The Velvet Underground - Max's Kansas City, New York City, 8-23-1970

I recently posted a couple of Velvet Underground (VU) concerts here, both from the End of Cole Ave. club in Dallas, and those have gotten a lot of downloads. (Although, oddly, way more people have downloaded the one from October 19, 1969 than the one from October 18, 1969. Their sound quality is similar, so if you like one you should like the other.) Just as a reminder, here are the download links to both:

October 18, 1969:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-velvet-underground-end-of-cole-ave_11.html

October 19, 1969:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-velvet-underground-end-of-cole-ave.html

Anyway, putting those together has put me in a Velvet Underground mood lately, so I've decided to do my best to try to improve some of their other live recordings. The next one I tackled in this Max's Kansas City show, so here it is. In my opinion, this version sounds significantly better than other versions.

The official album "Live at Max's Kansas City" is based on this concert. It was the very first official live VU album, being released in 1972. That's a bit odd in my opinion, because the sound quality was not great. But perhaps it was all that was at hand at the time. The concert was recorded by Brigid Polk (a.k.a. Brigid Berlin) who was a well known New York City high society socialite and associate of Andy Warhol. She recorded it on a mono portable cassette player, but perhaps it was an unusually good and expensive one, because the sound quality is very good for an audience recording. 

However, there were problems, and I've tried to fix them here. I've based this off the 2004 version, which is the only complete one. But actually it wasn't entirely complete, because the first minute or so of the song "Who Loves the Sun" was missing. But I got a lucky break with that. There's a bootleg of some band rehearsals from a couple of months earlier. The sound quality sucks for nearly all of the songs on that boot, except for two songs which sound much better, and one of those is a version of "Who Loves the Sun." So I used that version to patch in the missing first verse. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in the title.

I also used the UVR5 audio editing program to boost the lead vocals of all the songs. I think that helped a lot. And I used that program to do a lot of work on all the talking tracks. The concert was recorded in the middle of a crowd, so there was a lot of ambient noise, and especially talking nearby. I managed to cut out some, but not all, of that noise, and boost the voice of Reed doing the talking from stage. Now, you can pretty easily hear nearly all of his comments, which often had been buried in muck on all the official versions. 

I also edited out some comments by people next to the recorder that were unusually loud. I believe the microphone was being held by none other than Johnathan Richman, who would later have success as the leader of the band the Modern Lovers. For instance, on the official live album version, his voice could be heard ordering a glass of wine at one point. But I cut all that out, because my goal was to try to make this sound more like a soundboard quality recording.

A more difficult problem was that, occasionally, some loud talking by crowd members occurred during the songs. I cleaned that up whenever I could. But this was particularly bad for the song "Candy Says." In the middle of the song, some guy began talking to someone else, possibly his date, about the movie "Patton," which was in the movie theaters at the time. One could clearly hear the two of them discuss their opinions about the movie, which ruined much of the song. I was able to wipe out most of that discussion using UVR5, whenever it happened during instrumental sections. But there were some points when that talking overlapped with the singing. For that, I patched in bits from other parts of the song, or, failing that, from the version of "Candy Says" on the October 18, 1969 End of Cole Ave. concert I posted recently. I also wiped out some crowd noise on the song "Femme Fatale" using some patch work, though the problem wasn't nearly as bad. So that's why those two songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

This happens to be the very last VU concert with Lou Reed (not counting much later reunions). The band continued on the next night and beyond, with band member Doug Yule on lead vocals. The last album with Reed, "Loaded," would be released a couple of months after this concert. But the band slowly lost more key members and then fizzled out altogether in 1973. However, you'd never know this was Reed's last concert from listening to this recording, as there were no public good-byes or final dramatic gestures. But perhaps we missed those, because I have my doubts that the last song here was the actual last song of the night. "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" seems like an odd choice for the last song, especially since "Sister Ray" was the band's usual closer. It's very possible that the recorder's cassette tape ran out, which was a common problem for tapers in that era.

This also was a concert without drummer Moe Tucker. She'd temporarily left the band in early 1970 for the duration of her first pregnancy. She was replaced on drums by Billy Yule, the younger brother of Doug Yule. Some VU fans knock this recording because of the lack of Tucker's unique drumming style, while also claiming that Reed lost his enthusiasm and thus didn't sound as good. But I disagree. I think the band kicked ass right until Reed left, at which point it ceased being the VU in my opinion, since he wrote and sang nearly all of the songs. Decide for yourself by listening to this.

This concert consisted of an early show and a late show. You can hear the band announce they were taking a break at the end of the song "Beginning to See the Light." There are two songs in the late show that were also played in the early show: "Sweet Jane" and "Lonesome Cowboy Bill."

This album is an hour and 26 minutes long.

01 talk (Velvet Underground)
02 I'm Waiting for the Man (Velvet Underground)
03 talk (Velvet Underground)
04 White Light-White Heat (Velvet Underground)
05 talk (Velvet Underground)
06 I'm Set Free (Velvet Underground)
07 talk (Velvet Underground)
08 Sweet Jane (Velvet Underground)
09 talk (Velvet Underground)
10 Lonesome Cowboy Bill (Velvet Underground)
11 talk (Velvet Underground)
12 New Age (Velvet Underground)
13 talk (Velvet Underground)
14 Beginning to See the Light (Velvet Underground)
15 Who Loves the Sun [Edit] (Velvet Underground)
16 Sweet Jane [Version 2] (Velvet Underground)
17 talk (Velvet Underground)
18 I'll Be Your Mirror (Velvet Underground)
19 talk (Velvet Underground)
20 Pale Blue Eyes (Velvet Underground)
21 talk (Velvet Underground)
22 Candy Says [Edit] (Velvet Underground)
23 talk (Velvet Underground)
24 Sunday Morning (Velvet Underground)
25 talk (Velvet Underground)
26 After Hours (Velvet Underground)
27 talk (Velvet Underground)
28 Femme Fatale [Edit] (Velvet Underground)
29 talk (Velvet Underground)
30 Some Kinda Love (Velvet Underground)
31 Lonesome Cowboy Bill [Version 2] (Velvet Underground)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15264157/TVelvtUnd_1970a_MaxsKnsasCityNYC__8-23-1970_atse.zip.html

It's very hard to find any good photos of the band in concert, especially color ones. However, there was an ad for this series of shows, so I used that, cropped but otherwise unchanged. I cleaned it up some, and added the yellow background.