The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground
White Light/White Heat is the crazy cool one, Loaded has Sweet Jane, and novices often mistake The Velvet Underground and Nico for a greatest hits record. But the record that gets the least amount of press is the best: VU's third album. Though John Cale had departed and the group's amplifiers had been stolen, this record wasn't soft because of a newfound distaste for experimentation. I bet Reed realized that his music had been merged with the mainstream, and every day on the radio you could hear fifteen minute drug-fueled anthems "blowing" people's minds. This, then, is his response, a quiet, mostly acoustic, genuinely heartfelt record that includes some of Reed's best songwriting, like "Some Kind of Love," "Candy Says," and possibly his masterpiece, "Pale Blue Eyes," One of the Greatest Love Songs of All Time. I heard Green Day say once that making "Good Riddance" was the most punk rock thing they could have done at the time. While you laugh that off, think about how far away they were from real punk compared to VU's first two records, and just how punk a Jewish kid from Long Island making a song called "Jesus" that is as beautiful as anything coming from a church is.