Enough with these famous great songs everybody knows the words to. You think you’re good because you know Heroin? Here’s a Velvet Underground song nobody knows, and it’s one of their best. As you oughta know, the Velvets only put out four proper albums, but they recorded a ton of great material that didn’t make the cut in that limited amount of space. A lot of unreleased songs later surfaced, in a much shinier form, on Lou Reed’s solo albums. Many, many more original demos and never released songs finally saw the light of day on the Peel Slowly and See compilation. That box set is, as far as I know, the definitive Velvet Underground collection. There may well be some bigger, better more recent box set I’m not aware of, but I think Peel Slowly is the gold standard. If you need to start a decent record collection, this is where to start. It’s all the original four classic albums, augmented with bonus tracks, most of which turn out to be pretty classic themselves. The demo disc isn’t great listening, but it is an educational look at the creative process, allowing you to track a song’s progress from raw idea to fully formed. Yeah, I really think you should buy this box, if it’s still in print. I remember when my dad bought it from BMG Music Service, which is a thing that used to be a thing back when purchasing cds was a thing, and we listened to it a lot and it was my best introduction to the Velvet Underground. Not my first, but my best. Then I got a little older and had to buy one of my own. I usually don’t advocate for buying physical things when you can just download, but this has a peel-off banana sticker on the box, so it’s obviously worth buying.
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