I didn’t buy any Velvet Underground records.  That didn’t mean I didn’t SEE any Velvet Underground records or HEAR any Velvet Underground records, just that I didn’t BUY any!  Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the peelable banana on the cover of the debut album?  And someone played me "The Gift"…I remember hearing it and wondering if this was a joke, like the Fugs’ "Boobs-a Lot", or whether I should take this production seriously…

Then I bought Lou Reed’s solo debut.  You know how you reach a breaking point, you’re aware of an act so long that when you read a good review of their new album you rush out and buy it?  That’s how I was with Peter Gabriel, I owned no Genesis when I bought his first solo record and I owned no Velvet Underground when I bought Lou Reed’s first album.  With "Ocean".

That’s my favorite track on the record.  I liked the opener, "I Can’t Stand It", but the haunting final track was everything music should be, personal, majestic and otherworldly.

I bought every album thereafter.

"Transformer" was produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson, and it had the hit, but it wasn’t as great as the first record.  I seem to be one of the only people who liked "Berlin" upon its release.  Then came "Rock n Roll Animal".

My favorite live album is Tesla’s "Five Man Acoustical Jam".  Shoot me if you disagree, you’ve got no heart, no soul!  This was before every act went unplugged, these hard rock favorites played acoustically take you on a journey through the desert, to your girlfriend’s house and back.  I think my second favorite live album is "Rock n Roll Animal".  Nothing could prepare you for the explosion that came out of the speakers when you dropped the needle.

By this time, I knew a bit more about the Velvet Underground.  My buddy Andy played me the Doug Yule album "Squeeze" in his room adjacent to Middlebury College, before he took me out for a spin in his BMW 2800CS that he’d purchased from a Deerfield classmate.  I had no idea what a BMW was at the time, he floored it and I was scared shitless.

And he also played another album through those Rectilinear speakers in his abode, he dropped the needle on "Loaded".

Mott The Hoople had done a very good version of "Sweet Jane" on their breakthrough "All The Young Dudes", but it didn’t quite swing like the original, which felt like a walk through Greenwich Village in your engineer boots.  Could this be the same band from "White Light/White Heat"?  The sound was all cleaned up!  But the following track was positively riveting, it was like that pedestrian striding downtown had entered a rehearsal hall, picked up his axe and immediately fell into a groove with his bandmates.  He was playing ROCK AND ROLL!  LITERALLY!

But this studio rendition could not prepare one for the take on "Rock n Roll Animal".

The album starts off like the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East, but the music is played not by southerners, but city-dwellers.  There are intertwining guitars, Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter are recreating the double helix, right there on stage!  And as you’re surfing the aural landscape, riding the magic carpet down twisting, turning waves, a chord is struck, the bass is emphasized, there’s a change, and then, after an electric flourish, they’re playing "Sweet Jane" with all the power the Velvet Underground heard in their heads but couldn’t get to come out of the speakers.  When Lou starts to sing, it’s positively TRIUMPHANT!

That’s the opening track on the album.  And from there, there’s a segue into the definitive version of "Heroin", it’s my wife and it’s my life.

But the second side ends with a blistering, screaming, adrenaline-fueled ten plus minute take on ROCK AND ROLL!

One fine morning she puts on a New York station
And she couldn’t believe what she heard at all
She started shakin’ to that fine fine fine fine  music
Whew, her life was saved by rock and roll
Hey baby, rock and roll

Hey baby, ROCK AND ROLL!

It’s something that comes out of the radio.  In your bedroom, in your car, from open windows as you walk down the street.  It causes you to move, to shuffle, it brightens your whole damn day.  You don’t worry about your parents, your love life, your bank account, when you’re tuned in you’re encapsulated in a bubble, you’re perfectly happy.

Like at a Phish show.

Yes, I downloaded the second night’s MP3s.  Because I saw in the track listing, could it be…ROCK AND ROLL?

Most certainly.

I don’t think Backstreet Boy fans know "Rock and Roll".  I don’t think Miley Cyrus covers it.  But if Taylor Swift heard it, she’d go racing to Joe Jonas, imploring him to give up his virginity.

Yup, that’s rock and roll.  All the promises go out the window.  You follow this sound, all the way to the Hampton Coliseum, in Nowheresville, Virginia.  You can’t help but dance to that fine fine sound, YOUR LIFE IS SAVED BY ROCK AND ROLL!

This live take is informed by the definitive live version from "Rock n Roll Animal".  Even though it was played last night, mixed instantly, it’s got more vibrancy than all the pap made on machines and auto-tuned that comes out of the speakers of the radio stations people still listen to.  Radio is dead because the music it plays has lost its exuberance.  Sure, they used to sell commercials, but they were incidental.  Radio was the Facebook of its day, the Twitter.  It was the tribal drum, there was a sense of immediacy.

Where do you go to get that hit today?

The show.

You pack up your alcohol and drugs, you lay down your fifty bucks, enter the building to join your brethren and when the sound comes out of the speakers and starts cascading over you in waves, YOUR LIFE IS SAVED BY ROCK AND ROLL!