Well, first, then there were three. The externally imposed Nico had exited after the first album. Her deep dark worldliness bloomed into stranger territory under her own name. And then Cale was ousted. What was left was Lou Reed's songs and a band ready to play them. Oh, and Doug Yule, a kind of neat casual Lou Reed on bass, keyboards and some vocals. It was a different band. Then again, it begins as though it is.
Candy Says, a shivery song about Candy Darling, a trans New Yorker who sings of hating her body and wondering what she'd see if she could look at herself from outside it. Doug Yule's fragile vocal sings with quiet pain over the kind of Latin chord figure on the guitar from the first album. The gentle fade out of shimmering doo doo wah vocals and major 7ths lulls into a dark silence.
What Goes On is a canter of clean electric guitars and a bright organ, harmonies and a playful-seeming lyric featuring the same kind of opposites as The Beatles' Hello Goodbye. Well, except for the steady downward movement of the tone of the words as they head toward being doomed and falling, despite the best efforts of the catchy chorus telling us it will be alright. Instead of that chorus at the end we get an extended instrumental outro of a verse and chorus with the organ's block chords standing in for vocals or perhaps grinding forward like the futility of life Reed's perky vocal suggests.
With Some Kinda Love we get to a point at which, now we know, Lou Reed the future solo act emerges. We've had characters in Reed's songs up to now but here they are given more dialogue and given life beyond the street life folklore of the first two albums. Margarita and Tom are talking about love and either waxing philosophical or getting pretentious but really, they're ... well what? Gearing up for sexual adventure or just getting deeper into the discussion. Is the kind of love that makes your eyes moist a reference to emotion or physical strain. It's hard to tell and Lou is having the last laugh. The entire song is two chords rolling on clean guitars and bass without drums as Reed more talks than sings his way through.
Take the same arrangement idea and slow it down with a sad sounding tambourine shaking distantly while the narrator more nakedly addresses the woman he's been seeing outside her marriage. It feel like it's ending, the passion dissipated, but his longing continues like the insistent gentle guitars flowing under him and he lingers on her pale blue eyes. This is the most pained, open and earnest account of his own feelings until the torments of Berlin, itself set in fiction but with a grindingly real result.
The next song must have puzzled its first listeners. A few lines of prayer repeated over a gently insistent guitar figure and featuring some effortless, bright vocal harmonies which will develop into something fuller and more glorious as the songs progress. So what does go on, here? There is no smirk in any of it. It sounds real. Was Reed converting from a Judaism he wasn't particularly committed to? Or was this the next step in a slowly developing concept song cycle about different aspects of love? It ends the old side one, leaving the listener possibly worrying what was to be found on the flip.
Side two opens with Beginning to See the Light, a phrase suggesting either dawning personal wisdom or religious inspiration. The full band backs Reed's vocal with clean but rich toned guitars and a bright shuffle. A preacher style yell for the verse but then choruses with changing lyrics about playing the fool and "here we go again" ending in a fade of fullthroated harmonies on the line "how does it feel to loved?" Through each verse a series of confessions or descriptions about what he does and what is expected of him moves to this last question which really is a query about how much light he's actually begun to see. Love is fun and beautiful ... but messy.
A drone of organ and the kind of guitar tone possibly not heard again until Cocteau Twins albums over a decade later. I'm Set Free. Reed again uses religious phraseology culminating the the chorus of the title with its much expanded vocal harmonies over a building band. It intermittently sounds like a gospel song but then he says he saw his head laughing and rolling around on the ground. This is either a very peculiar spiritual experience or just more unbound life given a godless church service. Again, there is no irony to this, no sneer of an adolescent infidel or smirk of a wiser worldly man, just someone who knows that joy has a price but the purchase feels so good.
