The debate surrounding a classic Velvet Underground song
If you heard Loaded when it first came out in 1970, you had a lot of baggage to sort through. First and foremost, this was the album that caused Lou Reed to leave The Velvet Underground, the same band he formed with John Cale six years prior. If you were reading prominent music magazines during this time, you would also know that he left the band due to the album’s mixing and sequencing.
One of Reed’s major gripes was with ‘Sweet Jane’, the album’s main single. Reed put great care into composing ‘Sweet Jane’, and even though it only had three main chords, there was a special bridge that Reed was particularly proud of. The “heavenly wine and roses” section was one that Reed took pride in, flowing seamlessly with the rest of the song but introducing a completely different section into the mix.
Those initial listeners of Loaded heard no “heavenly wine and roses” section, though. The bridge had been cut from the song’s final mix, likely to cut down on the album’s runtime or simply make the song a bit tidier in terms of form. Whatever the reason was, the final version of ‘Sweet Jane’ didn’t have the bridge that Reed loved so much.
It doesn’t appear as though the band were the ones who did the editing, considering how the Doug Yule-led version of the band continued to perform the song in its full, unedited form while performing live in the last years of The Velvet Underground’s existence. In fact, Yule claimed that Reed himself was the one who edited ‘Sweet Jane’.
“He edited it,” Yule claimed in 1995. “You have to understand at the time, the motivation was… Lou was, and all of us were, intent on one thing and that was to be successful and what you had to do to be successful in music, was you had to have a hit, and a hit had to be uptempo, short, and with no digressions, straight ahead basically, you wanted a hook and something to feed the hook and that was it. ‘Sweet Jane’ was arranged just exactly the way it is on the original Loaded release exactly for that reason—to be a hit! ‘Who Loves The Sun’ was done exactly that way for that reason—to be a hit”.
This assessment seems to be in contrast with Reed’s complaints about the song over the years, but there actually is proof that Reed was more willing to accept the change than he initially indicated. While assembling the retrospective compilation LP NYC Man, Reed opted to use the edited version ‘Sweet Jane’, despite the original version previously being released on the 1995 box set Peel Slowly and See.
We may never know how Reed felt about the edit, but ‘Sweet Jane’ now exists as he originally intended.
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