Velvet Underground

This sleeper-fan-favorite from Lou Reed and Velvet Underground is getting its first reissue on vinyl in over 40 years. This 2LP is comprised of two late-in-the-year dates at End of Cole Ave in Dallas and at the Matrix in San Francisco, all sourced from fan tape recordings, the two-track mixdown straight from the live console, or from acetate copies.
The fact that few recordings of Velvet Underground exist from before 1970 has made this compilation a treasured gem amongst fans. The tracks on this 2LP showcase a stripped-down and vulnerable Lou Reed accompanied by a band at arguably their creative zenith, and each song offers a fresh perspective on their respective studio versions.

In the 1970s lower Manhattan's Max's Kansas City was the place to be, a perpetual meeting place for scene-makers and their satellites. In the summer of '70, The Velvet Underground was the house band, and their nightly gigs, propelled by Lou Reed's mesmerizing vocals, are the stuff of legend. Documented on a cassette player by one of the Velvet's entourage, this recording has since become the most famous "bootleg" ever, capturing one of Reed's last-some say final-performances with the band before going solo. It both immortalizes a precise moment in pop culture history, and also spotlights one of rock's most influential bands at the peak of their extraordinary powers.

Over the past decade, The Velvet Underground’s live archive has been raided with increasing frequency. First we got the official release of a long-bootlegged 1966 Columbus, Ohio gig as a part of the “super-deluxe” edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico. And in 2013, the 1967 Gymnasium gig (which had only circulated amongst collectors for a few years), showed up on the similarly super deluxe White Light/White Heat box set. At this point, there’s very little live material left from the John Cale-era of the group, at least that anyone knows about. But one of the strangest, most fascinating treasures of Cale’s time with the Velvets still remains in the hands of bootleggers: “Sweet Sister Ray.”

The Velvet Underground's classic self-titled third album, released in March 1969, by MGM, was a departure from the band's first two albums in more ways than one. Gone was co-founding member John Cale, and in his place was a 21-year-old with Long Island roots named Doug Yule, who stepped right in. The record was also a stylistic leap, as Lou Reed describes it in Rolling Stone editor David Fricke's liner notes, 'I thought we had to demonstrate the other side of us.

Live At Max's Kansas City is the 1972 album by The Velvet Underground, consisting of a bootleg recording someone recorded with a cassette player. This is taken from a 1989 CD pressing released by Atlantic.

The Velvet Underground and Nico is the debut album by avant-garde rock and roll band The Velvet Underground and vocal collaborator Nico. It was originally released in March 1967 by Verve Records, a subsidiary of MGM Records.Recorded in 1966 during Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, The Velvet Underground and Nico would gain notoriety for its experimentalist performance sensibilites, as well as its focus on controversial subject matter in songs such as "Heroin".Though largely ignored upon its release, it has since become one of the most influential and critically lauded rock album in history, appearing as #13 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time as well as being added to the 2006 National Recording Registry by the Librarian of Congress