Search - Velvet Underground :: Live 2

A wall of sound unbettered in popular music

steve@webmedia.com | London, UK | 01/24/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When I was about 17, Edwyn Collins of the then-magnificent Orange Juice told the New Musical Express that this was the best album ever made. He may be right.69 Live was the gorgeous, glamorous oddity with the rude cover in my record collection even before Edwyn's solemn declaration (I think we were all pretty solemn in 1980). It's a double album and, if you want to buy it now, you have to shell out for two separately-packaged CDs, which is a horrible thing to do to such a powerful unity. This is the Velvet Underground after John Cale's departure--less arty, out of Warhol's shadow--but no less melancholy or gloriously nasty for all that. It's a long, grubby recording made on cassette in Texas during one of the Velvets' long tours of college campuses. The quality is, by digital standards, so poor it would never make it to release these days. This is such a defiantly analogue recording that, if you could still buy it, I'd recommend that you buy the cassette and play it too loud on your car stereo.There's a sequence of songs on this album which so perfectly captures the low-life glamour, the elegiac beauty and the kinetic force of the Velvets at their best that it ought to be a compulsory listen for students of rock and roll. Waiting For My Man, Lisa Says, What Goes On, Sweet Jane and We're Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together--a twenty minute wall of sound unbettered in popular music. This means, that if you're going to buy just one of these CDs, it should be volume one."