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Fact #148403

When:

Short story:

Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, Doug Yule and Atlantic Records engineer Adrian Barber begin two days of recording rough demos intended for the fourth Velvet Underground album, Loaded. The songs they work on are Ride Into The Sun, Ocean, I Love You, Walk It And Talk It, and Love Makes You Feel Ten Feet Tall.

Full article:

LOADED BY THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
by Johnny Black

Loaded saw the ever-changing Velvet Underground mutate yet again, but it also brought their golden era to an end.

Recorded under withering circumstances during the summer of 1970, the album was a triumph of creativity over adversity. The band was simultaneously holding down an exhausting ten-week residency at Max’s Kansas City, drummer Mo Tucker was taking time out to look after her newborn daughter and guitarist Sterling Morrison was studying part-time at college.

Yet, from the breezy harmony vocals and chiming guitars of the opener, Who Loves The Sun?, Loaded over-turned all expectations. Their first three albums, although stylistically different, all shared a disturbing emotional intensity that was assumed to be the band’s defining characteristic, but now they sounded like they were having fun. Although the lyric of the album’s first acknowledged classic, Sweet Jane, wallows in sordid details of New York’s decadent sub-culture, the track’s simple, churning guitar riff is positively celebratory, as is Rock & Roll, Reed’s hymn to the delights of pop radio.

In Late August, on the last night of their Max’s residency, Reed quit. He’d simply had enough. For the next two years he lived with his parents in Freeport, Long Island, working as a $40-a-week typist in his father’s accountancy firm. Bassist Doug Yule, assisted by producer Geoffrey Haslam, brought the album to completion and, as with every Velvet Underground album, it was largely ignored by the record buying public. Fortunately, given the glorious 20/20 vision of hindsight, Loaded now stands revealed as a classic.