That's the Story of My Life bounces along like a cartoon theme from the fifties as Reed sings this over and again: "That's the story of my life, the difference between wrong and right. But Billy said both those words are dead. That's the story of my life." It sounds like it reads, a diary entry set to music but repeated as though the thought will never go away. Wrong and right are dead words. Reed's voice is affected, stung. And the boppy jaunt of happy faces gambols around his shaking head as he stares into the footpath as he walks.
The Murder Mystery is the closest thing on this album to the kind of experimentation the band would do in earlier lineups. A rapid ascending riff, a languid organ meander and then all four members of the band recite text at once in a cacophony that only very incidentally comprehensible but isn't meant to be followed: the tumble of the voices speaking suggests a strange alienated mood. This is broken up by a pair of voices (notably Maureen Tucker) singing disjointed phrases in a minor key phrasing: (please raise the flag rosy red carpet envy ...) before plunging back into the babel of voices. Is it a chaos of individual stories? Some of the passages are chants of words drawn out by the syllable. Are they the scattered thoughts of a murderer following the act? All and more beyond. This, to my ear is an exercise in suggestion created by the tension between a soundscape and an evocative title. Strangely, such a challenging and complicated piece is never irritating and you can try and isolate one of the voices to follow (it's very difficult) or just let it flow. There is a lot of discipline in the making of this piece and it ends up being a kind of aural sculpture rather than a song, fashioned and deliberate. It's both an awkward standalone on an album of openness and melody and a strangely engaging culmination of the complexity of the life the other songs describe.
We finish as we began with Reed giving to another band member. I can hear Reed singing this but Maureen Tucker's artless rendition is an apt message of farewell. After Hours is a mix of Goodnight Irene and Show Me the Way to Go Home as solo pieces traipsing through imagery both whimsical and dark set to the kind of melody that wouldn't be out of place in a Disney film. But it's about some very final thinking. "Say hello to never."
Reed didn't know it yet but he was already writing outside of a band. The band is clearly audible here and playing well in a kind of studied simplicity. Even more than its successor (the band's last with Reed) this set feels more at home beside Transformer or Berlin than the first two records. This is not to devalue the contributions of the others but in a record as dominated by its songwriter (even when he isn't singing his own lyrics) the Velvet Underground as a feeling as well as a band has left. Then again, if you don't know any of that, you could just put this on and relax into its Sunday afternoon of easy moods supporting troubling thoughts like a warm dose of something opioid. Go on, tell 'em Lou sent ya.
What Goes On is a canter of clean electric guitars and a bright organ, harmonies and a playful-seeming lyric featuring the same kind of opposites as The Beatles' Hello Goodbye. Well, except for the steady downward movement of the tone of the words as they head toward being doomed and falling, despite the best efforts of the catchy chorus telling us it will be alright. Instead of that chorus at the end we get an extended instrumental outro of a verse and chorus with the organ's block chords standing in for vocals or perhaps grinding forward like the futility of life Reed's perky vocal suggests.
With Some Kinda Love we get to a point at which, now we know, Lou Reed the future solo act emerges. We've had characters in Reed's songs up to now but here they are given more dialogue and given life beyond the street life folklore of the first two albums. Margarita and Tom are talking about love and either waxing philosophical or getting pretentious but really, they're ... well what? Gearing up for sexual adventure or just getting deeper into the discussion. Is the kind of love that makes your eyes moist a reference to emotion or physical strain. It's hard to tell and Lou is having the last laugh. The entire song is two chords rolling on clean guitars and bass without drums as Reed more talks than sings his way through.
Take the same arrangement idea and slow it down with a sad sounding tambourine shaking distantly while the narrator more nakedly addresses the woman he's been seeing outside her marriage. It feel like it's ending, the passion dissipated, but his longing continues like the insistent gentle guitars flowing under him and he lingers on her pale blue eyes. This is the most pained, open and earnest account of his own feelings until the torments of Berlin, itself set in fiction but with a grindingly real result.
