1969: the year of The Velvet Underground’s lost album ‘VU’
In the history of music, there is perhaps no singular year quite as fascinating as 1969. At the end of the decade, it also signified the end of an era. The optimism of the 1960s was fading out, morphing into something darker as chaos seemed to rule over the music world. Among the fallouts, deaths, attacks, and breakups, The Velvet Underground lost their grip on a masterpiece record.
The timeline of 1969 is bustling with the decline of a decade. Just as the era of peace and love concluded, a very different energy rolled in to take its place. Woodstock narrowly avoided disaster with the Air Force stepping in to drop off food and water. The Altamont Free Festival didn’t get such a lucky escape as several audience members died, and Mick Jagger faced a potential assassination attempt. Then, tragically, Charles Manson and his family’s brutal murders delivered the final and fatal blow to the hippie scene. Everywhere you looked, it seemed that the consequences of hedonism were taking a gripping and terrifying control as death and destruction replaced free love and pure joy.
Sure, it has to be said that the New York scene never quite invested in the same free-spirited culture that controlled the West Coast. Spiralling around the Chelsea Hotel, Andy Warhol, and Max’s Kansas City, the NYC crowd were always more grounded and stereotypically cynical. At the centre, The Velvet Underground set the sound of the city, leading the way with their darkly atmospheric and experimental tracks as shared on their earlier albums like White Light/White Heat or The Velvet Underground & Nico.
However, whereas some groups seem to grow more experimental as their years roll on, The Velvet Underground could be said to swing the other way. Having started out as what was essentially a performance project for Warhol, their beginnings were tied tighter to art than the desire to make hits. However, as they stretched away from the pop artist and gathered more attention, their records became distinctly lighter. Having started out with the inclusion of Nico’s gloomy majesty, then moved into expansive efforts like the 17-minute-long track ‘Sister Ray’, or sprawling storytelling tracks like ‘Candy Says’, the band began by firmly setting their intentions as being darkly intellectual.
But by the time Loaded came around in 1970, The Velvet Underground seemed ready to make singalong hits. Housing tracks like ‘Sweet Jane’ or ‘Who Loves The Sun’, the songs were coloured by a distinct lightness, as if they attempted to rebel against the end of the sun-shining decade. Or, perhaps by switching to creating more pop-led music, the band were still trying to set themselves apart from the masses, stating that while everyone else gave way to the darkness and delved into more typically experimental sounds, they would always move in the opposite direction, even if that led them to more commercially upbeat compositions.
But in the middle, there’s a missing piece. Between 1968 and 1969, the band were in the studio working on a new album as the decade was turning. Like everything else in music at that point, the group seemed to be in a period of utter chaos. Still reeling from the departure of the formative member John Cale, they were attempting to figure out what they wanted to do or be as they expanded beyond the small scene they came up in. As they spent a lot of time on the road, their sound naturally changed as they adapted to a more accessible stage set-up, perhaps leading to the creation of more classically enjoyable or engaging poppier songs rather than extended soundscapes.
At the same time, the band was involved in logistical battles with their label. For their previous self-titled album, the band had moved upstairs to a major label, signing a two-album deal with MGM. That might also have affected their switch to more pop-leaning songs as they attempted to play with the big leagues. However, after the first album, MGM axed them in an attempt to save money on unprofitable acts.
However, while all this was happening, the band had already recorded VU, a lost album that gathered dust on MGM’s shelves until the 1980s. Caught up in a moment of utter confusion for the band on all fronts, it fell between the gaps of their personal, musical, and contractual chaos.
But, when listening to the album, that energy is really nowhere to be found. If anything, VU feels like their most simple and straightforward release. ‘I Can’t Stand It’ is a good old-fashioned rock and roll song. ‘I’m Sticking With You’ could be seen as their most obvious attempt at a commercial hit, standing as a sweet little love song. ‘Lisa Says’ feels like the most solid and accessible take on their returning storytelling tracks, dropping in on different characters.
Even ‘Andy’s Chest’, a piece about their ex-manager and complex friend Andy Warhol, is coloured by simplicity and obvious sincerity. There is a distinct lack of any of the art rock complexity that they used to represent back in the John Cale days, instead leaning fully into the philosophy that Lou Reed had always wanted to apply to the band. “What I wanted to do,” Reed told an interviewer in 1987, was “write rock ‘n’ roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn’t lose anything. It would be timeless in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics.” On VU, Reed seemed to make his clearest attempt at timelessness by diving into approachable simplicity.
VU is a strangely tame beast, born out of a strangely wild time. Maybe, as they faced several layers of confusion and the end of an era that was giving way to something darker, Reed and the band simply wanted something nice to hold onto. Perhaps the only way they could approach making this record during all that carnage was to keep it light and easy. Or maybe turning to creating their most commercial songs yet was the most left-field thing the band could do at a moment in time when experimentation was at its peak.
