Another View

Composition and collection

When the Velvet Underground moved from Verve Records (who had released their first two albums) to parent company MGM Records, they signed a two-album deal, releasing their third and eponymous album The Velvet Underground in March 1969. Later that same year, however, there was a management change and MGM Records' new CEO, Mike Curb, was brought in to try to rescue the financially struggling label. He decided to purge the record company of its many controversial and unprofitable acts. The Velvet Underground quickly became one of the groups blacklisted and were released from their contract. The band had, however, in the meantime recorded fourteen tracks for possible release as their second MGM album. All of these were shelved and forgotten by their record company until the early 1980s.

As Verve (by then an imprint of Polygram) prepared to re-release the band's three Verve/MGM albums on vinyl and, for the first time, on CD, they found nineteen previously unreleased tracks: five Cale-era tracks and the fourteen "lost album" tracks, some of them in two-track mixdown format, some of them even on multitracks. The cream of the nineteen tracks was released in February 1985 on VU; the rest remained for the time being in the vaults.

In 1986, Polydor decided to prepare a vinyl box set for European release. Simply titled The Velvet Underground, this box, which was released in June, consisted of the band's first three albums, VU, and an untitled bonus album containing the remaining nine tracks from Polygram's vaults. That untitled album was later separately released on vinyl and CD as Another View.

An acetate-sourced alternative mix of this album's version of "Ride into the Sun", featuring vocals by Lou Reed, has appeared on bootlegs and on the Australian box set What Goes On.

As the Velvet Underground moved from MGM to Atlantic, they re-recorded two of the songs on Another View, "Ride into the Sun" and "Rock and Roll", for possible inclusion on Loaded. Only "Rock and Roll" made the grade, but two of the Another View songs would be recycled by Lou Reed during his early solo career: "Ride into the Sun" (on Lou Reed, 1972) and "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" (on Street Hassle, 1978).

Track listing

All tracks written by Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, except where noted.

Personnel