The Velvet Underground: The Matrix Tapes 4CD Box Set

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by DeeThomaz, Sep 4, 2015.

  1. notesfrom

    notesfrom Forum Resident

    Location:
    NC USA
    I'd like an audio-visual DVD of some kind to come out that accesses all the Warhol-shot stuff.
     
  2. notesfrom

    notesfrom Forum Resident

    Location:
    NC USA
    Clearing the vaults like crazy - better now than never. Lou's gone, it's time to let it all out.
     
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  3. trumpet sounds

    trumpet sounds "The radio makes hideous sounds." Bob Dylan

    Location:
    Chicago, IL, US
     
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  4. rnranimal

    rnranimal Senior Member

    Location:
    Ohio
    I'd love that as well but the Warhol people seem to have no interest in releasing that stuff. And I believe just screening those films publicly gets them the EU copyright, no need to release them. Of course, they need to be on the rush to do screenings of some of the stuff that has yet to have any. Still, if they never let a copy out, there's no copy to get into the public domain.
     
  5. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    Before the term "wide receiver" was invented (after Lou's high school days), they were also referred as Ends. So Lou might be A) referring to an offensive end, in which case his comment about weight makes sense, or B) be using the age old joke about playing end ("My position is end - the end of the bench").
     
  6. citizensmurf

    citizensmurf Ambient postpunk will never die

    Location:
    Calgary
    This is great news. I had held off on any of these deluxe album sets because I only really want the live stuff, so I am truly hoping for the Valleydale and Gymnasium stuff to get a separate release. All these single and mono mixes don't really excite me, as I own the Peel box and the Sundazed mono box.
     
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  7. Sean Murdock

    Sean Murdock Forum Intruder

    Location:
    Bergenfield, NJ
    Thanks -- good advice. Sorry I almost gave you a heart attack in the other thread! :angel:
     
  8. Sean Murdock

    Sean Murdock Forum Intruder

    Location:
    Bergenfield, NJ
    Man, ICE was the best. :shake:
     
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  9. TeddyB

    TeddyB Senior Member

    Location:
    Hollywoodland
    "Actually I was a pole vaulter" he says on Take No Prisoners. And he went out at 8'6".
     
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  10. Stuggy

    Stuggy Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ireland

    Seems downright sadistic and possibly counterproductive if all 3 are true. You'll have a number of poor Velvets/Reed fans on that day or at least less rich..
     
  11. dino77

    dino77 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Europe
    Well, the Lou set looks like a cheap repackaging of the 10 Sire albums without any additional content. Perhaps remastered, but all 10 albums sound great in original form. For newish Lou/Velvets fans who don't have them it's a bargain.
     
  12. DeeThomaz

    DeeThomaz Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    In The Felony Room
    One potential complication in a LIVE 1969 remaster, from Unterberger's book:

    And as also noted earlier, there’s definitely yet more material recorded on the Matrix’s four-track equipment. Abrams retains four hours worth of recordings, and notes, “’69 Live was only the tapes from the first two weeks. When they came for another two weeks, I got some more material, and cut out some of the [recordings] that are on ’69 Live. Some of [them], I improved on; I found better performances, so I deleted ones that I had saved from the first two weeks. At the time, our budget was very small; I couldn’t afford to save all the tape. It was just too much tape; it was half-inch tape, and rather expensive. So I edited it down to the four hours that I ended up keeping.”

    So unless Abram's memory is mistaken, it looks like Universal may have to resort to their existing tapes for certain performances. I choose to interpret Abram as meaning that he replaced earlier performances with later performances OF THE SAME SONG, but he doesn't explicitly say that.
     
  13. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    Yes, it makes sense that some of the material may need to come from the inferior "mixdown" tape. But the manifesto, from the point of view of most any fan, I'd think, is "Let's have it ALL, and all in one place, please". If some of it comes from a lesser source because it exists in no other way, so be it. It's still a sonic step up from a tape with a man ordering drinks on it (and we're happy to have THAT too).
     
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  14. Walter H

    Walter H Santa's Helper

    Location:
    New Hampshire, USA
    I bought a hi-rez download of the third album Super Deluxe, and it has NO LINER NOTES. :realmad: :realmad: I've noticed a change in quality towards the end of the long Sister Ray. Are we hearing something patched in from the Quine tapes of the same performance, to cover something missing (e.g. reel change) from the multis? Is anything like that mentioned in the notes?
     
  15. DeeThomaz

    DeeThomaz Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    In The Felony Room
    Yep, the Matrix "Sister Ray" has a patch (presumably from Quine, as you mention). The tapes Abram was using were 30 minute. Not mentioned in the notes.

    I'm picturing Abram getting progressively more stressed out as the Velvets begin to stretch the song dangerously close to the half hour mark, and then his abject horror when they passed the point of no return.
     
  16. R. Totale

    R. Totale The Voice of Reason

    Unless my memory is mistaken they don't have any other sources for the Matrix (other than Quine). All the Mixdown tapes used for 1969 Live are from the same well of Matrix board recordings that they now have all of.
     