The next song must have puzzled its first listeners. A few lines of prayer repeated over a gently insistent guitar figure and featuring some effortless, bright vocal harmonies which will develop into something fuller and more glorious as the songs progress. So what does go on, here? There is no smirk in any of it. It sounds real. Was Reed converting from a Judaism he wasn't particularly committed to? Or was this the next step in a slowly developing concept song cycle about different aspects of love? It ends the old side one, leaving the listener possibly worrying what was to be found on the flip.
Side two opens with Beginning to See the Light, a phrase suggesting either dawning personal wisdom or religious inspiration. The full band backs Reed's vocal with clean but rich toned guitars and a bright shuffle. A preacher style yell for the verse but then choruses with changing lyrics about playing the fool and "here we go again" ending in a fade of fullthroated harmonies on the line "how does it feel to loved?" Through each verse a series of confessions or descriptions about what he does and what is expected of him moves to this last question which really is a query about how much light he's actually begun to see. Love is fun and beautiful ... but messy.
A drone of organ and the kind of guitar tone possibly not heard again until Cocteau Twins albums over a decade later. I'm Set Free. Reed again uses religious phraseology culminating the the chorus of the title with its much expanded vocal harmonies over a building band. It intermittently sounds like a gospel song but then he says he saw his head laughing and rolling around on the ground. This is either a very peculiar spiritual experience or just more unbound life given a godless church service. Again, there is no irony to this, no sneer of an adolescent infidel or smirk of a wiser worldly man, just someone who knows that joy has a price but the purchase feels so good.
That's the Story of My Life bounces along like a cartoon theme from the fifties as Reed sings this over and again: "That's the story of my life, the difference between wrong and right. But Billy said both those words are dead. That's the story of my life." It sounds like it reads, a diary entry set to music but repeated as though the thought will never go away. Wrong and right are dead words. Reed's voice is affected, stung. And the boppy jaunt of happy faces gambols around his shaking head as he stares into the footpath as he walks.
The Murder Mystery is the closest thing on this album to the kind of experimentation the band would do in earlier lineups. A rapid ascending riff, a languid organ meander and then all four members of the band recite text at once in a cacophony that only very incidentally comprehensible but isn't meant to be followed: the tumble of the voices speaking suggests a strange alienated mood. This is broken up by a pair of voices (notably Maureen Tucker) singing disjointed phrases in a minor key phrasing: (please raise the flag rosy red carpet envy ...) before plunging back into the babel of voices. Is it a chaos of individual stories? Some of the passages are chants of words drawn out by the syllable. Are they the scattered thoughts of a murderer following the act? All and more beyond. This, to my ear is an exercise in suggestion created by the tension between a soundscape and an evocative title. Strangely, such a challenging and complicated piece is never irritating and you can try and isolate one of the voices to follow (it's very difficult) or just let it flow. There is a lot of discipline in the making of this piece and it ends up being a kind of aural sculpture rather than a song, fashioned and deliberate. It's both an awkward standalone on an album of openness and melody and a strangely engaging culmination of the complexity of the life the other songs describe.
We finish as we began with Reed giving to another band member. I can hear Reed singing this but Maureen Tucker's artless rendition is an apt message of farewell. After Hours is a mix of Goodnight Irene and Show Me the Way to Go Home as solo pieces traipsing through imagery both whimsical and dark set to the kind of melody that wouldn't be out of place in a Disney film. But it's about some very final thinking. "Say hello to never."
Reed didn't know it yet but he was already writing outside of a band. The band is clearly audible here and playing well in a kind of studied simplicity. Even more than its successor (the band's last with Reed) this set feels more at home beside Transformer or Berlin than the first two records. This is not to devalue the contributions of the others but in a record as dominated by its songwriter (even when he isn't singing his own lyrics) the Velvet Underground as a feeling as well as a band has left. Then again, if you don't know any of that, you could just put this on and relax into its Sunday afternoon of easy moods supporting troubling thoughts like a warm dose of something opioid. Go on, tell 'em Lou sent ya.
