This box isn't exactly a grand opening of the vaults: as nice as it is to have all this stuff in one place, less than a quarter of it hasn't been officially issued before, and it's not like there's a shortage of Velvet Underground live recordings that could stand to be released for real. Their most protean song, "Sister Ray", turns up in a relatively relaxed, noodly 37-minute performance that's far from its face-melting White Light/White Heat incarnation. The bizarre take on "I'm Waiting for the Man" that opens the box is slowed down to a crawling blues, extended to 13 minutes with some seemingly extemporaneous new verses "Lisa Says", which the group had recorded in a studio just a month earlier, has almost totally rewritten lyrics and an entirely new bridge. Yule later said of Reed that "there were times when he would invent or put together songs on the fly in a performance, and he'd just turn around and say, 'Follow me'". But The Complete Matrix Tapes is useful as a way to hear how the Velvets constantly reworked their repertoire. That said, some of the Matrix box's extended vamps get draggy, and there's a lot of song duplication here: four versions apiece of "Some Kinda Love", "Heroin", and "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together", three apiece of "There She Goes Again" and "I'm Waiting for the Man", two apiece of seven others. Both "White Light/White Heat" and "I'm Set Free" are much more dramatic and vivid here than in their studio incarnations. The version of the throwaway two-line rocker "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" on disc two is utterly thrilling, and the hushed, droning "Heroin" later in that set is a solid 20 years ahead of its time. The first disc's magnificent "What Goes On", with Morrison and Lou Reed's guitars chattering together at breathless speed while Doug Yule hammers at an organ, is the wellspring for, among other things, the Wedding Present's entire catalogue "Ocean" is the seed and the soil for both Low and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The peculiarly thin sonics of Matrix owner Peter Abram's recordings don't do Maureen Tucker's caveman drumming any favors, but they make a serious case for Sterling Morrison as God-Emperor of Rhythm Guitarists. Rain and Stephanie Says.The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. Side four of the second LP is rounded out with bonus tracks recorded in 1968 including Hey Mr. Although these recordings have been previously released, they've never been represented on vinyl in this expansive 2LP format. For this new vinyl recreation, Levenson has assembled the album using 19 mixes. Whatever the real story is, these songs, recorded just after their lauded self-titled album, which include many gems like Foggy Notion, Ride Into The Sun and I Can't Stand It, help to tell the band's enigmatic story and shine a light on their creative restlessness and rapid evolution.
While there's been reports that the album was intended to be the band's fourth record only to be rejected by MGM, it's also possible they were scrapped by the band or possibly shelved by them for being ahead of its time. Nearly 50 years later, much remains unclear about these mysterious recordings.
Reconstruction of The Velvet Underground's Fabled "Lost" 1969 Album, Available On Vinyl for the First Time with Bonus Tracks! To honour The Velvet Underground's 50th anniversary, Grammy-winning producer Bill Levenson has lovingly recreated the band's much-mythologized "lost" album, 1969.
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