Loaded is a perfect rock'n'roll record: 40 minutes long, five songs to a side, and not a single wasted note. Originally released in 1970, the Velvet Underground’s fourth album marked the moment where Lou Reed’s early gig as a Pickwick Records song doctor ceased to be an amusing footnote to the band’s story and became their governing principle. Loaded is the sort of proper album that feels like a greatest hits collection, with each track thoroughly inhabiting and mastering a dominant rock archetype: the hippy-dippy, harmony-rich singalong; the sneering, street walkin’ prowler; the cheeky honky-tonk throwback; the wedding slow-dance standard; the dirty blues grind; the lighter-waving, anthemic grand finale. Loaded remains the one Velvets album you can put on at a house party among mixed company without killing the vibe or sending people running for the door, and it contains the only song in their repertoire—"Sweet Jane"—that you have any hope of hearing on an oldies station today.
But being a perfect rock'n'roll album is a very different thing than being a perfect Velvet Underground album. Part of what makes the Velvet Underground’s official discography so unique is that each of the four dramatically different albums they released between 1967 and 1970 could be considered their definitive statement, and yet each could also be considered the outlier. However, in the latter sense, that distance is amplified with Loaded, and not just because Moe Tucker—the pounding heartbeat of the band—sat out the sessions to tend to her pregnancy, necessitating a drumming-by-committee approach. When stacked against the dark, droning psychedelia of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the flesh-melting distortion of White Light/White Heat, and the disarming quietude of The Velvet Underground, there’s nothing overtly contrarian about Loaded. It’s the album that plays least into the myth of the Velvets as transgressive avant-rock outsiders and speaks most loudly to their reality, as a working band playing half-empty bars, desperate to deliver a hit to their antsy major label minders.
That pressure was baked into the very title of the record, a directive from their Atlantic Records bosses to produce a record "loaded" with potential hit singles—and the band delivered on every count, except, of course, the sales part. In that respect, Loaded stands as one of rock’s first truly meta artifacts, prefiguring such label-baiting in-jokes as Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’ rebuke to Geffen Records and Nirvana’s "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter". This is, after all, a rock 'n'roll album that advertises its populist intent with a song about rock'n'roll called "Rock & Roll". Past provocations gave way to carefree kicks: "Head Held High" is "I’m Waiting for the Man" fresh out of rehab; "Train Round the Bend" is "Sister Ray" sent to the confession booth. But while Loaded may constitute a concerted effort to play by the rules, the Velvets come off like boarding school-bound delinquents who spend their class time stifling giggles and sneaking snarky notes. Whether answering the Beatles’ optimistic "Here Comes the Sun" with the withering "Who Loves the Sun?" or crashing the Byrds’ country-rock rodeo on "Lonesome Cowboy Bill", Loaded feels as much like a sardonic comment on pop’s ruling class as a bid to join its rarefied ranks. Atop the immortal riff of "Sweet Jane", Reed declares, "me, I’m in a rock'n'roll band," before adding a "huh"—and, after a million listens, it’s still hard to tell if it’s being delivered with a smirk or a shrug.
Alas, all that contradictory tension proved emblematic of deeper fissures running through the band. As this six-disc box set expansion of Loaded makes clear, the Velvets’ most airtight album ironically bears telling signs of their unravelling. Compiling remastered stereo and mono versions of the album, demos, alternate mixes, outtakes, a surround-sound DVD album mix, and two live sets, Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition highlights the painstaking tweaks and tinkering that went into making a seemingly effortless rock'n'roll album. Like the previous box sets in the Velvets’ current reissue campaign, Re-Loaded is less about unearthing rare tracks (much of the bonus material here first surfaced on 1997’s Fully Loaded) than getting the story straight, and properly contextualizing the output of a band whose official albums have been overwhelmed by a continuous stream of posthumous live albums, rarities compilations, and bootlegs. In the case of Loaded, the stereo and mono mixes don’t exist merely to satisfy differing listener preferences, but to present conflicting visions for the album. The former contains the extended versions of "Sweet Jane" and "New Age" that were eventually pared down for the official November 1970 release, much to Reed’s chagrin; he had left the band shortly after recording was completed, effectively sealing the album’s doomed fate before it even hit stores.
