Parts of it are more interesting than listenable, like the band dicking around while Lou Reed patiently attempts to explain the lyrics to "Venus in Furs" to Nico. The rest of disc four is pulled from a taped rehearsal at the Factory a few months before the Scepter sessions, previously available in bootleg form. And since the audio's taken straight from a beat-up acetate the whole fantastic mess is covered in crackles and hiss. Moe Tucker's rudimentary drumming on an alternate version of "Heroin" is primitive to the extreme, while the original mix of "Femme Fatale" place a bizarre falsetto backing vocal from one of the male members high enough in the mix to put a listener on edge. Compared to the familiar finished version the material sounds unhinged. Some of the tracks would end up on the version of album that Verve issued after taming them down during another round of mixing others were re-recorded entirely. The first half is a reproduction of the one-of-a-kind acetate discovered by a record collector in a New York City street sale in 2002- and sold on eBay a few years later for over $25,000- that contained the first version of the album that the band delivered to Columbia Records (and which the label rejected). It's a sensual sensory overload that underlines just how successful the group was at the music-as-S&M game it was playing with listeners.ĭisc four is even rawer, and removes the last bit of remaining studio refinement to expose the Velvets' primal proto-punk heart. "All Tomorrow's Parties", "Venus in Furs", and "The Black Angel's Death Song" are oppressively noisy, but pleasurably so. Lou-fronted rockers like "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "Run, Run, Run" leap out from the speakers with an aggression that other versions lack. The transformative effect it has on the songs is unreal. In fact, with every throbbing bassline and squalling viola set dead center, the mix is suffocating. As incredible as it sounds, though, the mono version on the second disc provides the set's first moment of serious revelation: It doesn't breathe at all. The stereo mix breathes in a way that the album never has before. The amp hiss, tape saturation, and overall grit that made TVU&N leap out from the scores of mannered psychedelic rock albums released around the same time is still firmly in place it's just that the grit sounds better. Levenson knows the material well enough to keep from making it sound too clean. The remastering process was handled by Bill Levenson, who's been working on Velvets material since the mid-80s rarities collections VU and Another VU, and who oversaw the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set that collected all of the group's studio recordings. On paper it may seem indulgent, but listening through the entire massive collection of material results in a sharper-edged portrait of the group than there's ever been, with all of the danger filled back in.įirst there's the album proper. So aside from the 45 minutes of Chelsea Girl, you've got five hours of essentially the same 11 songs presented over and over in various levels of audio fidelity. The new super deluxe edition of TVU&N consists of a new stereo remaster of the album, a new mono remaster (both taken from the original tapes), a disc of alternate versions and mixes of the songs, a disc of practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording from around the time the album was recorded (spread across two discs), and a remaster of Nico's solo debut, Chelsea Girl, which the Velvets performed on. Is a limited-edition "super deluxe" six-disc box set really going to help restore any of the ineffable outsider cool that it's lost over the years? Actually, yeah, it is. The most dangerous record of 1967 has been absorbed into the establishment rock canon the paradoxical fame it earned from its hilariously terrible sales figures in its early years has been negated by reissue after deluxe-edition reissue and its transgressive kinky-druggy menace has been smothered by the embrace of millions of overly precious Wes Anderson acolytes. Forty-five years after its release, everything that was supposed to have made The Velvet Underground & Nico special has been nearly eradicated by its own legend.
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