Customer Reviews

Velvet Underground Live 1969 volume 1

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a completely fantastic album. Everything about it is just great: the song selections, the groove of the band, Lou Reed's dry, amiable banter ("No one here has school tomorrow?"). It gives the listener about as close a feeling to being at a VU show as, I imagine, we're ever gonna get.

No, the sound isn't Mobile Fidelity 24-bit whatever quality. But that's kind of the point. When you listen to "1969" you're listening to a band that never really got the proper appreciation when they were operating so they never really got properly recorded. We can't have it both ways. But it sounds just fine to me. This is what there is and I'm just thankful it exists at all.

My favorite songs: a chilled out "Waiting for my Man" that's a mellow shadow of the abrasive original but reinforces, not waters down, the point of the song; a smokin' "What Goes On" that transcends its own washing machine drone over 8:55 and becomes a kind of musical locomotive; "Over You," which is sad and beautiful and tender and, in my opinion, just a perfect love song.

My only complaint is not with the music but with the packaging. These are not two separate entities here, but for some reason the record company sells them as such. That may come in handy for those buying music on a budget, but "1969" deserves to be re-packaged as a proper single unit. You wouldn't break up "Exile on Main Street." There isn't a "White Album" volume 1 & 2. Columbia has yet to put out a respectable CD of "Blonde on Blonde" but at least there's not "Blonde 1" and "Blonde 2." "1969" is in a class with all three of those records and should be treated as such.

Even more than "The Velvet Underground and Nico," this album made me a lifelong VU obsessive. I learned to play guitar because of this album. It redefined how I would listen to all music afterward. It makes me ache with regret because I was too young to ever see this band live. It's ample proof of Lou Reed's songwriting genius--and surprisingly revealing evidence that he's not just a nasty, scary human being (despite his efforts the rest of his career to prove he is). It's where you should go to hear the underrated, quiet heroes of the VU: Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker. It's so essential you won't mind the low-fi sound and tape hiss. It's music that makes you glad to be alive. A Top 5 desert island disc. I could go on...

However, as has already been noted often, breaking up the original two-LP set into individual CDs is an injustice. And the cover is one of the all-time eyesores.

But who cares?

Ok, I'll join the bandwagon of those mystified why this original double album, which I proudly still own, was broken down into two separate volumes. This now means I have to write two 5-star reviews instead of one, but with this piece of work I'll gladly do it.

I've listened to a lot of double-live albums in my life. Most of them are unlistenable even once. These albums go on and on with extended jams of their songs, and it just gets tedious.

This piece of work work does exactly the same thing, but for some reason mesmerizes me. Maybe it's because the songs were too short in their original recording. Maybe it's because they're so good they can go on forever as far as I'm concerned. Or maybe this band just knows how to play a live set.

I'll go with the last choice here. As influential as The Velvet Underground is famous for being, they add a new dimension to that praise with this album. They hit home run after home run with songs that were good to begin with, but take on majestic status in their live translation. Much of what they do is not that complex, and is almost primitive in it's repetitiveness. But from Buddy Holly to John Lennon to this band, it's turning something simple into something magic that makes it good rock and roll.

If they offered 6 stars, this is one of the few reviews I would give that rating to.

When I was about 17, Edwyn Collins of the then-magnificent Orange Juice told the New Musical Express that this was the best album ever made. He may be right.

69 Live was the gorgeous, glamorous oddity with the rude cover in my record collection even before Edwyn's solemn declaration (I think we were all pretty solemn in 1980). It's a double album and, if you want to buy it now, you have to shell out for two separately-packaged CDs, which is a horrible thing to do to such a powerful unity.

This is the Velvet Underground after John Cale's departure--less arty, out of Warhol's shadow--but no less melancholy or gloriously nasty for all that. It's a long, grubby recording made on cassette in Texas during one of the Velvets' long tours of college campuses. The quality is, by digital standards, so poor it would never make it to release these days. This is such a defiantly analogue recording that, if you could still buy it, I'd recommend that you buy the cassette and play it too loud on your car stereo.

There's a sequence of songs on this album which so perfectly captures the low-life glamour, the elegiac beauty and the kinetic force of the Velvets at their best that it ought to be a compulsory listen for students of rock and roll. Waiting For My Man, Lisa Says, What Goes On, Sweet Jane and We're Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together--a twenty minute wall of sound unbettered in popular music. This means, that if you're going to buy just one of these CDs, it should be volume one.

I'd give this an extra half star if the sound were better. People talk about "lo-fi" as if bad sound were somehow part of the Velvets' game plan. Wrong. What they pumped out live is one thing. What made it onto the tape is another. Fact is, this sounds like a very good bootleg---better than the "Quine Tapes" official release, to be sure. But it could be much, much better. But it ain't! So we have to deal with that. Still, this, and Vol. 2 (which I rank a half-star better), are mandatory for VU fans. It's post-Cale VU, and it's just before Lou Reed split the band. ...(and please get Vol. 2 as well, since it SHOULD be a double CD). All the songs are worth having. "Heroin" stands out---in fact, it jumps out and grabs you by the throat, or somewhere else. But I guess my real passion for this album is based on the extended jam on "What Goes On"---it may be the most vital 9 minutes of rock 'n' roll you'll ever hear. Words fail me---I'm listening to it now (again). Get it!!!

