The Velvet Forum

According to the liner notes, the following tracks on VU and Another View are the original mixes;

Ocean (mixed june 69)
I'm Gonna Move Right In (mixed september 69)
Ferryboat Bill (mixed june 69)
Rock And Roll (mixed june 69)

Yer know what i think? I think there are NO OTHER original mixes of the VU and Another View tracks. I think all the other songs only exist as unmixed multitracks. And that, my friends, is why the 1969 versions have not been released. 'What about the original mix acetates?' I hear you wail. I reckon Sterl just balanced the multitracks to his liking purely to run off the acetates. No final mix dub tape need have existed to do that. Therefore, the acetate mixes are probably NOTHING like how the album would have turned out. So, I don't think we'll EVER know how the rest of those tracks were REALLY intended to sound.

Personally, I hate the Another View mix of Rock And Roll, but find the acetate version much more listenable. I love both versions of Foggy Notion but would love it even more if the guitars were higher up in the mix on the VU version.

PhantomRaspberryBlower wrote:I reckon Sterl just balanced the multitracks to his liking purely to run off the acetates. No final mix dub tape need have existed to do that. Therefore, the acetate mixes are probably NOTHING like how the album would have turned out.

Don't know about you, but personally, I'd prefer Sterling's contemporary aesthetic vision over some 80s mixing engineer that has an 80s Lou looking over his shoulder any day of the week.

Yes, agreed. Fingers crossed that there are tapes in existance.

PhantomRaspberryBlower wrote:According to the liner notes, the following tracks on VU and Another View are the original mixes;

Ocean (mixed june 69)
I'm Gonna Move Right In (mixed september 69)
Ferryboat Bill (mixed june 69)
Rock And Roll (mixed june 69)

Yer know what i think? I think there are NO OTHER original mixes of the VU and Another View tracks. I think all the other songs only exist as unmixed multitracks.

The other alternative, of course, is that 1969 mixes were used for tracks above because the multitrack tapes don't exist, preventing the VU/Another View compliers from remixing them. Knowing a little about the archiving habits of 1960s record companies, I think it's less likely for expensive multitrack tapes to survive than stereo mixdowns. Most likely the majority of VU multitracks were wiped and promptly reused for Hendrix and Zappa albums.

Mark wrote:

I think it's less likely for expensive multitrack tapes to survive than stereo mixdowns. Most likely the majority of VU multitracks were wiped and promptly reused for Hendrix and Zappa albums.

The evidence does not support this argument. Of the 19 tracks on VU & Another View at least fifteen of them survive as multitracks. I bet the released 1969 mixes were used to save money on studio time, and if further tracks had been available 'pre-mixed' they would have used those too.

It's really beginning to piss me off that we have to fumble around in the dark like this when it comes to The Velvet Underground. Somebody needs to write a book. Or maybe Olivier, Sal and Bill should get together and create a definitive guide to exactly what the archives contain.