Closing the night with “The Velvet Underground live at Max’s Kansas City” on vinyl, featuring the foreground natterings of Jim Carroll, two Yules, Lou, and Sterl.
This has been my favorite VU record for years, because an old girlfriend left a partially demagnetized tape of the record with me some long time before it was reissued in the late 1980s. The demagnetization, plus tape failure, plus the live recording itself, meant that the performance was well less than 50% audible, and I listened to it over and over again. The dropouts became part of the tunes, and the warbles of tape failure became what I wanted to hear.
Forty years after the show was recorded, Jim is among the people who died, and one of the Yules is a guy I know. There’s an expanded CD of the show, which explains how Jim was involved with the recording, and how the original shows were compressed to the first 40 minute vinyl, and how it may have been Lou’s last show with the band.
Well before any of that, I developed a love for “Sunday Morning” from this record that cannot be eroded save when St. Alzheimer comes for me. The band itself, all the hairy incarnations, is my delight, and the only song that ranks above “Sunday Morning” for me is “Who Loves The Sun,” for reasons which shall not be recorded upon the face of the internet.
