The Velvet Underground - Sweet Sister Ray (1987/2023)

Highly desirable artefact with the cataclysmic 'legendary guitar amp' version of Sister Ray recorded at the Boston Tea Party in 1969. Over the past decade, The Velvet Underground’s live archive has been raided with increasing frequency. First we got the official release of a long-bootlegged 1966 Columbus, Ohio gig as a part of the “super-deluxe” edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico. And in 2013, the 1967 Gymnasium gig (which had only circulated amongst collectors for a few years), showed up on the similarly super deluxe White Light/White Heat box set. At this point, there’s very little live material left from the John Cale-era of the group, at least that anyone knows about. But one of the strangest, most fascinating treasures of Cale’s time with the Velvets still remains in the hands of bootleggers: “Sweet Sister Ray.”

Recorded at a tiny, subterranean Cleveland, Ohio, club called La Cave in late April 1968, "Sweet Sister Ray" is a near-40-minute jam—a languid, endless boogie. Its titular character aside, it's a different tune altogether from "Sister Ray", which closed out White Light/White Heat in a blaze of noise-scuzz fury. Released a few months before the La Cave show, that song was just the beginning of the VU's exploration of Sister Ray; Cale remembers the band working up several different sequels to the song, including "Sister Ray, part 3" in which Reed would become "a Southern preacher man, telling stories and just inventing these fantastic characters as we played." But "Sweet Sister Ray" is the only recorded evidence we have of these trips into unknown territories.

The journey kicks off with the band (most likely just Cale, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison; drummer Maureen Tucker isn’t audible here) chugging steadily, slowly over a spare, spidery riff. It’s easygoing, like they have no particular place to go, though there’s an underlying tension and menace. Reed’s guitar spirals off into a more abstract direction for a bit, almost reminiscent of Roger McGuinn’s flights of fancy on “Eight Miles High”. You lean in. What exactly is going on? Is the band just warming up? Is there even anyone (aside from the taper) in the club? Through the murk, a decidedly surreal atmosphere develops. The music continues at a morphine-drip pace, drifting and droning, with Morrison playing a nervier counterpoint to Reed’s laconic fretwork, Cale rattling around in the background. At some point around the half-hour mark, Cale switches over to keyboards, lending the proceedings a curiously magisterial feel, as Reed begins coaxing beautiful, simmering feedback from his amp. It’s as if some new genre of music is being invented on the spot.

Extended live improvisations were, of course, nothing new for the VU. The aforementioned Columbus show in 1966 features two marathon performances (“Melody Laughter” and “The Nothing Song”) that showcase the band’s most adventurous, avant-garde leanings. But those pieces were created to complement the extravagant multimedia overload of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with dancers, lights and films adding to the experience. La Cave might’ve had a light show, but it was undoubtedly low-tech. On this particular night in Cleveland, it was just the Velvet Underground, the small audience and “Sweet Sister Ray.”

The One Song Weyes Blood Wishes She Wrote

Throughout the song, Reed steps up to the mic from time to time to sing a few verses. The lyrics may be off-the-cuff (Reed was known for his ability to generate lyrics at will), but they’re not indecipherable. In fact, they might even tell a fairly cohesive story, a veritable prequel to the actual “Sister Ray,” as our titular protagonist watches “the weirdest movie I’ve seen in my days.”

Reed goes on to sing about a topic he was intimately familiar with: electroshock therapy. “All the vaseline on your forehead/ Makes you feel so nice,” he deadpans. “My hair stood on end/ And I thought I’d been frozen with a knife.” It’s a thinly veiled slice of autobiography; Reed was subjected to electroshock as a teenager to curb his homosexual tendencies. And the final lyrics feel even more hauntingly personal, if still oblique: “Just then I saw a hole in the ground /And I jumped right in ‘cause there was no one around.” Down the rabbit hole young Lou eagerly goes, to rock'n'roll, to Warhol, to the dangerous and thrilling dreamscapes of “Sister Ray” itself. Which is right where the rest of the Velvets join him back in Cleveland, as Moe Tucker finally ambles onstage and begins thumping out that unmistakable beat and they segue into what was likely an even wilder excursion. Alas, it’s at this point that the tape fades out …

So where did “Sweet Sister Ray” go after La Cave? There’s some indication that it was further refined and developed into “Sweet Rock And Roll”, a mythical lost VU number from the summer of ‘68. Lou’s old sparring partner Lester Bangs is mostly responsible for the legend, calling the performance he witnessed in San Diego, CA “the most incredible musical experiences” of his life. “It was built on the most dolorous riff imaginable, just a few scales rising and falling mournfully, somewhat like ‘Venus In Furs’ but less creaky, more deliberate and eloquent.”

Will we ever hear “Sweet Rock And Roll”? Probably not. But Sterling Morrison claimed that a tape of the show Bangs wrote about was made, but quickly added that it was “stolen that very night. Stolen within seconds, actually. As soon as it ended, it vanished, never to reappear on this earth.”

Tracklist
A Sweet Sister Ray 21:01
B Sweet Sister Ray 18:07
C Sister Ray 25:15
D Sister Ray 25:02