Lou Reed’s earliest Velvet Underground demos unearthed for reissue

Lou Reed’s earliest versions of some of the Velvet Underground’s greatest songs, including I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin, have been unearthed and will be released in August.

The US record label Light in the Attic, in partnership with Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson, will release Words & Music, May 1965 as the first album in a new archival series.

It features demos of songs that Reed recorded with future Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale, and mailed to himself in a notarised package as a way of securing copyright on the recordings without filing the official paperwork. The five-inch reel-to-reel recordings remained sealed for nearly 50 years and have been heard by almost no one before.

Reed performs the songs on acoustic guitar and harmonica, with Cale adding vocal harmonies, making the performances more akin to the folk music of the time than the avant garde rock that the Velvet Underground would soon pioneer. Two months later, in July 1965, guitarist Sterling Morrison had joined the group for another round of demos, by November they were called the Velvet Underground, and by December their lineup was finalised with Maureen Tucker on drums.

Of the songs demoed in May 1965, I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin would end up on their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, while Pale Blue Eyes would be released in a substantially different version on the band’s self-titled 1969 album.

Some of the lyrics on the May 1965 demos also deviate from the later versions: the demo of Heroin opens with the line: “I know just where I’m going,” and has some distinctive Reed lines that didn’t make the finished recording: “People selling people pound by pound / And the politicians and the clowns / And the do-gooders with their frowns.”

Writing the liner notes for the release, US rock critic Greil Marcus said: “The poverty in these songs – the bathtub-in-the-kitchen you hear in their clumsiness, the fifth-floor-walkup you can hear in their defiance – lets you hear them, now, as chalk on a wall, not the markings that wash away in the next rain but inscriptions that somehow become part of the brick, even if in a year or two no one will be able to read them.”

The reissue also features Reed-penned songs that have never been recorded since, such as the doo-wop-tinged Too Late, and the R&B track Buzz Buzz Buzz. Another folk-tinged song, Men of Good Fortune, shares a title with a track from Reed’s solo album Berlin but is completely different. Included with some versions of the reissue are unheard Reed songs from home recording sessions in 1963 or 1964, plus doo-wop number Gee Whiz, recorded by Reed in 1958 when he was 16 years old.

Words & Music, May 1965 will also be available on single LP, CD, cassette and 8-track formats, as well as on streaming and download services. Clips of the songs can be heard now on Light in the Attic’s website.