This was actually the first Velvets album a lot of us ever heard if you were growing up in the mid-70s, as their original albums (except for "Loaded") were all out of print and impossible to obtain in most areas of the country. I first heard it in about 1976 on 8-track tape. I remember listening to it in my dad's car, which was the only 8-track tape player in the house, idling the car with the window open so I wouldn't die from gas fumes, listening to "What Goes On," and thinking, "So -this- is what all the fuss is about."

This isn't the furiously aggressive Velvets of the John Cale/Warhol/Factory days, as others have noted. With Cale's exit from the band, and the addition of the far more pop-oriented Doug Yule to bolster Reed's move back toward more basic rock and roll, some people regard this as a watered-down version of the Velvets. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's true, the songs sound different without Cale, but the new versions of the songs reveal different aspects that were sometimes lost underneath the ferocious howl and drone of Velvets Mark I. This is the version of the band that Jonathan Richman saw and fell in love with, and it's not hard to hear that influence in his music, as well as the music of most of the lower-key post-rock bands these days.

"Live 1969," also gives us a chance to hear Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed play guitar. Sterling, who was terminally underappreciated, really shines here with his tough, blues-based solos and solid backing for the songs. And of course Lou Reed's anarchic, fuzz-zapped guitar is perfectly on target, whether he's grinding out buzzsaw solos or rattling jagged rhythm guitar.

It would be nice to have this remastered properly and in one complete package, instead of broken up over two CDs, and it would be nice if it had real liner notes instead of a dated essay by Elliot Murphy (anybody remember him?), but in this life you can't have everything, and these two CD's contain a lot, even in their current state.

When a live album re-creates its studio sound, where's the added value in that? This VU album doesn't. These songs find a groove and then meander with a lazy intensity that's oddly compelling and much different than their studio versions. Also, Lou pokes a little fun at the Dallas audience as an added bonus. I'd get the album for one track alone: "What Goes On." Try putting that song on your Walkman right before you go for a run or when you pull your car onto a deserted highway. You'll motor.

Along with the MC5, the Velvets were the most undeservedly overlooked band of their time. This album and its companion, Volume 2, are still every bit as fresh played today as when they first came out. Eight, nine, ten minute songs without a wasted note, great versions of "Waiting For My Man", "Sweet Jane", and a thrashing "Heroin" are all here plus more. Lou Reed and the late Sterling Morrison run a hefty guitar clinic, and the banter onstage is pretty rich. Great stuff. Five stars also for the second volume.

This is truly an amazing album, capturing one of the great bands in music history live in first rate form, though not in their best incarnation. The band had recently undergone a transformation, with Doug Yule replacing John Cale as bassist, though not replacing him on the other instruments and not possessing Cale's general musical genius. The departure of Cale, who was forced out of the band in a power struggle with Lou Reed, left the outfit a simpler, less complex band, and more of a backing band for Lou Reed. One would have imagined that this would have had a dramatic impact on the quality of their live performances, but Cale is amazingly missed less than one would imagine, even on songs like "Heroin" where one would imagine the starker sound would not be adequate.

The quality of the recording is average at best, with many of the numbers possessing a boxy quality (e.g., listen to the vocals on "Femme Fatale") and the songs are consistently hurt musically by Reed's persistently out-of-tune guitar, but this is completely overwhelmed by the energy and passion of the performances. "Passion" is an odd word to use in writing of the Velvets, since they were always known far more for their detachment and cool disregard. But these are nonetheless passionate, even aggressive, performances. In a couple of places the songs are, in fact, downright exhilarating, far more so than on the original studio recordings. "What Goes On," for instance, always makes me want to not merely dance, but move every part of my body. The long instrumental breaks, which are in many ways remarkably simple from a musical point of view, are nonetheless flat out hypnotic, with Lou Reed playing rhythm guitar almost as if it were lead. Luckily, this isn't the only musical highlight on the disc, with several tremendous versions of Velvet Underground standards, from "Lisa Says" to "Sweet Jane" to "Rock and Roll" to the surprisingly robust "Heroin" (the number one would have thought Cale's absence was most likely to devastate).

Most fans will know that the original LP of the album was split into two CDs with extra cuts added. The great news is that the two discs work marvelously as separate discs. I would definitely encourage any fan to pick up both. Vol. 1 has more of a rock and roll feel than the second disc, but I really couldn't say that one is better than the other. Most of us never got to hear the Velvet Underground live (indeed, I have never met anyone who can make that claim, while I have on the other hand friends who saw Television and Big Star in the seventies), so I'm especially grateful that these two discs exist.

This is my personal favorite of ALL the Velvets' immortal discs -- the only problem is that this original double-album has been cut into two separate CDs when it ought to be packaged as one. The Lou Reed we see here is a far cry from the snarling beast he was to become; in his remarks between songs, he actually sounds as if he wants to be liked. And well he should -- what makes this live disc so unusual is that the Velvets were playing great rock and roll for a crowd that barely seemed awake. Glorious rave-ups that should end with cheers end with a few pitiful claps -- proof positive that this band would always be light-years ahead of its audience.