1970@50: LOADED - THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

And then there were three. And Doug Yule. Same as the previous except drummer Mo Tucker left to have a baby. All songs by Lou Reed and four lead vocals by Yule. If you don't want to look it up, Doug Yule sounds like a younger Lou Reed. Three years at the top of the hip world and the bottom of the charts had taken their toll. The previous record had used the absence of John Cale's avant gardism to present a cleaner sound and this one was meant to be the pop breakthrough. The title not only referred to being intoxicated but also Loaded with hits.

Who Loves the Sun? begins with a sweet Yule vocal and Mammas and Pappas backing vocals. There's an edit towards the end that's so rude it sounds like a hard tape splice where the band falls into a Beach Boys style a cappella break before resuming. Whatever the intention this mostly appealingly sugary number sounds like something from half a decade before. That and the jolting vocal break make it sound like the most sneering attempt at writing commercially imaginable.

It tinkles and jangles into a fade that gives way to one of the most iconic of all Velvet Underground Songs and one that would effectively be the source point of Reed's career beyond the band. While a few of the lines lifted from the lyric might promise drugs and cross dressing this is more of a Diane Arbus photo rendered in song and has more to say to the hippies ridiculing the squares of the previous generation that those pre boomers have life in them, didn't invent sex or hedonism either but got there before the flower children. Reed has and eats his cake with this one. Sounds risque but it's not what you think. The editing of the track on the first release of this album leaves out a bridge and an ecstatic choral coda and Reed often cites it among the reasons why he upped and left before it was in the shops. What remains is a fabulously catchy song that pays the patient listener with depth that it pretends it doesn't have.

Rock & Roll treads path already familiar and would continue to be as a band puts the term Rock and Roll into a title or a chorus, mentions teenagers and the radio. This one adds a circular chord progression. The major reason this doesn't sound dated to me is that the formula was in place for decades and seemed to stretch into my adulthood. Or is it that this kind of boomer anthem was as go-to as a Chuck Berry knockoff is to every single garage band that ever practiced under the house or in a bedroom? History will decide.

It's here that I'll stop going track by track and say that the first impression I had of this record has never been superseded by a closer listen later. The concept of making a record stuffed with hits condemned it to sounding of its time and once you've done that you fall behind the times. In the interest of full disclosure I find most of the rock music released between 1969 and 1976 grating and regressive and, while this album is by no means a poor effort it sounds more like that kind of rock music than any of the three previous VU albums. 

Exceptions are New Age that could fit comfortably on any solo Lou Reed album form the '70s, I Found a Reason and Sweet Nuthin' which continue the gospel influences that helped make the third album so strong. These don't sound like Boomers on the Radio but they do hark back to the days of a better band.

So was it the further dissipation of the membership, the influence of new and straight-minded members/musicians, weariness with the game of it, that makes this one sound like a contract filler rather than a statement by a group? All and none, probably. The next studio album to bear the band's name was effectively a Doug Yule solo effort and, while it's a perfectly creditable set of songs, it is mired in that flavourless swamp that was most of early '70s rock. When Reed left for his solo career he redesigned himself faster than Bowie for a little while until settling on a premature rock sage role with records like Berlin. And when it came to do the live album mandatory for all successful rock acts of the '70s (even The Beatles had a couple of posthumous live discs) Rock 'n' Roll Animal it was unusually a single album and featured an almost all Velvet Underground set list.

Many fans of the band put this at the end of the studio albums and have no issue with its sound or writing, thinking of it as a kind of cynical progression. Me, I can listen to it but almost always stop it near the end of the old side one. I keep wanting to listen to Transformer or Berlin. But this record also poses questions along the lines of the ship of Theseus. Huh? Well, Theseus had a ship and over the years it had all of its parts replaced. Was it still the ship of Theseus? Was the Velvet Underground of Loaded the same one as the Banana album? Decidedly not but closer to the self-titled one. But the self-titled one was a set of heavily crafted pieces that continued the raw emotional shocks of the earliest recordings which survive as ghosts of the afternoon on Loaded. If "and Nico" is a warehouse apartment with the windows blacked out Loaded has them all smashed in. The sunlight's blaring in but it's just not the same place.