Velvet Underground: Live 1969 vs. Grateful Dead: Live/Dead

(also, got a '67 tape where the Dead do a version of "Cream Puff War" which might be YU influenced--anyway, sounds like something I'd expect from a CBGB band a decade later---but they dropped that song from their setlists pretty early, right?)

Did Sterling ever say anything about The Dead?

I'd be surprised if he hasn't.

In that long Sterling interview in the VU companion, I seem to recall him commenting on the Dead, but saving real praise for Quicksilver Messenger Service.

yeah he was a big cippolina booster -- don't know what he thought of the Dead, though he probably took Lou's view.
the VU really hated Bill Graham (and the feeling was mutual), which i think colored everything for them about the SF scene.

VU (and arthur lee) otm re: bill graham

lol at saying the jefferson airplane "can't play". it really is a clash of opposites, in a way. i remember jorma and jack in some interview/documentary going off on how bemused/disturbed they were by pre-punk stuff like the who destroying their instruments... "like, instruments are like sacred temples, man"

jefferson airplane's music is a lot darker and more fucked up then they're given credit for, anyways.

the true darkness comes in the starship age

In any case, the Velvets didn’t return to California for two years. As Sterling said in his usual manner, “We left California alone for two years, because they’re so determined to do their own thing, their own San Francisco music. We were just rocking the boat – they don’t want to know about that. ‘There’s only one music, and we all know what that is…it’s what the Grateful Dead play. That’s the very best rock & roll can ever get…’ We said, ‘You’re full of shit, your city, your state, and everything else.’”

hahaha love it

wonder what the "I have heard neither of these albums but I'm still voting" split will look like -- I fall into that camp & I vote VU, but only partly out of spite

Wish there was as much VU recorded live between 65 and 70 as there is GD. Especially the Cale years.
Still I do love the GD speshly August 'ö8, Feb '69 and May '70 but there is other really good stuff by them over those years and up to the '74 retirement, beyond to some extent too.

would love to hear the acid test stuff. only really early live dead i've heard are those two lps of 66 live material that came out on (i think) mgm in the early 70's & are pretty ropey performance-wise.

dunno if the vu's rehearsals for the max's kansas city run have been released officially, but there's some great stuff in there from memory.

jefferson airplane's music is a lot darker and more fucked up then they're given credit for, anyways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYr5D4lqC0w

They were sort-of released, they came out as part of the 2 disc promo, but were dropped when the deluxe edition came out.

I never much cared for live VU - better in the studio.

....just the opposite for the Dead.

live VU can be awesome but 69 live is dull as dishwater imo. I know lotsa people love that jangly pastoral VU style but to me it really amplifies a lot of weaknesses in Lou's writing, weaknesses that can be submerged in pure volume.

there are so many other dead live artifacts i never get back to live/dead, so i guess the velvets record

Don't agree that it's just jangly or that there are important weaknesses in Lou's VU songs, but either way, the Gymnasium set is a satisfying Cale-era onslaught, prob still posted here and there.

"heavenly wine and roses seems to whisper to me when you smile"

Delmore Schwartz lols from the grave at that line

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

OH SHIT

yes, from a tremendous height, onto the dead.

I've never owned that VU record, but from the parts I've heard it surely gets my vote. I'm another one of those "I've tried" types with Live/Dead, and it'll never be my thing.

there are so many other dead live artifacts
this is why i voted for the VU ultimately, though Live/Dead is a great example of the classic double live LP.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Quite.

Back in yr stinky hippyhole deadheads

:(

:(

Frank Zappa is rolling over in his grave

Too close

The answer is so obviously live/dead... get with it dorks

rong

I enjoy both but have to go with VU. I also love that Dark Star. I still recall hearing it and thinking, " ohhh, so this is why some people say T Verlaine sounds like J Garcia ". Until then i'd only heard Workingmans and American Beauty, and thought, "wtf are they talking about"? Lol. I know better now. Also I strongly dislike "lovelight".

I'll always choose a group reinventing rock, in their own image, over white boys imitating Otis Redding re "Lovelight".

swiss movement is miles ahead of both of these. i'd still like to hear the velvets' set from the night in '69 they shared the bill with the dead. the dead's set shows a band who were completely put off their game by the velvets, to the point that they said "fuck it, let's just playback 'what's become of the baby'"

oh and of course "at san quentin" is also way better than either of these records

i am solely basing this opinion on the dark star on there also

Man, considering how much I like the Velvets, it's pretty interesting that I have next to no interest in any of their live recordings.

I'll always choose a group reinventing rock, in their own image, over white boys imitating Otis Redding re "Lovelight".

― VyrnaKnowlIsAHeadbanger, Saturday, February 17, 2018 12:53 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Grateful Dead, led by a half-Spanish-American vocalist/guitarist, helped reinvent rock/blues/folk/bluegrass as improvisational and experimental music that was not infrequently equally avant-garde as that of the Velvets, if not moreso. Just as John Cale played with La Monte Young, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten studied composition under Luciano Berio and played alongside fellow student Steve Reich. And just as Lou Reed was a New York (well, actually, Long Island) Jew inspired by African-American jazz musicians, Mickey Hart was a New York Jew inspired by not just the same (though of a less avant-garde ilk than Reed; that interest was more Lesh's domain) but also by Latin-American and African percussion, and who had gone further and actually played with notable jazz musicians before joining the Dead. It was, yes, an Irish-American "white boy," Ron McKernan, who sang that Joe Scott sang made famous by Bobby Blue Bland, among many other blues and r&b classics including an Otis Redding tune, but he did so after being immersed in blues and r&b from a very early age by his father, a dj at a primarily African-American radio station, as well as in African-American society growing up in Palo Alto, CA, whose then-incorporated Eastern half in whose bars he began hanging out as a teenager became majority-black in the early-mid '60s.

except for 'what goes on' 1969 version yep xp

moo vaughn i <3 u

The answer is so obviously live/dead... get with it dorks

otm

Back in yr stinky hippyhole deadheads

― Οὖτις, Friday, 29 May 2015 00:58 (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no u

Live 1969 would be even more perfect had it contained "Foggy Notion."