  17. ralphb

    ralphb "First they came for..."

    Location:
    Brooklyn, New York
    And tuinal, don't forget the tuinal.:)
     
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  18. lou

    lou Fast 'n Bulbous

    Location:
    Louisiana
    What he's saying is that Abrams erased some of the performances he had already used to make the mix down tape used for Live 1969. So there are three sources, the mix down tape, the Quine tapes, and the Matrix multis.
     
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  19. R. Totale

    R. Totale The Voice of Reason

    Could be, but that's not how I read it. It sounds to me more like the second set of shows came along and they played [X song] again and Abrams liked that version better and was running out of tape so he cut [X song] from the first two weeks and substituted the later version, putting the tape from the first back into the blank pool. It could have been months or years before he made acetates from his pool of tapes to give to the VU management, it would've had to have been in that two week period under the three source scenario. But the VU is so intensely documented that I'm sure this is all laid out somewhere, in fact I think I've seen it.
     
  20. gilbertasm

    gilbertasm Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vilnius, Lithuania
  21. DeeThomaz

    DeeThomaz Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    In The Felony Room
    One interesting thing that popped up on eBay back in 2006 was a set of acetates used while compiling LIVE 1969 put up for auction by Elliot Murphy, the author of the album's liner notes. A member of the Velvet Forum wrote to inquiry about them and posted Elliot's response:



    VELVET UNDERGROUND LIVE 1969 ACETATES

    I wrote the original liner notes for this album and the acetates
    were given to me before the release while I was working on the
    notes. There are 4 two-sided acetates and 1 one-side acetate.
    Some have timings and some do not. Each acetate is labeled
    Mercury Sound Studios Reference Lacquer with song titles and
    Velvet Underground at the bottom. There are 4 white
    cardboard album jackets with various notes on them and
    additional notes on the inner sleeves mostly about timing etc.
    There are no numbers to the acetates so the reference numbers
    1-5 are my own: Specifically:

    Acetate 1 one-sided:
    RIDING TO THE SUN TK 1
    RIDING TO THE SUN TK 2
    SOME KINDA LOVE
    WHITE LIGHT, WHITE HEAT

    Acetate 2 two-sided:
    SIDE A
    PALE BLUE EYES (FROM F) 6:14
    PALE BLUE EYES (FROM G) 6:17
    I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR 2:48
    SIDE B
    FEMME FATALE 3:24
    SOME KIND OF LOVE 4:17
    I'M WAITING FOR MY MAN 7:00

    Acetate 3 (two-sided)
    SIDE A
    ROCK AND ROLL 6:04
    HERE COMES THE OCEAN 10:50
    HEROIN 8:18
    SIDE B
    HEROIN 9:50
    SWEET JANE 3:58
    WHAT GOES ON 8:50

    Acetate 4 (two sided)
    SIDE A
    ROCK AND ROLL MOODY
    OVER YOU
    WE'RE GONNA HAVE A REAL GOOD TIME TOGETHER
    BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT
    SIDE B

    CAN'T STAND IT ANY MORE
    WHITE LIGHT, WHITE HEAT

    Acetate 5 (two sided)
    SIDE A
    SWEET BONNY BROWN 7:50
    LISA SAYS 3:12
    WHY AM I SO SHY/LISA SAYS 2:35
    SIDE B
    NEW AGE (MIX #1) 6:35
    NEW AGE (MIX #2) 6:26
    PALE BLUE EYES 5:50
     
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  22. DeeThomaz

    DeeThomaz Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    In The Felony Room
    Re: the acetates, my understanding is the two versions of Ride Into The Sun are the studio take (w/vocals) and Rock And Roll Moody is the bootlegged rehearsal with Lou and Mo.
     
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  23. DeeThomaz

    DeeThomaz Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    In The Felony Room
    This is one of the most intriguing aspect to the listing, as it seems to lend credence to the theory that the version of "Lisa Says" on the album might be an edit piece (there has always been a shift in fidelity just as the "Why Am I So Shy" bridge begins).
     
  24. notesfrom

    notesfrom Forum Resident

    Location:
    NC USA
    The 'Lisa Says' on the original Live '69 set clocks in at 5:46, so there's a join going on between the two due to whatever reasons of lack of continuity - band breakdown or perhaps that 2nd part is from an entirely different set/night. Probably it's from the same performance, just with some unwanted seconds of stage-confusion on the reel between the two parts as originally performed.

    Would Abrams really take it upon himself to act as a producer and fly in the 2nd part of the song from another performance? - or, even more ambitiously, create a new suite out of adding the 2nd part to the song freshly-written and augmented to the set a day or more later? Logicians want to know...
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2015
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  25. RayS

    RayS A Little Bit Older and a Little Bit Slower

    Location:
    Out of My Element
    Hmmm. While it's totally irrelevant, one of the bootleg CDs for Springfield 1970 gives the bridge its own index number (so the track number goes from 5 to 6 when the bridge begins). I remember it because it bugged me when I added it into itunes and I lack the technical knowledge to fix it. So I'm guessing that the bridge was SO different that more than one person thought it was a completely different song.
     
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