Perhaps slightly skewed away from their self-titled third album and obviously excluding their non-canon, Lou Reed-free swan song Squeeze, any Velvet Underground album could be anyone’s favorite with roughly equal probability. I’ve long thought my personal favorite, 1968′s White Light/White Heat, was mostly taken for granted by music listeners. Yet I recently found out that most of my close circle of friends are fellow White Light/White Heat fans. Though its casual fan base may grow with the recent 45th-anniversary reissue of the album, White Light/White Heat seems to be an album that only people familiar with it know as great.
White Light/White Heat has a much cooler and more dangerous reputation than the band’s 1969 self-titled, but it’s infinitely less listened to than the twin behemoths, The Velvet Underground & Nico and Loaded, that bookend the band’s career (again, not counting Squeeze). This is also the band’s funniest, raunchiest, noisiest and most fun album. For all the lyrics about death, heroin and botched surgery, White Light/White Heat is somewhat light-hearted.
“Sister Ray,” easily the album’s most famous song, was essentially a one-take jam session. It’s only allowed to go on for 17 deafening minutes because of how much fun the band clearly had playing it. Reed was clearly having a blast screaming about smack and transvestites, and John Cale, the great artsy classical geek, was pounding the keys like there’s no tomorrow. As bleak as the lyrics are, they never succeed in instilling a sense of dread or hopelessness. Reed wants you to laugh when he drops hilarious penis slang and sings about the carpet getting stained.
Much of the humor lies in the fact that the music can manage to be candid and disturbing while not that different from bubblegum pop at its melodic core. The title track is purportedly about meth, but it’s catchy enough that LCD Soundsystem could transform it into a synthpop song called “Drunk Girls” without anyone noticing.
Cale’s songs are more serious but possess a certain goofiness. “The Gift” consists of eight minutes of Cale reading a short story over distorted garage rock. If you follow the story closely enough, it’s essentially a black comedy highlighted by a brutal but hilariously ironic ending. “Lady Godiva’s Operation,” a more straightforward rock song at least in structure, comes with an (almost) equally horrible ending for its protagonist that’s read back and forth by Cale and an obviously-fucking-around Reed.
“Here She Comes Now,” the album’s purest pop song, is like a virgin wandering through the album’s orgiastic squall. It’s often interpreted as an innuendo (“come,” ha ha), but it’s such a sweet little tune that I like to think of it as no more than such.
The disc of rarities included with the reissues is somewhat baffling, consisting of a mix of songs that have already been bootlegged and compiled to the point that new versions will only be palatable to hardcore Velvet Underground obsessives. The best thing on the disc is “Stephanie Says,” a stunning ballad that’s never found a home on any Velvet Underground album — but is likely out of place on White Light/White Heat.
But it’s the album itself that deserves most of the attention — it’s still the best rock ‘n’ roll album by a group that pushed the genre’s boundaries more than perhaps any other American band of the 1960s. Even if there’s nothing on here as heartbreaking as & Nico‘s “Heroin,” as creative as The Velvet Underground‘s “What Goes On,” or as catchy as Loaded’s “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll,” this is still an intensely enjoyable album if you’re prepared for its sonic and thematic assault.