Loaded (1970)

Loaded is the fourth studio album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground, released in November 1970 by Atlantic Records subsidiary Cotillion. It was the final album recorded featuring any of the band's original members; the lead singer and primary songwriter, Lou Reed, left the band three months before the album's release, and the guitarist Sterling Morrison and the drummer Maureen Tucker left the band in 1971. For this reason, it is often considered by fans to be the last "true" Velvet Underground album. The multi-instrumentalist Doug Yule remained and released the album Squeeze in 1973 before the band's dissolution the same year.

Though the album was intended to appease Atlantic's request that the Velvet Underground produce hit songs, none of the singles originating from Loaded nor Loaded itself succeeded in entering the charts. It has retrospectively gained critical acclaim; Loaded was ranked number 110 in 2012, and number 242 in 2020, on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Background

Loaded was a deliberate attempt to gain radio play, while the album's title refers to Atlantic's request that the band produce an album "loaded with hits", with a double meaning about the word "loaded", which can also mean "really high on drugs". Singer and multi-instrumentalist Doug Yule said that "there was a big push to produce a hit single, there was that mentality, which one of these is a single, how does it sound when we cut it down to 3.5 minutes, so that was a major topic for the group at that point. And I think that the third album to a great extent shows a lot of that in that a lot of those songs were designed as singles and if you listen to them you can hear the derivation, like this is sort of a Phil Spector-ish kind of song, or this is that type of person song."

Recording

Reed was critical of the album's final mix. He left the Velvet Underground on August 23, 1970, before Loaded was released that November. Reed consistently maintained that it had been remixed and resequenced without his consent.

One of his sore points was that the "heavenly wine and roses" section was cut out of "Sweet Jane". In the original recording, this part was intended to provide a perfectly flowing bridge to a full-fledged plagal cadence two-chord version of the chorus (earlier choruses in the song have a 4-chord riff). In Reed's initial solo performances, he would include the verse (see for instance American Poet), until 1973, when he would routinely leave it out, as the bridge fits less well in a more hard rock version (as heard for instance on Rock 'n' Roll Animal). However, the post-Reed, Yule-led band always performed the song with the verse included. A career-spanning retrospective of Reed's recordings with the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist, NYC Man (The Ultimate Collection 1967–2003), which Reed compiled himself, uses the shorter version. When asked about the shortened versions of "Sweet Jane" and "New Age" and Reed's long-standing claims that they were re-edited without his consent, Yule claimed that Reed had in fact edited the songs himself. "He edited it. You have to understand at the time, the motivation was... Lou was, and all of us were, intent on one thing and that was to be successful and what you had to do to be successful in music, was you had to have a hit, and a hit had to be uptempo, short, and with no digressions, straight ahead basically, you wanted a hook and something to feed the hook and that was it. 'Sweet Jane' was arranged just exactly the way it is on the original Loaded release exactly for that reason—to be a hit! 'Who Loves The Sun' was done exactly that way for that reason—to be a hit."

Reed also felt snubbed by being listed third in the album's sleeve credits, and by the large photo of Yule playing piano. Later releases satisfied many of Reed's concerns: he was acknowledged as the main songwriter and listed at the top of the band line-up, and the 1995 box set Peel Slowly and See contains mixes of his full versions of "Sweet Jane", "Rock & Roll" and "New Age".

Although she is credited on the sleeve, the album does not feature long term Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker, as she was pregnant at the time. Drumming duties were performed mainly by bassist Doug Yule, recording engineer Adrian Barber, session musician Tommy Castanero and Yule's brother Billy. Reed commented that "Loaded didn't have Maureen on it, and that's a lot of people's favorite Velvet Underground record, so we can't get too lost in the mystique of the Velvet Underground... It's still called a Velvet Underground record. But what it really is is something else."