Tellingly, on Loaded, Reed already sounds like he’s handing the keys to the band over to bassist Doug Yule, who sings lead on four of the album’s 10 songs and plays much of the instrumentation. In contrast to John Cale, the band co-founder he replaced in 1968, Yule was never so much Reed’s foil as his eager understudy, with a more naturally melodic voice that buffed away Reed’s rough edges. But that’s no slight: Yule’s smooth-talker act yields the album’s most subversive moments, whether selling the bitter cynicism of "Who Loves the Sun?" as shiny, happy, ba-ba-da-ba pop, or playing the hotel bar-prowling hustler on "New Age" who sycophantically woos a faded movie star for a one-night stand only to cruelly discard her as "over the hill." And as the outtakes disc reveals, "I Found a Reason" could’ve easily wound up as a straight Dylan rip, before Yule’s angelic harmonies helped transform it into the most gorgeously celestial ballad in the Velvets’ canon. (Partially due to outstanding contractual commitments, Yule would soldier forth under the Velvet Underground name without any other original members for 1973’s largely forgotten Squeeze, an album unlikely to enjoy its own 45th-anniversary box set moment.)
More than just a collection of song scraps, Re-Loaded’s demo stash lets us imagine how Loaded might’ve turned out without the hitmaking ambitions, from the rough-hewn takes of future Reed solo standards like "Satellite of Love" to the organ-swirled fantasia of "Ocean" (the most prog the Velvets ever got) to a molasses-slow version of "Sweet Jane" that anticipates the Cowboy Junkies’ codeined cover. Meanwhile, the first live disc—a remaster of Live at Max’s Kansas City—offers a glimpse of the arena-ready powerhouse the Velvets had become just prior to Reed’s exit. (The two sets that make up the show—one devoted to rockers, the other to ballads—were recorded by Factory regular Brigid Polk on August 23 1970, reportedly Reed’s last night fronting the band; the version included here omits two tracks from the 2004 double-disc reissue of the complete concert, presumably to make it fit on a single disc.) If Loaded is the closest the Velvets ever got to becoming the Rolling Stones, on Max’s Kansas City they practically turn into the Who, as Doug’s brother Billy propels "I’m Waiting for the Man" and "Beginning to See the Light" with thundering Moon-shot drum rolls. But the recording is ultimately a faded snapshot of a live act in peak form at a career nadir: from the infamous intrusion of Jim Carroll trying to score some Tuinal to the idle audience chit-chat about the movie Patton that overwhelms "Candy Says", the Velvets are rendered as mere background noise even for the few devotees who bothered to come out to their shows.
The second concert included here—and of most interest to Velvets completists—predates the Max’s Kansas City show by a few months, but exudes an even greater degree of finality. Recorded by a fan on a reel-to-reel, the May 1970 set at Philadelphia’s Second Fret club sees Reed, Yule, and guitarist Sterling Morrison performing without a drummer (though Yule would hit the skins on a couple of songs). The stripped-down, slackened presentation greatly distinguishes it from other live Velvets documents of the era, while emphasizing certain subliminal textures, like the krautrock pulse running through "Cool It Down", or the tremolo wash on "Train Round the Bend" that essentially invents Spacemen 3 a good 12 years early. (There’s also a rare Reed-sung version of "New Age" with considerably different lyrics.) These curios aside, Live at Second Fret is the sort of moldy bootleg you probably only need to hear once, that is, if you can even make it all the way through—the recording has the fidelity of a pocket-dial. But the decaying, desolate presentation feels like an appropriate way to capture a band on the verge of disintegration. The set ends, as Loaded does, with "Oh! Sweet Nuthin’", and the two versions crystallize the album’s story in miniature: one is the grandiose statement of a band with chart-topping aspirations, the other is the lonesome sound of a band that ain’t got nothin’ at all.
