Lou Reed’s ‘Words & Music, May 1965’ Is a Fascinating Snapshot of the Embryonic Velvet Underground: Album Review

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Considering their short lifespan and relatively slim discography, the Velvet Underground may be the most thoroughly excavated and documented rock band of their era: Nearly every studio and concert recording, acetate and demo has been scrutinized, digitized and optimized for the many awesome boxed sets that have been released since the world caught up with the group’s brilliance in the 1980s, a dozen-odd years after they split up.

The foundation of that brilliance, of course, is Lou Reed’s songwriting, which combines a novelist’s gritty realism with equally confrontational rock music, but also includes soft, vulnerable songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” — songs that are all the more poignant because you can sense, somehow, that the sensitive soul who wrote them isalso kind of an asshole.

Considering that Reed left the group 52 years ago and died in 2013, new finds have been rare. But after his archives were given to the New York Public Library, researchers Don Fleming and Jason Stern found a blockbuster hiding in the artist’s CD collection: A five-inch reel-to-reel tape from 1965 featuring Reed and Velvets cofounder John Cale, both 23 years old at the time, singing 11 Reed originals, including dramatically different versions of several of the world-changing tracks featured on one of the most influential albums in rock history, 1967’s “The Velvet Underground and Nico.” Reed had mailed the tape to himself as a “poor man’s copyright” — the postmark (May 11, 1965) would serve as proof of the date of the recordings — but never opened it.

To be clear, these are not professional recordings; they’re loose versions of the songs sung into a cheap recorder, and consist of Reed on