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Volume CXXXIII, Number 12 |
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Velvet Underground reunites for one night only... in 1972
TED REINERT
ORIENT STAFF
The Velvet Underground & Nico is my favorite record made before the 1990s. It was released in March 1967, in the year of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Summer of Love. The hippies out west were singing their lovely ballads of peace and change. In New York City, Lou Reed and his friends were making noisy distorted music about scoring drugs, heroin addiction, and sadomasochism.
There's a saying about the Velvets that not many people bought their albums, but those that did all formed bands. That didn't keep the group together, though. Nico, the German chanteuse with a haunting, unique voice (who was producer Andy Warhol's only real musical contribution to the group) was the first to split; Welsh violist John Cale left after the second album. Reed himself left just before the release of 1970's Loaded.
The recently released live album Le Bataclan '72 finds Reed, Cale, and Nico reuniting for a one-off concert in Paris in January 1972. The show is an interesting artifact for a Velvets fan. Reed, Cale, and Nico take turns behind the mic, supporting each other on their instruments, and run through six songs from the Velvets debut among other tunes.
Reed's songs are probably the most interesting. The concert is mostly acoustic and the versions of "Waiting For the Man" and "The Black Angel's Death Song" are vastly different from their studio counterparts. "Black Angel" benefits from being slowed down and the lyrics being rendered somewhat intelligible, but the quiet, slow "Waiting For the Man" loses the song's key feeling of paranoia.
The epic "Heroin" is presented in a solid, faithful version. Reed also plays a pair of songs from his self-titled solo debut and exhibits his droll wit in introducing tracks. He gives no indication, however, of the direction he would take on his glam-rock coming out party Transformer later that year.
Cale's contributions to the Velvet Underground was found in the sound not the songs and his tunes here are a pleasant surprise. "The Biggest, Loudest, Hairiest Group of All," a possible send-up of his former band, is particularly fun.
When Nico takes over, the album gets a little strange. The Reed-penned ballads "Femme Fatale" and "I'll Be Your Mirror" are lovely little songs, but in between them are three songs from Nico's solo work that I can best describe as haunting, droning medieval German death chants. Listening to these tracks, time seems to slow down and 17 minutes stretch into an eternity. By the end, Nico has somewhat blown out her voice and the encore "All Tomorrow's Parties," like "Waiting For the Man," loses its punch without the pounding percussion and piano of the original.
The bonus tracks from rehearsals, "Pale Blue Eyes" and "Candy Says" from 1969's The Velvet Underground album, are not rare, Nico-sung gems as I dared hope, but snippets from tapes left on in the background, and are basically worthless.
The concert isn't absolutely fantastic and the quality of the recording isn't perfect either, which might explain why it took 32 years to get around to releasing Le Bataclan. That said, it's worth a listen for any big Velvets fan.
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