VELVET UNDERGROUND LP “White Light Heat” VERVE orig ’68 stereo SKULL NM

$

37

Artist:  VELVET UNDERGROUND

Title:   “White Light / White Heat”

Label:   VERVE ~ V6-5046.  Stereo pressing on medium weight vinyl.  Label is blue with silver text. 

Year:  1968

Condition: 

DISC:  Vinyl is gorgeous NM-, a beauty!  The playing surface is immaculate, with a high luster, played a small number of times and handled with care.  Plays beautifully with superb fidelity.  Labels are clean and pristine. 

JACKET:  Jacket with original ANDY WARHOL “skull” artwork is nice VG+.  Front and back panels have light ring wear, but are otherwise clean.  Front has “STEREO” sticker at upper right corner.  Minor wear on seams, spine and corners.  A fine jacket to accompany the SUPERB disc.

Track Listing: 

Side One:

• White Light / White Heat
• The Gift
• Lady Godiva’s Operation
• There She Comes Now  

Side Two:

• I Heard Her Call My Name
• Sister Ray

Review:

The world of pop music was hardly ready for The Velvet Underground's 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), 1968's 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 Godiva's Operation"), and the album's 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 Reed's 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 Underground's 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.”

(courtesy of Mark Deming, allmusic.com)

Guaranteed to be original and authentic first pressing from 1968.  I do not sell bootlegs or modern reissues.

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