Vinyl Release

There’s pop and rock brilliance to be found in this 1970 album from the New York four-piece – even if it tore them apart. Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue

The other day I was sorting through boxes and files in the attic when I came upon a faded, almost illegible old fax. Squinting at it under a bright lamp, I discovered it was from, of all people, Moe Tucker, legendary drummer with The Velvet Underground.

It must have been sent to me in the late summer of 1993 as it referenced a story that NME, the publication I was editing at the time, had printed suggesting that the band, who had reunited for a bunch of dosh-grabbing gigs, were on the brink of splitting up again due to the long-festering animosity between Lou Reed and John Cale, which had seen the latter chucked out the first time round, back in 1968.

On further investigation, it transpired that Moe’s fax expressed the usual gripe that members of the press are a rabble of scurrilous rumour-mongers and that, contrary to our story, all was perfectly rosy in the VU garden and that we should all, y’know, take a hike or some such.

Magic month for music

As I recall, the tour crashed to a halt a few weeks later, Reed and Cale unable to inhabit the same continent as one another, let alone the same stage. I’m telling you this because, although it may not seem directly relevant to Loaded, the album we’re here to discuss, it’s not every day you get a fax from a member of The Velvet Underground. As a matter of fact, Moe, being something of a contrary character, didn’t even play on Loaded, but we’ll come to that shortly.

The album was released in November 1970, possibly the greatest month for records in the whole history of popular music. Other offerings that month included Barrett, Syd Barrett’s second and final solo album since being weirded out of Pink Floyd, Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, The Kinks’ Lola vs. Powerman, Tim Buckley’s Starsailor, Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, Minnie Riperton’s Come Into My Garden, Laura Nyro’s Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat, and Kraftwerk’s eponymous debut. Phew.

Above: The Velvet Underground, still with John Cale (second from right) promoting their 1968 album White Light/White Heat

Loaded was The Velvet Underground’s fourth album, and their first for Atlantic’s spin-off label Cotillion after the band had been dropped by Verve. It was also the last to feature principal songwriter Lou Reed, who quit even before it was released. The title was a wry comment from the band on the instructions from Ahmet Ertegun, head of Atlantic, that he wanted a record ‘loaded with hit singles’, as opposed to the commercially impossible dirge-y druggy dark stuff they were notorious for. The joke, of course, being that ‘loaded’ was also slang for being wasted.

Sweet, sunny, rock ’n’ roll

The tracks that begin the album are unimpeachable, as good a starting trio as any album ever. ‘Who Loves The Sun’ is a casual putdown of the Summer Of Love sung with mopey disinterest by Doug Yule, who had been drafted in to replace Cale. It sounds romantic, but it’s the opposite; The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes The Sun’ given a glorious mocking.

Above: Label of the Loaded LP on Cotillion

‘Sweet Jane’ follows, one of Reed’s cool, riff-y throwaways that’s effortlessly better than the several millions who’ve tried to cover it or rip it off except, maybe, Cowboy Junkies’ version that appears on the soundtrack to Oliver Stone’s tremendous Natural Born Killers. Then comes ‘Rock And Roll’, another song most would die for, knocked out here by Reed with a nonchalance that says, ‘I can do stuff like this in my sleep’.

The genius is these are terrific pop songs yet, simultaneously, they sound like parodies or critiques of the pop song process. They’re disdainfully beautiful, if that’s indeed possible, the only comparable exercise in sarcasm I can think of being The Turtles’ exquisitely saccharine ‘Happy Together’, a number written to mock the inanity of Top 10 singles that just happened to breeze into the Top 10.

Jekyll and Hyde

The same cocktail of resistance and acquiescence informs the rest of the Loaded album, and on numbers like ‘New Age’ it’s hard to navigate this attitude, Reed’s eerily unsympathetic lyric rendered all the more sinister by Yule’s insinuating vocal. Why Reed allowed his bandmate to hijack so many of his vocals is a mystery, but there’s no denying there’s a Jekyll/Hyde dynamic that adds a beguiling mystique and tension to each song’s intent.

The album concludes with one of rock’s most glorious world-weary anthems, the seven-minute ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’’, again written by Reed but sung in the most hangdog hymnlike fashion by Yule and boasting a guitar solo upon which the whole of Television’s Marquee Moon [HFN Oct ’24] was surely based.

Going dow-town?

Here’s where Moe Tucker does and doesn’t come back into it. She’s listed on the cover of Loaded as playing drums but she actually doesn’t. She was pregnant at the time and duties behind the kit were mostly fulfilled by Yule and his brother Billy.

The liner notes infuriated Reed, not only because he appeared third out of four on the listing of the players, but also that all the tracks were credited to the band instead of him. He left The Velvet Underground in high dudgeon, feeling deeply unappreciated, accusing the record company of butchering his work, moaning about the under-production and insisting that tracks such as ‘Sweet Jane’ were brutally cut down to suit radio play.

Above: Ex-Velvet Undergrounder Lou Reed at the Pohoda Music Festival in 2012

It’s been said that Loaded is one of rock’s truly meta artefacts, the forerunner of Nirvana’s ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ from their In Utero album. Even the cover artwork leaves us guessing. Designed by Polish graphic designer Stanislaw Zagorski, it features a drawing of the entrance to the Times Square 42nd Street subway station in New York City. Why? Because Zagorski knew nothing about the band so conceptualised around the ‘underground’ part of their name. Oh, and the ‘downtown’ on the sign is misspelled as ‘dowtown’. Does it mean anything or is it merely a boo-boo? Who knows?

Loaded didn’t sell very well and once Reed quit, the rest of the group soon followed. Yule was left to carry the band name onto the now largely forgotten but not-half-bad Squeeze album, released two years later. In the half-century since, some people have rated Loaded as their favourite Velvet Underground album. Lou Reed, on the other hand, said it shouldn’t even be considered part of the band’s oeuvre. As for Moe, I’m waiting for another fax.

Issued in late 2024, Analogue Productions’ 2xLP limited editions re-release of The Velvet Underground’s Loaded [APA 034-45] is part of the label’s ‘Atlantic 75’ series. Cut at 45rpm and mastered from the original analogue tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound in Nashville, the set comes in a ‘Tip-On’ gatefold jacket, and splits its ten tracks over four sides of 180g black vinyl. An SACD release [CAPA 034 SA] has been prepped for a March 2025 release. HFN