Live at Max's Kansas City
| Live at Max's Kansas City | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||
| Live album by The Velvet Underground | ||||
| Released | May 30, 1972 | |||
| Recorded | August 23, 1970 | |||
| Venue | Max's Kansas City, New York City, New York, United States | |||
| Genre | Rock | |||
| Length | 38:21 | |||
| Language | English | |||
| Label | Cotillion | |||
| Producer | The Velvet Underground | |||
| The Velvet Underground chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
  |
| Blender |
|
| Robert Christgau | B− |
| Rolling Stone 1972 | (not rated) |
| Rolling Stone 2004 | |
Live at Max's Kansas City is a live album by the Velvet Underground. It was originally released on May 30, 1972, by Cotillion, a subsidiary label of Atlantic Records.
The Velvet Underground signed a two-album deal with Atlantic in late 1969 and released their fourth studio album, Loaded, in September 1970. By the time of its release, however, singer/guitarist/main songwriter Lou Reed had left. The band soldiered on with bassist Doug Yule moving to vocals and guitar and Walter Powers being drafted in to play bass.
This line-up did a tour of the United States and Canada promoting Loaded. As the band still had a contract for another album, they wrote and played new songs eventually to be included on it. Atlantic, however, had lost faith in the band's commercial prospects and, wanting to cut their losses after the disappointing chart showings of Loaded, decided to release an archive live recording instead.
The tapes that would later become Live at Max's Kansas City were recorded on August 23, 1970, by Andy Warhol associate Brigid Polk on a portable cassette recorder. While they were recording Loaded, the Velvet Underground held a nine-week engagement (June 24 – August 28, 1970) at New York nightclub Max's Kansas City, playing two sets a night. Polk recorded almost everything happening around her at the time, and this happened to include her attendance of the last concert that Lou Reed played with the Velvet Underground. She recorded both the early and the late set. Later that year, Atlantic A&R employee Danny Fields heard the tapes and submitted them to his superiors, who accepted the recordings and in 1972 decided to make an album out of them. The line-up at the concerts comprised Reed, Sterling Morrison, Yule and Billy Yule, the younger brother of Yule who was filling in for usual drummer Maureen Tucker while she was on maternity leave to have her first child Kerry.
...
Wikipedia