The 1985 Project Part 12: The Velvet Underground VU

I'm sticking with this album

I’ve been looking at albums from 1985, starting with the results of the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll for that year. It’s weird that two records in a row on the poll were actually recorded many years earlier.

First, a little bit of personal context. When I first started reading rock magazines in 1978, with a heavy emphasis on the punk and new wave music that was so exciting to me, I encountered a few older bands that were all difficult to find in stores. Music by the Stooges, the MC5, the New York Dolls, and the Velvet Underground was all out of print in those days. I was lucky enough to find most of these seminal records in used stores.

The first three Velvet Underground albums - Loaded, album no. 4 had been in print so I’d had it for some time - came my way in 1983 and ’84, and they quickly became one of my very favorite bands of all time. In fact, if you’d asked me in those days what was my very favorite song ever, I would have instantly answered “Pale Blue Eyes” from the self-titled third album. I played those records incessantly back then. So when VU appeared early in 1985, I was able to hear it more or less as the very next installment of the band’s career.

Eight of the ten songs on VU were actually recorded in 1969, along with several more which would get released later on Another View, as a planned follow-up to The Velvet Underground. They got scrapped by their record label when the band was dropped. Several were redone by Lou Reed on various solo albums in the 70s, but I hadn’t encountered those records yet. Two more were recorded in 1968 before John Cale left the band. But to me, all ten were brand new songs that I could fall in love with.

This album, then, is less raucous than White Light White Heat, more rocking than most of The Velvet Underground, and more ramshackle than Loaded. There are no comparisons I can make to The Velvet Underground and Nico, which remains always an album unlike any other I’ve ever heard.

I think Lou Reed was beginning to think more commercially with these songs, which sometimes seem like distant cousins to soul records of the time. The hooks are bigger, the song structures more stable, and the arrangements tend to stick to rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, and drums fulfilling their normal roles. But, this band was still loosey-goosey in its playing, so the feel of these songs can never be imagined to fit with what was on radio at the time.

None of that ever mattered to me, though, because I was captivated instantly by every song here. “Foggy Notion,” which is probably closest in spirit to a more controlled “Sister Ray” and which contrasts a woman being beaten with the same woman rejecting flowers from somebody who witnessed this, is so full of pep and drive and catchiness that you barely notice what he’s singing. This results in a cognitive dissonance that takes some getting used to, but which I ultimately decided provides sympathy for Sallie Mae despite never spelling out the foggy notion to do it again.

Reed, as he often did, liked to mix lyrical images and statements into unsettling stories. Take “I Can’t Stand It,” which is another sing-along masterpiece here. He tells of a man living in a garbage pail where he’s hit by a mop by the landlady, who seems to live with thirteen dead cats and a purple dog in spats, but who wants his baby to come back so things will be better and he can play his music louder. I swear it all makes sense and makes me want to dance like a maniac.

The two songs with John Cale – “Stephanie Says” and especially “Temptation Inside My Heart” – fit in with the tenor of the rest of the record so well that I frequently have to look up which ones he’s on. His replacement – as if that was something that could be done – Doug Yule sings “She’s My Best Friend,” which I’m guessing was considered for being a single by the band. Sterling Morrison plays some of his best lead guitar lines on many songs here. Maureen Tucker’s idiosyncratic drumming is, as always, an instantly identifiable part of the band’s song and she and Reed sing the delightful music hall number “I’m Sticking With You” to close out the record in a more hopeful conclusion than “After Hours,” the song she sang at the end of the third record, had been.

I can’t quite give this album ten points because it’s not as perfect as the first or third albums had been, but I will happily give it nine out of ten because it still sounds as fresh and enjoyable as it did all those years ago.