The Velvet Underground & Nico LP 1967 Verve LP+ Polygram LP Lou Reed John Cale

$

58

This auction is for my two Velvet Underground and Nico LPs produced by Andy Warhol The 1967 LP on Verve V-5008 with the gatefold cover. The jacket has ring wear on the front and the back has the sticker that the record company placed after the lawsuit. Someone tried to peel some of it in the past 47 years. Side 1 plays with surface noise but please be aware that Side 2 has a few skips as it plays. The banana peel sticker is long gone. The Polygram reissue 0701 plays near mint. It looks as if it was hardly ever played. The jacket is firm with a little bit of ring wear on the front. History of the album: When the album was first issued, the main back cover photo (taken at an Exploding Plastic Inevitable performance) featured an image of actor Eric Emerson projected upside-down on the wall behind the band. Emerson threatened to sue over this unauthorized use of his image, unless he was paid.[6] Rather than complying, MGM recalled copies of the album and halted its distribution until Emerson's image could be airbrushed from the photo on subsequent pressings. Copies that had already been printed were sold with a large black sticker covering the actor's image. The image was restored for the 1996 CD reissue. The album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico is recognizable for featuring a Warhol print of a banana. Early copies of the album invited the owner to "Peel slowly and see"; peeling back the banana skin revealed a flesh-colored banana underneath. A special machine was needed to manufacture these covers (one of the causes of the album's delayed release), but MGM paid for costs figuring that any ties to Warhol would boost sales of the album The Velvet Underground & Nico was recorded with the first professional line-up of the Velvet Underground: Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker. German singer Nico was also featured, having occasionally performed lead vocals for the band at the instigation of their mentor and manager, Andy Warhol. Nico sang lead on three of the album's tracks—"Femme Fatale", "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "I'll Be Your Mirror"—and back-up on "Sunday Morning". In 1966, as the album was being recorded, this was also the line-up for their live performances as a part of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The bulk of the songs that would become The Velvet Underground & Nico were recorded in mid-April, 1966, during a four-day stint at Scepter Studios, a decrepit recording studio in New York City. This recording session was financed by Warhol and Columbia Records' sales executive Norman Dolph, who also acted as an engineer with John Licata. Though exact total cost of the project is unknown, estimates vary from $1,500 to $3,000.[6] Soon after recording, Dolph sent an acetate disc of the recordings to Columbia in an attempt to interest them in distributing the album, but they declined, as did Atlantic Records and Elektra Records. Eventually, the MGM Records-owned Verve Records accepted the recordings with the help of Verve staff producer Tom Wilson, who had recently moved from a job at Columbia. With the affirmation of a label, three of the songs, "I'm Waiting for the Man", "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin", were re-recorded in two days at T.T.G. Studios during a stay in Hollywood later in 1966. When the record's release date was postponed, Wilson brought the band into a New York studio in November 1966 to add a final song to the track listing: the single "Sunday Morning".