Much of the material the Velvets performed over a series of shows at the Matrix club in San Francisco in November 1969 has crept out before – on the Live 1969 album, The Quine Tapes box (in extreme lo-fi) and last year’s reissue of the third album. Here, though, is the mother lode – all the available music, in excellent recordings. It’s fascinating stuff, even for those for whom a 37-minute version of Sister Ray is pushing it a bit. It’s actually where the band stretch out that it becomes most fascinating – this isn’t a fierce, confrontational noise band, but a group finding a groove and locking into it – it becomes almost proto-motorik at times. One version of I’m Waiting for the Man expands to 14 minutes, Lou Reed throwing in extra verses, followed by a nine-minute What Goes On; another show, meanwhile, opens with the same two songs, but dispenses with them both in 10 minutes. It all goes to show a band who were treating each set differently, as a chance to try different things within the same framework – a group who could improvise or just play rock’n’roll, as the mood took them. And those who sniff at the post-John Cale lineup should listen to the tense, creepy versions of Venus in Furs here – proof that the Velvets were always more than the sum of their parts.
