True, any VU stuff we haven't heard by now could easily have been lost or destroyed or rotted away, and with every passing year that possibility becomes more acute. Then again, there are plenty of counter-examples of ancient tapes that have withstood the test of time. Obviously there' s the Quine tapes, and the Warhol Museum CD material which was sitting on a shelf in Pittsburgh for 30 years before anyone heard it, ditto the '65 rehearsal tape that was lying forgotten in Cale's archive until he unearthed it for PS&S.Jez wrote:I'm reading Lou's biography by Victor Bockris at the moment and was suprised to hear that he had to go and buy an unplayed copy of The Bells and use it for the Between Thought and Expression anthology, because the master had rotted away on record company shelves, because of poor storage. What chance does some privately recorded tape from the sixties stand?
There are clearly places where more stuff than we've heard exists. The Warhol Museum has vastly more complete versions of the tapes that were sampled on the Factory CD - and possibly other stuff that we don't know about. Jamie Klimek has the masters for many of the Velvets' Cleveland appearances, which must include some material not on the ciruculating tapes. Cale has any number of live and rehearsal recordings. There's the Joseph Freeman tape from Max's. Maybe Piero Heliczer's widow even has the proto-Velvets recordings that were made of them jamming behind the screen at Heliczer's 1965 mixed media events. The list goes on.
Recently, someone posted on Dime a 1971 live tape of The Modern Lovers that nobody had ever heard before. Two (almost) full sets, great quality, real holy grail stuff for us fans, and yet it had lain unidiscovered for 36 years. For as long as that kind of thing can happen, I still have some hope for some unheard VU material.
