Matrix Tapes latest homage to the Velvet Underground

“The band went out on the road and developed a whole different style of playing. It wasn’t based on hard work and musical … a certain amount of musical … extrapolation. It really turned into a road band. It was a drag. It was tedious.”

— John Cale, talking about the Velvet Underground in 1983 As each of the Velvet Underground’s studio albums have approached (or in a couple of cases passed) the 45th anniversary of their release, they’ve been celebrated with multi-CD boxed sets crammed with new material. For a band that’s famous for being the quintessential cult favorite, it might seem odd that they’ve been so celebrated in recent years.

Why 45, not 40 or 50? Because of the singular numerological significance of the figure? A cynic might suggest that Lou Reed’s death in October 2013 might have something to do with the revival, but the six-CD edition of the band’s first record, The Velvet Underground and Nico, was issued the year before.

The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes (Polydor, $59.99), a four-CD, 42- track set released last month, documents two shows the band played in San Francisco 46 years ago at the legendary venue The Matrix — a renovated pizza place Marty Balin opened in 1965 to give his band, The Jefferson Airplane, a place to play.

And then there’s the sixCD, 45th anniversary edition of Loaded (Rhino, $80), the band’s more accessible yet least characteristic record.

Obviously neither of these sets is aimed at the casual consumer, and even hardcore Velvet fans might balk at being asked to plop down more than $100 (the street price is considerably lower than suggested retail, and if you’re willing to download the tracks, it’s even cheaper) for music that might be best presented on the original albums. Some people have raved about the 37- minute version of “Sister Ray” on Disc 3, but that track was included on last year’s 45th anniversary edition of the group’s third album, The Velvet Underground.

Still, if you can afford it, this is a rewarding rabbit hole to descend into. Once, on an FM radio morning show, I suggested that The Velvet Underground might be considered one of, if not the, greatest rock ’ n’ roll bands this country has ever produced.

Certainly I said this in the spirit of provocation — I was arguing against the likes of commercial juggernauts like the Eagles and Journey, and the conversation was meant to draw spirited dissent from callers who we hoped would say entertaining, outrageous things we could mock or champion. The point was not to arrive at a consensus or even establish a criteria by which we might measure greatness. The point was to fill the three hours not given over to commercial messages.

Still, I’m not sure I wasn’t right. The Velvets may be best remembered for being Andy Warhol’s pet band or for not selling many records, but I’m hard pressed to think of any band — up to and including The Beatles — that’s more important in terms of the way pop music has evolved and is received. If Bob Dylan made it all right for grown-ups to take rock ’n’ roll seriously, The Velvet Underground pushed it into the avant-garde, marrying Hank Williams to Erik Satie while Warhol stood in the back and nodded his approval.

You can’t trace back any of those streams of punk, alternative, indie or experimental rock without passing through the dark and throbbing jungle that is The Velvet Underground. They set the stage for Iggy Pop, Joy Division, Roxy Music, David Bowie, R.E.M, Big Star. It’s nearly impossible to imagine any sort of punk, alternative, indie or experimental rock without them.

ROCK ’N’ ROLL

Their influence was summed up by Brain Eno, who was quoted by Musician magazine in 1982 as saying that Reed told him “the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years … that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”

That’s hyperbole worth walking back. The truth is the band’s debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, the one with the famous banana peel sticker on the cover, certainly was a disappointment in that it failed to sell in numbers that Warhol (who designed the cover) and the label expected. Still, the record did better than is generally believed. MGM — parent company of the venerable and prestigious jazz-oriented label Verve, to which the Velvets were signed — reported 58,476 copies sold through Feb. 14, 1969, about two years after it was released. (By 2013, it had sold more than 560,000 copies — enough to be certified “gold” by the Recording Industry Association of America.)

