VELVET UNDERGROUND WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT LP VG+

$

75

I am selling some of the records I've had for many years in my great collection.  The Velvet Underground's WHIT LIGHT/WHIT HEAT  is one of the early experimental rock records that was ahead of it's time.  It didn't sell well upon release with songs about sex and drugs dominating the LP.  But as with all Underground LP's, WLWH has been raised to legendary status as a work of art.  As all of the Underground LP's are, it is a masterpiece, and a must have LP for any lover of music.

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.

The cover front shows signs of wear with a notable scuff along the center bottom as well as overall rubbing areas to the black, a scratch or 2, and a promo punch hole top left.  There are no split seams, and the spine has one white mark.  The back of the cover has a few brown spots, the back side of the punch hole, and a 1/4" part of the paper flipped back on the top right to expose a bit of cardboard.  The labels show signs of play Side 1 is in very nice condition with sone faint spindle marks.  Side 2 the table is split in thirds which can almost be seen as symbolic of the Velvet's break up with Warhol and Nico with all 3 going their separate ways.  The vinyl looks played, but has some shine to it.  There are some hairlines, and small smudges that are visual but do not effect the music playing condition.  In between songs you can hear the sound of the hairlines when no music is playing, but the sound is beautiful on this LP with no distortion, skips, jumps, or any other sound from the surface of the LP.  This LP moans, and screams, out like nothing else from the 60's.  They were the anti love in type hippies, but yet embedded in their time.   A keeper of an album!