The Velvet Underground Are Old Before Their Time

ARTIST: The Velvet Underground TITLE: “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore” WEB DEBUT: Feb. 22, 2008

FIRST-LISTEN VERDICT: This 1967 live recording from a New York gig by the young and always delectably seedy-looking Velvets captures the apparently heretofore unreleased post-Velvet Underground And Nico cut “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore.” It’s a ragged rocker in the in of a looser, more swaggering “I’m Waiting For the Man,” guided by the snaking guitar interplay rather than the submerged, metronomic beat. More of a hypnotic vamp than a great tune, with Lou Reed drawl-moaning the title like a former juvenile delinquent’s mantra, the song’s highlighted a great buzzing mid-song drone-off between (one assumes) Sterling Morrison, Reed, and John Cale. The quality of the recording is full of pops and surface hiss but still surprisingly strong for a four decade old bootleg, with the rawness of tape decay obviously only adding to the band’s grotty atmosphere after the fact. Whatever the veracity of the “unreleased” claims, this jam is still a find. WHERE TO FIND IT: Dead Flowers, which has a download of the entire bootleg, including a semi-incendiary take of the noise-rock progenitor “Sister Ray,” a song that had yet to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.