![]() ![]() Besides, any album featuring no less than three Lou Reed-penned classics of the calibre of the laconic Sweet Jane, the strident Rock And Roll and the stately ballad New Age will always demand attention. It took an unashamed tilt at guitar-led pop classicism on tracks such as Head Held High and the summery Who Loves The Sun, but it also welcomed quirkier cuts such as Cool It Down, the tongue-in-cheek Lonesome Cowboy Bill and even the gospel-tinged I Found A Reason. Regardless of the trials and tribulations, Loaded ended up featuring some of The Velvet Underground’s most stellar songs. The songs: “It’s one of my favourite tunes from the Velvets catalogue” ![]() ” The band also enlisted session musician Tommy Castanero to help out, but when the band forgot his surname, his album credit simply red “Tommy”. “ Billy was a pretty good drummer at the time… so he came out and played… and I’ve always been a frustrated drummer, so I play drums on some of those. “We needed a drummer for Loaded because Maureen was pregnant,” he said. In addition to Yule’s increased role in the group, Loaded was the first Velvets album not to feature the band’s original drummer, Maureen Tucker, though her absence was for purely personal reasons, as Yule later confirmed in The Velvet Underground Fanzine. It sort of devolved down to the Lou and Doug recreational recording.” “Also Lou leaned on me a lot in terms of musical support and for harmonies, vocal arrangements,” Yule furthered. “He felt basically, sort of cut out, which I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that I was feeling much more confident since the third album, more a part of the group. “Sterling became discouraged early on because he felt I had too much an influence in it,” Yule told Perfect Sound Forever in 1995. Yet his increased role in the recording sessions inadvertently created friction within the Velvets camp. Yet that’s unfair, for – in addition to playing bass – Yule handled most of the organ and piano, several of the guitar solos, and sang four songs on Loaded, and his dexterity was central to the album’s completion. Having replaced the Velvets’ multi-instrumental savant, John Cale, in the autumn of 1968, Boston-born Doug Yule has sometimes been criticised simply for not being his predecessor. Nonetheless, Loaded has come under fire from some fans. The recording: “It sort of devolved down to the Lou and Doug recreational recording” However, while it lacks the edgy, avant-garde leanings of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the sheer abrasive intensity of White Light/White Heat, or the mellow insouciance of The Velvet Underground, Loaded is still a fine record that stands on its own merits. Leaving its deliberately ambiguous title aside, Loaded has proved the most divisive of The Velvet Underground’s four studio albums featuring original frontman and primary songsmith Lou Reed. 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.” Speaking to The Velvet Underground Fanzine in 1994, Yule shone a further light on the group’s mindset at the time of recording the album: “On Loaded 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 three and a half minutes? So that was a major topic for the group at that point. “The album was ‘loaded’ with hits.” Listen to ‘Loaded’ here. ![]() “The title was a reference to the fact that the label and Reed and Sesnick all wanted hits,” bassist Doug Yule later explained. Surely that all pointed to it being their most decadent-sounding record yet? Here was a record by a band best known for writing provocative, drug-addled songs such as Heroin and Sister Ray, and it was called Loaded and housed in a trippy sleeve depicting a New York City subway entrance. ![]() Anyone coming cold to The Velvet Underground’s fourth album could easily have jumped to the wrong conclusion when it was first released, in 1970. ![]()
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