Loaded

Loaded is the fourth and, as considered by many, the final Velvet Underground album, as it’s the final album to include any of the founding members.

By this time, John Cale had long since left and been replaced by friend of the band Doug Yule. Maureen Tucker was pregnant, so she was credited on the sleeve, but she never actually played on the album – her parts were covered by Doug Yule, his brother, the recording engineer, and a session musician. Sterling Morrison was studying for his eventual PhD in medieval literature at City College of New York, so he filled in on occasion but was most likely creatively absent.

The band had been dropped by MGM Records after releasing only one album of a proposed two-record deal, due to controversy surrounding the band mixed with poor sales. The band had already recorded a complete album, but in the wake of their firing, the band lost the rights to those tapes and the album was scrapped. The band threw out a majority of those songs, retaining only “Rock and Roll”, “Ocean” and “I’m Sticking with You” for the Loaded sessions. Only “Rock and Roll” made the cut to the album.

The band were picked up by Cotillion Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic. In an attempt to rectify their poor sales, Loaded was a concerted effort to make the band sound more commercial and create music that would fit more comfortably on pop radio. The title refers to the band’s new Atlantic-supplied manager demanding that Lou Reed lighten up his lyrics and produce an album “loaded with hits”. The sessions lasted five months in 1970 – longer than the sessions for the first three albums combined.

Lou Reed grew more and more disillusioned with the band throughout the sessions – the group that had such promising, provocative beginnings with Andy Warhol and the New York underground was reduced to him and Doug Yule writing upbeat pop songs for months on end in the studio. He’d practically sold his soul already. So, by the final month of sessions – during the last week of a month-long residency the band played at Max’s Kansas City – Reed quit the band.

In its aftermath, Lou Reed almost completely disowned Loaded, criticizing the editing done to its songs to make them more commercially-appealing (especially the deleted bridge in “Sweet Jane”) – though Doug Yule claims that Reed edited the songs himself. It didn’t help matters that, when the album came out, the back cover featured a photo of Doug Yule alone in the recording studio – despite the fact that Reed wrote all the songs. And, insult to insult, Yule was credited first – before Reed.

Loaded is likely The Velvet Underground’s most popular album – “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll” have gone on to be rock radio staples. Critically, it’s recieved the same acclaim that their other three records have – universal praise. The album was widely influential – Graham Coxon claims it to be a huge influence on Blur and Phish covered the entire thing in concert on Halloween, 1998.