Three Times Dead: Three Live Funerals by The Velvet Underground

 

Live albums are rarely my favorites. However, these three documents capture unique moments far beyond the studio, in historic and unrepeatable venues, by a band whose performances were few but truly legendary.

Live at Max's Kansas City (1970): The collapse in real time

Live at Max's Kansas City is not just any live recording. It is a document that captures, almost accidentally, the collapse of a band in full entropy. An audio recording made not by a trained sound engineer, but by a simple portable cassette recorder. It couldn't get any more punk.

By 1970, The Velvet Underground was no longer the avant garde monolith of NYC. Warhol's Factory, Nico, and Maureen Tucker's minimalist drumming were things of the past. The band was clinging to life with Doug Yule as Lou Reed's clone, and now also with Billy Yule, his brother, on drums.

Lou Reed was singing "Sweet Jane," but while performing the song, his mind was already considering leaving the band immediately, forgetting music forever, and going to work at his father's company.

Max's Kansas City was the last remnant of the Warholian nightmare in NYC. Once the epicenter of New York avant garde, it opened in 1965. One of the key points in the birth of punk rock in the mid 70s. A place that served as "home" for bands like the VU, the New York Dolls, and the Ramones. The Velvets had taken up residence there for weeks, as the last stand before the end. Their performances felt like the rawest scenes from the movie Midnight Cowboy.

Some would point to this recording as the pure essence of rock with attitude. Others would consider it an unnecessary and poorly recorded document. Yet the record would become legendary in the DIY scheme and lo fi ethos of the years to come.

Here, thanks to Brigid Polk's obsession with homemade recordings, we forget about sonic fidelity and understand why punk had to happen and emerge precisely from this moment.

Le Bataclan 72: The séance in Parisian exile

Le Bataclan 72 is not exactly a Velvet Underground concert. It's more like a séance attempting to summon ghosts from the past.

The Velvet Underground had ceased to exist a few years earlier. In their place, only three beings remained in exile, in a freezing Paris in January 1972.

Le Bataclan 72 is an acoustic album. The band, or its ghost, once again anticipated the industry by decades, producing one of those acoustic records that would become so popular in the 90s.

Reed, Cale, and Nico in complete exile. While America had rejected the Velvets until they were destroyed, Europe still remembered them fondly.

Reed had failed with his first solo album. Cale was still redefining his career as a producer and solo artist. Nico simply wandered through Europe like a gothic ghost.

It wasn't that the world missed the Velvets. In reality, it was the morbid curiosity of the French for an old American legend. France was doing the Velvets a favor. The band would repay it decades later. It was a pact.

Located in Paris's 11th arrondissement, Le Bataclan began as a café concert hall, became a cinema, and by the 70s had established itself as one of the city's most recognized concert venues, known for its acoustics and intimate atmosphere despite its capacity for 1,500 people.

Two guitars, a piano, Cale's viola, and Nico's ghostly harmonium were all that was available. Paradoxically, the band achieved a quite decent sound. In this way, the Velvets were inventing the Unplugged format, far removed from the corporate exploitation of the 90s.

A testament to the power of the Velvets' songs, which could shine beyond furious noise. Through the acoustic mode, the Velvets moved from the somber folk of Leonard Cohen to the murderous ballads of Nick Cave.

Le Bataclan 72 would remain an almost secret document circulating in Europe for decades, feeding the myth until its official release in 2004. Some would call it the "holy grail" of the Velvets' live recordings.

Thanks to this document, it is said that Lou, Cale, and Nico regained faith in their solo careers.

Live MCMXCIII (1993): The institutionalization of the myth

If Live at Max's was the end of the party and Bataclan was the confession in exile, this album is the institutionalization of the myth. It is the moment when The Velvet Underground stopped being a dangerous band and became a national monument. The result is an electric tension you could cut with a butcher knife.

Live MCMXCIII is a fascinating and terrifying document. It is the sound of four people who invented the future in 1967 trying to survive each other in 1993.

In 1993, "alternative" was legal tender. Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Sonic Youth had turned the VU's noise into a multi million dollar business. The reunion of the classic lineup, Reed, Cale, Morrison, and Tucker, seemed like an act of poetic justice.

But the reality was darker: Lou Reed and John Cale were not speaking offstage.

This album was recorded at L'Olympia in Paris, the same sacred ground of Edith Piaf, who saved the venue from bankruptcy after a series of historic performances. The oldest music hall in Paris still in operation (founded in 1888) and probably the most prestigious stage in France. It was also the venue for The Beatles' debut in France in 1964 and historic performances by Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, and the Rolling Stones.

The production, raw yet massive, captures that "all or nothing" atmosphere. The Velvets were paying back their 1972 debt to France.

Here the production is impeccable, almost surgical. You can hear every pick striking the string. The cultural impact was immediate: the world finally heard what the VU sounded like with state of the art technology.

A fierce battle of egos. Cale tries to push toward the avant garde with his electric viola, while Reed tries to maintain control with an almost authoritarian minimalism.

The press sold it as a triumphant reconciliation. The reality is that the tour collapsed before reaching the United States because Reed wanted to produce the album alone and refused to let Cale contribute new material for a studio record. This live album is, literally, the final divorce decree.

Many celebrated the fidelity and power of Moe Tucker's drumming, who proves to be the true rhythmic heart keeping these monsters together.

The most radical sectors, influenced by the No Wave ethic, called it "armed robbery" and a corporate nostalgia exercise that betrayed the spirit of primal noise.

Sterling Morrison, the guitarist who was always the band's glue, died of lymphoma just two years after these recordings. This album is, tragically, his last great statement before the silence became final.

The success was financial, the failure was human. The tour was a box office hit in Europe, but the internal poison was so potent that they canceled the MTV Unplugged appearance, losing the chance to cement their legacy for Generation X on a massive scale.

What this album revealed is that the VU was not a sound: it was a zone of brutal conflict. In Live MCMXCIII, the danger no longer comes solely from volume or feedback, but from the icy silence between the notes. It is the sound of four adults realizing they were no longer the young people who changed the world of music, but that they could still play better than any of their legions of followers.