Hear Me Out: ‘Loaded’ is the real Velvet Underground masterpiece
Recently, I was lucky enough to pick up an original early copy of The Velvet Underground’s Loaded. It came as a surprise to me that the twinkling prologue to ‘Sweet Jane’ didn’t exist on it. This set in motion a particular fascination that I haven’t been able to shake: that songs are never a fixed form of art.
Words in a book, once committed to the page, will stay that way forever, barring the odd differing translations or revisions. Likewise, a painting may fade over time or be splashed by Cream of Tomato in a Just Stop Oil attack, but for the most part, all other art is as it was. Songs, however, are impermanent paintings elaborated on canvasses of silence, wiped clean like an etch-a-sketch by the noiselessness that they fleetingly impeached. Songs are an art form forever in flux.
So, something like ‘Sweet Jane’, a track fans of alternative music have heard so many times it seems as solid and unchanging a masterpiece as the Statue of David, is but one temporary incarnation of a performance that was never the exact same ever again. Up until they were recorded, and forever afterwards, songs are subject to the odd lyric change, minuscule or major tempo shifts, notes out of place and every other revision, natural variation, or edit you can think of – there are no carbon copies in music, no such thing as songs, in a way, merely recordings of musical performances.
The variant shifts between different acetate etchings have massive consequences; they change immeasurably what we once thought to be fixed thanks to the nature of recording techniques. So perhaps something as simple as the shimmering prologue to ‘Sweet Jane’ – a few bars that sound like the till ringing open on spring – being absent on the initial copy of Loaded, consigned it to the ash heap of history, where a minor production flurry may have heralded it as The Velvet Underground’s breakthrough masterpiece… at long last! Much to Lou Reed’s disillusion, fate decreed that was not to be the case.
However, this line of intrigue got me thinking about where the album truly does triumph, perhaps beyond any other in the band’s brief discography. My thesis was this: if songs are far from as solid as the vinyl that houses them, merely one-time performances of a preordained idea – which was particularly true with the largely recorded ‘as live’ Loaded – then beyond the concepts or facets that draw highfalutin commentary, what are the performances like on the album?
As far as songs being considered ephemeral bursts of energy, few records in the history of alternative music can match Loaded. This is typified by the knockout jab and cross of ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Rock & Roll’. Those two tracks alone embody the energy and atmosphere that The Velvets had mused upon since their formation. Their songs up until this point had been about the underbelly of New York City, but this time, the crack and fizzle of the raucous music seemed to capture its energy with a fidelity that still places you in the bowels of 1960s-era Soho half a century later.
There is a pop and fizz to everything on the record. The sense of urgency exuding from the songs is fitting for the band. The rush brings out brilliantly imperfect performances from everyone involved. For an outfit that unprecedentedly tugged at the fraying seams of civility, the duly rugged beauty and enthusiasm in the simple, melodic guitar has a stunning beauty all of its own.
If The Velvet Underground’s intentions from the very start had been to combine the literary scope and honest grit of beat prose, the avant-garde experimentation of the Fluxus movement, and the visceral edge of rock ‘n’ roll, then their focus was sharpened this time out. Having joined an Atlantic subsidiary prior to making the record, their new label was keen for the band to produce an album “loaded with hits”. Naturally, the commercially repelled group turned this into a double-entendre with the record’s intoxicated title, but the new remit did allow Reed to indulge in his genuine love of AM radio.
This creates a scintillating collision. The songs this time out are genuine self-contained rock singles assorted into a masterpiece that still stays true to the arty tenets of the band. And all of this is transfigured by the group putting in a performance that seemed to mainline the dirty buzz of some backstreet in Greenwich Village where the real counterculture movement was unfurling.
Thus, in some ways, it also seems fitting that when Atlantic first edited these original recordings, Reed left the band in a rage, not because the pecs of his figurative Statue of David had been chiselled without his permission – songs are always subject to change, a band who jammed for hours knew that – but because the far more precious energy had been transmuted—and its energy where Loaded lives and breathes. The awesome buzz the band created on those ten tracks is why superb would-be singles like ‘Satellites of Love’ were demoed and then cut, failing to stand up to the sheer euphoria of ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin!’.
Likewise, ‘I’m Sticking With You’ was too sweet for the bitter vitriol of ‘Cool It Down’. And ‘Lisa Says’ wasn’t quite potent enough balladry to compete with the album’s lullaby reprise, ‘I Found a Reason’. The latter declares that the darkness of the scene that the band were in keeping with was not without the light of soppy love.
Evidently, as time would prove, these shunned songs were, in their own way, brilliant tracks, but vitally, they didn’t align with the energy of the other performances. So, while the coda of shimmering half notes that usually kickstarts ‘Sweet Jane’ was absent on this old, dodgy copy of Loaded I had acquired, it didn’t matter too much because the buzz that was there embodied an album that couldn’t be sullied even if Oppenheimer tried to fiddle with the kinetics of it.
Loaded is the album where the band play with gritted teeth and muscular confidence. The Velvets seem to say, ‘If they want rock ‘n’ roll hits, let’s give them rock ‘n’ roll hits’. Then they do this without selling out a single ounce of the sincere, exultant burst of art, brimming with experiential squib, that made them progenitors of a new branch of expression in the first place. Loaded jabs like a needle in the arm, laced with life in the big city, and there isn’t too much subtlety or experimentation to twist it beyond that—that’s a good thing.
Thus, if songs are impermanent paintings elaborated on silence, then New York City’s bohemian heart was The Velvet Underground’s canvas. They captured its beating likeness on the record with a searing, swaggering indifference that typified what they stood for and, in turn, made Loaded their definitive masterpiece.
