#The who songs 1965 free#

The same goes for the doo-wop of “Too Late,” which is a love letter to Dion and the Belmonts. It was a place he wouldn’t have cause to go again in his songwriting life. Where the other tracks sound like what they are-demos, rough drafts, ideas put down for the sake of record-this one feels like the final version, a vision of a song Reed pulled whole from somewhere in his subconsciousness. Sharing a melody with Merle Travis’ “ Dark as a Dungeon,” it’s both odd and deeply out of character, and Reed sounds more committed to its performance than to anything else here. It’s Reed’s take on a child ballad, a story of a woman grappling with the fear that she will die unmarried and alone. Maybe it’s for that reason the most interesting moments on the demo tape have nothing at all to do with the Velvet Underground, or with the well-known character of “Lou Reed.” “Men of Good Fortune,” for instance, bears no relation to the song from 1973’s Berlin, despite the name. Just as this set’s spartan title implies, he had the words and he had the music. He also tries out an early version of “Heroin” with a plunky walking bassline on the low strings that sucks the liquid motion from the song, the sense of love and danger mixing as quickly and seamlessly as the blood into the dropper’s neck. The dreamy essence of the final recording lies entirely in that vocal take.

Without the grace note Reed threw on the word “on” in “linger on,” for instance, “Pale Blue Eyes” somehow transforms into a straight country ballad. The Velvet Underground’s songs were already skeletal, and when X-rayed this way, they give up new secrets. This narrator doesn’t really sound sick and dirty, more dead than alive, and there is no menace, no threat, to the line “Hey white boy/Whatcha doing uptown?” You can see through the song’s swagger right to its fragile, birdlike bones. The second version is even further off, with a harmless clippity-clop knocked out on the guitar’s hollow body, and the harmonies even more subdued. They sound like the Weavers or the Kingsmen, and the slouch that Reed would work so hard to perfect is nowhere in sight. You hear Cale and Reed harmonizing in a way they never did again-no bent notes, no howling, no sneering, Reed’s voice breaking into an honest-to-god yodel. There is no better illustration of this than in the two versions included of “I’m Waiting for the Man.” The first version opens the set.

#The who songs 1965 free#

For an artist known for cool and cruel observations, for cutting remarks and misdirections, these recordings show him completely free from guile. Instead, what we get is a photograph, stark and charming. Nothing on Words and Music redefines or amplifies Reed’s legend. These versions are slight and sly and simple sometimes, they fail to even tap you on the shoulder.

They knew they were out there, but they find them only fitfully. On each track, you hear Cale and Reed go on fishing expeditions, seeking the dark and untamable spirits that would soon occupy their songs. They sound more like a folk duo than the unholy terror of a rock band they would soon become. As demos often are, these recordings are bare and unadorned: just Cale and Reed harmonizing over some hastily strummed acoustic and a wheezy harmonica. “Words and music by Lou Reed,” he intones at the start of each performance, his deadpan concealing the barest hint of bashful pride. In other words, Words and Music captures Reed just as he was beginning to take himself seriously as a songwriter. Included here are the earliest-known renditions of future classics like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Heroin.” Reed mailed them to himself with a notarized signature as a sort of “poor man’s copyright,” a cheap and effective way to prove the songs on the tape were, indeed, his. Nevertheless, the songs on the long-lost reel-to-reel tape capture the early days of John Cale and Lou Reed’s artistic partnership. Because real life often bedevils the neatness of archives, the spindly little demo recordings that slipped out of the package were not, in fact, made on that epochal day.