Remembering Lou Reed: The Yule-era Velvet Underground

Doug Yule was a 21-year-old kid in 1968 with little professional music experience. He was a guitar player with a local band in Boston who was a friend of the Velvet Underground's road manager.

With the departure of John Cale soon after the band's split from Andy Warhol, Lou Reed clearly now was the Velvets' dominant force. Yule just happened to be the right guy in the right place at the right time. The band needed somebody to play bass, and Reed was extremely attracted to Yule's pliability.

This personnel shift was scantly noticed in the world at the time. But it had a huge impact on the Velvets as a band and on Reed as a songwriter.

No longer was the Velvet Underground a traveling Warhol art show. No longer was it an avant-garde sonic experiment. And no longer was Lou Reed obsessed with chronicling the New York underbelly.

The band spent the rest of its existence as a tight rock-and-roll outfit touring the country with songs about love, anger, desperation and personal discovery. Reed for the most part shelved his journalistic tendencies and started writing from his heart.

The sound of the band's self-titled third album, released in March 1969, was a jarring departure from the abrasion that dominated the first two albums. This one was quiet and sweet, a songwriter's album.

Yule sings lead on the album's opening track, "Candy Says," a beautiful ode to Warhol superstar Candy Darling. "What Goes On" is the only single released from the album. It went nowhere on the charts but has become one of the Velvets' most-covered songs.

"Pale Blue Eyes" is Reed's signature love song from this era. This really is the first glimpse we get of Reed as a solo singer-songwriter. "Jesus" is as quiet as the band gets, featuring Reed's voice at its best with gorgeous harmonies sung by Yule.

"Beginning to See the Light" picks up the pace, the closest the Velvets get to kicking out the jams on this album.

Reed wrote "After Hours" specifically for Moe Tucker, who makes her debut as a lead singer accompanied by an acoustic guitar (probably Reed's, possibly Morrison's) and Yule's bass.

The Velvets began touring exhaustively after completing the third album, dropping into a studio now and then to lay down tracks for an intended fourth album that never materialized. Many of those tracks surfaced 16 years later on the compilation VU. "Foggy Notion" is a straight-ahead rocker. "I'm Sticking With You" is a playful little Reed-Tucker duet.

The lo-fi bootlegs that have been officially released over the years, including one slated for next month, come from the Velvets' 1969 tour. 1969: The Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed, released in 1974, is the essential one.

The highlight is an early working version of "Sweet Jane," which became a very different song by the time it showed up on "Loaded." This is the version the Cowboy Junkies turned into a hit in 1988.

"Over You" and "Sweet Bonnie Brown (It's Just Too Much)" are a couple of numbers that have never turned up in studio-recorded versions. The former has Reed playing the smooth lounge crooner while the latter has the Velvets in full-on Chuck Berry mode.

"Loaded," released in November 1970, became the band's most commercially successful album. Ironically, as Reed pointed out many times in the following years, it's really not a Velvet Underground album so much as a Reed-Yule project. Tucker got pregnant and bowed out (she is credited on the album but doesn't actually appear). Morrison returned to college to finish his degree and only showed up in the studio occasionally.

It does include two iconic Velvet Underground-credited tracks -- "Sweet Jane" and "Rock & Roll."

"New Age" is a song Reed worked on during the long tour, but which manager Steve Sesnick insisted that Yule sing on the album. It was one of several points of contention between Reed and Sesnick over Yule's increasingly dominant role in the band, ultimately leading to Reed's departure before the album's release.

Yule also sings lead on "I Found a Reason," with Reed providing doo-wop harmonies and reciting the bridge.

"Sad Song" is an outtake from the "Loaded" sessions that ultimately appeared on the Fully Loaded Edition reissue in 1997. Reed reworked the song drastically for his 1973 album Berlin.

Reed, exhausted from the long 1969 tour and frustrated with losing his grip on his splintering band, called it quits in August 1970, leaving Yule and Sesnick in charge of finishing up and releasing "Loaded." Reed went home to Long Island and took a job with his father's accounting practice.

Sesnick, meanwhile, pulled Yule, Morrison and Tucker together for a 1971 Velvet Underground tour. Yule released a solo album in 1973 titled Squeeze under the Velvet Underground name that was quickly forgotten, though it has resurfaced in recent years as a curiosity.

Next: Lou Reed goes solo.