David Allan Coe's son Tyler on why he hates the Dead--he posts on FB all the time about his love for the Velvets' live recordings, 25 minutes of "Sister Ray."

(And 25 minutes of "Sister Ray" is about 20 minutes too much, even on the studio record, my interest does flag after a certain point, tho some of it's brilliant.)

man I haven't listened to the studio Sister Ray in many, many years but I do remember feeling like it was worth it if you rode it out. when the vocals come back in, the feeling that you've been somewhere very different. not unlike dark star really, only with worse musicians and a harsher vibe

which one has the great recording of I think I'm falling in love?

Live At the Gymnasium?

I don't know, I just wanted to be in the chat!

Background, according to Wiki:
The Velvet Underground signed a two-album deal with Atlantic in early 1970 and released their fourth studio album, Loaded, in November 1970. By the time of its release, singer/guitarist/main songwriter Lou Reed had left. The rest of the band stayed together, with bassist Doug Yule moving to vocals and guitar and Walter Powers being drafted in to play bass.

This line-up did a tour of the United States and Canada promoting Loaded. As the band still had a contract for another album, they wrote and played new songs eventually to be included on it. Atlantic had lost faith in the band's commercial prospects and, wanting to cut their losses after the disappointing chart showings of Loaded, decided to release an archive live recording instead.

The tapes that would later become Live at Max's Kansas City were recorded on August 23, 1970, by Andy Warhol associate Brigid Polk on a portable cassette recorder. While they were recording Loaded, the Velvet Underground held a nine-week engagement (June 24 – August 28, 1970) at New York City nightclub Max's Kansas City, playing two sets a night. Polk recorded almost everything happening around her at the time, and this happened to include her attendance of the last concert that Lou Reed played with the Velvet Underground. She recorded both the early and the late set. Later that year, Atlantic A&R employee Danny Fields heard the tapes and submitted them to his superiors, who accepted the recordings and in 1972 decided to make an album out of them. The line-up at the concerts consisted of Reed, Yule, lead guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Billy Yule, the younger brother of Doug Yule; regular drummer Maureen Tucker temporarily left the group several months earlier when she became pregnant with her first child, Kerry "Trucker" Tucker.

Originally, Live at Max's Kansas City was a single album distillation of both sets re-sequenced and edited by Lou Reed and Atlantic staff producer Geoff Haslam to reflect the band's loud and quiet sides, respectively. On August 3, 2004, Warner Music re-issue label Rhino Records released a two-CD Deluxe Edition that contains both sets in their entirety in their original running order. The songs were recorded on a mono recorder using a simple ferro musicassette in a small venue, resulting in tape hiss and an audience often drowning out the quieter bits of music.

Author Jim Carroll can be heard speaking on the album, ordering drinks and inquiring about drugs between songs as he was the one holding the microphone. Who was talking about Nixon?

Not seeing that one, plax---this is the double:
2004 reissue edition
All tracks written by Lou Reed except as indicated.

Disc one
No. Title Length
1. "I'm Waiting for the Man" 5:50
2. "White Light/White Heat" 6:07
3. "I'm Set Free" 5:33
4. "Sweet Jane" (Version 1) 6:18
5. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" (Version 1) 4:41
6. "New Age" 6:44
7. "Beginning to See the Light" 5:40
Disc two
No. Title Length
8. "Who Loves the Sun" 2:17
9. "Sweet Jane" (Version 2) 5:58
10. "I'll Be Your Mirror" 3:02
11. "Pale Blue Eyes" 7:10
12. "Candy Says" 5:48
13. "Sunday Morning" (Reed, Cale) 3:48
14. "After Hours" 2:50
15. "Femme Fatale" 4:07
16. "Some Kinda Love" 11:22
17. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" (Version 2) 5:00
18. "Atlantic release promo" (hidden track)

They also show the 2016:
2016 reissue edition
All tracks written by Lou Reed except as indicated.

No. Title Length
1. "I'm Waiting for the Man" 5:44
2. "White Light/White Heat" 5:15
3. "I'm Set Free" 6:27
4. "Sweet Jane" 6:17
5. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" (Version 1) 4:20
6. "New Age" 6:38
7. "Beginning to See the Light" 5:42
8. "I'll Be Your Mirror" 3:27
9. "Pale Blue Eyes" 6:01
10. "Candy Says" 5:50
11. "Sunday Morning" (Reed, Cale) 3:39
12. "After Hours" 2:58
13. "Femme Fatale" 3:09
14. "Some Kinda Love" 11:03
15. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" (Version 2) 4:17

Personnel
The Velvet Underground
Sterling Morrison – lead guitar, backing vocals
Lou Reed – vocals, rhythm guitar
Doug Yule – bass guitar, backing vocals, lead vocal on "Lonesome Cowboy Bill", "Who Loves the Sun", "I'll Be Your Mirror", "I'm Set Free", "Candy Says" and "New Age"
Billy Yule – drums, cowbell

The Gymnasium "Guess..." is also on Peel Slowly & See.

I also think they'd quite playing it live by '70.

I doubt they played it live after Cale left.