Archive
figures incessantly: compared to the
THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND
The Complete Matrix Tapes
The live motherlode from San Francisco, 1969. By Andy Gill
WHEN THE VELVET
Underground played
San Franciscos
intimate, musician-
friendly club The
Matrix in late
November/early
December 1969,
things were changing
both for the band and
for the citys music
8/10 scene. The Velvets
were no longer the
raging wild beast they had been during John Cales
tenure: a deliberate shift pop-wards had resulted in
their third album, released earlier that year,
surprising fans with its folksy understatement and
uncharacteristically sentimental attitudes; and they
were preparing material for another album, their
first for Atlantic, hopefully following the new labels
demand for a record loaded with hits.
San Franciscos music scene, meanwhile, was still
registering the queasy aftershock of the Manson
Family Murders down the coast in Los Angeles. Most
bands had already left the city, escaping to Marin
County to avoid the huge influx of panhandling
hippies and rubbernecking gawkers into the
Haight Ashbury district. And a distinct shift in
musical style had been signalled by the colossal
success that year of local band Creedence
Clearwater Revival, whose short, snappy little
songs had scored them a run of hits through 1969
that included Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising,
Green River and Fortunate Son. The Velvets
might have been forgiven for thinking that their
new, neatened-up, pop-conscious approach would
chime nicely with the changing conditions:
was it really that far, after all, from
Proud Mary to Sweet Jane?
All the same, they opted to open
their shows with the old warhorse
Im Waiting For The Man, an echo of
their earlier, darker inclinations. Its
going to be a very serious rocknroll set, Lou
POLYDOR
Reed teased the audience amiably. I dont want any
of you to enjoy yourselves frivolously, because it
goes against national policy. This is a song written
under the influence of dreams, and its about one
mans journey from uptown to downtown. What
follows is a very different version from the urgent,
implacable motorik of the first Velvets album: a
slow, languid affair sauntering past the 10-minute
mark on the string-bending swoons of limpid
guitars, while Reed affects the casual, laissez-faire
cool of a nightclub crooner. Its bizarrely devoid of
impact, almost trance-like, as if the song has been
strained through the aesthetic of the third album;
and not for the first time during their shows at the
venue, its greeted initially with stunned silence,
followed by a desultory smattering of applause.
Its a red herring, in a sense, as thereafter the
shows develop an itchy momentum through nippy
rockers like What Goes On, There She Goes
Again and Were Gonna Have A Real Good Time
Together, built on Sterling Morrisons frantic,
choppy rhythm guitar, so feverish it almost trips
over itself, and Mo Tuckers forceful, take-no-
prisoners snare shots. Reeds guitar and Doug Yules
organ, when called upon to solo, pursue small
expansive, freewheeling improvs the
Matrix audience might be familiar with
courtesy of such as the Dead and
Quicksilver, the Velvets here are
rudimentary and tight, disciplined rather
than indulgent, and their performances
hum with the new, minimalist aesthetic
then developing a significant influence
in New York art circles.
I Cant Stand It is another itchy,
rhythmic piece that finds the band in
transition en route to Loaded, with Reeds
surreal, Dylanesque lines (I live with
thirteen dead cats/A purple dog that wears
spats/Theyre all living in the hall/And I
cant stand it any more) offering few
semantic clues. But theres still room
within the tight, itchy groove for Reed to
essay an odd, modal guitar solo, through
which his Ornette Coleman influence
shines with a dark, confrontational gleam.
You can sense the effect its having on the
bands chum Robert Quine, out in the
crowd with his trusty cassette recorder,
capturing it all for posterity. In a few years
time, Quine will apply these lessons in his
own skronk guitar stylings for Richard
Hell & The Voidoids, and for Reed himself.
Sometimes, they try a bit too hard, as when Reed
yelps as he launches into his solo in Sweet Bonnie
Brown/Too Much, a pair of throwaway rockabilly-
style songs featuring notably dull lyrics, about which
his bandmates can barely hide the contempt in their
desultory chorus responses. And two runs through
White Light/White Heat are loose and raggedy,
paradoxically rushed but stretched-out, the closest
they come to losing their shape apart from the
woefully wallowy Ocean, which features some
of the worlds dullest organ soloing, and simply fails
to command attention.
At other times, they are simply perverse, with a
grim, antagonistic Black Angels Death Song all
too accurately summarised by Reeds smirking
introduction: This song we havent played in a
really long time, because it used to empty clubs as
a matter of fact, when a club wanted to close for a
while it would get in touch with us to play this song.
But overall, theres a good balance throughout the
sets between innocence and experience, fast and
slow, benign and malign. The four versions of
Heroin have a mesmerising, queasy grace, and the
two lashes of Venus In Furs are stately, majestic,
dark and velveteen, like a high-class hookers
counterpane. The four versions of Some Kinda
Love have a nodding, hypnotic momentum, with
Reed again playing the worldly crooner; and theres
a lovely formal, faded glamour to Pale Blue Eyes
that balances beautifully with the sweetness of the
ensuing After Hours.
Substantial tranches of the Matrix Tapes have
already appeared elsewhere, firstly in 1974 on the
1969: The Velvet Underground Live double album,
and subsequently on 2001s Bootleg Series Volume 1:
The Quine Tapes. More recently, Matrix recordings
comprised two of the six discs of the 45th
Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition of the Velvets
third album, including the 37-minute version of
Sister Ray included here, which offers the clearest
indication of how the band had changed since the
departure of John Cale. Starting out slow and
relaxed, speeding up, then dropping back and
surging forward periodically, it grooves along like a
standard jam session. But its a far more measured
acceleration and development than on the 1967
Gymnasium live recording included on the White
Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Edition: theres
none of the originals architectonic
quality, that sense of musical plates
shifting under forces beyond
their control. Those days were
well and truly gone and soon,
so was Lou Reed himself.
JANUARY 2016 | UNCUT | 89