{"id":88416,"date":"2025-08-23T23:27:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T23:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/88416\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T23:27:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T23:27:08","slug":"the-day-lou-reed-played-his-last-show-with-the-velvet-underground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/88416\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day Lou Reed Played His Last Show With the Velvet Underground"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the time 1970 rolled around, Lou Reed<\/a> had one foot out of the Velvet Underground<\/a> door.<\/p>\n

In his defense, the band had been splitting apart piece by piece for several years at that point. Producer\/manager Andy Warhol was fired by Reed after just one album together, their 1967 debut The Velvet Underground & Nico<\/a>. In turn, Nico quit the band, followed by cofounder John Cale<\/a> in 1968,\u00a0after he participated in the making of the band’s second album,\u00a0White Light\/White Heat<\/a>. By 1970, the core members of the band were Reed, guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Moe Tucker and bassist\/multi-instrumentalist Doug Yule.<\/p>\n

That worked well enough for the band’s fourth album, Loaded<\/a>, but Tucker didn’t contribute much \u2014 she was on maternity leave with her first child, leaving the parts to be recorded by session musicians that included Yule’s own younger brother, Billy. Morrison was also busy, splitting his time between the studio and finishing his undergraduate studies in New York City.<\/p>\n

‘The Final Straw Was Long Before That’<\/p>\n

But Reed was fed up\u00a0prior to the album’s\u00a0release in November of 1970.\u00a0Final mixing was finished without him.<\/p>\n

“The final straw was long before that,” Reed emphasized in a 2004 interview with Classic Rock<\/a>. Would he care to elaborate on that? “No, it was just a terrible thing with the manager. Where the manager feels that he is more important than the artist, or is in competition with the artist. It\u2019s always a bad situation. You know, the manager has an apartment and the artist is sleeping on the floor by the fireplace like a sheepdog.”<\/p>\n

Listen to the Velvet Underground Perform ‘Sweet Jane’ Live at Max’s Kansas City in August 1970<\/p>\n

That was in\u00a0reference to Steve Sesnick, whom Reed felt had driven “a wedge\u00a0between<\/a>”\u00a0himself and Yule during the making of Loaded. Still, the band’s label was excited about the new album \u2014 they thought “Sweet Jane” had a good deal of radio hit potential, none of which Reed was interested in himself.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t belong there,” Reed later said (via Mojo<\/a>). “I didn’t want to be in a mass pop national hit group with followers.”<\/p>\n

Reed Removes Himself From the Velvet Underground<\/p>\n

All of that came to a head in August of 1970. After approximately two months of a residency at Max’s Kansas City in New York City, Reed played his very last show with the Velvet Underground on Aug. 23. (Ironically, this show was tape recorded by a friend of Warhol’s named Brigid Polk and ultimately turned into a 1972 album called Live at Max’s Kansas City.) He went back to his parents’ home on Long Island, took a job as a typist at his father’s company and started writing poetry instead of songs.<\/p>\n

“When I left the Velvet Underground, I just packed up. I’d had it,” Reed explained to Rolling Stone<\/a> in 1989. “So I was a typist for two years. My mother always told me in high school, ‘You should take typing. It gives you something to fall back on.’ She was right.”<\/p>\n

Listen to the Velvet Underground Perform ‘Candy Says’ Live at Max’s Kansas City in August 1970<\/p>\n

Not that that was the end of the road for Reed’s musical career.<\/p>\n

“They said I would never write anything as good as ‘Heroin,'” he said to journalist Paul Zollo<\/a> in 2013. “And then they said that if I left the Velvet Underground, I would never be as good as I was in the Velvet Underground.”<\/p>\n

Of course,\u00a0Reed proved them wrong, in\u00a0particular with 1972’s Transformer<\/a>, a highly influential album in the world of glam rock. Reed would not return to the Velvet Underground until he reunited with Tucker, Cale\u00a0and Morrison in the early ’90s for a tour that eventually ended in another breakup.<\/p>\n

But in that period just after\u00a0his final performance with the Velvet Underground in 1970, Reed wrestled with all sorts of questions in relation to his future in music.<\/p>\n

“Did I want to do it myself? Did I want to have a band? Did I just want to do songwriting, not even get onstage?” he explained to Rolling Stone. “I’m the last person in the world I\u2019d have thought should be on a stage. Some people really like having a spotlight on them. I don\u2019t. What I like is the song and performing it. Doing it for people \u2013 who like it.”<\/p>\n

Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground Albums Ranked Worst to Best<\/p>\n

He’s made some of the most influential music ever. He’s also made some of the most reviled.<\/p>\n

Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the time 1970 rolled around, Lou Reed had one foot out of the Velvet Underground door. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[19413,96,128,23763,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-88416","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-anniversaries","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-original-features","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}