Forty-five years after its release, everything that was supposed to have made The Velvet Underground & Nico special has been nearly eradicated by its own legend. The most dangerous record of 1967 has been absorbed into the establishment rock canon; the paradoxical fame it earned from its hilariously terrible sales figures in its early years has been negated by reissue after deluxe-edition reissue; and its transgressive kinky-druggy menace has been smothered by the embrace of millions of overly precious Wes Anderson acolytes. Is a limited-edition "super deluxe" six-disc box set really going to help restore any of the ineffable outsider cool that it's lost over the years? Actually, yeah, it is.
The new super deluxe edition of TVU&N consists of a new stereo remaster of the album, a new mono remaster (both taken from the original tapes), a disc of alternate versions and mixes of the songs, a disc of practice sessions recorded at Andy Warhol's Factory, a live recording from around the time the album was recorded (spread across two discs), and a remaster of Nico's solo debut, Chelsea Girl, which the Velvets performed on. So aside from the 45 minutes of Chelsea Girl, you've got five hours of essentially the same 11 songs presented over and over in various levels of audio fidelity. On paper it may seem indulgent, but listening through the entire massive collection of material results in a sharper-edged portrait of the group than there's ever been, with all of the danger filled back in.
First there's the album proper. The remastering process was handled by Bill Levenson, who's been working on Velvets material since the mid-80s rarities collections VU and Another VU, and who oversaw the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set that collected all of the group's studio recordings. Levenson knows the material well enough to keep from making it sound too clean. The amp hiss, tape saturation, and overall grit that made TVU&N leap out from the scores of mannered psychedelic rock albums released around the same time is still firmly in place; it's just that the grit sounds better.
The stereo mix breathes in a way that the album never has before. As incredible as it sounds, though, the mono version on the second disc provides the set's first moment of serious revelation: It doesn't breathe at all. In fact, with every throbbing bassline and squalling viola set dead center, the mix is suffocating. The transformative effect it has on the songs is unreal. Lou-fronted rockers like "I'm Waiting for the Man" and "Run, Run, Run" leap out from the speakers with an aggression that other versions lack. "All Tomorrow's Parties", "Venus in Furs", and "The Black Angel's Death Song" are oppressively noisy, but pleasurably so. It's a sensual sensory overload that underlines just how successful the group was at the music-as-S&M game it was playing with listeners.
Disc four is even rawer, and removes the last bit of remaining studio refinement to expose the Velvets' primal proto-punk heart. The first half is a reproduction of the one-of-a-kind acetate discovered by a record collector in a New York City street sale in 2002-- and sold on eBay a few years later for over $25,000-- that contained the first version of the album that the band delivered to Columbia Records (and which the label rejected). Some of the tracks would end up on the version of album that Verve issued after taming them down during another round of mixing; others were re-recorded entirely. Compared to the familiar finished version the material sounds unhinged. Moe Tucker's rudimentary drumming on an alternate version of "Heroin" is primitive to the extreme, while the original mix of "Femme Fatale" place a bizarre falsetto backing vocal from one of the male members high enough in the mix to put a listener on edge. And since the audio's taken straight from a beat-up acetate the whole fantastic mess is covered in crackles and hiss.
The rest of disc four is pulled from a taped rehearsal at the Factory a few months before the Scepter sessions, previously available in bootleg form. Parts of it are more interesting than listenable, like the band dicking around while Lou Reed patiently attempts to explain the lyrics to "Venus in Furs" to Nico. Other parts are jaw-dropping, like a version of "Run, Run, Run" that quickly turns itself inside out and transforms into a frenetic, semi-improvised Bo Diddley impression that's denser and heavier than almost anything else in the Velvets' catalog and can demand repeat plays back to back.
What makes moments like this, and the set in general, so compelling is that you get a picture of the group as a living, breathing band, separate from the performances that would be frozen in time and started on a long march to iconhood a little over a year later. For a minute-- or sometimes for 12-- you get a sense of what they really were, which is just another garage outfit hopped up on pills and playing rock'n'roll music so hard that it starts flinging off parts. The difference is that their garage was the Factory, and that they were willing to ride it far closer to fully falling apart than anyone else.
That's the image that sustains the final two discs, which together comprise a bootlegged live set from Columbus, Ohio's Valleydale Ballroom in November, 1966, four months or so before TVU&N was released. While someone-- maybe a devoted fan of the Factory scene-- yells out Nico's name when she introduces "All Tomorrow's Parties", you get the very clear idea that very few people in the crowd know who the Velvet Underground are, or like what they're playing. You can hear maybe two or three members of the audience clap after the opener "Melody Laughter", a 28-minute jam that's mostly noisy drone with a brief pop coda at the end. After a feedback-filled scorched-earth rendition of "Black Angel's Death Song", Lou Reed snarls at the audience, "If it's too loud for you, you move back."
A few months later, right after the release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the group would convene to record parts of Nico's Chelsea Girl, which is a fine baroque folk-pop album, but nothing approaching that first record. The three other LPs the group recorded before Reed left the band almost four years after that show were great in their own rights, but paled in comparison to TVU&N. Listening to the live recording and hearing the silences between the songs, though, it's easy to imagine a roomful of people being pummeled by this strange, intimidating noise, and seeking safety in the back of the room, completely unaware that the band they're being assaulted by was at that moment (and for not much longer), the best in the world.
