The Velvet Underground [Album Covers]

1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico SR	$[ 2 / 30 ] 1968 White Light/White Heat The world of pop music was hardly ready for The Velvet Undergrounds first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968s White Light/White Heat was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety. Recorded without the input of either Nico or Andy Warhol, White Light/White Heat was the purest and rawest document of the key Velvets lineup of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, capturing the group at their toughest and most abrasive. The album opens with an open and enthusiastic endorsement of amphetamines (startling even from this group of noted drug enthusiasts), and side one continues with an amusing shaggy-dog story set to a slab of lurching mutant R&B ("The Gift"), a perverse variation on an old folktale ("Lady Godivas Operation"), and the albums sole "pretty" song, the mildly disquieting "Here She Comes Now." While side one was a good bit darker in tone than the Velvets first album, side two was where they truly threw down the gauntlet with the manic, free-jazz implosion of "I Heard Her Call My Name" (featuring Reeds guitar work at its most gloriously fractured), and the epic noise jam "Sister Ray," 17 minutes of sex, drugs, violence, and other non-wholesome fun with the loudest rock group in the history of Western Civilization as the house band. White Light/White Heat is easily the least accessible of The Velvet Undergrounds studio albums, but anyone wanting to hear their guitar-mauling tribal frenzy straight with no chaser will love it, and those benighted souls who think of the Velvets as some sort of folk-rock band are advised to crank their stereo up to ten and give side two a spin.$ 1968 White Light/White Heat SR	1969 The Velvet Underground SR	1970 Loaded SR
1971 Pop History	1971 Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground featuring Nico	1972 Live at Max’s Kansas City SR	1973 Squeeze SR
1974 1969: Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed SR	1982 Historia de la Música rock - 38	1984 VU SR	1986 Another View SR
1988 1969: Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed, Volume 1	1988 1969: Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed, Volume 2	1989 The Best of The Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed R	1991 Chronicles R
1993 What Goes On R	1993 Live MCMXCIII SR	1995 The Best of Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground	1995 Peel Slowly and See SR
2000 The Universal Masters Collection: Classic Velvet Underground	2000 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of The Velvet Underground S	2001 Rock and Roll: An Introduction to The Velvet Underground	2003 The Very Best of The Velvet Underground R
2005 Gold SR	2007 Rock Legends	2011 Icon	2012 The Verve/MGM Albums R
2012 Scepter Studios Sessions	2017 1969