Musically, however, you can hardly compare them with punk music. This was reflected in their lifestyle, drug use and "attitude". The Velvet Underground was already a real punk band ten years before the rise of this music genre. Certainly, in the 70s and early 80s the cult status of this group, briefly managed by Andy Warhol, reached extraordinary proportions. The band, with artistic exponents of text and music writers Lou Reed and John Cale, influenced generations of rock musicians and groups. Those who do not yet have an album from this legendary group can now fill this gap by purchasing the new Collected. We're close to halfway there now, and their place in the canon is secure, but we still haven't entirely figured them out.An album by The Velvet Underground needs to be in the collection of every legitimate music lover. Elliott Murphy's liner notes for *1969-*written in 1972, when the Velvet Underground were still a commercial nonentity with an enthusiastic but tiny cult-imagined a kid a hundred years later, in a "classical rock'n'roll class," listening to the Velvets and wondering what to make of them. On the other hand, you can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing, and considered that way, it's a jewel with a chip knocked off its top. This box isn't exactly a grand opening of the vaults: as nice as it is to have all this stuff in one place, less than a quarter of it hasn't been officially issued before, and it's not like there's a shortage of Velvet Underground live recordings that could stand to be released for real. Their most protean song, "Sister Ray", turns up in a relatively relaxed, noodly 37-minute performance that's far from its face-melting White Light/White Heat incarnation. The bizarre take on "I'm Waiting for the Man" that opens the box is slowed down to a crawling blues, extended to 13 minutes with some seemingly extemporaneous new verses "Lisa Says", which the group had recorded in a studio just a month earlier, has almost totally rewritten lyrics and an entirely new bridge. Yule later said of Reed that "there were times when he would invent or put together songs on the fly in a performance, and he'd just turn around and say, 'Follow me'". But The Complete Matrix Tapes is useful as a way to hear how the Velvets constantly reworked their repertoire. That said, some of the Matrix box's extended vamps get draggy, and there's a lot of song duplication here: four versions apiece of "Some Kinda Love", "Heroin", and "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together", three apiece of "There She Goes Again" and "I'm Waiting for the Man", two apiece of seven others. Both "White Light/White Heat" and "I'm Set Free" are much more dramatic and vivid here than in their studio incarnations. The version of the throwaway two-line rocker "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" on disc two is utterly thrilling, and the hushed, droning "Heroin" later in that set is a solid 20 years ahead of its time. The first disc's magnificent "What Goes On", with Morrison and Lou Reed's guitars chattering together at breathless speed while Doug Yule hammers at an organ, is the wellspring for, among other things, the Wedding Present's entire catalogue "Ocean" is the seed and the soil for both Low and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The peculiarly thin sonics of Matrix owner Peter Abram's recordings don't do Maureen Tucker's caveman drumming any favors, but they make a serious case for Sterling Morrison as God-Emperor of Rhythm Guitarists. The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out.
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