This edition was developed in conjunction with Lou Reed and John Cale. Within the pages will be plenty of the rare photos, pictures of memorabilia and a David Fricke Essay/interview with John Cale and Lou Reed from 2013. The hard bound book was a particular highlight last year, and the shape and size look to have been repeated for the White Light / White Heat Super Deluxe. One of the highlights will be the band’s complete show at The Gymnasium in New York, recorded on April 30, 1967, which includes five previously unreleased performances culled from John Cale’s personal copy. In 2012 we had 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico (a six CD set) and this year the 1968 follow-up White Light / White Heat will be available as a three-disc deluxe package.Īlthough this new set can’t match the breadth of material on offer last year, the White Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition will still offer ten previously unreleased tracks, amongst the thirty that are on offer. It is the epitome of the group’s art.For the second year in a row, a Velvet Underground Super Deluxe Edition will be available for purchase in the run up to Christmas. Lehman Design Cover Val Valentin Engineer Director Of Gary Kellgren Engineer Recording Maureen Tucker Percussion Billy Name Photography By Cover Show more credits. Here the Velvet Underground emulate the improvisation of free-jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor with, in the words of Reed, “a rock n’ roll feeling”. The Velvet Underground White Light/White Heat More images Tracklist Credits (11) Andy Warhol Cover Cover Concept Acy R. Sister Ray saidīut the most famous track on the album is Sister Ray – a raucous, 17-minute symphony of noise beneath another grim tale of New York’s underbelly. Both tracks are narrated by Cale – his Welsh lilt adding an extra dimension of strangeness. Another groovy backtrack is augmented with a slowing pulse, deep breathing and sickening shudders straight out of a low-budget horror film. The lyrics tell the legend of the famously naked Godiva, re-imagined as a cosmetic surgery procedure. Lady Godiva’s Operation is a disturbing, aural anaesthetic. As you might expect, the ending is bleak, comic, and straight out of a Shirley Jackson novel. In The Gift, a groove the band jammed to in live shows plays under a short story written by Reed at university, in which a man mails himself to his estranged girlfriend in an attempt to win her back. Other tracks are revolutionary in a different way – by blending experimental rock with the spoken word. On title track White Light/White Heat, a crunching bass cuts through a wall of distorted guitars, emerging at the end of the song as the sole survivor, while Moe Tucker’s drums are reduced to a swirling, crashing noise. Guitar greats such as Robbie Robertson would queue around the block to see Reed play, only to be disappointed by his perceived lack of “technique”. I Heard Her Call My Name contains, according to rock magazine Crawdaddy’s Wayne McGuire, “one of the most highly-charged moments ever heard in music” and features some of the most extreme guitar soloing of all time. He famously persuaded them to adopt German actress and model Nico as a singer, and funded their first LP, The Velvet Underground and Nico, released the previous year. Featuring film screenings, fetish dancing and light shows, EPI was one of the first “happenings” – and Warhol placed the Velvet Underground at the centre of each event. In reality, Warhol’s “management” of the group meant using them for his Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) – a series of multimedia events across America. But it was White Light/White Heat that best anticipated the end of the hippy dream. Fifty years on, two music LPs from 1968 especially sum up Axelrod’s stark monochrome vision: The Beatles White Album, and White Light/White Heat, the second album from The Velvet Underground, the New York cult rock group previously managed by pop artist Andy Warhol. After the optimistic psychedelia of the previous year, events took a harsh turn as assassinations, riots and war unfolded on TV screens across the globe. Veteran CNN reporter David Axelrod recently described 1968 as a time of “ chaos in black and white”.
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