![]() ![]() Tucker’s is the closing voice on the album, imbuing Reed’s “Afterhours” with a disarmingly sweet approachability.Īnd the beauty of the VU’s daunting reputation is that a suite of generally warm, simple, humanitarian songs was still construed as subversive in certain quarters. It’s not regressive, as such, but represents one of the few moments on a VU record that sounds nailed into its timeframe.Īnd what were “Beginning To See The Light” and “What Goes On” if not hearty, good-time rockers? The former in particular is a gush of irrepressible euphoria (“There are problems in these times/But whoo, none of them are mine”), with Moe Tucker’s drumming poised impeccably in the sweet spot between implacable forward momentum and the lazy back of the beat. The real shock is the fact that the organ trills wouldn’t sound out of place on a Doors or Strawberry Alarm Clock album. The obliquely experimental “The Murder Mystery,” meanwhile, outdoes White Light/White Heat’s “The Gift” by presenting two simultaneous narratives, panned either side of the stereo spectrum: Morrison and Tucker in the left channel, Reed and Yule in the right. The thrumming “Some Kinda Love,” like a low-voltage Creedence Clearwater Revival, swerves from non-judgemental (“No kinds of love are better than others”) to waspish (“And of course you’re a bore/But in that you’re not charmless”) and eventually strays into unsettling territory (“Let us do what you fear most/That from which you recoil”). “I’m Set Free,” the weightless, sincere “Pale Blue Eyes” (reputedly written with Reed’s former girlfriend Shelly Albin in mind), the appropriately hymnal “Jesus”… it was easy to interpret – or misinterpret – these spare, candid meditations as subconscious pleas for redemption, not least given the adulterous scenario set out in “Pale Blue Eyes”: “It was good what we did yesterday/And I’d do it once again/The fact that you are married/Only proves that you’re my best friend… But it’s truly, truly a sin.” “Let us do what you fear the most”īut it wasn’t all calmness and confession. Taking the transsexual Candy Darling as its nominal subject (glimpsed in the Andy Warhol film Flesh and, later, appearing at length in Warhol’s 1971 satire Women In Revolt), the song demonstrated an ahead-of-the-game sensitivity, applicable in any number of wider contexts – “I’ve come to hate my body/And all that it requires in this world” – and, as such, continues to resonate across a hearteningly broad listener base.Īs a by-product, “Candy Says” was also one of a handful of songs on the album which birthed an entire subset of unrepentantly awkward, wilfully naïf indie rock, delivered by bands who apparently took sartorial cues from Reed’s collegiate look on the album’s front cover. Plain-speaking, frail and small, the Yule-sung “Candy Says” made for a bravely muted opening track. Of course, the clues had been hiding in plain sight straight from the outset, with their debut album’s bruised, tender interludes “Sunday Morning” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” But when the third Velvets LP, matter-of-factly entitled The Velvet Underground, appeared in March 1969, it took this hushed vulnerability to the next level (downwards). It was time to reveal the fathomless depths beneath the shiny, shiny leather and peel-off bananas. The songwriter intuited that another album in the same distended vein would dilute the impact of both… besides which, the Velvets had been written off too often as mere sensationalists – a one-trick freak show. ![]() The conspicuously restrained songs that Reed brought to the table were deliberately at odds with White Light/White Heat’s static-flecked ozone of channeled chaos and cranked amps. Recordings for the third Velvets album began in Hollywood’s TTG Studios in November 1968. They needed a Pisces to balance it out.” Reveal the fathomless depths In an interview for the online music mag Perfect Sound Forever, Yule gnomically observed, “John a Pisces, Lou was a Pisces, Moe and Sterling were Virgos… and I was a Pisces. With Cale out of the picture, Yule was duly drafted into the Velvets to play bass and organ. Yule had been living in his band manager’s large apartment – sometimes frequented by various combinations of Velvets whenever they were passing through – and when Morrison happened upon Yule diligently practicing one fateful day, he passed a warm recommendation on to Lou Reed. Doug Yule, a soft-voiced guitarist from Boston, had been playing with The Glass Menagerie when his abilities came to the attention of Velvets guitarist Sterling Morrison. ![]()
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