album served as an introductory listening experience for a set of new fans who were otherwise unable to acquire their original albums. Thus began the band’s resurgence as an influence on punk and new wave music that culminated in an intense new popularity and recognition in the late 1970s.

The album itself is an odd representation of the band if it is viewed through their four original albums. John Cale had already left the band and thus there was no viola, many of the songs performed are vastly extended, and a few of the songs were previously unreleased by the band itself. But it’s a perfect distillation of the band’s casual essence and love of music and thus as-of-yet unheard songs, many of which, like "Ocean," are experimentally unstructured and not friendly to radio play, shine just as much as their more singular mainstays.

This live version of “Ride Into the Sun,” unlike the studio-recorded backing track shown before, is probably the best complete version of the song out there. Instead of extending one riff into a continuous loop, the song goes through a number of distinct stages. The demo that appears on the deluxe version of Loaded sounds like the band is struggling to make all of these various pieces fit together, but this live performance at The Matrix shows the band lending the song a sense of cohesion through quiet presence. It begins agonizingly soft, proceeding to build into an extended instrumental performance that ebbs and flows in the style of “New Age” or “Ocean.” Connecting it all together is Reed and Morrison’s distinctive dual guitar style, exceedingly lyrical, yet always subtle and focused on texture and mood. The two overlap with an abstracted style that would inspire future alternative guitarists like Television’s Tom Verlaine and Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham.

"I Love You" later appeared on Lou Reed’s first self-titled solo album along with a number of songs that he had written for the Velvet Underground but had never gotten a chance to record before the band dissolved. That first solo album is a notorious disappointment. Having left the band, Reed had, for a moment, focused his vision on the mainstream and thus created an album that took songs with distinct emotional complexity and embellished them in strange and often unfittingly saccharine ways. Honestly, that album’s rendition of "I Love You" is one of its highlights, but really it is a simple song with a simple message, and anything more than the quick and sparse demo above, softly played on guitar and organ, is giving the song more than it needs. This is, after all, Reed’s specialty: subtle songwriting that shines through arrangement with an indelible vision. No drums are necessary.

As is particularly evidenced by "Prominent Men" and early takes of "I’m Waiting For The Man," Lou Reed as a songwriter for the Velvet Underground was very influenced by Bob Dylan, at first mimicking his deeply cutting chord structures, vaguely cryptic lyrics, exploratory vocabulary, and constant sense of urgency. While Dylan span this style off into various styles and an epically expansive vision, early on Reed distilled an element of the style to a certain simplicity that helped to make the Velvet Underground’s songs become as direct and raw as they are. Sure, he mimics something of Dylan’s vocal inflection on "Love Makes You Feel Ten Feet Tall" a late demo by the band, but more so, the song, like famous Dylan numbers such as "Corrina, Corrina" or "Mr. Tambourine Man," evinces a wonder and disassociation with a small and simple piece of life. It would be hard to say that the the Velvet Underground really sounds like Dylan, but if you look hard enough, you can see his seed at their roots.

This demo of "Oh Gin," a song that was never properly recorded in the studio, embodies a particular part of the the Velvet Underground's sound that never really got refined during the band’s short life, although it’s a sound that we can hear faintly on songs like "What Goes On," "Train Round the Bend," or "I Can’t Stand It." It’s a road song, written to be blasted from the windows of a car as it’s careening down an American freeway. One can only imagine the glory of "Oh Gin" if it were ever recorded live or flushed out in a full studio recording. It has the potential for a long instrumental segment and storytelling elements in the vein of "I’m Waiting For The Man," but unfortunately, for a reason that is unknown, it remains a demo left as an afterthought, a chorus and a single verse recorded by the band in this short two minute and forty second clip.