# 3 The Velvet Underground - Loaded

  This is the first Velvet Underground album I ever bought. I don't recommend it. It's a horrible, disjointed selection of great songs that don't belong together and were never meant to be sequenced this way. It's also got a shockingly bad cover. It's totally unrepresentative of this irreplaceable and utterly unique band, all almost entirely taken from the second and third albums and has only Venus In Furs from the first record and nothing at all from the fourth. This was the only Velvet Underground album I owned before I went to university. I think I was more than  little afraid of them. I soon learned the error of my ways.

Rod, my neighbour in the block that I lived in during my first year had a copy of '69 Live. At the end of a day at university in the first two terms of my first year the four of us very similarly minded blokes, who by some remarkable chance were lined up in a row of four rooms opposite each other, would gather after a few in the campus bar and listen to Rod's records while his kettle boiled for coffee as we talked politics, literature, music, girls, and life. Quite possibly in that order..I still remember listening  to and talking about this great record.

You learn a lot at university. Especially if you fall amongst the right people. I chanced upon another Velvets.man even more opportunely a few weeks later when we started to get to know Andy, who lived a couple of blocks down from us. We met at Santanas, who hosted the Thursday '60s club night in Norwich which was aimed pretty squarely at students. Trust me. You had to be there to understand. We'd walk there and back through the bleak, starless darkness and constant drizzle every week during our first term. They never to my memory ever played the Velvet Underground.

Rod and Andy. About to listen to Loaded. I'll do so and raise a glass to the pair of you. Thanks!