The Velvet Underground (1969)

I knew most of the songs on this album one way or another but wasn't on intimate terms with the album itself until the '80s. I liked it quite a bit and have found it's one that repays going back to regularly—"the quiet one," I came to think of it, among the core of their releases (compared to "the first one," "the loud one," "the live one," "the best one," and finally, way down the line, those last two orphans). With John Cale out of the picture, Lou Reed may have felt some need to burnish the avant-garde experimental credentials with the longest song here, the talky cerebral "The Murder Mystery," which has never done much for me, except occasionally excite some degree of respect but more often impatience. But the rest is a knockout, a lot of real beauties mixed with performance standards. "What Goes On," "Beginning to See the Light," and "I'm Set Free" are probably closer to the latter, pointing the way to the kind of grooves they laid down with such reliably gentle yet firm authority in their live shows (for the evidence, start with 1969 and continue with The Quine Tapes). Because I knew 1969 before anything else, those versions are still the ones I prefer. They are, as one would expect, a little looser, more freewheeling, stretched out and taken places. They sound fine here in their "studio versions," if slightly prim and airless, but my favorites on this one are all the folkie confessional ... I'm not even sure what to call them. They're quiet like ballads, but with hard clarion edges, such as "Some Kinda Love" and "Pale Blue Eyes" (my #1 favorite Velvets song without hesitation for a time). This is kind of Lou Reed's Leonard Cohen album, and you can feel him straining for the studied literary affect in the lyrics, which actually stand up to the scrutiny if one is moved to examine them closely. They work as poems on the printed page, more or less. But they are more than that, and that is seen perhaps nowhere more clearly than in "After Hours" and especially "Jesus," which really stake out their territory and occupy it. I mean, the year is 1969, and no one is going to mistake anyone in this band for Jesus freaks or any kind of innocents even then. Yet the song "Jesus" is played so achingly straight, with such a perfect absence of irony, pulling hard against the peculiarity of the circumstances of this band doing that song. And it works to that extent, sounding almost like a cover of some old-time gospel standard. But it's a Lou Reed song too. The color scheme for the cover drips with inky black but this album may well operate like the proverbial pinprick of light within the universal blackness. For the most part I think The Velvet Underground makes a reasonably straightforward case for peace and goodness. It is at any rate another excellent way in to this great band.