Reed’s self-mythologizing aside, by 1969 the Velvets seemed to have run their course as an art project — they’d shed their affiliation with Warhol and chanteuse Nico after the first album, released the screeching attack on pop sensibilities that was White Heat/White Light (after which John Cale, the most avant-garde member of the band, a classically trained violist heavily influenced by the neo-dadaist Fluxust movement, was forced out by Reed for being too “out there”), then followed that up with The Velvet Underground, which dialed down the sonic aggression and turned up the tunefulness as Reed’s songwriting hit an early, sophisticated peak.

By the time the squeakyclean Mike Curb became president of MGM and looked to purge the label of deviant drug abusers, Reed and his band mates were ready to move into the bigger time, signing a two-record deal with Atlantic in late 1969.

But before heading into the studio to record the sessions for Loaded ( the title comes from Atlantic executive Ahmet Ertegun’s admonition to Reed that he lay off the sex and drugs, and instead load the album with hits: “I gave them an album loaded with hits and it was loaded with hits to the point where the rest of the people showed their colors,” Reed said in 1972, after he’d disbanded the group to embark on his solo career), the quintessential New York band went on the road, playing a number of dates in California, including 18 in the San Francisco Bay area.

The Matrix box focuses on two 1969 shows, recorded on Nov. 26 and 27 (Thanksgiving Day). Though this is the first time these tapes were professionally recorded to four-track, it should be noted that some versions were first recorded by Mercury Records in 1974 as part of the double LP 1969 The Velvet Underground Live. And one of the audience members at a number of the San Francisco shows was Robert Quine, a law student who went on to play guitar for both Richard Hell and Reed. (Quine’s personal cache of tapes was released by Polydor in 2001 as Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes.)

OH! SWEET NUTHIN’

What the Matrix shows demonstrate is that the Velvets — with a lineup that included Cale’s replacement Doug Yule on bass and keyboards along with Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker — were a highly capable live band, delivering tight, almost poppy, performances. Reed undermines the band’s pretensions from the beginning, announcing that the audience was about to hear a “very serious set” they should not receive frivolously. While not all the songs register as classics, a lot of the material is excellent and the performances vary from workmanlike to revelatory. At times — during the slamming initial version of “What Goes On” and all three versions of “There She Goes Again” — it’s hard to understand why the Velvets didn’t quite make it. On the other hand there’s a ponderous version of the Cale co-write of “Black Angel’s Death Song,” minus his dissonant electric viola and with lyrics that might have provoked embarrassed giggles for Jim Morrison. (Reed later wrote that the words were strung “together for the sheer fun of their sound, not any particular meaning.”)

While it’s a mild apostasy to say it, the post-Cale Velvet Underground was probably a better rock band, and had the center held, it might have become the hit-making machine for which Reed (and Warhol) had hoped. Loaded is the most accessible and least interesting studio album the Velvets ever made, although it’s difficult to discount any record that leads off with the irresistible Monkees- style pop of “Who Loves the Sun,” segues into the four-chord miracle — D-A-G-Bm — that is “Sweet Jane,” and then follows with the definitive propulsiveness of “Rock & Roll.”

Of course, it doesn’t keep it up, and there’s an undercurrent of exhaustion in Loaded. Reed ceded vocals and some lead guitar work to Yule (a fine multi- instrumentalist who hasn’t always received his due; when The Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, Yule wasn’t included) on four of the 10 tracks, Morrison’s role is reduced and Tucker, on maternity leave, is completely absent, with Yule’s brother Billy, engineer Adrian Barber and session musician Tommy Castanero sitting in behind the drum kit.

Three months before the album was released, Reed quit the band (an action presaged by the otherwise forgettable “Train Around the Bend”). He repaired to his father’s accounting firm where he worked as a $40-a-week typist for about a year before launching his solo career. To fulfill contractual obligations, a Yule-led version of the band persisted for a couple of years, issuing the 1972 disc, Squeeze, which is really more a Yule solo record. By that time, Morrison had left to pursue a doctorate in medieval literature at the University of Texas. Tucker had settled into gentle domestic tranquility.

Reed, of course, went on being Lou Reed. Saving lives through rock ’n’ roll.