Ain’t It Peculiar?: 40 Years of The Velvet Underground’s VU

Looking back on the New York City icons’ ‘lost’ LP

February 28, 2025February 28, 2025 Melody Esme 1 Comment 1985, 40th Anniversary, Doug Yule, John Cale, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, Squeeze, Sterling Morrison, The Velvet Underground, Verve Records, VU

VU was a bold title for this 1985 record.

When you see a new release from a long-broken-up band named after the band, you might expect a greatest hits album, a box set, or god willing a new album from the band following a reformation.

VU is none of the three. It’s a collection of unused recordings, discovered by Verve Records as they prepared to re-release the first three Velvet Underground albums, that were then remixed and sequenced into an album.

VU is the best possible outcome of a band’s unreleased tracks being packaged into a new product. It flows, there’s synergy, there aren’t any weird outliers that hint at these songs never being meant to go together. This is nothing short of a miracle, considering that, amidst all the cuts from 1969, after John Cale left and was replaced by Doug Yule, we get two Cale-era tracks that make no attempt to hide his presence. Hell, “Temptation Inside Your Heart” is among the most Cale-focused Velvets songs. The inclusion of these two songs means that the pieces that comprise VU were recorded in two different years, with two separate lineups, for two labels (the band moved from Verve to its parent company MGM after Yule joined), over the course of several sessions. VU is certainly not the fifth Velvet Underground album, like Robert Christgau claimed. The band never planned for this random assortment of tracks to be packaged as a new album. But a better query than its status as an official studio album would be: Is VU canon?

The actual (technical) fifth Velvets album, 1973’s Squeeze, has never been canon. Despite the band’s name being on the record, it features none of the founding members, instead being written and recorded by Yule after the rest of the band exited. Squeeze has been exiled from the conversation — left off of compilations, hardly mentioned in biographies and not even touched in Todd Haynes’ 2021 documentary.

But how about VU? If it’s not an official album, it’s at least part of the band’s story. So it’s canon, right? What’s remarkable about it, no matter the answer, is that it passes as canon. The pieces come together. Not only is every song fantastic, they move together as a pack, with intent. It’s hard not to think of it as an official Velvet Underground album, because if you place it within their discography, only the first and third albums (the other two named after the band, funnily enough) hold a candle.

The Velvet Underground VU, Verve Records 1985

Six of the album’s ten songs had already appeared on solo Lou Reed records at the time of its release. “I Can’t Stand It,” “Lisa Says,” and “Ocean” were re-recorded for his 1972 solo debut — an overproduced mess, with an aggressively foregrounded snare and overbearing backing vocals. On VU, “I Can’t Stand It” is a nasty bit of garage rock, “Ocean” is a transcendent and expressionistic work that may be the most beautiful song the band ever recorded, and “Lisa Says,” while the least extraordinary of the ten tracks, is a pretty little tune and sounds great (though the best version of it is easily the live Matrix recording originally released on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live). On Lou Reed, the power is sucked from all three as Reed tries to find his place in the early ‘70s mainstream rock ‘n’ roll world that, despite the influence he’d already had on it, didn’t seem to have much of a place for him. The result is that these three works that all differ wildly in scope and tone are reduced to the same kitschy muck until all that makes them distinct is gone.

“Stephanie Says” was recycled for Reed’s rock opera Berlin, with its title changed to “Caroline Says II” and the lyrics re-written to fit the album’s tragic story; still, the utter dread of that project actually does a disservice to the song’s complicated melancholy by removing all of its nuance, leaving it emotionally bare to a fault. “She’s My Best Friend” found a home on Reed’s 1975 album Coney Island Baby, with its lyrics re-contextualized by the album’s focus on Reed’s transgender partner Rachel Humphreys. That re-recording is especially ruinous, both because the new context ties it to a relationship in which Reed was horribly abusive and because the frail arrangement takes away all of the song’s jubilance.

This leaves the Transformer recording of “Andy’s Chest” as the one case where the later version does the song justice, with a delicate double-bass and whispered vocals introducing things before it abruptly transitions into an upbeat glam rock jam. An appropriately weird arrangement for an abstract lyric, and yet the anxious, slapdash original feels more fit for a song named after a spot on the body where a man was shot.

The other four songs, “Foggy Notion,” “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” “One of These Days” and “I’m Sticking with You,” are all bizarre little masterworks. “Foggy Notion” sits alongside “What Goes On” as their most Nuggets-ready song — the sort of dancey protopunk record that I can imagine being released by a local band in the mid ‘60s and charting at no. 93 for a brief moment before fading from the memory of all but the least sociable of record geeks. What gives it away are the lyrics, which might be about an overdose, fucking, or fucking during an overdose. Either way, it’s an even more depraved song referencing calamine lotion than The Coasters’ “Poison Ivy,” and that song is about a woman with gonorrhea. Don’t try to out-sleaze Lou Reed; you will lose.

“One of These Days” is a twangy bit of country-rock, with slide-guitars and Reed offering his off-key take on yodeling. It’s similar to the Loaded track “Lonesome Cowboy Bill,” but less silly and a bit darker; catchier, too. “I’m Sticking with You,” meanwhile, is easily comparable to “After Hours,” the closer to their third album also sung by drummer Moe Tucker. Tucker’s shy vocals, the simple pop arrangements that accompany them, and their nursery rhyme melodies make these two closing tracks clear precursors to twee pop bands like Allo Darlin’ and anti-folk singers like Kimya Dawson–hence why “I’m Sticking with You” is the only Velvet Underground song to make the Juno soundtrack.

“Temptation Inside Your Heart” offers something different, though: context. The move from White Light/White Heat’s proto-punk/metal/noise to The Velvet Underground’s soft, folky confessionalism, where Reed seemingly dropped all protective irony and edginess, delivering the most nakedly emotional set of songs of his career. The change was, obviously, spurred by Cale leaving the band. Cale and Reed’s differing ambitions had been present for as long as they’d worked together. Cale was a classically trained violist, involved in the NYC avant-garde scene, and in many ways opposed to Reed’s pop instincts. This clash added a lot of depth to the band. “Venus in Furs”’s S&M-focused lyrics are enhanced by Reed’s absolutely stunning pop melody which is in turn enhanced by Cale’s experimental viola stings.

“Temptation Inside Your Heart,” then, is the middle point, a hard line between WL/WH and TVU, in which Reed fully gives in to his pop side while Cale heckles him: “Motown! You don’t look like Martha and the Vandellas!” VU is a brilliant album, for sure. But I’m not sure that “I Can’t Stand It,” “She’s My Best Friend,” or even “Foggy Notion,” “Stephanie Says,” and “Ocean” tell me anything I wouldn’t know already about the band. “Temptation Inside Your Heart” is the exception. The song is history, it’s integral, and the idea of a time where Loaded existed and this song didn’t is wild to me–like a brief-yet-critical moment in time that vanished, an essential piece of the puzzle missing.

VU’s remarkability became all the more apparent with its sequel the following year, Another View, which feels like the epitome of a thrown-together archival comp. The songs are all good, obviously, because it’s The Velvet Underground in their prime and they could do no wrong. But between its best track being an instrumental, the inclusion of two separate versions of “Hey Mr. Rain,” and the clumsy way the tracklist is organized, its status as an outtakes album is readily apparent. What it offers another view of is not The Velvet Underground, but of the efficacy of milking a legendary band’s back catalog.

Great things can come from digging for scraps, but it’s critical to know when you’re overindulging.