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Via

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The Observatory by Robert Morris (1971)

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Man Ray. Pebbles, 1927.

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Richard Serra. Courtauld Transparency #6, 2013

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The Velvet Underground - La Cave, Cleveland, Ohio, April 28, 1968

Happy Sweet Sister Ray Day! This high holy day for Velvet Underground fanatics is always worth celebrating. But today, on the 57th anniversary, it's especially worth celebrating because Mr. Charlie has unearthed an "extraordinary, previous uncirculated low generation source tape" of this legendary Jamie Klimek recording, which has been bootlegged in inferior quality for decades now.

We're still talking about an audience tape from 1968, of course, but I'm going to agree that "extraordinary" is the right word to use — there's a new clarity and crispness here that blows away any previous version I've heard. And that is great news, because "Sweet Sister Ray" is one of my favorite things in the world. Thank you, Mr. Charlie! And thank you to the late/great Jamie Klimek for bringing his gear to La Cave all those years ago and capturing this unbelievable performance.

In case you need a deeper dive, you can read my long essay "The Velvet Underground's Elusive 'Sweet Sister Ray'" after the jump ...

Recorded at a tiny subterranean Cleveland, OH club called La Cave in late April of 1968, “Sweet Sister Ray” isn’t exactly a song, per se. It’s a close-to-40-minute jam, a languid, endless boogie. The audience tape we can listen to all these years later is murky, but that feels appropriate. “Sweet Sister Ray” is nothing if not a murky experience. 

The journey kicks off with the band (most likely just Cale, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison; drummer Maureen Tucker isn’t audible here) chugging steadily, slowly over a spare, spidery riff. It’s easygoing, like they have no particular place to go, though there’s an underlying tension and menace. Reed’s guitar spirals off into a more abstract direction for a bit, almost reminiscent of Roger McGuinn’s flights of fancy on “Eight Miles High.” You lean in. What exactly is going on?  Is the band just warming up? Is there even anyone (aside from the taper) in the club? Through the murk, a decidedly surreal atmosphere develops. The music continues at a morphine-drip pace, drifting and droning, with Morrison playing a nervier counterpoint to Reed’s laconic fretwork, Cale rattling around in the background. At some point around the half-hour mark, Cale switches over to keyboards, lending the proceedings a curiously magisterial feel, as Reed begins coaxing beautiful, simmering feedback from his amp. It’s as if some new genre of music is being invented on the spot.

Extended live improvisations were, of course, nothing new to the VU. The aforementioned Columbus, OH show in 1966 features two marathon performances, “Melody Laughter” and “The Nothing Song,” that showcase the band’s most adventurous, avant-garde leanings.  But those pieces were created to complement the extravagant multimedia overload of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with dancers, lights and films adding to the experience. La Cave might’ve had a light show, but it was undoubtedly low-tech. On this particular night in Cleveland, it was just the Velvet Underground, the small audience and “Sweet Sister Ray.”

We haven’t even mentioned that throughout the song, Reed has been stepping up to the mic from time to time to sing a few verses. The lyrics may be off-the-cuff (Reed was known for his ability to generate lyrics at will), but they’re not indecipherable. In fact, they might even tell a fairly cohesive story, a veritable prequel to the actual “Sister Ray,” as our titular protagonist watches a movie — “the weirdest movie I’ve seen in my days.”

Reed goes on to sing about a topic he was intimately familiar with: electroshock therapy. “All the vaseline on your forehead / makes you feel so nice,” he deadpans. “My hair stood on end / and I thought I’d been frozen with a knife.” It’s a thinly veiled slice of autobiography — Reed was subjected to electroshock as a teenager to curb his homosexual tendencies — where you’d least expect it. And the final lyrics feel even more hauntingly personal, if still oblique: “Just then I saw a hole in the ground / and I jumped right in ‘cause there was no one around.” Down the rabbit hole young Lou eagerly goes, to rock and roll, to Warhol, to the dangerous and thrilling dreamscapes of “Sister Ray” itself. Which is right where the rest of the Velvets join him back in Cleveland, as Moe Tucker finally ambles onstage and beings thumping out that unmistakable beat and they segue into what was likely an even wilder excursion. Alas, it’s at this point that the tape fades out …

So where did “Sweet Sister Ray” go after La Cave? There’s some indication that it was further refined and developed into “Sweet Rock And Roll,” a mythical lost VU number from the summer of ‘68. Lou’s old sparring partner Lester Bangs is mostly responsible for the legend, calling the performance he witnessed in San Diego, CA “the most incredible musical experiences” of his life. “It was built on the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling mournfully, somewhat like ‘Venus In Furs’ but less creaky, more deliberate and eloquent.” Bangs even quotes some of the lyrics, which fall into line with what Reed was singing a few months earlier in Cleveland: “Sweet Sister Ray went to a movie / The floor was painted red and the walls were green / ‘Ooooh,’ she cried / ‘This is the strangest movie I’ve ever seen.’”

Will we ever hear “Sweet Rock And Roll”? Probably not. But Sterling Morrison claimed that a tape of the show Bangs wrote about was made, but quickly added that it was “stolen that very night. Stolen within seconds, actually. As soon as it ended, it vanished, never to reappear on this earth.”

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