The Velvet Underground - Live at Matrix 1969 - Set 3 and 4 (Full Album)
This brings the excellent stuff found in the original tapes from the Velvets series of shows at the Matrix club in San Francisco, in November 1969. Here is the mother lode – all the available music, in excellent recordings. It’s fascinating stuff, even for those for whom a 37-minute version of Sister Ray is pushing it a bit. It’s actually where the band stretch out that it becomes most fascinating – this isn’t a fierce, confrontational noise band, but a group finding a groove and locking into it – it becomes almost proto-motorik at times. One version of I’m Waiting for the Man expands to 14 minutes, Lou Reed throwing in extra verses, followed by a nine-minute What Goes On; another show, meanwhile, opens with the same two songs, but dispenses with them both in 10 minutes. It all goes to show a band who were treating each set differently, as a chance to try different things within the same framework – a group who could improvise or just play rock’n’roll, as the mood took them. And those who sniff at the post-John Cale lineup should listen to the tense, creepy versions of Venus in Furs here – proof that the Velvets were always more than the sum of their parts.
